Introduction
Over the last decade, much attention has been placed on corruption all around the world through the work of Transparency International (particularly their Corruption Perceptions Index, their Global Corruption Report, and their Bribe Payers’ Index) as well as through other organizations.
While organizations have conducted research, results have not always been conclusive due the ‘tabooness’ of collecting the data – some folks just do not want to talk about, reveal their organization’s impact by, or their organization’s participation in corruption. Because corruption is a form of illicit and illegal activity that may or may not be made open, the perceptual measures are the next best thing available to gauge the extent of its existence other than the all but impossible to obtain objective actual quantity.[i] This paper aims to critically analyze and assess the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index.
Overview
Transparency International, a corruption-fighting organization based in Berlin, Germany publishes the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) annually since 1995. Transparency International (TI) formed an Index Advisory Committee (IAC) in 1996 to offer advice on its global corruption measurement tools. The role of the committee is to provide technical expertise and advice in the development and strengthening of the methodologies used by TI to measure corruption and governance. Members of the committee are economists, statisticians, and social and political scientists.
The CPI indicates the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist among public officials and politicians in the countries included in the report. The CPI 2008 ranks 180 countries from the least perceived to the most perceived corrupt. The CPI is a composite survey, reflecting the perceptions of business people and country analysts, both resident and non-resident. It draws data from 14 different surveys from 10 independent institutions. For a country to be included, it must be featured in at least three of the 14 surveys. As a result, a number of countries, including some which could be among the most corrupt, are missing because not enough survey data is available.
More than two-thirds of the 180 nations in the 2008 CPI, including many of the world’s most poverty stricken, score fewer than 5 out of a clean score of 10. Corruption is perceived to be rampant in Bangladesh, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Guinea, Iraq, Myanmar, and Somalia, countries with a score of 2 or fewer in the 2008 index. Countries with a score of 9 or higher, with very low levels of perceived corruption, are predominantly wealthy countries, namely Denmark, New Zealand, Sweden, Singapore, Finland, Iceland, and Switzerland.[iv] Peter Eigen, the former Chairman of Transparency International said in his interview, ‘Poverty is no excuse for tolerating corruption, but neither can wealth protect a country against suffering from it in the future. Constant vigilance is essential everywhere’.[v]
Table 1. 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index [vi]
| Country rank | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 7 | 7 | 9 | 9 | 178 | 178 | 180 |
| Country | Denmark | New Zealand | Sweden | Singapore | Finland | Switzerland | Iceland | Netherlands | Australia | Canada | Iraq | Myanmar | Somalia |
| 2008 CPI score | 9,3 | 9,3 | 9,3 | 9,2 | 9 | 9 | 8,9 | 8,9 | 8,7 | 8,7 | 1,3 | 1,3 | 1 |
| Surveys used | 6 | 6 | 6 | 9 | 6 | 6 | 5 | 6 | 8 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Confidence Range | 9.1 – 9.4 | 9.2 – 9.5 | 9.2 – 9.4 | 9.0 – 9.3 | 8.4 – 9.4 | 8.7 – 9.2 | 8.1 – 9.4 | 8.5 – 9.1 | 8.2 – 9.1 | 8.4 – 9.1 | 1.1 – 1.6 | 1.0 – 1.5 | 0.5 – 1.4 |
The CPI continues to indicate a vicious circle of poverty and corruption. Corrupt political elites in the developing world, working hand in hand with unscrupulous investors, are putting private gain before the cornerstone of capitalism, the welfare of citizens and the economic development of their countries. The world’s poorest peoples are the greatest victims of corruption.[vii]
Measurement and Validity
The CPI provides data on extensive perceptions of corruption within countries. It ranks countries on a one to ten scale; a perfect 10.00 would be a totally corruption-free country. The CPI is a composite index that makes use of surveys of businesspeople and assessments by country analysts. This index is based on a weighted average of approximately ten surveys of varying coverage. For example, 14 sources could be included in the 2008 CPI, originating from 12 independent institutions[viii].
Therefore, the CPI is an aggregate perception indicator based on single perception indexes computed from surveys of business people, local citizens, and experts’ opinions. All sources employ a homogenous definition of the ‘extent of corruption’, in which this term equally reflects the frequency of bribes and the total value of bribes paid. The definition of corruption generally is ‘the misuse of public power for private benefit, such as bribing of public officials, kickbacks in public procurement, or embezzlement of public funds. Each of the sources also assesses the ‘extent’ of corruption among public officials and politicians in the countries in question.’[ix]
It’s worth mentioning that a source must provide a ranking of nations to be included in the CPI sources. For example, if a source conducts surveys in a variety of countries but with varying methodologies, the condition is not met because comparison from one country to another is infeasible in this case. Moreover, the sources must measure the overall extent of corruption. This condition is not met if aspects of corruption are mixed with issues other than corruption such as political instability or nationalism or if measures are changes instead of the levels of corruption.[x]
Additionally, comparisons to the CPI for different years should be based on a country’s score and not its rank since a country’s rank can change simply because new countries enter the index and others drop out. A higher score suggests that respondents provided better ratings, whereas a lower score suggests that respondents revised their perceptions downward. Nevertheless, year-to-year changes in a country’s score could result from a changing sample and methodology, as well as from a changing perception of a country’s performance. Old sources drop out of a recent CPI index and new sources enter, which disturbs the consistency of the assessment.[xi]
To the extent that changes can be traced to a change in assessments provided by individual sources, trends can be identified. For example, countries whose 2008 CPI decreased by at least 0.3 relative to the 2005 CPI, where this drop is not a result of technical factors, are Barbados, Belarus, Costa Rica, Gabon, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uruguay. It should be noted that these countries are in democratization development process now. Improvements of at least 0.3 can be observed for Argentina, Austria, Bolivia, Estonia, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Moldova, Nigeria, Qatar, Slovakia, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, and Yemen.[xii]
Countries whose 2008 CPI decreased by at least 0.3 relative to the 2005 CPI, where this drop is not a result of technical factors, are Brazil, Cuba, Israel, Jordan, Laos, Seychelles, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, and USA. Improvements of at least 0.3 can be observed for Algeria, Czech Republic, India, Japan, Latvia, Lebanon, Mauritius, Paraguay, Slovenia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Uruguay.[xiii]
On the other hand, there is high correlation between different sources as shown by the standard Pearson correlation and Kendall’s rank correlation, suggesting that the sources do not differ considerably in their assessment of the levels of corruption. The standard Pearson correlation and Kendall’s rank correlation are, on average, 0.87 and 0.72 respectively, averaged over different pairs of sources.
Since each source uses its own scaling system, the data should be standardized before each country’s mean value can be determined. This is done by using matching percentiles; the percentile rank of countries – not the score – is the only information processed from each source. Another standardization is done in a second step by beta-transformation, a monotonic transformation to increase the standard deviation to the previous year’s value, while preserving the range from 0 to 10.
Paul G. Wilhelm, a professor in the School of Business at the University of Texas, conducted a study to examine the validity of the CPI. He used one criterion (macro-economic outcome) in his validation analyses and found a highly significant correlation (p < 0.001; r = 0.86) between the CPI and real gross domestic product per capita thereby supporting validity of the CPI.[xiv] This highly significant correlation supports the validity of the CPI.
On the other side, critics point out that the CPI is imprecise since its components often do not measure the same thing. The components themselves are often imprecise, and the accuracy of the CPI will depend on the accuracies of the components in a particular year. In the same way, the type of data used to create the CPI varies from one year to the next, and comparing the CPI ranking of countries from one year to the next demands care. In addition, the CPI relies primarily on the perceptions of a handful of country experts. These perceptions are distorted by a variety of factors, including media coverage, culture, and personal experience/interests. Similarly, Razafindrakoto and Roubaud argue that experts systematically overestimate the level of corruption suffered by the citizens.[xv]
In their study, the authors coordinated two types of surveys on the same subject, the petty bureaucratic corruption experienced by the population in their interactions with government officials, in eight sub-Saharan African countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo). Their study does not address large-scale corruption. The first type of survey covering a sample of over 35,000 people takes an objective measure of the frequency of petty bureaucratic corruption and its characteristics. The second type (the mirror survey) reports on 350 experts’ opinions on the same matter. They also found that experts who contribute to the CPI overestimated four or fivefold the extent to which households in some francophone African countries experienced corruption, compared to survey of households evidence.[xvi]
Discussion and Conclusion
The CPI is a universally accepted measure of international corruption. The lack of a widely agreed upon definition of what counts as corruption is an obstacle to measuring it. Likewise, it is virtually impossible to come up with precise objective measures of corruption since corruption is clandestine. However, tracking perceptions about corruption can be a useful way of measuring it and monitoring the success of governments’ anti-corruption strategies. However, averaging over several numbers improvers the accuracy.
The indices reflect people’s self-reported perception rather than objective measures. Yet, this perception can be different from reality and from one source to another. However, Wei argues that the pairwise correlations among the indices are high, despite the different sources of the surveys. For example, the correlation between the BI and TI indices and that between BI and GCR indices are 0.88 and 0.77 respectively.[xvii] These high correlations suggest that statistical inference on the causes and consequences of corruption is not very responsive to the choice of corruption index.
On the other hand, Donchev and Ujhelyi provide evidence from the International Crime Victimization Survey that reported corruption perception may be weak predictor of actual corruption experience, and they suggest that corruption perception indices measure corruption perception and there is little compelling evidence that they measure corruption experience.[xviii] Corruption experience might require more objective measures of corruption. They also argue that the respondent assessment could be attitudinal if the respondent did not have any personal experience with corruption. These attitudes may also be affected by individual characteristics.
For instance, a more educated respondent living in an urban area might be more knowledgeable about politics and the operation of the bureaucracy, and might be more critical of certain behaviors. It is also likely that he/she might have heard of more concrete examples of corruption from personal contact or the media, and this might cause him/her to report higher corruption perception. Generally, specific, well-publicized events might have a large impact on the respondents’ perception of corruption. In addition, someone who benefits from a corrupt climate, such as an entrepreneur with political ties, may be reluctant to label or view corrupt acts as corruption. Attitudes will also be influenced by country characteristics, which include the norms of behavior of political leaders or officials, and the political culture in general.
Therefore, corruption perception can be different than corruption experience, and thus in order to understand the causes and determinants of actual corruption and to test theories about actual corruption, better measures of actual corruption might be needed. Corruption perception indices might have to be regarded as measuring corruption perception, but not necessarily corruption experience, but this is no way diminishes their importance or usefulness. In their opinion, many studies using corruption perception indices might be usefully rethought as telling us something about the determinants and implications of corruption perceptions, and political trust more generally.
In a similar vein, Olken examines the empirical relationship between beliefs about corruption and a more objective measure of it in the context of a road-building program in rural Indonesia.[xix] He suggests that perceptions data should be used for empirical research on the determinants of corruption with considerable caution, and that there is little alternative to continuing to collect more objective measures of corruption, difficult though that may be.
The bottom line is that one should undertake a careful analysis of the validity of corruption indicators. In addition, there is need for further collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative survey information from firms and households to help in improving our understanding of how corruption impacts different social groups in various countries, which will also contribute to more effective design and implementation of anti-corruption strategies. Furthermore, those measuring corruption should make efforts both to minimize measurement error and to be transparent about the error that inevitably remains. On the other hand, imprecision does not mean that indicators are unreliable. Rather, explicit margins of error allow users to be clear about the conclusions that can and cannot be made with confidence based on a particular measure.
Peter Eigen said on the release of the 2005 CPI, ‘Corruption is a major cause of poverty as well as a barrier to overcoming it. The two scourges feed off each other locking their populations in a cycle of misery. Corruption must be vigorously addressed if aid is to make a real difference in freeing people from poverty’.[xx] Transparency International continues to point out that good governance and transparency are essential to sustainable development. Political leaders of the world must set the framework for investment such that the rule of law is applied and enforced fairly so that industries are sustainable for the development of the local economy.[xxi]
Endnotes
- [i] L Soon, ‘Macro-economic Outcomes of Corruption: A Longitudinal Empirical Study’, Singapore Management Review, Vol. 28, no. 1, 2004, pp. 63-72.
- Transparency International. Corruption Perceptions Index 2008, retrieved April 2009, <http://www.transparency.org/news_room/in_focus/2008/cpi2008>
- TI CPI, 2008
- Ibid.
- P Eigen, ‘Clean Sheet: Transparency International’s New Chapter’, OECD Observer, 252/253, 2005, pp.16-17.
- TI CPI, 2008
- Ibid.
- JG Lambsdorff, ‘The Methodology of the Corruption Perceptions Index 2007,’ Transparency International (TI) and University of Passau, September 2007, retrieved April 2009, <http://www.transparency.org/content/download/23965/358196>
- TI CPI, 2008
- P Wilhelm, ‘International Validation of the Corruption Perceptions Index: Implications for Business Ethics and Entrepreneurship Education,’ Journal of Business Ethics, No. 35, 2002, pp. 177-189
- M Razafindrakoto and F Roubaud, ‘Are International Databases on Corruption Reliable? A Comparison of Expert Opinion Surveys and Household Surveys in Sub-Saharan Africa,’ Document de Travel Dial, DT/2006-17, 2006, retrieved April 2009, <http://www.dial.prd.fr/dialjublications/PDF/Doctravail/2006-17_english.pdf>
- S Wei, ‘Why is Corruption so Much More Taxing than Tax, Arbitrariness Skills,’ NBER Working Papers No. W6255, 1997
- D Donchev and G Ujhelyi, “Do Corruption Indices Measure Corruption?,” Economics Department, Harvard University, 2007, retrieved April 2009, <http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~ujhelyi/corrmeasures.pdf>
- B Olken, ‘Corruption Perception vs. Corruption Reality,’ Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), Discussion Paper 6272, 2007
- Transparency International. Corruption Perceptions Index 2005, retrieved April 2009, <http://www.transparency.org/news_room/in_focus/2005/cpi_2005>
- Transparency International. Corruption Perceptions Index 2006, retrieved April 2009, <http://www.transparency.org/news_room/in_focus/2006/cpi_2006>
Analysis Of Theoretical Framework
Pearson used the schema theory as the theoretical framework for her Doctoral dissertation, “The comparison of the effects of three prereading advance organizers on the literal comprehension of fifth-grade social studies materials.” Schema is argued, in this dissertation, as the most influential internal human factor that impacts reading comprehension. Schema represents the systematic organization of past reactions, ideas, and experiences. Schemata pertain to the conceptual knowledge system that develop cognition and used to make sense of new ideas and experiences.
Schema theory posits that there is an interactive relationship between the text and the readers, and what the readers bring into the text influences how much they understand it. The higher the schemata for that topic, the easier and more deeply it will be understood, because learners can make meaningful connections through their schemata (Turner, 1988 as cited in Pearson, 1990, p. 2). This belief supports the idea that text is interpreted by students, not according to the presentation of the content itself, but how the text relates to the readers’ schemata (Vacca & Vacca, 1986 as cited in Pearson, 1990, p. 2). Schema theory asserts that it does not matter if authors of school textbooks divide chunks of compound sentences into smaller sentences, if the students lack the schemata needed to understand these smaller sentences.
Building on the schema theory, in order to understand the text, the background information on it should be improved (Pearson, 1990, p. 3). Background information enables the learner to create an internal configuration of the text, based on prior knowledge and experiences (Ausubel, 1960 as cited in Pearson, 1990, p. 17). Prereading activities, called “advance organizers or structured overview,” can provide the knowledge and experience that can improve the learner’s schemata, in relation to the text (Pearson, 1990, p. 3). The power of connections that a learner can make depends on the associations between the text and student knowledge/experience that schemata can provide (Pearson, 1990, p. 3). Teachers can prepare their students to absorb new materials by using organizers that attempt to tap old experiences and knowledge that can specifically be related to the new reading material. They can enhance understanding of new material, by preparing their students using stories, pictures, or processes that can trigger relevant schemata connections.
Advance organizers are believed to improve reading comprehension (Pearson, 1990, p. 3). Advance organizers provide the anchor between the new ship of ideas, to the embedded ocean of ideas and experiences of the learners. They act to scaffold understanding of new material, so that superordinate structures can be analyzed and interpreted properly through available schemata. Advance organizers can be quite useful for content area reading, because of the conceptual load they contain. There are several kinds of advance organizers, with mixed results on their effectiveness in improving reading comprehension and retention. Social studies particularly present diverse unknown concepts and topics, which is why Pearson used this subject to understand the impact of organizers on reading comprehension.
Pearson reviewed literature and discovered that none of them compared the effectiveness of graphic organizers to one another. She decided to compare the impact of three organizers on reading comprehension- verbal concept organizer, a graphic organizer, and a problematic situation- and to also compare their results with a control class that used no organizer, using a specific reading selection. She wanted to know, in particular, if any specific advance organizer is more effective than another. She also examined the superiority of advance organizers to using no advance organizers at all. These research aims led to her two research questions. These research questions test the schemata theory’s primary contention that providing a framework for comprehending new text can be a strategic tool in improving comprehension and recall better than without providing any comprehension framework at all.
Reference
Pearson, C.L. P. (1990). The comparison of the effects of three prereading advance organizers on the literal comprehension of fifth-grade social studies materials (Doctoral Dissertation, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville).
The Development Of Relations Between A Man And A Woman In Three Stories Analysis
The three stories, “The Astronomer’s Wife,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” and “Shiloh,” each explore the evolving of a man’s relationship with a woman and the collision of two worlds, which come together, forcing the characters to choose between them. These stories bring together two people with a joined history and allows a third person to be the instrument of change between them. The symbolic use of movement illustrates the movement of the characters from where they were to where they are going. These combined thematic views serve to work together to generate an image of the evolution of the male/female relationship and the transition of a character from one mental state to another.
In Kaye Boyle’s “The Astronomer’s Wife,” the wife, Mrs. Ames, is described peripherally: she is defined by her position as the astronomer’s wife and does not have her own identity. She is emotionally dead and wakens to each day as an “evil moment” because she knows that every day will be the same. Her husband retains a distance between them by not speaking to his wife and maintaining his position above her. He makes her like she is less important than him and is dominant in his superiority. His silence further establishes his perceived superiority – what he has to say is so far above his wife’s comprehension, he cannot be bothered to say anything at all.
In Mrs. Ames’ world, the man is above everything and the woman must maintain the workings of the house, as the man cannot be bothered. The only time her husband speaks, it is to chide her, “’Katherine!” said the astronomer in a ringing tone. “There’s a problem worthy of your mettle!’” (64). He informs her and the plumber that the only things she is capable of dealing with are on the level of a clogged drain – she is incapable of higher thought (Callarman, 85). She feels rebuked by her husband and her face flushes in embarrassment: “When the sun in the garden struck her face, he saw there was a wave of color in it, but this may have been anything but shame” (64). Mrs. Ames, Katherine, would prefer her husband’s silence to his berating and the fancy thoughts he expresses about illusions and ideas that are not tangible
Mrs. Ames believes that all men are like her husband – distant and elevated over anything menial, and therefore believes that her husband should be the one who should speak to the plumber, thinking herself incapable of understanding what the plumber says as men believe, and have so far proven to be, that they are above her level of reasoning and ability: “’I’m sorry–I’m sorry that my husband,’ she said, ‘is still–resting and cannot go into this with you. I’m sure it must be very interesting. . . .’” (64). Mrs. Ames’ answer is that her husband does not go “down,” “he likes going up . . . ‘On the roof. Or on the mountains. He’s been up on the top of them many times’” (64). He does not descend into the lower things that are part of his wife’s world. But the plumber does and she begins to see that not all men are like her husband
When she meets the plumber, she realizes that some men are more like her and deal with the everyday workings of life. She is confused to how she can have a logical, rational – and understandable – conversation with a man: “She . . . [was] bewildered that it should be a man who had spoken to her so” (65). It was an amazing thing to be putting forth logical questions “to which true answers are given” to a man as she had never done so with her husband (65). As she speaks to the plumber, she begins to realize that not all men are like her husband, some represent the mind and some are the “meat of mankind” (65).
The plumber tells her that any problem as a solution, you just had to look for it. This concept is foreign to Mrs. Ames who is accustomed to a different response. The experience she had with the plumber allows her to realize that she does not need to live in her husband’s world but can live in her own. She begins to fee youthful again and seems to be embracing life where before she felt rundown and stuck in a monotony of life. When she asks the maidservant to deliver a message to her husband that she has gone down. She has gone into the real tangible world that her husband does not occupy. She now has a world of her own.
Ascend and descend are treated in an ironic way. Usually, ascend is a good thing – ascending to God and descend is evil, going to the devil. “Whereas her husband had always gone up, as the dead go, she knew now that there were others who went down, like the corporeal being of the dead” (65). Here, ascend also means to live outside the tangible world whereas descend is to live among real things and people.
When “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” the entire town is affected by the result and it changes the future of the town. Stephen Crane’s story examines the shifting of two worlds: the wild west versus the civilized east. The bride, who rarely speaks, is the instrument of change: it is because of her that Scratchy does not do what he usually does. The concept of marriage is foreign to Scratchy as he does not comprehend it. It is the impetus for Potter to change as well as the change of Scratchy.
When Potter travels to San Antonio, he does so to woo his bride and marries her out of impulse while there. On the train trip back, he begins to regret his decision not to tell the town where he was going, feeling certain that they would be angry that he had not done so. As Potter move from east to west, he is moving emotionally from the old west to the unavoidable expanse of civilization. Potter has changed; he does not fight Scratchy as he normally would have. He instead embraces his new life as a married man and tells Scratchy that he has no guns. He is not carrying them because he was married – he had become civilized.
When he faces Scratch in the street outside his home, he admits he does not have a weapon, as eastern gentlemen often do not carry them. Scratchy, so used to Potter facing him and always carrying a gun, believes that Potter is lying to him: “Don’t you tell me you ain’t got no gun on you, you whelp. Don’t tell me no lie like that. There ain’t a man in Texas ever seen you without no gun” (490).
When Potter explains to Scratchy that he is not carrying a weapon because he has just been wed and was bringing his bride to his home. This is a foreign concept to Scratchy, the last hold out of thee town’s wilder days. When Scratchy finally accepts the concept of marriage, he puts his gun away and wanders off down the street, finally realizing that his west, his place of sanctity, has changed permanently. If his old nemesis will not face him, then the world must really have changed forever. To Scratchy, the marriage means “it’s all off now” (490). The west has changed and he must change with it. It is beyond his comprehension. “Wife is important not because of who she is but because she represents civilization and its evolving. She is the reason that Scratchy does not shoot, or marriage is. It symbolizes the changing west as the gunfight is averted in atypical fashion (Erksine, 316).
The west has already changed, but Scratchy is determined to preserve “the good old days” and only when confronted with unavoidable proof that it had changed did he begin to accept it. The drummer represents the civilization of the west – he cannot comprehend the ways of the west just as Scratch cannot accept that the west is not what it was. In addition, Scratchy is like a child and often described in childlike terms. He plays with the town and is a “simple child of his earlier plains” (490). Potter defeats Scratchy with marriage while scratchy has six guns. He slumps off in defeat much like the west was defeated and overcome with civilization (Moses).
The story “Shiloh” by Bobbie Ann Mason, is the story of a husband and wife and their exchanged gender roles as well as the shifting position of their marriage. Norma Jean, formerly undisciplined and the woman of the house, has begun to have more masculine qualities in order to bring a sense of order into her life. Her husband has just returned home after fifteen years on the road and is injured and afraid to return to his previous job. She begins weight lifting and exercise to transform her body into a new one, a hard one. She is also attempting to change into a different woman. She takes composition classes and body building lessons. She is slowing changing. Norma Jean is trying to change, she is unsatisfied with her old life and is trying to change to improve it, but she no longer fits in with Leroy’s life and she no longer wants to be married.
Leroy is also evolving into a different person. He used to be the man’s man – a truck driver on the road most of the year. Now, he is home doing craftwork and needlepoint, using as his excuse that “all the big football players on TV do it” (486). Mabel is not convinced and mocks him, “You don’t know what to do with yourself – that’s the whole trouble. Sewing! (486). He keeps announcing that he is going to build them a log cabin and Norma Jean persistently refuses, saying that they would never permit one inside the new subdivision.
He longs to build a log cabin because he sees it as a chance to start over and begin anew. He feels that he does not know his wife anymore and that “they have known so long they have forgotten a lot about each other” (488). As the story moves forward, he begins to take his fantasy world and convert it into reality. He thinks of ways to pay for it and mentions that he wants to sell his rig. He orders plans for a log cabin and practices building them with Lincoln Logs. He is trying to embrace a new world where he and Norma Jean can live together and get to know each other again. He is in denial as to the depth of the rift between them.
When Norma Jean and Leroy travel to Shiloh, each is looking for a different thing. Norma Jean is trying to appease her mother but does not expect any change in her relationship with Leroy, whereas Leroy sees the journey as an opportunity to start over with Norma Jean and begin their marriage again. He realizes that he should not have been planning and pushing for a log cabin, that Norma Jean would not be happy there. When she mentions that she wants out of the marriage, Leroy resists, but Norma Jean is insistent and move away from him. He cannot keep up with her, much like he is not keeping up with her emotionally or symbolically. She reaches the edge and waves her arms where she must choose whether or not she going to fly like a bird or drown herself, thereby selecting neither life (Cook, 197).
All three stories represent different aspects of men. “The Astronomer’s Wife” shows how a husband reduces his wife to a position beneath him, relegating her to a second-class citizen. She has subjugated her own personality and accepts living in her husband’s world until the end, when she finally finds a world of her own (Barnhisel, 133). In “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” the bride pretends that everything her husband says is new to her, she is being amiable and saying what she believes he wants to hear or expects from her. In this way, she is alienating her own personality and knowledge to that of her husband. Here the husband is present within his bride’s world, he treats her more as equals (Moses, 122). These newlyweds were very much in love and happy to be together. Unlike astronomer’s wife who was unhappy in her marriage and felt every day was the same (Petry, 46). “Shiloh” examines a husband and wife on the precipice of the end, until they travel to Shiloh and Norma Jean announces her intentions. Their roles had previously been that he worked on the road and she took care of the house, cooking his favorite foods when he was home and taking care of him. When he comes “home to roost” like his rig, she rebels and moves away from him. They had previously had a contented life mostly apart, but faced with being together all the time, she moves away. Their roles had reversed and she was now the dominant one in the relationship (Blythe, 52).
In each story, a third party was the instrument of change in one of the other characters. “The Astronomer’s Wife” illustrates how the plumber connects with Mrs. Ames and shows her that there is another world besides her husband’s. She moves into that world by “descending” while her husband remains up (Callarman, 241). The plumber was the impetus for that change. In “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” the bride herself is the impetus of change for Scratchy. The wife is not important as a woman, she is a symbol of marriage and civilization and that changes Scratchy. Mrs. Ames is detached from her emotions and begins to reinvent them as the story proceeds; however, Scratchy is challenged by logic and is forced to change his way of thinking, much like the wife changed her way of thinking. In contrast, Norma Jean and Leroy both change within the context of the story and Mabel is the means of that change. It is her catching Norma Jean smoking and pushing them to travel to Shiloh that persuades Norma Jean that she wants out of her marriage.
These three stories are about people who are trying to fit into one place or hold onto one idea and change into someone else. In “Shiloh,” Norma Jean is trying to change into another person because her life has turned upside down, Leroy has changed too into a more feminine person and both are on the brink of changing their entire lives, not just physically but emotionally. “Shiloh” ends with the couple divided, whereas both “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” and “The Astronomer’s Wife” conclude with the woman remaining in the marriage, one with the bride by his side and the other with the bride reaching out to a new world of her own. Each story has something new to reveal about marriage and change and use movement to move toward a different world.
Works Cited
Barnhisel, Greg. “Critical Essay on ‘Astronomer’s Wife.’” Short Stories for Students. New York: The Gale Group, 2001. 132-136.
Blythe, Hal and Charlie Sweet. “Mason’s Shiloh.” Explicator. Fall 2001, Vol. 60 Issue 1, 52-54.
Callarman, Judith. “Astronomer’s Wife.” Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. New York: Salem Press, Inc., 2004. 240-245.
Cook, Stewart. “Mason’s Shiloh.” Explicator. Spring93, Vol. 51 Issue 3, 196-199.
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