28 pages • 56 minutes read
Ray BradburyDark They Were, and Golden Eyed
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1949A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The White Cottage
When the Bitterings arrive on Mars they build a “small white cottage and ate good breakfasts there” (631-32). The mention of breakfast links the cottage to the normalcy of their home on Earth—specifically, the routine of eating breakfast together as a family. Like the “warm hearth” and “potted blood-geraniums” that Harry checks on every morning “precisely as if he expected something to be amiss” (632), the cottage is a reminder of Earth and the lives they lived there, as well as a marker of the colonization project at work: The goal is to recreate American culture on Mars, and the focus on the cottage suggests a particular emphasis on exporting the nuclear family.
When the settlers move to the Martian villas at the end of the story, the significance of leaving the cottage is accentuated by the possessions the Bitterings leave behind in it, from the furniture they brought from Boston to Laura’s dresses. Full of their belongings from Earth, the cottage symbolizes the parts of themselves that are still linked to Earth, which they are now leaving behind. As Harry and Cora look back on the cottage from the Martian villa and comment “such odd, ridiculous houses the Earth people built” (644), it is clear that the Bitterings have become fully Martian. What’s more, the cottage is now abandoned as the villas were at the beginning of the story, capping off the theme of Colonization and the Repetition of History.
The Wind
The strong winds of Mars, mentioned throughout the story, represent the internal and external changes that the Bitterings and the other villagers are subject to in their new environment. When the Bitterings first arrive, Harry feels that “the wind blew as if to flake away their identities” and worries that the “Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from a white bone” (631). The suggestion that the air around them is eroding their old selves and exposing new ones extends to the cottage; Harry says that it too has changed because “the wind’s done something to it. The air’s burned it […] It’s not an Earthman’s house any more” (636). For those living in Mars’s atmosphere, the inescapability of breathing the air and feeling the wind embodies the inevitability of change. Like all of the changes in the story, however, the wind is not unhealthy or bad, but merely different; Harry reflects after the nuclear bomb has hit Earth that he and the others are “left to the strangeness of Mars, the cinnamon dusts and wine airs” (634). The description of the winds like warm spice and drink suggests the allure of the changes, despite Harry’s fear.
Water
Like the wind, mentions of water serve to show how the Martian environment is changing the characters. However, where the wind is associated with the Martian heat and the immense differences between Mars and Earth that frighten Harry, the water has a calming effect, soothing his fears and acclimatizing him to the new way of life; respectively, they evoke Change as Death, Change as Survival. Early on Harry says that he feels “like a salt crystal […] in a mountain stream, being washed away” (632), suggesting the water, like the wind, is eroding his former self. Later, however, Harry finds calm in a similar sensation; while swimming in the canals with his family, he submerges and reflects that if he stays there “the water will work and eat away [his] flesh until the bones show like coral” (640). This wearing away of the self is not destructive but creative of new life, as Harry thinks that “the water can build on that skeleton—green things, deep water things, red things, yellow things. Change” (640). After this day Harry is more amenable to the changes already at work in the other villagers, the water having shown a gentler kind of change than that brought about by the harsh Martian winds.
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By Ray Bradbury
