Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Symbol: Jack and Jill (allusion)
"I call him 'Jack the One-eyed Jill'--not to his face, of course" (Berendt 53).
In Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, the narrator walks into a junk-shop and meets both a salesman, who wears makeup on one eye, and the boss, who refers to the salesman as 'Jack the One-eyed Jill.' This is an allusion to "Jack and Jill," a nursery rhyme which originated in the 14th century. In the original stanza of the rhyme, there is a distinct lack of parental figures, though both Jack and Jill are generally assumed to be children. The lack of strong guiding figures often leads to rebellious behavior. This could be a reference to the obdurate behavior of the salesman, who continued to paint his eye against the wishes of his boss. The nursery rhyme also mentions a bucket of water that Jack and Jill were meant to fetch. Water is symbolic of life and freedom, suggesting that by comparing the salesman to Jack and Jill, the boss believed the salesman was after the freedom to express himself however he liked.
posted by k1donna @ 6:49:00 AM
3 Comments:
This is really cool! When I was reading this part I couldn't think of any reason why the boss would call the salesman "Jack the One-eyed Jill," but I think this is a pretty-good analysis of that name. Another point I'd raise here is that the boss knows that he paints his eyelid, but he doesn't say anything and lets the salesman believe he's fooling him. In this way I'd say he's like Jack and Jill in that they're silly kids who, even to do a very simple task of fetching water, messed up greatly in the end, and as you said there didn't appear to be any guiding figures. So the boss sees the salesman as naive and childish for not obeying and thinking that he's clever enough to fool him, but he just lets him do his thing and leaves him alone.
Ryan McGuire Singh:
Perhaps another possibility for the boss dubbing the salesman "Jack the One-eyed Jill" is because the salesman's name is Jack. Since putting on eye makeup is considered to be a very feminine activity, the boss likely wanted to create an epithet that would include the salesman's name whilst poking fun at his perceived femininity.
I like where you are going with that one Ryan, but I thought of it in a very different way. How I interpreted this quote was that each of the salesman's eyes represents Jack and Jill. The first eye to have the makeup removed is Jack because he fell down the hill first. The second eye represents Jill because I believe later the boss will force the salesman to remove the makeup, which shows how Jill followed Jack down the hill.
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