Themes
The title comes from a quote found in a book review by George Orwell:
| “ | I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period -- twenty years, perhaps -- when he did not notice it. | ” |
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—"Notes On The Way", George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters. Volume Two, ISBN 1-56792-134-5 |
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The selection of this quote at first appears ironic. In his essay, Orwell laments that the search for truth requires giving up all belief in religion, yet without religion mankind lacks a moral base. L'Engle was a member of the Episcopal Church, writing about flawed people in a religious community. L'Engle's characters comment on this, even as the events of the novel dramatize the problem:
| “ | "It's all too easy to see the Church in that image, the greedy wasp unaware of its brokenness. And I don't mean just the Episcopal Church which still hasn't rid itself of its image—"
"God's frozen people," Bishop Juxon murmured. Undercroft nodded, "It's also the Romans, the Evangelicals, the Pentecostals, all of us who believe we profess Christ." |
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—A Severed Wasp, page 60. |
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The character Felix Bodeway then states what may be seen as L'Engle's response to Orwell: "Once that we recognize that we're broken, we have a chance to mend." As Carole F. Chase states in her book Suncatcher: A Study of Madeleine L'Engle And Her Writing, L'Engle recognizes "that the church is broken," and that its community "reflects the humanness (and therefore the imperfections) of its participants," which extends to the events of the novel. Characters associated with the Cathedral perpetrate and suffer from "blackmail, threatening phone calls, violence, drugs, jealousy, and revenge motives." Though wounded and imperfect, L'Engle finds value in the Cathedral community's capacity for (in Chase's words) "understanding, compassion, forgiveness and acceptance." As Chase notes, "Forgiveness–and the question of who is qualified to forgive–is one of the main themes of A Severed Wasp. Madeleine believes firmly that all who know their own need of forgiveness, and who have experienced forgiveness and love, can forgive others."
Read more about this topic: A Severed Wasp
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)