road; London, Jack: caLL oF the wiLd, the;
Morrison, Toni: beLoved; Mukherjee, Bharati:
MiddLeMan and other stories, the; Paine,
Thomas: “Common Sense”; Steinbeck, John: oF
Mice and Men.
FURTHER READING
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York: Norton,
1993.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Trans-
lated by Constance Garnett. New York: Bantam,
1996.
Killinger, John. “Existentialism and Human Freedom.”
English Journal 50, no. 5 (May 1961): 303–313.
Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. New York:
Barnes & Noble, 2004.
Savage, J. B. “Freedom and Necessity in Paradise Lost.
ELH 44, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 286–311.
Jessica Hooten
futility
The theme of futility or overriding hopelessness
in literature has been driven by philosophical con-
cepts regarding life and how we live it. The later
decades of the 19th century saw rapid industrializa-
tion, which helped support Karl Marx’s theories of
alienation and the consideration of all history as a
battle between opposing economic forces—an eter-
nal class struggle between the new industrialists and
their workers. If Marx was right, then human his-
tory is robbed of any emotional or superlative value
and God is unnecessary. Thus, human life becomes
valueless and life after death just so much dust and
myth. In 1859, Charles Darwin (1809–82) wrote On
the Origin of Species, in which humans were shown
as descending from primates. The long-held idea
that man was simply made in the image of God was
challenged by science. Thomas Huxley (1825–95),
the grandfather of the novelist Aldous Huxley
(1894–1963) was one of the eminent men who took
upon himself to refute religion and establish this
new Darwinian idea. Marx and Darwin, though
perhaps not intentionally in the latter’s case, called
the idea of God’s existence into question. This natu-
rally had the effect of extinguishing any hope that
people had of better lives after death. This sense
of futility and utter hopelessness was expressed in
British literature by Matthew Arnold (1822–28) in
Dover Beach (1851):The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s
shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges
drear
And naked shingles of the world.This is further reflected in Thomas Hardy’s pes-
simistic novels The Return of the Native (1878),
tess oF the d’urberviLLes (1891), and Jude the
obscure (1895). This line of thinking was con-
tinued by the likes of the French author Albert
Camus (1913–60), who had written on the monoto-
nous absurdity of daily life in The Myth of Sisyphus
(1942). The novel is a retelling of the ancient myth
of Sisyphus, who has to forever push a stone up a
hill. Our lives are like Sisyphus’s: No matter what we
do, we are bound to fail. Christopher Marlowe’s
doctor Faustus (1604) is a well-known study in
futility. Faustus loses all hope in both the Renais-
sance and Christianity. He can only lament when he
hears Satan answer about life:Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of
God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
(3.74–78)Even in the 17th century, Marlowe anticipated the
intensity of futility’s pain that the modern era would
explore in depth.
The irony of the critiques of futility, both literary
and philosophical, lies in their ultimately revealing
the “charm” of despair and how futility almost always
gives way to inner spiritual freedom. We see these
kinds of Romantic meditations on futility in such
diverse works as William Shakespeare’s Mac-38 futility