Field of Deferred Dreams: Baseball and Historical Amnesia in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home

In her interrelated novels Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), Marilynne Robinson portrays American racism in a surprising and subtle way. Apart from Jack Boughton’s African American wife and son, Della and Robert Miles, whose existence he keeps secret and who appear only in the last pages of Home, the characters in these novels are all Caucasian and are living in all-white Gilead during the summer of 1956. Yet the books are clearly concerned with the evils arising from American slavery and the failure of Reconstruction, including the sort of white racism that exists in the absence of other races and takes the form of indifference to the consequences of prejudice. The novels show that despite Gilead’s isolation in rural western Iowa, the town reflects American history and attitudes, including a desire to forget or rewrite disturbing events in the past. In both of these novels, baseball, presented primarily as a social phenomenon rather than a sport, is seen as a vehicle of both inclusion and exclusion. Major League Baseball—the game most closely associated with American values, including cultural assimilation—is used to highlight the sorry history of American race relations from around 1890 to the middle of the twentieth century, while in a related theme amateur baseball is shown to be neither healing nor particularly welcoming of outsiders. Baseball therefore becomes a powerful symbol for what has been lost in the town—and in the country—and what might be restored to it.

Whenever baseball appears in either popular or literary fiction, it tends to carry a symbolic weight, often focusing on American values. Popular baseball fiction is typically about the “straight white male [who] is the default value American” (Morris 109) and is, according to Cordelia Candelaria, “participating in a closed activity of the dominant—that is, white, male, Christian, and capitalist—culture” (3). In contrast, literary novels that include baseball may condemn exclusion based on race, religion, or other prejudicial criteria. In Candelaria’s terms, baseball functions in fiction as a “cultural metonym,” a “slice of American life that uniquely reflects and represents the whole” (84), good and bad; or, as John A. Lauricella puts it, “baseball allusions serve as emblems of American values, tropes of American beliefs, the signature of our national myths” (31). Candelaria and Lauricella each divide literary novels involving baseball into two groups. One includes novels whose plots revolve around baseball, typically focusing on a particular player, team, or season; these include, among others, Ring Lardner’s You Know Me Al (1916), Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (1952), and Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel (1973).¹ Those in the other group, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952), use baseball only briefly and tangentially.

Gilead and Home could be put into the latter category, but they make more frequent and more significant use of baseball than the books just named. Their plots do not center on baseball, but Gilead refers to baseball thirty-odd times, and Home does so on some two dozen occasions. These passages, which involve historical facts, fictional events, and reminiscences combining both, reflect historical American values and help develop two themes common in baseball fiction, “the relationship of father and son” and—more important here—“ethnic prejudice” (Lauricella 9). Further, the pattern of most juvenile and many adult baseball novels, in which “a team blends its talents, overcomes conflict and despair, and wins the Big Game” (Morris 155) is echoed in Gilead and Home, though not in the usual way. John Ames, the elderly Congregational minister who narrates Gilead in the form of a journal-like letter, needs to overcome obstacles to his spiritual well-being, and Glory Boughton, the viewpoint character in Home, must break out of the depression she sank into when she realized that she would never have the life she hoped for.

Accepting history rather than forgetting it is crucial to both of these victories and to...