Out of the Dust as a historical novel
Out of the Dust as a coming-of-age novel
Out of the Dust as a symbolic structure
Out of the Dust as a series of linked poems

     We can look at Out of the Dust from a variety of perspectives, some of which may connect it to other reading during this course, while others are unique to this book:

• As a historical novel  Out of the Dust presents a time beyond the memory of today’s children, and even of their parents; however, it is much closer in time to us than the medieval world of someone like Catherine/Birdy.  Thus, it is easier for Billie Jo to be psychologically true to her own time without seeming terribly different from the contemporary reader.  What happens to Billie Jo over the course of the novel is horrifying, harrowing – but her response to it is easy for us to understand, requiring no special historical insights.

        Hesse conveys the sense of the past in two ways:
• Through details of Billie Jo’s day-to-day life, including constant concern about the weather and the dust and specific details like Mad Dog’s debut on the radio, references to President Roosevelt, or the arrival of the refugee family at her school.  Note such details as her mother’s “Rules of Dining” (21), which bring home the reality of the ever-present dust.
• Through the occasional insertion of poems about specific historical events, like the birth of the Dionne quintuplets in Canada or the eruption of the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii.  While these contemporary references do connect to the novel’s events (e.g., paralleling her mother’s pregnancy or the different kind of natural disaster in Oklahoma), they have no direct effect on the plot of the narrative.
Even though the specific concerns of the Dust Bowl years were different from our own – we are not experiencing a depression or massive crop failures – there are obvious resonances, especially for farm families.  In recent years, many farm areas have experienced drought, though not as severe or prolonged as during the Dust Bowl.  Even in good years, the weather needs to be a constant concern for the farmer.  So it may be easy to make a psychological connection to Billie Jo.  Still, she appears to be wholly a child of her own time, not of ours.
        The one possible departure from historical verisimilitude comes from Billie Jo’s teacher, who exhibits an environmental and economic awareness that more likely reflects 1990s America than the thoughts of a rural teacher in the Oklahoma panhandle sixty years earlier.  In “Rabbit Battles,” Miss Freeland (whose name is surely intentional) comments on the ecological impact of farming: “if we keep/plowing under the stuff they [the rabbits] ought to be eating,/what are they supposed to do?” (6) In “The Path of Our Sorrow” (83), she presents an economic analysis of the farmer’s plight and an environmental explanation for the collapse of the farming economy.  While such an analysis was certainly possible at the time, much of our understanding of the causes of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl has come retrospectively, and it seems unlikely that an ordinary schoolteacher would have possessed such insights at that time.

• As a coming-of age novel  The novel begins with Billie Jo’s recognition that she is not the child her father wanted:

He wanted a boy.
Instead,
he got a long-legged girl
with a wide mouth
and cheekbones like bicycle handles. . . .
By the summer I turned nine Daddy had
given up about having a boy.
He tried making me do.
I look just like him.
I can handle myself most everywhere he puts me,
even on the tractor,
though I don’t like that much. (1-2)

At the same time, she expresses her dissatisfaction with her home: “From the earliest I can remember/I’ve been restless in this/little Panhandle shack we call home,/always getting in Ma’s way. . .”  Over the course of the narrative, then, Billie Jo must come to terms with these feelings: of rejection by her father for being a girl, of desire for escape, of rivalry with her mother.
       In the early part of the book, the primary conflict is with her mother, while Billie Jo appears to be friendlier toward her father – perhaps reflecting her sense of identity with the man whom she resembles.  She uses subterfuge to get her mother’s permission to play the piano (12), and envies her mother’s playing, in a scene that specifically connects the music to her father’s love:

Daddy gets soft eyes, standing behind her while she plays.
I want someone to look that way at me.    (24)

Billie Jo attributes her mother’s resistance to the 13-year-old’s burgeoning musical career to jealousy (28). She responds to her mother’s discipline with obedience but resentment: “. . . all the while I glare at Ma’s back with a scowl/foul as maggoty stew” (29).  She also resents her mother’s refusal to demonstrate her pride in Billie Jo’s academic success:

I wish she’d give me a little more to hold on to than
“I knew you could.”
Instead she makes me feel like she’s just
taking me in like I was
so much flannel dry on the line.  (30)

Though these expressions of resentment are mild, and are balanced by more positive images (for instance, Billie Jo calls her “My dazzling ma” while watching her dance naked in the rain (56)), they suggest an unconscious desire underlying Billie Jo’s role in the accident which leads to her mother’s death.  Her conflict over her feelings about her mother could contribute to the guilt she feels afterward, and to her anger at her father, whom she wants to blame.
        Part of growing into adulthood includes coming to terms with her parents.  For Billie Jo, her mother’s accident and subsequent death remove the parent most able to help her in the transition to young womanhood, and leave her with additional feelings of guilt and resentment toward her father.  It also destroys one of her main hopes for escaping from the dreary farm life that she hates, because her own injuries impede her piano playing.  Much of the rest of the novel presents her struggle against her father’s silence, which is only resolved when she makes her final attempt to escape “out of the dust.”  In meeting the Kansas drifter on the train, she finally recognizes her own need for family and place, so she is able to return to and reconcile with her father.
 
• As a symbolic structure  Hesse manipulates several symbols to underline the novel’s themes, in particular the importance of hope. The great human disaster of the Dust Bowl is the replacement of hope with its converse, despair:
The way I see it, hard times aren’t only
about money,
or drought,
or dust.
hard times are about losing spirit,
and hope,
and what happens when dreams dry up.    (225)
Among the more important symbols of this hope are the piano, the apple tree, and the pool.
        The piano represents Billie Jo’s hope for escape from the farm; until she burns her hands, she anticipates a career as a performer.  It is an escape in another way, too: her music is the primary source of pleasure in her life: “It’s the best/I’ve ever felt,/playing hot piano. . . . /How supremely/heaven/playing piano/can be” (13-14). The piano is also a vehicle for her independence, as she uses it to earn her own money.  At the same time, it functions as a link to her mother, first in that her mother taught her to play, and later as the only tangible thing left from her mother.  This link is made explicit in “The Dream” (193): “Piano, my silent/mother,/I can touch you. . .”  After her mother’s death and her own injury, Billie Jo resists playing the piano because of the pain it causes to her hands; her resumption of music is one mark of her gradual psychic and physical healing.
        The apples are a recurrent symbol of the family’s hopes, and another link to Billie Jo’s mother.  When her father’s hopes for a wheat harvest are dashed, he challenges the mother’s suggestion he try growing a different crop by lashing out against the apple trees (41).  But the mother has planted and cared for the trees so “that she and they might bring forth fruit/into our home,/together.” (43)  Billie Jo expresses her hopes for the future in a sensuous catalogue of apple dishes she looks forward to their ripening (45).  When the dust storm and the too-hard rain destroy the second wheat crop, the apples suffer, too, but “there are enough left;/enough/for a small harvest,/if we lose no more.” (47)  Thus, the apples appear to represent the last best hope for comfort and sustenance in the family.  At the nadir of hope, the moment of her mother’s death, Billie Jo watches a swarm of grasshoppers destroy all of the fruit; there is no hope left (68-69).  Near the end of the book, Billie Jo expresses the connection between the apples and her mother:
“Whenever she could,
Ma filled a bowl with apples,” I tell Louise.
“I’m crazy about apples. . .” (216)
In the novel’s final scene, the apple trees have again borne fruit, and Billie Jo plays the piano:
[Louise] brings apples in a sack,
perfect apples she arranges
in a bowl on the shelf
opposite the book of poetry.
Sometimes, while I’m at the piano,
I catch her reflection in the mirror,
standing in the kitchen, soft-eyed, while Daddy
finishes chores,
and I stretch my fingers over the keys,
and I play.  (227)
The imagery connects these two major symbols to suggest the restoration of the family’s hope in the future.
     The pool, too, is a symbol both of hope – because it provides the moisture needed for continued existence – and of the mother – because it was her plan, and because the father only undertook to build it following her death.  The connection between pool and mother/hope helps to explain the simile used in “The Dream” (193), where Billie Jo expresses the emotional stillness she finds in piano music: “. . . that stillness/like a pond/a pond/when the wind is quiet . . .”
 
• As a series of linked poems  Although Out of the Dust has a narrative (plot) structure, it has been constructed as a series of blank-verse poems.  Many of these poems function quite well independent of the narrative, and it is useful to spend some time considering the language of some individual works, to appreciate the author’s use of sound, rhythm, and image.  Try reading the following poems for their “poetic” qualities:
• “On Stage” (13)
• “Rules of Dining” (21)
• “Breaking Drought” (23)
• “Hope in a Drizzle” (55)
• “Roots” (75)
• “Boxes” (80)
• “Snow” (137)
• “The Dream” (193)
• “Thanksgiving List” (220)

Updated May 10, 2000
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