against the superior power of the white man in
thinGs FaLL apart.
Nonetheless, society is not an unmixed blessing.
Pip, in Charles Dickens’s Great expectations,
loses his essential innocence and goodness in the
urge to rise in an ambitious and mercenary soci-
ety; while a taLe oF two cities shows a Sidney
Carton distraught with disappointments, although
his innate capacity to love cannot be killed even
amid the bloodthirsty fury of Paris in the grip of
the French Revolution. George Eliot’s Silas Marner
suffers wrongly in the hands of his fellow beings
and becomes an embittered recluse but is later
rescued from the unenviable fate of a misanthrope
by the love of a castaway child. That man cannot
live alone is depicted, consciously or unconsciously,
even in texts where this theme is least expected. It
is an utter lack of communication with his family
and society who have forsaken him, terrified at his
vermin form, that eventually kills Gregor Samsa in
Franz Kafka’s The MetaMorphosis. Estragon and
Vladimir, in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot,
decide not to even playfully attempt suicide to pass
their time because if one dies accidentally, the other
will be left alone. So, even amid existentialist angst
and in an absurdist limbo, an individual’s minimal
necessity for company cannot be disregarded. A
society is a “natural” product, and an individual, in
turn, is a “social” one.
See also Anderson, Sherwood: winesburG,
ohio; Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451; Bunyan,
John: piLGriM’s proGress, the; Byron, George
Gordon Byron, Lord: don Juan; Dickens,
Charles: christMas caroL, a; Emerson, Ralph
Waldo: “American Scholar, The”; “Self-Reli-
ance”; Faulkner, William: LiGht in auGust;
Gay, John: beGGar’s opera, the; Hawthorne,
Nathaniel: scarLet Letter, the; “Young
Goodman Brown”; Hesse, Herman: siddhar-
tha; Huxley, Aldous: brave new worLd; Irving,
Washington: sketchbook oF GeoFFrey crayon,
the; Jackson, Shirley: “Lottery, The”; Ker-
ouac, Jack: on the road; Kipling, Rudyard:
kiM; Kozinski, Jerzy: painted bird, the; Lewis,
Sinclair: Main street; Melville, Herman:
biLLy budd, saiLor; Molière: Misanthrope,
the; Naipaul, V. S.: house For Mr. biswas, a;
Orwell, George: nineteen eiGhty-Four; Poe,
Edgar Allan: “Murders in the Rue Morgue,
The”; Rand, Ayn: antheM; Shakespeare, Wil-
liam: roMeo and JuLiet; taMinG oF the shrew,
the; Solzhenitsyn, Alexander: one day in the
LiFe oF ivan denisovich; Sophocles: antiGone;
Swift, Jonathan: GuLLiver’s traveLs; Thoreau,
Henry David: “Resistance to Civil Govern-
ment”; waLden; Vonnegut, Kurt: cat’s cra-
dLe; Wharton, Edith: ethan FroMe; house oF
Mirth; Winterson, Jeanette: oranGes are not
the onLy Fruit.FURTHER READING
Aubert, Vilhelm. Elements of Sociology. London: Heine-
mann, 1968.
Hawthorn, Geoffrey. Enlightenment and Despair: A
History of Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1976.
Susmita Royeinnocence and experience
Perhaps because literature so often focuses on
human experience, it frequently covers the themes
of innocence and experience. Just as there are many
stories, so too are there many forms of both inno-
cence and experience. For many centuries, innocence
and experience were interpreted primarily in terms
of religion, with innocence denoting a state free
from sin. As European civilization became increas-
ingly secularized, however, these terms took on more
general usage wherein innocence came to denote
roughly a state of naïveté or simplicity without
necessarily implying religious overtones (though
these had not vanished). One of the most frequently
depicted changes, and one that became a touchstone
of romanticism, is that from the optimism of child-
hood to the realities of adulthood.
William Blake’s popular set of poems sonGs
oF innocence and oF experience (1794) helps to
illuminate the interdependence and relative value of
both terms. At first, childhood may seem like a time
of innocence and freedom from the responsibilities
of maturity, whereas adulthood is a time when expe-
rience, education, and exposure to the world taint
one’s sense of innocence. Even in this straightfor-
ward account, the two terms are interdependent, as a60 innocence and experience