Memory and Forgetting in Joyce Carol Oates’s American Melancholy
Thematic Claim: Memory as Burden and Foundation, Forgetting as Mercy and Erasure
In American Melancholy, Joyce Carol Oates presents memory and forgetting not as simple opposites but as a volatile, often indistinguishable pair. Memories can be traumatic, artificially implanted, or selectively buried; forgetting can be an act of grace or an instrument of neglect. Across the collection, Oates asks whether we can ever truly escape our pasts, and whether erasing memory might sometimes be the only mercy left. The poems suggest that personal and collective identity is woven from threads of both remembrance and oblivion, and that the tension between the two is what makes us human.
Three Key Poems That Examine Memory and Forgetting
1. Little Albert, 1920: Conditioned Memory and the Inescapable Past
In Little Albert, 1920, Oates gives voice to the infant subject of John Watson’s infamous conditioning experiment. The poem traces how a learned fear of a white rat becomes a generalized terror that follows Albert into his short life. The memory is not organic but manufactured, yet it proves as real and painful as any naturally acquired fear. Oates writes that “memory of this (baseless) fear will endure contained / in the unfathomable brain.” Here, memory is a prison built by others. Albert cannot forget the clanging hammer or the Santa Claus mask, and his early death—from hydrocephalus, not the experiment—makes forgetting impossible. The poem questions whether such conditioned memories can ever be undone; Watson never de-conditioned him. Memory is thus shown as something that can be inflicted, becoming a permanent scar on the psyche.
2. Obedience: 1962: The Guilt That Cannot Be Forgotten
In Obedience: 1962, Oates re-imagines Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments from the perspective of the “teacher” who administers what he believes are real shocks to a “learner.” The speaker is told that he is participating in a memory experiment, but the true experiment is about obedience. The poem’s repeated mantra—“Because it was explained to you, you must follow orders”—drives home how memory of the act lingers long after the debriefing. Even when the speaker learns that no volts were actually delivered, he remains haunted: “Fifty years live and relive the infamous experiment through the ruin / of your life. / Fifty years sleepless made to recall the silence after you’d delivered / four hundred seventy-five volts.” Forgetting is not available here. The memory of complicity and the imagined death of the learner become a permanent moral wound. The poem suggests that some memories cannot be willed away, especially those that implicate us in cruelty.
3. Old America Has Come Home to Die: Forgetting as Collective Neglect
The character of Eli, the “Old America” figure in Old America Has Come Home to Die, embodies the tension between being forgotten and seeking remembrance. After a lifetime of wandering and hardship, Eli returns to die, desperate to confess his sins and reconnect with family. But as the poem’s refrain notes, “Old America, we are not cruel / people, but the fact is mostly we’ve / forgotten you.” His family has moved on; his beloved Marta died decades ago. The memories he carries—of a robbery he did not commit, of abandoned children, of frostbitten fingers—are vivid to him, but the world around him has erased him. Forgetting here is a form of social death. Yet the poem also suggests that forgetting can be a kind of protection: the family had long assumed Eli died in the Yukon, and his sudden return disrupts a settled grief. The clash between the speaker’s frantic need to be remembered and the relative’s casual amnesia reveals forgetting as both a product of time and an act of will.
The Complexity of Forgetting: Mercy or Destruction?
Not all forgetting in American Melancholy is negative. The short poem The Mercy offers a counterpoint: “The stroke / that wipes out / memory / is another word / for mercy.” Here, amnesia is presented as a gift, a release from unbearable pain. This idea complicates the collection by acknowledging that sometimes forgetting is necessary for survival. Yet other poems, such as Harlow’s Monkeys, expose the cruelty of forced forgetting—the surgical removal of monkey vocal cords so their screams, which are identical to human screams, cannot be heard. In that poem, sensory deprivation and maternal separation lead to “learned helplessness” and despair. Forgetting, when imposed from outside, becomes a form of torture.
Similarly, That Other dramatizes the denial of memory: “You don’t remember that. / What you think you remember— / it wasn’t that.” The speaker gaslights the listener, undermining the reliability of personal recollection. This poem highlights how memory can be contested and distorted, especially by those with power. The line between accurate recall and self-serving fiction blurs, leaving identity unstable.
Character and Symbol Connections
The theme of memory and forgetting is woven through several recurring characters and symbols. Little Albert stands for the violence of imposed memory, while Eli (Old America) represents the pain of being forgotten by one’s community. The speaker in Obedience is a stand-in for anyone burdened by the memory of complicity. The “interpreter” figure (noted in the outline) may also appear in poems that question whose version of history is remembered.
Symbols deepen the theme:
- Sinkhole: A physical hole that swallows everything—houses, memories, landscapes. It suggests the sudden erasure of the past, a forgetting that is geological and impersonal.
- Tunnel: In the poem “The Tunnel,” the speaker descends into a hospital room to witness a loved one dying. The descent mirrors the act of delving into buried memories, painful but unavoidable.
- Kite: A fragile connection between ground and sky, kite string can stand for the tenuous thread of memory that ties us to the past, easily cut.
- Hammock: In “In Hemp-Woven Hammocks Reading the Nation,” the hammock suspends its occupants in a state of peaceful forgetting—a temporary reprieve from time and mortality.
These symbols do not resolve the tension; they instead echo the poems’ central ambiguity: memory can anchor us or drag us under, and forgetting can be a soft hammock or a dark sinkhole.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does Oates use the figure of Little Albert to critique the ethics of memory manipulation?
The poem reveals that conditioned memory can be as powerful as natural memory, and that the experimenter’s refusal to de-condition Albert means he carries a fabricated fear to his grave. Oates condemns the disregard for the subject’s long-term well-being, suggesting that memory—even artificially induced—becomes a defining part of identity.
2. In “Obedience: 1962,” why does the speaker remain haunted by the experiment even after learning no shocks were real?
The speaker’s memory is of his own willingness to obey, not just the sensory details. The moral weight of his actions cannot be erased by debriefing; the poem argues that the memory of complicity, once formed, is indelible. The line “Killed a human being” (though untrue) shows how guilt fuses with memory.
3. Compare the treatment of forgetting in “The Mercy” and “Old America Has Come Home to Die.” Which is more sympathetic?
“The Mercy” frames forgetting as a stroke that wipes clean painful memory, a form of grace. In contrast, “Old America” shows forgetting as neglect that leaves a dying man unrecognized. Both are sympathetic but from different angles: one from the perspective of the sufferer wishing to forget, the other from the perspective of the forgotten wanting to be remembered.
4. How does the sinkhole symbol relate to the theme of forgetting?
The sinkhole erases things suddenly and completely, like an involuntary amnesia. But it also leaves a void that marks the absence. Forgetting in the poems is not a clean slate; it leaves a psychological crater that can still affect the present.
5. What does the poem “That Other” suggest about the reliability of memory?
It suggests that memory is vulnerable to gaslighting and external manipulation. The repeated denial—“you don’t remember that”—destabilizes the listener’s sense of reality, showing that memory is not a private, trustworthy archive but a contested narrative shaped by power dynamics.