Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1939

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Themes

Nihilism

Pale Horse, Pale Rider is a story about Miranda. As such, the story is infused with her personality, and her nihilistic worldview becomes a central theme. Nihilism is a philosophical view that rejects every traditional value or belief about the world, instead positing that life and existence are essentially meaningless. After an apparent lifetime of unhappiness, Miranda can’t view the world as anything but meaningless. To her, every action and event is defined by its ineffectiveness. Even something as consequential and historical as World War I is relatively unimportant to Miranda. To her, the war is just another inevitable consequence of human action. She has no ability to affect or change the war. She spends more time worrying about paying her bills—something over which she at least has control. Miranda’s nihilism is all-consuming. Every part of her life is affected by her detachment from society. She drifts through life, unable to really care about anything because everything seems to her to be already terrible. Given the scale of the war and the rise of the influenza, both of which will kill many millions of people, Miranda feels justified in her nihilism.

Adam’s role is to provide a rebuke to Miranda’s nihilism. Not by design or purpose, he enters Miranda’s life and casually shows her that another future is possible. Whereas Miranda is consumed by nihilism to the point that it defines her life, Adam doesn’t think in these terms. He doesn’t obsess about the past or the future, nor does he let the rising sense of dread in the world stop him from having a good time. Adam thinks about the future in broad terms. He wanted to be an engineer once and still holds onto this ambition, even though he knows that he’s being sent into the deadliest conflict in human history. Miranda never leaves the US yet can’t envision an optimistic future. Adam is being sent into the swirling vortex of death and destruction that is Europe in the grip of a world war and a plague—yet he thinks positively about the future. Simply through existing in his casually optimistic manner, he provides a counterpoint to Miranda’s nihilism. He shows her that she doesn’t need to define herself by her negative emotions, even if she can’t remember a time when she was really happy. Adam effectively penetrates Miranda’s nihilism—but not because he’s effusively optimistic or overly hopeful for the future. His optimism and his ability to derive meaning from life is unpremeditated and calm, as though he takes it for granted. His existence gives Miranda something to hope for, mixing their futures together to break through the steely defenses of her depression and suggest that they might have a future with one another.

Eventually, Miranda is vindicated. She survives the disease but loses Adam in the worst way, without being able to say goodbye or properly mourn him. She returns to a world even more devoid of meaning. His death is a cruel joke that snatches away the brief glimpse of optimism she once treasured. Miranda reacts by doubling down on her nihilism. She decides that she’ll continue to exist—but barely so. She’ll show emotions to the world even though she’s already convinced that her existence is pointless. Her public life will be a performance of conformity, while her inner, private life will embrace her vindicated nihilism. Rather than just believing that life has nothing left to offer her, Miranda is now certain of it.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Amid the chaos of a world war and the threat of a global pandemic, Miranda’s life is a series of relatively minor impediments. These impediments may seem trivial in the global sense but to Miranda are the most pressing issues in her life. She worries how she’ll pay her bills. She worries whether she can afford to buy a Liberty Bond and, if she doesn’t, whether she might be fired from her job. She worries about her social interactions, her own nihilism, and her internal thoughts and fears—far more than she worries about the state of the world. These minor impediments place restrictions on Miranda’s life and prevent her from being able to pursue happiness. Miranda considers herself a victim of circumstance, in which the current problems faced by society limit her ability to enjoy life. This isn’t new for Miranda, however, as she has never really felt happy. Her minor concerns have dominated her life and prevented her from ever really enjoying herself, helping forge her nihilistic outlook more than the wars and diseases that now ravage the world. Miranda doesn’t know happiness because she has never had the opportunity to pursue it. In the context of the story, her life is a faltering pursuit of happiness as she tries to experience it for the first time.

Miranda isn’t alone in being forbidden from achieving any form of happiness. Society places restrictions and social expectations upon people that define what they can and can’t do. Chuck is one of the most prominent examples of this. Although he’s the sports reporter at the newspaper where Miranda works, as he confesses to Miranda, he isn’t particularly interested in sports. He’d much rather have Miranda’s job as the theater critic, as he’s a lifelong fan of the theater. Chuck is in a similar position to Miranda, forced into a working position that he doesn’t particularly enjoy because this is where society expects him to be. The working expectations of society are gendered. In the patriarchal society, men are expected to cover sports, while women are expected to cover the theater. Miranda would rather report on real news stories (also a male-gendered role in society), while Chuck would rather cover the theater. Chuck can’t pursue true happiness in the form of a job, which would be more rewarding for him, because the patriarchal society demands that he adhere to a stereotype. The pursuit of happiness is hindered by the gender roles and expectations of the patriarchal society.

For most people, surviving the influenza outbreak would be a happy occasion. The opportunity to live a little longer and pursue happiness even further would, for most, be considered a gift. To Miranda, survival is a cruel irony. She’s nursed back to health by a medical team that expected her to die. Miranda survives but learns that Adam died in Europe, likely after contracting the disease in her apartment during the first days of her illness. Survival is tainted for Miranda and, rather than giving her an opportunity to pursue happiness, simply gives her more time to dwell on the tragic nature of her existence. She can’t pursue happiness because she’s consumed by guilt and pain—and because she feels that nothing’s left to pursue. Her life is antithetical to happiness, as though happiness is a strange, alien concept that has no relation to her whatsoever. Miranda ends the story completely alienated from the idea of happiness to the point that pursuing it is a dead end.

Performance

The society depicted in Pale Horse, Pale Rider is one in which everyone is a performer. The characters feel as though they’re being watched and monitored at all times, which creates a social pressure on each of them to perform a specific role in society. They’re expected to always be patriotic and positive, whether they’re purchasing Liberty Bonds, attending dances with drafted soldiers, or visiting injured men in hospital wards. The characters watch one another—and note one another’s performances. Performance is part of society itself, in which relentless positive patriotism is expounded in public while, in private, the characters whisper to one another about their fears and doubts. Towney knits publicly, for example, as she wants the world to believe that she’s creating clothing for the injured soldiers. Her actions are a performance for the benefit of others—but are insincere. She’s knitting the sweater for herself, but she needs society to believe that she’s performing patriotism. Similarly, Chuck publicly insists that he loves sports, while he’s really indifferent to them. In reality, he’d prefer to be the newspaper’s theater critic. Towney and Chuck hide their true feelings while performing according to the expectations society presses upon them.

Performance is policed by social expectation. Anyone who’s not seen to perform the proper role is threatened with social ostracization or worse. The Liberty Bond salesmen mostly explicit illustrate this social threat. They visit people’s workplaces and insist that people very publicly purchase bonds that will contribute to the country’s ability to finance the war. Anyone who declines is threatened with the implication of public shame: No one wants to be accused of being unpatriotic. Even worse, the characters fear that they may lose their jobs if they don’t purchase the bonds. The performance of patriotism comes with a steep financial cost for characters already struggling to make ends meet. In this situation, the characters aren’t exhibiting actual patriotism. They don’t purchase Liberty Bonds because they love their country. Instead, they’re pressured into purchasing such items, which reduces the public performance of patriotism to a commercial transaction. Everyone understands the symbolic meaning of the Liberty Bonds and how they pertain to the performance of patriotism. Even Miranda, who feels alienated from society, feels obliged to continue the performance.

Miranda’s alienation derives from her awareness of the nature of performance in society. As a theater critic, she’s aware of the nature of performance. She’s expected to scrutinize and interrogate performance for a living, so she can detect that she and others are expected to perform their emotions in public while guarding reality from one another. She turns this awareness of the nature of performance into a growing nihilism. Everything is insincere in society, she surmises, so everything’s meaningless. No emotions are authentic, so she sees little point in investing herself in any kind of community. After surviving her illness and then losing Adam, this sense of alienation reaches its nadir. She’s so completely detached from the world that she embraces the reality of performance. Miranda commits to the public performance of normality. She plans to pretend that she’s a normal, functioning member of society while—in secret—she feels hollow. Her conclusion is that performance has so completely overtaken society that she has no choice but to commit to her own performance. She’ll never be happy, but at least she can play the role of the happy, well-adjusted survivor for the time being. She accepts the performed emotion as a substitute for a happiness she doesn’t believe she can ever feel again.