Meaning In W. Cather's Clemency Of The Court

Childhood is the foundation of what a person will become and how they will react to their situations in life. In Clemency of the Court, by W. Cather, the main character serge, has a terrible childhood full of abandonment, abuse, and negligence. The horrible bringing up of serge forced him to fabricate fallacious senses of hope, love, and belonging. Cather uses symbolism to convey that when people go through onerous times they tend to create many false hopes as an attempt to gain comfort. Though false hope is originally intended for comfort it only leads to great disappointment and disheartenment.

Serge’s mother committed suicide when he was just an infant, but Serge takes the little that he knows about her to create a fictitious connection with her. The outdoors is a symbol used to represent Serge’s made-beleive connection with his biological mother. In the snow, is a place where Serge loves to be, since he believed that his birth mother loved it and passed the fondness down to him. To show, “Before his birth his mother used to go off alone and sit in the snow for hours... The feeling for the snow and the love for it seemed to go into the boy's blood, somehow.
Whenever times got particularly tough in Serge’s life he always eased himself with the fact that the state would save him, or that the state would come for him one day. To prove, “He was never impatient, for he believed that “the State” would come some day and explain, and take him to herself. He watched for her coming every day, hoped for it every night”(Cather 3). This shows that this idea of “the state” is the only thing that kept him going and the only thing that gave him hope. Serge was not the only one who believed in “the state”; he only heard about it through other people in his life. Even people who had a fantastic life compared to Serge needed something to give them a sense of