Thoughts of Spoon River

What to make of Emily Sparks? That she was a caring, motherly, school teacher who is able to see aspects of her students others are oblivious to is evident in her epitaph. That she is a woman of faith is just as obvious. The question I ponder is whether her devotion to Reuben Pantier is entirely healthy. That Emily Sparks is a lonely old spinster is plain to see. And she appears not to have any cats! All the natural love and desire for affection of a healthy human being has to find expression one way or another. The longing of her first line - "Where is my boy, my boy - " - implies she lavishes hers upon the idea of Reuben Pantier. As there is no suggestion, either in this epitaph or the previous one, of untoward behaviour, we can accept that Emily Sparks is a morally upstanding woman - with perfectly natural feelings and desires! Her letter to Reuben Pantier, "Of the beautiful love of Christ" is a sublimated expression of her love/attraction to a boy for whom sh...

Reuben Pantier, product of a broken home - a father defeated by his wife, a mother disgusted by her husband. A boy with all the wrong role models, learning, from his father, that men can take what they desire from women, and, from his mother, that women will discard their men like so much garbage. No wonder that young Reuben little respected anyone, including - or, maybe, especially - himself, adopting a life of debauchery, such that he was deemed the "worthless son of Benjamin Pantier" by A.D. Blood, a view probably held communally. Pantier acknowledges this effect his parents had upon him, maybe seeing it as his excuse for the life of "wine and women and joy of life" he fled towards after his "trouble" with the Millner's daughter, Dora Williams. His lifestyle, like the young man himself, is a product of his upbringing, adopted without thought or care, a seeking after those immediate gratifications that serve to fill the void in the lives of those w...