Lynd Ward developed his masterpiece in the depths of the great depression with his pictorial narrative the Wild Pilgrimage. Wild Pilgrimage is a narrative that portrays a laborer in this case referred to as a protagonist who is fleeing from the frustrations of the countryside to the city. In the narrative the countryside is far from being ideal and the laborer ends up with enemies of his own class whom he has to deal with in the city. The narrative implies individual escape and its rejection and a hint of what might be referred to as a lifestyle of the enslaved. The title of the narrative is gotten from Arturo Giovannitti and Ward added a passage of his writing to this narrative as an epigraph in this quote: “thinking things that cannot be chained and cannot be locked, but that wander far away in the sunlit world, each in a wild pilgrimage after a destined goal” (Ward, 69).
Social inequalities
In this novel Ward is portraying the degree of inequalities and exploitation of individuals in society. The violent confrontation that the protagonist feels is between the city and himself and is seen actually fighting between two different groups of people and that is the workers at the factory and the police officers. One theme that cannot be ignored is that of inequalities due to the link between action and thought and in this view Ward is of the opinion that vision, discontent and thought are the three ingredients for action.
Ward reflects the society’s inequalities in the narrative claiming that it was in the thirties that the exploitation by individuals was more evident because of the way of doing things. At the time this was possible in only two ways; there were individuals who sought for solutions by themselves. The second way was of individuals who ran away from the industrial and urban wastes to find refuge in any place with a sign of some deliverance. In other circumstances there were individuals who in the event of joblessness and hunger just roamed aimlessly in the hope of finding a job or a solution to their hunger in a faraway place from where they came from. Other individuals who had no option but to stay and chose to confront any problems that arise one at a time in the hope that one day the problems will come to an end. The novel is comprised of various parts but does not have any internal divisions. Some of the parts include:
Workers go back home due to the closure of the factory and to pass time some of them go home, others stop to listen to the communist, others pay a visit to prostitutes but the protagonist decides to roam around his small working-class town. He witnesses a funeral procession and stops to imagine what is in store for him in this small town and the life he will have outside the factory (Ward, 37). His fear is that this might be his final chance before his death; the protagonist’s prison is actually the industrial society, so he is hoping to break down the bars around him in order to escape to the outside world in search of companionship and a home; the countryside is not what the protagonist had seen in his dream, and after witnessing a black man being lynched by a mob he ends up in despair and this leads him to a farm where he finds a job working for a farmer.
Meaningful work gives him a sense of pride and self-esteem and here he gets to sleep in the barn and enjoy sharing dinner with the farmer’s family; while at the barn he yearns to have a woman even with his self consciousness that he a nobody cannot have a woman; he dares to approach the woman who screams out of fear. The farmer throws him out of the farm and his home; the protagonist in fear feels like he is being lynched by the mob and that they have set a trap for him; finally his escape to the forest leads him to another farm and it is here while working that the farm owner introduces him to a book on themes of anti-capitalism and through his visions and dreams the protagonist imagines that he is in a pit full of fire and the farmer rescues him and pulls him out of the fire (Ward, 45).
In the process he turns around and notices he was not alone in the fire and that there were others in the fire with him and they have ropes tied around their necks. These ropes are being handled by some hazy figures which he cannot see but from the side of the city. It is here that him and the farmer uplift a pit of fire to symbolize the ability of a people in unity to overthrow a system that oppresses and makes its people suffer; in his final clash with his enemies the protagonist sees his victory and as he lifts up the head of his enemy he realizes it’s his own; his journey comes to an end with a fight with a police officer where he ends up dead (Ward, 73).
In the narrative another obvious fact is that the women have been portrayed as objects of sexual satisfaction or desire and as the ones responsible for keeping the homestead stable whereas the men have been portrayed as the striking workers, the slaves, and the artist and in a special case the protagonist who is defined as the Wild Pilgrimage. Ward has portrayed the deep frustration that was looming in the 1930s in America and which was felt by many an individual and what the people had to go through to fight the consequences of capitalism and inequality.
Conclusion
This novel documents the clear the journey of one man from the rampage of an industry to how he manages to escape his prison like environment and goes out into the wooded environment, and it is here that he witnesses the ugly side of the human race through the lynching of a young black man. All through his journey his dreams and reality drive him from one episode to the next in the narrative. The novel portrays the sharp contrast between heroism and happiness of the protagonist’s dreams and the actual disastrous realities that come after these dreams.
Ward’s artwork fits the novel in the best way possible putting into consideration former works he has done. The novel leads to sharp contrasts and hard edges with Ward making use of a medium level like tone to explain the theme of inequality. Every scene in the book feels like it has a much bigger meaning as Ward has used a visual style that has a momentous quality in his descriptions. In the novel it is clean that individual panels and icons are capable of making their own stand even with any context put into consideration and it would still pan out to be a perfect story. The novel Wild Pilgrimage by Lynd Ward is a work of art at every level and it is a heart wrenching story in itself that describes and portrays inequalities in society as it was in the 1930s.
Work Cited
Ward, Lynd. Wild pilgrimage: A Novel in Woodcuts. New York: Dover publications, 1932.
