Wow. What a difference forty years makes. I can hardly believe what I am reading. I'm sure that in 1977 with our small RCA color television, antennas that provided two or three channels, and a shut-off time at 12:00 midnight, the idea of interactive televisions that covered an entire wall seemed both futuristic and fantastical. I certainly did not imagine 24-hour television. I am not sure how a 17-year-old high school student defined the concept of "parlor walls" or "parlor families". After reading the book for the second time, I feel as though an anvil has been placed upon my chest. I read a passage to the book club and begin to cry ~ completely engulfed by this sinking desperation clawing its way through my thoughts. I feel it swirl around in my head and body until it finally speaks: Welcome to 2020.
What are parlor walls? Finding the "Expert Answer" on the enotes website prompted me to read the book a second time. As I scanned the main characters, setting, etc. in an attempt to jar my memory and after reading two entries without a subscription, I knew that I dare not skim my way through this book.
DESCRIBE the "Parlor" and the "Family" in Fahrenheit 451. The following are the two responses.
HOLLIS SANDERS eNotes educator | CERTIFIED EDUCATOR
In the world of Fahrenheit 451, the typical modern home designates entire walls to be occupied by enormous television monitors. The most popular programs played are loud, bombastic, and in some cases, interactive. One of the first things we notice about Mildred's character is her all-consuming preoccupation with these programs. The "parlor walls" and "family" are the often interchangeable terms that represent the object of Mildred's obsession. When Montag is gaining his first notions of free thought and doubt toward the authoritarian complex, he becomes particularly resentful toward Mildred in regard to the value that she places on her "parlor family." The parlor walls are, to some extent, responsible for Montag's expulsion from the city. In a rage, Montag reads "Dover Beach" to Mildred and her friends in an attempt to elicit any sort of higher emotion. It is implied that Mildred phones the authorities out of fear of losing her parlor walls because of Montag's seeming insanity.
GRETCHEN MUSSEY eNotes educator | CERTIFIED EDUCATOR
The parlor walls are massive, interactive televisions that take up the entire wall of a home. In Bradbury's dystopian society, the citizens are obsessed with meaningless entertainment and install massive television screens the size of entire walls in their homes. Montag's home has three parlor wall televisions, and Mildred spends the majority of her leisure time watching interactive television shows. The majority of shows displayed on the parlor walls are shallow, extremely loud, and violent. There are bright, fast-moving colors, massive explosions, and a myriad of senseless things happening during each show that keep the viewer engaged. One of the interactive television shows includes a family. Viewers like Mildred follow along with the script and participate in the interactive program by reading lines at certain designated moments. The plots of the shows are depicted as meaningless and confusing, but Mildred finds them fascinating.
I was so intrigued by the description of parlor walls that I re-read the novel. Big sigh. The world we live in has yet to employ firemen who burn books, but I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that we are reaching the fringes of that world. The conversations between Clarisse and Montag could take place in my own living room with my adult children.
As a life-long devotee of the written word, I felt a shock of recognition as Whitman, Faulker, and Millay were tossed in the fire on their specific days ~ recognition because I see these books in boxes headed to a dumpster on a daily basis. These books don't check out, they don't sell, and they don't matter to the fast-paced world of 2020. Even contemporary attempts at reviving literature, such as Outlander and Game of Thrones, are only partially received by our 2020 society. Have you read the books? The answer is emphatically NO! Always accompanied by the qualifying explanation that the books are hundreds of pages or I'll just wait and watch the series on my parlor wall television.
In 1977, I did not understand the novel's concept of the "blur". When I read the book during the same year as the setting, I was introduced to an unrealistic existence. Both of my parents worked, and my time in front of a television was limited. My family was my family - my grandmother, my aunts and uncles, my cousins. I never considered any family on television as a parlor family, and our parlor wall was a once-a-week trip to the local movie theater.
One of my favorite passages in the book is a conversation between 17-year-old Clarisse and Guy Montag, the main character who is a book-burning fireman. She is walking (another foreign concept in the book), and he joins her. The following is an excerpt from that conversation:
"Well, doesn't this mean anything to you?" He tapped the numerals 451 stitched on his sleeve.
"Yes," she whispered. She increased her pace. "Have you ever watched the jet cars racing on the boulevards down that way?"
"You're changing the subject!"
"I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly," she said. If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he'd say, that's grass! A pink blur? That's a rose garden. White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn't that funny and sad, too?"
"You think too many things," said Montag, uneasily.
"I rarely watch the parlor walls or go to races or Fun Parks. So I've lots of time for crazy thoughts, I guess."
A friend once made an odd statement to me. He said, "There is one place that I pass on my drive home, and I always think about you. Not sure why, but I do." I replied that I was afraid to ask. He continued, "Nothing weird or anything, just a wide-open pasture of green grass. For some reason, every time I pass that field I think of you."
I know I am more open pasture than parlor walls. My first realization of that fact happened during my time in Ireland - not in Dublin, or Galway, or any of the larger cities, but traveling the one-lane roads through the Irish countryside. Stopping on the side of the road to eat blackberries. Following sheep who had no concern for our check-in time or next destination. No parlor walls, no blurs, no fast-moving cars.
Another quote from the book: "Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending...Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume...Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh?, Uh? Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bang, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests....Then, in mid-air, all vanishes."
As a librarian, I hear one sentiment over and over, especially from a certain age demographic. Reading is a waste of time. I can't imagine sitting for two or three hours and just reading books. One final 1950 quote for 2020 insight (now hindsight): "Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us."
