Ike McCaslin: Traumatized in a Hawthornian Wilderness

While the earliest critical estimates of "The Bear" tended to canonize Ike, more recent criticism has viewed him--and in particular his act of repudiation in Part Four--with increasing distance and irony. Readings which either ignored the problems inherent in Ike's repudiation in order to focus on an heroic wilderness initiation, or which saw that repudiation as itself an heroic act, (1) have largely given way to interpretations making of this heroic Ike first a tragic and then an ironic figure. In tragic readings, Ike's fatal flaw becomes his inability to apply to his life in the "tamed land" the lessons he has learned in the wilderness, to make his initiation work within the bounds of civilization. His wilderness initiation is seen as valid--he has successfully ascertained and learned the lessons of the hunt and the values the wilderness represents--but modern civilization no longer has a use for those values or a place for initiates into such a value-system. Ike's tragedy thus becomes the tragedy of modern man, the burden of his failure resting upon society or the "modern human condition" rather than upon Ike's own shoulders. (2) Ironic readings begin to see Ike as the source of his own failure: he has misinterpreted the significance and meaning of his wilderness experience, and is consequently rendered ineffectual by his mistaken adherence to a vision of the wilderness as Garden of Eden, a sanctuary in which he can escape those guilts and moral responsibilities which await him in the tamed land. (3) Similar readings, focusing upon the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" episode, transmute the terms of the story's central dichotomy from "wilderness versus civilization" to "art versus life," and find Ike deficient insofar as he rejects life for the safety of a timeless, unchanging artistic realm. (4) Almost all of these critics, however, share a belief in the basic simplicity of Ike's relation to the wilderness: if Ike has distorted and subverted the meaning of that realm by making of it an Edenic sanctuary, he has done so only because of his complex and ambiguous feelings towards his McCaslin heritage. (5) The very act of distortion--of reinterpreting his wilderness experience--is accordingly seen as occurring after the fact, somewhere between his first look at the ledgers immediately following the death of Old Ben and his act of repudiation at twenty-one, a reinterpretation evidently worked out simultaneously with the complex mythic historiography he presents to Cass at twenty-one. There are problems in accepting such an assumption. First, they fail to adequately explain why an Ike who longs to escape from the complexities and guilts of civilization into an Edenic wilderness, who supposedly repudiates his claim to a plantation for this very reason, nevertheless chooses to spend his life from that time, not in the wilderness, but in Jefferson. His connections with the wilderness are in fact as tangential to his daily existence as are his interactions with the tamed land, being limited to yearly holiday hunts (excepting the relation of being, as a carpenter, a customer for the lumber company that is eating up the wilderness). If Ike, as some notable critics have suggested, is a latter-day Natty Bumppo, it is a role he fulfills only on vacations. Second, to see his willful misinterpretation of the meaning of his wilderness initiation as something which occurs only after the fact--that is, only once he must juxtapose that wilderness heritage with a McCaslin heritage--is to ignore how extraordinarily active a role Ike has from the very beginning in determining the rules, nature and significance of his own initiation, to ignore the fact that Ike is as much the creator of the initiatory myth surrounding the hunt for Old Ben as he is of the mythic view of history he presents to Cass in Part Four, or the mythologizing eulogy he delivers at the graves of Sam, Lion and Ben in Part Five. Certainly, from the beginning Ike is acutely self-aware of the initiatory nature of his wilderness experiences, believing, on his first trip into the wilderness, that, "at the age of ten he was witnessing his own birth. …