Tales of “Conformity Gone Mad”
Tales of “Conformity Gone Mad”

Summary/Abstract: The four “tales” under consideration here come from four entirely different authors and were published over a time span of about one-hundred-and-fifty years(about 1830 to 1980). They are Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and Nadine Gordimer’s “The Moment Before the Gun Went Off ”. Our “mad” in the title (borrowed from one of the critics writing about the second story) also stands for such terms as “weird”, “terrible” or “sinister”,describing the relationships between each of the stories and a certain tradition against which the conflict is projected. Consequently, tradition, conformity,convention, ritual/rite, scapegoat… in these stories are the main concepts that define the development of our critical discourse. In this corner of the fictional world, each individual tradition or conformity to community rules and customs,whether inherited or invented, religious, utopian, secular or political, ultimately goes “mad”.

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