Miniver Cheevy

The overarching theme of “Miniver Cheevy” is discontentment with modern life. Miniver is unsatisfied with modernity, preferring romantic notions of past eras—even those that are actually fictional. His mishmash of references (Thebes, Camelot, King Priam, the Medici) shows a shallow understanding of the past, but it is no matter: Anything is preferable to the current time for Miniver.

By the early 1900s, Americans had increasingly left behind life on the farm for factory work in the city. Whereas farmworkers could obtain satisfaction from seeing their labor bear fruit during each harvest, factory workers were cogs in a larger machine, only having a hand in a small fraction of the process. Whatever odd “labors” (Line 10) Miniver begrudgingly engages in to pay the bills do not leave him with a sense of fulfilment or accomplishment, which is why he turns to his elaborate fantasies of the past for comfort. Moreover, the Gilded Age of the late 19th century was a time in which the wealth gap between the rich and the poor grew considerably. Money is a sore subject for the underachieving Miniver, contributing to his discontentment.

Miniver’s nostalgic beliefs resemble the philosophy of antimodernism, which arose in the late 19th century as a reaction to