55 pages • 1 hour read
Wallace StegnerThe Spectator Bird
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Dangers of Tampering with Nature
Content Warning: This section contains references to rape, incest, and eugenics.
Stegner, renowned for both his fiction and his efforts to protect the environment, had a profound interest in the ecology of his native California. In his novels, these concerns are never far from the surface. In All the Little Live Things, set shortly after Joe Allston’s move to northern California, Stegner’s misgivings about environmental threats and depredations are front and center: Marian, a neighbor of Joe’s, serves as a mouthpiece for many of his ecological concerns. Among these is that native plants are far superior to imported exotics, because of their complex symbioses with the land. She also persuades Joe to end his campaign of killing the many gophers and other pests on his large property.
In The Spectator Bird, Joe seems to have mostly absorbed her lessons. In the novel’s first pages, he notes that the development and “subdivision” of the hills where he lives have upended the natural balance of the region, driving out the natural predators of the deer, which now overpopulate the area. “One-acre, one-house rigidities” have “ruined” the area (51), leading to erosion and mudslides. Stegner’s love of the natural world also shows itself in Joe’s tender descriptions of the native flora and fauna on his property, including wrens, bush tits, plum trees, birch, eucalyptus, and juniper.
Eigil Rødding, a sort of anti-Marian, shows what not to do to an environment. A proponent of efficiency and “purity” in all things, Eigil has virtually denuded his vast estate of any life that does not factor into his “scientific” approach to farming and animal husbandry. There are no “[w]ild things […] cottontails or gophers or snakes or moles or rats or polecats” (144). Even the woods are meticulously “cultivated” to serve as game cover. What animals there are, all raised for product, seem almost monsters, like Eigil’s genetically engineered hares the size of dogs.
Eigil’s estate unnerves Joe, who argues the merits of natural, native wildlife and “mongrelization.” Surely, he says, a stag with “bad” horns might have some genetic importance not so easily gauged by Eigil’s narrow, industry-driven calculus. The count coolly retorts that he raises stags only for “trophies,” so the beauty of their horns is his only concern. Here, in hyperbolic microcosm, resides an age-old conflict: the narrow, self-serving “needs” of human industry versus the complex needs and health of the land. When the Rødding men’s incestuous engineering of their own bloodline is revealed, it dovetails logically with the soulless way they’ve micromanaged their farms. The brutal lengths to which the counts have gone to bend nature to their wills serve as a metaphor for rapacious developers everywhere.
American Deracination Versus European Gothic
Early in The Spectator Bird, Joe confesses, with an ironic wince, “I wanted to own a past the way Rødding owned his” (22). Twenty years earlier, meeting the writer Karen Blixen in Denmark, he preaches the virtues of a “safe” place: a motherland to come home to, layered snugly with family history and age-old traditions. It is a comfort he has never had: “His parents or grandparents were immigrants, uprooted. He was born in transit, he has lived in fifty houses in fifteen places” (96).
“Deracinated,” Joe’s word for the disconnectedness that has always haunted him, refers to being uprooted, alienated from one’s native culture or environment. At times, Joe wishes his mother had stayed in Denmark instead of sailing to America at age 16; with no ancestors, family lore, or even memories of a stable childhood, he often feels like a “tourist” in his own life. As Joe suggests, this sense of emptiness may be a defining trait for Americans—at least those whose native cultures were diluted or erased a generation or two earlier in the melting pot. Related to this chronic ache for heritage is the phenomenon of “cultural cringe,” the nagging sense that the culture or national character of one’s own country is inferior to those of another. Significantly, most of the many quotes and literary allusions Joe sows throughout his story are from European writers, and the only two characters in the novel who are authors (Karen Blixen and Césare Rulli) are European as well. Joe’s attraction to Astrid, the Danish countess, seems a metaphor for his (somewhat snobbish) infatuation with his mother’s European birthplace, with its castles, art, and ancient culture.
The Gothic turn that the novel takes during Joe’s trip to Denmark is a reminder that history necessarily entails baggage. America of course has its own bloody history—e.g., the genocide of Indigenous Americans and slavery—which is one reason why Joe is only a second-generation immigrant; without strong ties to either his mother’s birthplace or her adopted country, he remains personally naive to how suffocating the past can be. This changes when he goes to Ørebyslot and later revisits it in his journals. The trappings of Gothic literature—crumbling mansions, old aristocratic families, long-buried secrets, etc.—evoke the weight of history. Even incest, another staple of the genre, functions similarly, demonstrating that one can have “too many” family ties just as one can have “too much” history.
All of these Gothic tropes are present in Ørebyslot, but where much traditional Gothic literature leaves its arguments about history and heritage implicit and metaphorical, Stegner ties the novel’s Gothic elements to Nazism and the WWII occupation of Denmark: Astrid’s husband was a collaborator, and her father and brother pursue Nazi-like eugenics programs. With this, the novel explicitly critiques Joe’s infatuation not only with Europe but with the concept of a homeland. Only a few decades before the novel takes place, this nostalgia resulted in atrocities.
Choice and the Inevitability of Regret
In both form and content, The Spectator Bird looks backward. Its protagonist is nearly 70, so the bulk of his life (and the entirety of his career) is behind him. As he reflects on what he has experienced, he rereads the journals from his trip to Denmark, creating the novel’s retrospective structure and forcing him to reckon with the choices he has made and not made.
The latter are what plague Joe most as he considers both his professional and personal life. In his mind, his career as a literary agent represents more than a failure to pursue his own writing career. Rather, it encapsulates his attitude toward life broadly; instead of proactively forging (i.e., authoring) his own path, he feels that he has watched others do so. He also likens this to being a “tourist,” evoking the novel’s travel narrative and giving it greater symbolic weight. Although he goes to Denmark hoping to ground himself more firmly in his familial and cultural heritage, most of what he discovers there pertains not to his story but to Astrid’s. Once again, he is in the position of spectator, and while he is a player in the romance that develops between Astrid and himself, it is Astrid who makes the most momentous decision in that relationship—namely, not to allow it to go further than a kiss.
The trip therefore crystallizes Joe’s regrets not merely because he did not pursue a relationship with Astrid but because of his perceived inaction and passivity while in Denmark. This is why coming to terms with the trip also helps Joe accept the course his life has taken. Key to this is Astrid’s recognition that Joe would ultimately regret abandoning his commitments (particularly to Ruth) for her sake. The remark implies that Astrid saw him for who he was: He has not simply witnessed life but has been witnessed himself. Furthermore, Joe now realizes that Astrid was right: He would have regretted the abdication of responsibility and the loss of his life with Ruth in and of itself.
This realization does not entirely remove the sting of regret, but it does lead Joe to another epiphany: that regrets are all but inevitable in life. In fact, Joe concludes that regrets may be a sign of a life well lived, as they imply that one made certain choices rather than others, thus exercising agency. Although Joe previously felt that his choices were not truly choices but merely passivity, he eventually recognizes that this is exactly what his choices would look like given the value he places on restraint and rationality. While he may ponder how his life would look if he had chosen a more “active” route of indulgence like Césare, he can’t truly regret an existence led in accordance with his principles.
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