63 pages • 2 hours read
David Adams RichardsMercy Among the Children
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Snow and Whiteness
Snow represents purity and the innocence that characterizes Lyle’s falsely accused parents. Richards’s novel shows that innocence, like knowledge in the biblical sense, is ambivalent. Sydney and Elly are innocent of the crimes of which they have been accused, yet they refuse vindication. That Autumn is albino marks her out physically as the bearer of her parents’ ethical position, their simultaneous blamelessness and culpability for their fate. Her physical whiteness also emphasizes the allegorical level of the novel, aligning her with other pale, virtuous women of literature, such as the central character in the poems of the Pearl Manuscript.
The constant theme of adversity in the novel is concretized through pathetic fallacy, with seemingly eternal snowfall adding to the sense of hopelessness. It is unclear whether Sydney is a hero or an antihero in that his tragic flaws engulf him, just as the snow, the symbol of his innocence, ultimately does. Sydney’s death in the snow is reminiscent of the death of Victor Frankenstein in the snows of the North Pole. Mary Shelley’s alternate title for the 1818 novel Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus, could equally apply to the misadventures of Sydney, himself a misunderstood outcast and fan of literature like Shelley’s “monster.” Percy too, a symbol of moral purity in the story, dies in the snow.
Anti-Arcadia and On Walden Pond
Other utopias hover behind the events of the novel. The natural setting of the novel in rural Canada is unavoidably Edenic, generating a parallel between Lyle’s innocent parents and the biblical first parents. This pastoral context is also evocative of the biblical metaphor of Christ as man’s shepherd, and in modern literature, of Thoreau’s idyllic existence at Walden Pond. Richards’s novel is a kind of parody of Thoreau’s representation of a self-sufficiency in nature; Thoreau’s Transcendentalist theories contrast starkly with the events in Richards’s novel. Man’s essential goodness is not evidenced in the lives of Richards’s characters, for whom virtue appears more challenging than vice. The latter is the default, stalwartly resisted by Sydney since childhood. Lyle fails to guard against vice and organically falls into it as do the biblical first parents and rebel angels. He laments, “I had become exactly as those who hated us” (322). In contrast with Thoreau’s bohemian philosophy, which states that virtue must be pursued once one has the necessities for life, Richards’s characters are beset by temptation because they can barely attain the breadline. Lyle’s lapse into vice is in part the corollary of the emotional and literal poverty of his circumstances:
I also remember walks in the woods, and picnics and fishing trips up Arron Brook in the spring where Dad would speak about poetry and Walt Whitman and Thoreau; yet what I say here is something to measure my father by—he did not know that he, and not Thoreau, was the real article (45).
