“An American Childhood” Book by Annie Dillard Essay

Introduction

In the autobiographical book, An American Childhood, Dillard depicts her childhood memories and unique experiences, which shaped and influenced her personality and writing style. On the one hand, Annie Dillard had typical childhood born in a small town. On the other hand, she had unique childhood influenced by religious values of her mother and rebellious nature of her father.

Main body

Dillard was the eldest of the three daughters of Frank and Pam Lambert Doak. Dillard had an affluent childhood. Her paternal grandfather was a strict Scots-Irish Presbyterian and her father, though lapsed, dropped his children off at Sunday school and church and sent them to church camp. Dillard was quite pious. She remembers, “I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean.” Teenage doubts began to bother, and she briefly quit church at age 16 to be lured back when the minister loaned her works by C. S. Lewis. In high school she loved poetry and Emerson, and took English literature and theology in college. Many contemporary children of the Protestant tradition have left the church, wandered into wonder, and gone through it and out the other side into the maze of appealing and interesting religious and ethical traditions from the world over. In her autobiographical An American Childhood (1987), Dillard recalls being encouraged by the Ellis headmistress to apply to Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where “her rough edges” would be smoothed off; Annie herself hoped that those rough edges would be “a can opener, to cut … a hole in the world’s surface” through which she could escape (243).

In contrast to many children, Dillard lived in wealthy family and had an opportunity to visit a private school. The combination of the postwar economic boom, an increased consumerism, and the tremendous growth of advertising in magazines and on television produced one of the dominant stereotypes of American life: the Fifties home. Images of it were everywhere in the media, and it still has a nostalgic power, for good or ill, that few other images can match. Located on a suburban street among homes just like it, it was a “ranch style” house–all on one floor–or perhaps a split-level house. This image, although a stereotype, did reflect some reality. More of the white populace did live in the suburbs and could indeed afford many of the latest conveniences. Moreover, many families built bomb shelters in their homes, stocked with water and canned goods and, in some wealthier homes, bars and easy chairs, against the time when the Soviets would unleash a hydrogen bomb on America. In contrast to many other children, Dillard did not face difficulties or economic problems. The private school had evolved from an intellectual, privileged venue of learning to a social center where teens established their own values and were their own arbiters of success and failure. The number of extracurricular activities had also increased, partly in an effort to provide teens with safe, supervised recreation and keep them from becoming the dreaded juvenile delinquents.

Dillard had an opportunity to study art, music and dance. The romantic swayings of the waltz, and lively folk dances like the schottische and the polka, might have entertained adults in the early years of the century, but young people–especially girls-began to move to entirely different music. If boys found their entertainment in arcades and nickelodeons, girls found theirs in dance halls where all social strata and all ethnic groups mixed and danced to the new jazz and ragtime music. The popular “animal” dances were, to the pure-minded, aggressively primitive in name and action. “I had boyfriends all along and got invited to the boys’ school dances.” (153). Dillard depicts her unique experience when partners embraced each other closely, the man’s legs enclosing the girl’s and her arms not on his shoulders but around his neck; and ragtime music encouraged rhythms and movement seldom seen in public before, at least in polite society.

Another important aspect of Dillard’s childhood was reading experience. Dillard writes: “I disliked buildings, considering them only a stiffer and more ample form of clothing, and no more important. I began reading books, reading books to delirium” (80). Literature written for and read became a battleground, with authors, publishers, and marketers lined up on one side, and parents, teachers, ministers, and legislators on the other–the teens themselves, as usual, were caught in the middle but managed to survive and read what they wanted to in any event. As with the arcades, nickelodeons, movies, and dance halls, a teen’s own dollar hard-earned in the street or factory, or wheedled from reluctant parents, became a powerful incentive to those who produced the popular culture of these early decades. Any Sunday School book, must constantly put her arrogant and erring father to rights while she weeps for his soul. “I had got religion at summer camp, and had prayed nightly there and in my bed at home, to God, asking for a grateful heart, and receiving one insofar as I requested it” (195). Dillard liked books in which home became a gloomy manor house governed by a handsome, mysterious man, where a girl without family or dowry might find employment as a governess or nurse and where, eventually, the lord of the house sees her beauty and virtue and falls in love with her. The American character, with its strong streak of evangelical Protestantism, has established across the continent both a vigorous entrepreneurial capitalism and the world’s foremost environmental organizations. Dillard rites: “copper, natural gas-and the banking and transportation industries that put up the money and moved the goods. Some of the oldest Scotch-Irish and German families in Pittsburgh did well” (209). Americans loved economic success, yet their idealism never let them entirely enjoy it. The Puritan legacy yielded both a sense of sin and a sense of possibility, that people failed to live up to moral standards built the city upon a hill. “We rarely saw the pale men at all; they were off pulling down the money on which the whole scene floated. Most men came home exhausted in their gray suits to scantily clad women smelling” (216). It sometimes seemed a contradiction that Americans want a growing economy along with an improving natural environment preserved from corruption.

Conclusion

In sum, the unique childhood experience had a great impact on Dillard and her life views. As long as nature in the American mind forms the spiritual counterweight to material civilization, the environmental movement will continue to be refreshed with strength and vitality. In contrast to many other children, Dillard did not experience economic problems living in wealthy family. She had opportunities to study art and dance, read different literary works and attended private school.

Works Cited

Dillard, A. An American Childhood. Harper Perennial; 1st Perennial Library Ed edition, 1988.