Ben Reigle
Dr. Howe
EN 290
May 10, 2012
Creating dominance and preserving dominance: the roles of religious institutions and the ruling class
In every social system with its particular political model, a class exists that rules above another, enjoying and consuming resources lavishly while a larger lower social class is allowed smaller amounts of means to live. The powerful ruling class stays in their position of power, even though their actions seem morally unjust. Ironically, it is religious institutions that allow these systems to continue and preserve them in a cultural context through manipulation. Bishop argues, there exists a failure to identify and reject this moral hypocrisy amongst the mass populous. Although it may be the ruling political class that creates status characteristics within a cultural system to establish economic inequality, religious institutions keep the population suppressed by maintaining such order. We can see these cultural issues present in Bishop’s poems “A Miracle for Breakfast”, “Roosters”, and “The Hanging of the Mouse”.
In Bishop’s poetry there is an indication that a class holds power over another. In “Roosters” the narrator identifies a group preserving their ruling power over others. The narrator refers to them as roosters, and these roosters “planned to command and terrorize the rest” (24). These roosters are then a group that supports each other while suppressing another. The narrator further emphasizes that this group dominates other parts of their society by presenting imagery. Symbols of the roosters preside “over” the beds of the dominated social class, “over” their churches, and that ruling class screams a “senseless order…all over town” (28-29). The imagery of the roosters being elevated demonstrates that they are higher on the social and political order in their society. The roosters are in control of the town’s political, religious, and even personal lives.
Bishop emphasizes a control over others through different ways in “Roosters” and “A Miracle for breakfast”. In “Roosters” the ruling class takes a direct and obvious control over the suppressed class. The roosters establish that the nation they preside in is theirs by shouting, “’This is where I live!’” (45). The use of the exclamation mark shows that the roosters wish not to hide their dominance, they want to shout it out and assert themselves as rulers. The narrator wonders what the roosters mean by such a strong assertion (48). The roosters establish that they are in charge and the dominated class should remain in its place when they shout, “’Stop dreaming!’” (47). In “A Miracle for Breakfast”, the ruling class takes a much more subtle approach. They do not directly assert their dominance or hinder their subjects’ hopes or dreams. Instead they let the ruled class believe that their disposition is normal. The same way people in any social system feel as though their lives or normal regardless of being subjected to conditions, that when examined through a non-culturally biased lens, that are unequal and oppressive. J
The ruling class establishes this order through enforcing status characteristics amongst the common people. In Murray Webster, Jr. and Stuart J. Hysom’s article Creating Status Characteristics, they write that status characteristics connote “social worth” as well as “wealth and power” (351). Status characteristics then establish the social roles in which people fit into. Furthermore, status characteristics cause people within a social system to accept their disposition by becoming “task focused” (353). This means that once a person accepts their role in a society, their social actions and meetings center around “solving some problem or set of problems (rather than to address primarily social-emotional concern)” (353). This acceptance within a unbalanced social system and disregard for social and emotional concerns is presented by Bishop in her poem “A Miracle for Breakfast”. In the poem there is an oppressed group of people who wait to be handed bread and coffee by a ruling person who exists on a balcony above them. The oppressed social group’s political resign is demonstrated when the narrator repeats several times that they are “waiting” instead of demanding their daily rations (Bishop 1). Even when the common people receive only “one rather hard crumb” and “one drop of the coffee”, only a few “scornfully flicked [the crumbs] into the river”; but, they do not rebel or show outrage over the meek provisions they receive (Bishop 16-18). This neglect to speak out against the ruling class who enjoys “gallons of coffee” shows a acceptance of status characteristics, in which the oppressed class deserves their disposition and accepts it as a norm (Bishop 30).
The ruling class successfully establishes these status characteristics that keep the masses oppressed and there selves enjoying bountiful amounts of resources by making the social reality seem normal. Another way to express this kind of apathy towards social injustice and imbalance is calling the established social roles a tradition. In Peter Konsenko’s political reading of “The Lottery” he argues, “man sticks to tradition even though it may be irrational and all sense of logic may be lost” (5). Traditions are systematic rituals that a cultural group finds normal. For example, the traditional day for an adult, American citizen is to wake up from eight hours of sleep, go to work for eight more hours, then spend eight hours of leisure before repeating the process. This lifestyle, although it may seem odd to a person existing in a primitive community that thrives on hunting and agriculture, appears as something that is “normal” to those who practice it as a daily routine.
In “The Hanging of the Mouse”, Bishop shows her reader that entities in power thrive upon this sense of tradition as a means of control. In the poem, a mouse is being taken to the gallows where he is to be hanged. The animals are anthropomorphized to make the events in the poem apply to society. Along the way he is escorted by several other animals that are part of the social system he is a part of. These entities are beetles who are guards, a raccoon who is the executioner, and the king’s messenger who is a bullfrog. All of these creatures are described as either wearing “traditional” clothing of some type or carrying with them “traditional” objects (Bishop 10, 16, 29, 53). There are other animals that are there to watch the hanging, but none of them are described as wearing traditional things or having traditional belongings. Tradition, then, is associated with whoever is in power.
Like in “A Miracle for Breakfast”, creatures in “The Hanging of the Mouse” do not question the traditional system that is in place, even though the actions the ruling class do not make sense to them. In this passage of “The Hanging of the Mouse” one sees the common people of the society forfeiting logic as they experience a speech given by the king’s messenger, a traditional member of the social system they exist in:
The scroll and the white plume on his hate made him look comically like something in a nursery tale, but his voice was impressive enough to awe the crowd into polite attention. It was deep bass: “Glug! Glug! Berr-up!” No one could understand a word of the mouse’s death sentence. (55-59).
Even though the creatures do not understand the death sentence they allow the mouse to be hanged, and they fail to question the justice in the act. One spectator, a cat, does weep at the hanging of the mouse, but decides that seeing the hanging is “an excellent moral lesson” for her child, who is also witnessing the event (75). Even though the citizens within this social system do not understand the explanation for their traditional leader’s decision to take a life, they believe it to be morally correct. They show irrational acceptance in their social system.
What would cause a people to accept the killing of person without understanding the reason? Michael Ryan argues religious institutions play a large role in maintain obedience in a social system in his chapter “Political Criticism: From Marxism to Cultural Materialism”. Ryan example is the role of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. He argues the Catholic Church, being the only means of education for the subservient lower class, provided “training in obedience and submission to authority from an early age” (116). Religious institutions then, become the means for the ruling class to justify their status characteristics as rulers, while the lower class accepts their position of powerlessness within their societal system.
The relationship between the ruling class and the religious system of a society is shown in “Roosters” by Bishop’s choice to clump the ruling class and the church under one identity, that of the rooster. Bishop shows the injustice towards Mary Magdalen’s sins, which are seen as worse than St. Peter (who, unlike Magdalen, directly betrayed Jesus), by saying:
Only holy sculpture
Could set it all together
In one small scene, past and future (55-57)
Bishop’s language implies that only the Catholic Church had the ability to construct an idea that one societal group (women) was inherently worse than the more politically powerful group (men). The Catholic Church also, in Bishop’s opinion, has such a power over the people that its influence not only persuaded people towards its ideological outlook in the past, but will do so in the future as well.
Bishop reveals a religious group maintaining the tradition of cultural dominance of one societal group over another in “A Miracle for Breakfast” in two ways. One is establishing the dominance of one cultural/political group over another as normal, the other is establishing a figure or group as holy. First, the dominated class, while waiting for provisions, sees their waiting as normal as said before. They are waiting for their food and coffee to come from a “certain balcony”(3). The group sees this coming from a group they refer to as “kings of old”, which associates it with the previous idea of a tradition; but, this idea of tradition comes from the concept that the spreading of wealth will be “like a miracle”(4). This is the cultural error that recurs throughout the poem. As this presumably starving population waits for food they continually realize that to sustain the life of the people with such small amounts of food, a miracle must occur. Kosenko and Ryan’s arguments on the trained obedience of religious conditioning come to life here. In the spirit of Kosenko’s ideas the dominated class finds this to be the norm, as they do not show outrage, as stated earlier. Their unsettled feelings must have been conditioned by Ryan’s argument about religious groups teaching obedience.
The dominated group in “A Miracle for Breakfast” follows their ruler’s system because they see the ruler as a religious entity. The man up on the balcony, who distributes the food is described as have his head “up in the clouds—along with the sun” (18). The balcony ruler’s head being up in the clouds shows that he is physically and socially higher than those waiting for provisions. This association with being higher up presents a connotation that he is closer to the heavens, making him closer to being deity than those on the ground. His physical position relates to the position of the sun, the sole reason why life is possible on our planet. These two indicators show that people see this person as a god on Earth, but more importantly, this man is the reason they have food and energy (coffee) thus they feed into the system of him being in charge.
This brings us to Bishop’s largest concern: people in the socioeconomic lower class refuse to acknowledge hypocrisy within the actions of the ruling class, and therefore accept their conditions rather than enacting social progress. In the last stanza of “A Miracle for Breakfast”, the narrator says:
We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee
A window across the river caught the sun
As if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony (37-39).
Here the reader sees the lower class noticing that the sun (representing life giving power and therefore religious power) shines upon those up on the balcony, the members of the ruling class. But, these people only acknowledge it is happening, but once again refuse to show outrage or take action. The people of this socially and economically corrupt system accept their status characteristics as lowly citizens instead of causing a rebellion.
Bishop’s strongest point is that religious systems may also see the moral hypocrisy of their actions but they choose become part of the corrupt inequality put in place by the political party in power. Bishop demonstrates this in “Roosters” by identify the political and religious group as one entity, the roosters. This implies that the religious group has forfeited a separate identity from the political group in power, therefore, the religious group does not have separate moral values or goals from that group. The religious institution allowed itself to be consumed by the ideology of the reigning political power, and thus serves no purpose but the collective concern to stay in control.
In “A Miracle for Breakfast”, Bishop shows this by giving a holy persona to the person in charge, which shows the end product of a religious institution merging with a political power. In “The Hanging of the Mouse”; however, the reader can see Bishop’s presumption that a religious power eventually loses its original identity and bleeds into being as brainwashed as the oppressed society. The religious entity in “The Hanging of the Mouse” is the praying mantis. The whole time he watches the mouse approach the gallows he “seemed to feel ill at ease”, and he approaches the mouse to console him; but his words come out in a “high and incompressible voice” (Bishop 33-34). This suggests the praying mantis is so frantic he cannot properly explain salvation to the mouse. He is too overcome by the socially constructed situation of execution. Even though he is the religious entity in this fictional reality, he cannot retain his religious identity. Bishop emphasizes this point as she explains the actions of the praying mantis following the hanging of the mouse “The praying mantic, with an hysterical fling of his long limbs, had/ disappeared in the crowd” (70-71). In these lines we see the mantis losing its religious authority and becoming another cog in the systematic wheels of the constructed social system created by the ruling political class, the traditional figures of power.
In her poems, Bishop proved that there is, of course, a ruling class in a social system, and that they make their cultural/societal reality seem normal with religious justification; but, eventually the religious group becomes less an of a group of its own and instead becomes a reluctant piece of the ruling class. Bishop’s message then, is that religion is a tool to make a socioeconomic class subservient, but they themselves become subservient in the process, losing their moral and ethically identity over time to become part of a tyrannical identity that their values never actually supported.
Works Cited
Bishop, Elizabeth. “A Miracle for Breakfast”. Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Grioux, 2011. Print.
Bishop, Elizabeth. “Roosters”. Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Grioux, 2011. Print.
Bishop, Elizabeth. “The Hanging of the Mouse”. Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Grioux, 2011. Print.
Kosenko, Peter. “A Reading of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. New Orleans Review. 12:11(1985) : 1-5. Jstor. 15 April. 2012.
Webster, Murray Jr., and Stuart J. Hysom. “Creating Status Characteristics”. American Sociological Review.63:3 (1998): 351-78. Jstor. April 10. 2012.