Timid Defender of the Faith: The Prophetic Vision of Miss Lonelyhearts

Introduction

In the essay that suggests that Miss Lonelyhearts conveys a positive note, describing the title character as heroic in his unrelenting search for love and in his efforts to offer hope to humanity through a renewed connection with God.

Objective Analysis of the Text

Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, cast for half a century as naive dupe of his own delusions, has been as much maligned by his critics as by his friends. Indeed, he appears weak, ineffectual, absurd, and monomaniacal in his determination to rescue the world from suffering and self-destruction. But in fact he is a hero of sorts, courageously submitting to mockery, misunderstanding, and contempt in his obsessive quest to reconstruct a shared center of value that will redeem humanity from despair. Misguided as he is, he nevertheless finds hope in the eviscerated symbols that once connected humanity with its sources of transcendent power, and he seeks to translate that hope to others through the vehicle of those original images (West, 39). Thinking, working, and dreaming in symbols, he exhausts himself in the attempt to make them not only express a legitimate meaning for contemporary existence, but to help him attain, shape, and organize that meaning, as well. Surrounded by powerful personalities and social forces that see his quest as meaningless, Christ as meaningless, sex, love, and humankind itself as meaningless, he nevertheless boldly continues to try to do something about this modern malaise, tenaciously refusing to succumb to inaction or defeat. Even though he is internally torn by ambivalence, doubt, self-delusion, and opposition, he persists in his labor to refresh word, dream, ritual and image with regenerative, redemptive power (West, 41).

Miss Lonelyhearts' primary goal is to experience love. He seeks in love a motive and a method to heal the breaches leading to violence, insensitivity, and disorder and to restore both the spiritual and communal connections that humanize men and women. His "Christ complex" betrays neither madness nor naivete, but rather the supremely human attempt to locate and incorporate a dimension of meaning lying beyond the mundane physical plane (Long, 92). Shrike, his boss, can only mock those who seek this spiritual knowledge. "I spit on them all," he boasts. "Phooh! And I call upon you to spit" (Long, 93). But Miss Lonelyhearts will not spit. Immediately after this episode, he returns to the refuge of his room and re-reads the marked chapter in Dostoevsky containing Father Zossima's sermon on the unifying, forgiving, transcendent power of love in discovering "the divine mystery in things" (Long, 93). He later identifies himself to Betty as a "humanity lover" and submits to the humiliations of even his own erratic and contradictory behavior as he stumbles to find some sensible symbolic framework in which to understand and implement his dim and eccentric vision (Langer, 45). Although most of the characters wrestle to some extent with the problem of living a human life in the contemporary world, Miss Lonelyhearts is the only one who recognizes ...