The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder

First published: 1967

Type of plot: Family saga

Time of work: 1880-1905

Locale: Chicago, Illinois; Coaltown, Illinois; Hoboken, New Jersey; and Chile

Principal Characters:

• John Ashley, a mining engineer and fugitive after a murder conviction
• Beata Ashley, his wife, an operator of a boardinghouse
• Roger Ashley, their son, a prominent young journalist
• Lily Ashley, the eldest Ashley daughter, a concert singer
• Sophia Ashley, the second Ashley daughter, her mother’s chief support
• Constance Ashley, the youngest daughter, a social reformer
• Breckenridge Lansing, John Ashley’s friend and employer
• George Lansing, the murderer of his father, Breckenridge

The Novel

In a prologue, Thornton Wilder sets forth the external facts of the conviction of John Ashley in 1902 for the murder of Breckenridge Lansing, his subsequent rescue by five masked men shortly before his scheduled execution, and his escape to parts unknown. Then, in six long chapters, the novel moves backward and forward in time to explore the background of the Ashley and Lansing families, their relationships to the community, and their reactions to these bizarre events.

The Ashleys and Lansings live at opposite ends of the main street of a depressed southern Illinois coal-mining town. By hiring Ashley, a creative tinkerer, Lansing props up the faltering mine, which he has been incompetently managing, and leaves himself free for the social life which interests him more. At a weekend get-together of the two families, while the men are practicing with rifles, a bullet kills Lansing. Unjust town gossip linking Ashley and Eustacia Lansing in an affair and the absence of any other plausible suspect creates an atmosphere prejudicial to Ashley. Following his conviction and mysterious rescue, the novel details Ashley’s flight down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and eventually to South America. Knowing that copper-mining engineers are needed in Chile, he acquires a new identity as James Tolland, a Canadian engineer. In South America, he establishes a reputation as a hard worker and active humanitarian. When, three years after his escape from the law, a bounty hunter succeeds in identifying him, Ashley flees, and shortly before the middle of the book the fugitive drowns at sea.

The novel then traces the same period in Coaltown and in Chicago, where Roger Ashley goes to work in anonymity to help support his mother and sisters. The middle daughter, Sophia, encourages her mother to convert their home to a boardinghouse, which gradually prospers despite the obloquy of their situation as the family of an escaped convict. After energetically pursuing many humble jobs, Roger finds his metier in journalism, and his sister Lily discovers hers on the concert stage. Eventually, both succeed well enough to shed protective pseudonyms and proclaim their identity as children of the notorious Ashley.

After bringing both the Chilean and Illinois events forward to 1905, John Ashley and his family remaining mutually ignorant of one another’s circumstances, Wilder reverts to the year 1883, in New Jersey, the scene of Ashley’s courtship of Beata Kellerman, daughter of a prosperous Hoboken brewer, their elopement, and their later settlement in Coaltown. Before resolving the mystery, however (Wilder contrives that the reader suspects the identity of the killer long before the Ashleys do), another lengthy flashback describes the formation of the Lansing family, Breckenridge’s deficiencies as husband and father, and the consequent plight of the three Lansing children, especially George’s as the only son. This chapter tends to create sympathy for the Lansings, who are all victims in one way or another.

In the final chapter, dotted with brief anticipations of the subsequent lives of the two families, George, who had disappeared from home around the time of the murder and later fallen from a train and spent time in an insane asylum, returns and confesses to killing his father in defense of his afflicted mother. A sympathetic Russian-born neighbor, Olga Doubkov, arranges for George’s written confession and his escape to her own native land. Finally, the deacon of a small religious sect informs Roger that members of his congregation had daringly rescued his father to express their gratitude to the man who had helped them build their church.

The mystery surrounding Ashley is less important than Wilder’s conviction that the truth is complex, contrary to external appearances, and discoverable only in time. Thus, he organizes the novel to create in the reader not suspense but progressive insight into the minds and hearts of its characters, who themselves are following the path of discovery.

The Characters

The reader senses a tinge of irony in Wilder’s frequent references to John Ashley as “late-maturing” and “unreflective.” Ashley is a man uninterested in the goals of most people who are considered mature: the making of money, advancement on the job, community acknowledgment. He happily allows Lansing the credit for his own work in the Coaltown mine. He would rather invent useful devices than patent or sell them. Even his family knows little or nothing of his charities, which typically take the form of deeds rather than of donations. He is “unreflective,” for example, in his failure to see the good in making his inventions and services available to the world at large. No abstract philanthropist, Ashley wishes only to help people within his ken. Nor do discriminations of rank, wealth, race, ethnicity, and religion mean anything to him. He restricts his thinking to the solution of practical problems and the assistance of neighbors.

Wilder draws Beata Ashley in the broadest of descriptive strokes. She is a colorless character completely devoted to her husband; as wife of a supposed murderer, she stands proud, silent, aloof. The children, especially Roger and Sophia, resemble their father in their energetic and resourceful approach to pressing problems, although as social outcasts with their usual source of income cut off, they are more cunning and calculating. Roger’s rise to eminence in Chicago journalism before he is out of his teens is less credible than Sophia’s labors to establish the boardinghouse that her mother would have been too proud to initiate and too distant to maintain alone. Both Lily and Constance, the youngest daughter, resemble their parents in daring to be different. Lily informs Roger that she intends to have a dozen children by a dozen different men, all of whom she will love without marrying. Constance, the least well-developed Ashley character, will live the life of an international social reformer.

As the unhappy son of an autocratic father, Breckenridge Lansing duplicates his father’s folly. A hearty man with the knack of making a strong initial impression, Breckenridge wins the heart of a beautiful girl of mixed Creole and English parentage. Although an able assistant in her father’s store, she nevertheless desires neither more nor less than to be a wife and mother. Learning of her husband’s weaknesses too late, Eustacia Lansing watches him try to “make a man” of George by subjecting the boy to stringent and disheartening exercises, refusing to acknowledge his achievements, and always setting a standard beyond his capacity. One of John Ashley’s charitable deeds is the befriending of this severely maladjusted boy, who later shoots his father and (inadvertently, it would appear) brings on Ashley’s murder conviction. Wilder never shows Lansing outside his family circle; as his childhood is reported only summarily, his back-slapping, lodge-joining aspect only briefly, Lansing emerges as a rather sinister figure, and it is difficult to imagine Ashley choosing to socialize with him on weekends.

Ashley, however, is a character more mythic than realistic. At one point, Wilder compares him to an apostle, at another a Chilean fortune-teller insists that he is especially beloved of God. The manager of the Chilean mine, Dr. MacKenzie, tells Ashley about Greek mythology and raises the question—which he does not presume to answer—as to what sort of hero “Tolland” is. Ashley displays a number of the traits of Homeric heroes, particularly Odysseus. He makes periodic descents to the “underworld” of mines, though he normally conducts his work on the surface. Very Homeric are his periodic rejuvenations, as though touched by a friendly deity, which allow him to pass as a much younger man (he is actually in his early forties during his exile) and escape detection by a swarm of international bounty hunters. He is most Odyssean in his never being at a loss. Yet he does not return to his patent “Penelope,” and his “Telemachus” must fight the battles of maturation without his father’s assistance. In his attitude toward his accusers, he is more apostolic than Homeric: Revenge never enters his mind.

Critical Context

Common threads run through many of Wilder’s plays and novels. In The Eighth Day as in Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), his imagination focuses on family relationships—both the loyalty and the conflict of close families. The same fondness for editorial comment and omniscience that created the character of the Stage Manager in Our Town (a role that Wilder himself played for two weeks on Broadway) breaks forth in The Eighth Day. As in The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), published forty years earlier, this novel begins with sudden death and proceeds to scrutinize its meaning and effects. Like The Ides of March (1948), The Eighth Day develops its story of a murder by moving back and forth in time. There are many other thematic and technical similarities to other Wilder works.

While Wilder’s best plays are highly innovative, his novels are more conventional, and the narrative technique of The Eighth Day works against its theme to some extent. Like Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner before him, Wilder uses chronological shifts and dislocations to develop the sense of an unfolding truth, but he undercuts the effect with fussy references to this technique (“as we shall see,” “as I shall have occasion to say”). Such disparities seem to reflect an unresolved tension in Wilder between his receptivity to highly original minds and talents (for example, his intimate knowledge and love of the work of Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce) and his conviction that the old-fashioned values and virtues of Protestant Christianity remain adequate to guide men in the twentieth century. As a result, this highly intellectual and sophisticated man often wrote in the manner of a nineteenth century novelist who feels free to hold forth comfortably as though unaware of modern doubts and skepticism. In The Eighth Day much more than in The Bridge of San Luis Rey or The Ides of March, the reader senses his manipulating of his characters and situations.

The Eighth Day stands as the longest and most ambitious novel of a man whose dual achievements in the novel and drama are unequalled by any other American writer. Because of its lapses into didacticism and authorial self-indulgence, it cannot be considered a complete success. Yet if it fails to capture the essence of the American experience, it remains an impressive testament to the possibility of familial solidarity in an unstable and largely faithless world.

Bibliography

Castronovo, David. Thornton Wilder. New York: Ungar, 1986. Two chapters on Wilder’s early and later novels. A useful introductory study, including chronology, notes, and bibliography.

Goldstein, Malcolm. The Art of Thornton Wilder. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. An early and still useful introduction to Wilder’s novels and plays. A short biographical sketch is followed by an in-depth look at his work through the one-act play Childhood (1962). Includes bibliographical notes and an index.

Goldstone, Richard H. Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975. An intimate portrait of Wilder by a close friend who had written previous studies on the subject, had access to personal documents, and interviewed family and friends. Includes notes, a selected bibliography, and an index.

Harrison, Gilbert A. The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1983. A chatty biographical study of Wilder by a biographer who was provided access to Wilder’s notes, letters, and photographs. Harrison successfully re-creates Wilder’s life and the influences, both good and bad, that shaped him.

Simon, Linda. Thornton Wilder: His World. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979. A solid biographical study of Wilder that includes examinations of his published works and photographs, notes, a bibliography, and an index.

Wilder, Amos Niven. Thornton Wilder and His Public. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. A short critical study of Wilder by his older brother, who offers an inside family look at the writer. A supplement includes Wilder’s “Culture in a Democracy” address and a selected German bibliography.