Alternative Perspective: A Gender Reading

Lecture 4

Dandelion Wine (1957):

Plot Development, Character Development (Main Characters, Narrative Point of View), Setting, Themes.

Alternative Perspective: A Gender Reading.

Dandelion Wine (DW) is one of Bradbury’s autobiographical fantasies, a novel that fully embodies Bradbury’s love for creating eccentric characters and exploring their lives. The novel is more autobiographical than fantasy (unlike its companion, Something Wicked This Way Comes), with the majority of events being daily moments of life in the Midwest in the late 1920s. The main character, Douglas Spaulding, is based on Bradbury. In an introduction written in 1974 Bradbury describes how this novel originated with a writing method that used word association to access memories of childhood.

Considered one of Bradbury’s strongest works, the novel has received a good deal of acclaim and critical attention. John B. Rosenman compares DW to Faulkner’s short story “That Evening Sun” in its use of symbolic settings that represent heaven and hell. In “The Fiction of Ray Bradbury: Universal Themes in Midwestern Settings,” Thomas P. Linkfield examines three novels set in the Midwest: Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Halloween Tree, arguing that Bradbury’s themes—fear of death, nostalgia, and the necessity of accepting reality—are universal or literary, rather than particular to science fiction.

Loren Logsdon, in “Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Kilimanjaro Device,’: The Need to Correct the Errors of Time,” identifies the central idea in Bradbury’s fiction as the need to correct “serious mistakes in time.” While Logsdon’s main focus is the short story identified in the title, he notes that both DW and Something Wicked This Way Comes depict characters that focus too much on either their pasts or their futures, ignoring the present moment to their detriment.

This novel is often compared with Something Wicked This Way Comes. Both are set in Green Town, and both have protagonists clearly based on Bradbury himself. Both novels share a concern for the passage of time and the maturation of young men. However, important differences also exist between the novels. Something Wicked has a more clearly developed plot structure focusing on conflicts between characters. DW is set in the summer, Something Wicked in the autumn. Events in DW are not clearly organized in a linear plot. The unifying structure of the narrative is chronological (summer 1928), but the pace is more leisurely and apparently realistic: that is, the narrative focuses on events that take place during that summer, but the underlying pattern is not clear on a first reading.

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