Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1968

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Essay 1

Part 1, Essays 2-3

Part 1, Essays 4-7

Part 1, Essay 8

Part 2, Essays 9-11

Part 2, Essays 12-13

Part 3, Essays 14-15

Part 3, Essays 16-20

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Part 2, Essays 12-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “Personals”

Part 2, Essay 12 Summary: “On Morality”

Didion is in a Death Valley motel on a 119° day trying to write a piece on morality for The American Scholar. She distrusts morality as an overarching concept and is more interested in its particulars, which she explains via an accident on the previous night. A car turned over on the highway, and the driver was killed instantly, leaving his girlfriend in shock and bleeding internally. Didion speaks to the nurse who drove the woman to the nearest doctor 185 miles away. The nurse explains to Didion that her husband stayed behind with the body because to do otherwise would be immoral.

Didion trusts this notion of morality because of its specificity. A body left alone will be eaten by coyotes, and preventing that is part of the promise we make as a society. Didion calls this “wagon-train morality,” a term which is sometimes used in the pejorative. She turns to two famous tragedies—the Donner party and the Jayhawkers—saying that she was taught that these people died in the wilderness because they had failed in their responsibility to each other. Didion thinks this kind of morality is the only kind that has real meaning.

She realizes this may not be what is expected of her, but she finds it difficult to believe that “‘the good’ is a knowable quantity” (159). She relays another story from the desert, this time of sheriff’s deputies trying to recover bodies from an underground pool. A widow, pregnant and eighteen, is watching the search, which has gone on for ten days. One of the deputies comes up confused, claiming that the water got hotter and he saw magma and saying it had to do with underground nuclear testing. All around Didion are stories like this one in the desert, and staying in the motel she keeps thinking she hears a rattlesnake.

She doesn’t know what these stories mean, only that something sinister is in the air, and that doing what a person thinks is right is not a valid morality: “How many madmen have said it and meant it? How many murderers?” (161). She finds a belief in moral goodness to be arrogant except when taken at the most basic levels.

Didion intends to be obstinate about the fact that there’s no real way to know what’s right and wrong, and to project one’s moral values on others is an insidious impulse. People who put a sense of moral virtue on their own behavior rather than admitting it is expedient or motivated by one’s one desires or needs are deceiving themselves, and to do so, in Didion’s view, is to “join the fashionable madmen” (163).

Part 2, Essay 13 Summary: “On Going Home”

Didion is writing during a trip to her childhood home of the Central Valley of California, noting that her husband does not understand her family’s way of life, which includes living in very dusty houses and talking exclusively about real estate and people who are being committed to mental institutions or arrested for drunk-driving. What Didion’s husband doesn’t realize is that all of this is a way for them to talk about home.

Didion thinks that perhaps hers will be the last generation that thinks of going home as a burden—she talks of the anxiety of calling home, even though she had a relatively happy childhood—and that the people born after World War II are too carefree to feel it.

She tries to understand this by going through an old drawer, but the various items from her personal history don’t add up to anything meaningful. She dreads her husband’s evening call while she’s home, because he always suggests that she head to San Francisco or Berkeley. Instead, Didion visits an old graveyard, then goes with her father to a ranch. She visits with her great aunts, who aren’t sure who she is and thinks she still lives in New York. And she has a birthday party for her infant daughter. After, Didion watches her daughter sleep, thinking that she would like to give her daughter this same sense of home, though she lives differently now and likely will not.

Part 2, Essay 13 Analysis

Didion’s “On Morality” takes a thorny philosophical question—what is goodness?—and grounds it in her real-world experiences while spending time in the desert. Didion’s distrust of the term morality is rooted in her belief that the details of individual situations matter. She’s closely aligned with the idea of moral particularism, which was first coined in 1963 and argues that a set of universal moral principles is indefensible and would actually be prone to moral error.

Didion arrives at a similar conclusion thanks to her time in the desert, which she views as a potent example of the moral problems that occur when people encounter life and death situations. Didion’s argument for a return to “wagon-train morality” posits that times of crisis are the only place where a true concept of morality can be tested, and that what people owe to each other in those moments is the bedrock of morality. She suggests that to look for further or broader examples of morality is to misunderstand the scope at which it operates. She concludes (in a belief that likely would have been unpopular at the time) that people who use their own personal sense of morality to guide their actions are operating under a delusion; they are more likely to be guided by what is expedient and are using morality as a rationale. Didion sees the “moral imperative” of protest movements that prioritize doing what is “right” as hollow gestures (163).

“On Going Home” is a brief essay that looks at Didion’s relationship with her childhood home (this is also the subject of the first essay of the next section) in light of her current family life. She wrote this essay when she had been married to John Dunne for several years and had a recently-adopted baby with him named Quintana. She is careful to point out that she lives this new life that is largely inaccessible to her family, and is seen by some as an abandonment, the “classic betrayal” of growing up and getting married (165).

Didion writes that her childhood upbringing was not troubled or awful, but there’s still a tension and anxiety about her relationship with her family, and there is a distinct burden to reckoning with that. Her writing on the upcoming generation colors her perception that this sense of burden is a problem distinct to people in her age group. Didion sees this as a sad thing, particularly in Quintana’s life, as Didion has a distinct, defined concept of her home as a place full of meaning that Quintana won’t be able to access. Didion downplays what she herself can offer Quintana, but the concluding line—”I give her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and I promise to tell her a funny story”—hint at the warmth and care that she has for her daughter and how Didion gives Quintana what she did not receive in her own childhood (168).