sue goals that were geared toward making them
unhappy. It seems, then, that success might best be
equated with, or at least linked to, happiness. Indeed,
when we look at differing accounts of the “suc-
cessful” over time, we see that one thing they have
in common, whether we are discussing a simple,
yeoman farmer from the 18th century, or the 20th-
century steel baron Andrew Carnegie, is that they
were pursuing their dreams in order that they might
achieve excellence and be fulfilled. In other words,
they were tying success to personal happiness, not to
wealth, power, or fame. Those things might come as
accessories to success, but they are not the primary
motivators. Literature is full of characters for whom
those empty dreams are the driving forces, and those
characters usually meet bad ends. In order to see the
truly “successful” among the pantheon of literary
characters, we must first explore exactly what we
mean by success.
Although thoughts on success and its nature are
quite common in literature, often the characters who
embody it or seek it are deeply unhappy and dissatis-
fied with their lives. The philosopher Tom Morris
might argue that this is because these characters are
confusing true success with something else, some-
thing destructive in its emptiness. In his 1994 book
True Success, Morris argues that we misconceive the
meaning of success, confusing it with fame or with
power or, most often, with wealth. But, he says, we
can all think of wealthy people who are unhappy or
who did nothing on their own to attain their wealth.
Both of these qualifications seem to go against the
basic definition of success: obtaining the object of
one’s desire. In Silas Marner, by George Eliot, Silas
hoards the gold he earns, becoming very wealthy
but very unhappy. It is not until he has a fulfilling
purpose in life, raising Eppie, that he can truly be
called successful.
The extreme unhappiness and dissatisfaction of
the wealthy Sutpen family from William Faulkner’s
Absalom! Absalom! demonstrates how inherited
wealth does not automatically bring success. Thomas
Sutpen is a self-made man whose outward appear-
ance might be the picture of success. But although
he is wealthy and powerful, he not only guarantees
his own unhappiness by denouncing his part-black
son but also passes that unhappiness on to his chil-
dren. He ends his life an alcoholic, murdered by the
grandfather of his 15-year-old mistress and largely
forgotten by his community. Like wealth, fame and
power do not guarantee success either. Both can be
fleeting, and if our only end is to achieve them, not
to find fulfillment in the pursuits that led to the
fame and the power, then we are doomed to fail. In
our tabloid rich society, it is not difficult to think of
people whom power and fame had seemingly put on
top of the world, but who quickly descended to the
depths of failure.
In lieu of the dubious pursuits of wealth, fame,
and power, Morris posits a new conception of
success, one requiring that we incorporate certain
conditions into our daily lives. He says, “Our idea of
success should be more closely related to our ideas of
excellence and fulfillment. And to our idea of happi-
ness” (32). He claims that to truly be successful, we
must have a clear idea of what we are seeking; we
must be confident and consistent, committed to the
pursuit and the concentration it takes; and finally,
and perhaps most interestingly in light of literature,
we must have character of “high quality” and the
capacity to enjoy our success. Morris contends here
that if “success” is pursued for immoral means or if
the spoils of success are the only motivator, then that
is not “true success.”
Morris is (understandably) working against the
popular 20th-century concept of success. Interest-
ingly, definitions of success prior to this period were
more in line with Morris’s thinking. Rex Burns, in
Success in America, explores older ideas of success,
focusing on the yeoman farmer, the epitome of
success in the 18th century. He explains that under
this conception, there were three major elements in
order to claim success: competence, independence,
and morality. This farmer needed not wealth, and
certainly not fame or power, to be considered suc-
cessful. In fact, Jeffrey Decker explains in Made in
America that in the 18th and 19th centuries, success
was “character based.” There was an explicit link
between productive enterprise and religious faith
that came to be known as the “Protestant work
ethic,” which informs the stories of Horatio Alger,
popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These
stories, sometimes called “rags to riches” or “luck and
pluck” stories, usually involve a poor adolescent boy108 success