Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem Summary

Review on Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem

In her memoir titled, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion includes a collection of essays that focus on her experiences in California during the 1960’s. By combining true historical facts, with a keen eye for gothic imagery, Didion narrates a felt experience from the perspective of a participant and an observer— calling into question the values of her own generation, while simultaneously embracing them in order to create a palpable narrative. Part One, Life Styles in the Golden Land provides a both a nostalgic and geographic origin story for the following chapters. The collection opens with the essay, Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, which tells the tale of Lucille Miller and her

Her approving tone, which is sparsely given, is expressed when describing Wayne. She writes, “Although men I have known have had many virtues…they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow” (30). In this passage she confesses how John Wayne (Both the actor and movie character), epitomized her dreams of a male hero. Later, she goes onto describe how he said he would kill another man before let him go to prison, in a tone that suggests her value on hyper-masculine values that existed in Wayne’s films. For Didion, his stereotypical image as the Western cowboy exists as a metaphor for the stability and order the present “California” lacks. She juxtaposes this image of with “the present” image of the 1960’s San Francisco—as a city of chaos, “In a world we understand early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever, but in any case existed no more—a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do” (31) Here, “the center can