Class and Hypocrisy in "Holiday"

One element of "Holiday" that stood out for me was the role of class and Father Mueller's reading of "Das Kapital." At first, the narrator describes the family as salt-of-the-Earth folks, but slowly we begin to see there is more going on. And it seems Father Mueller is not the giving socialist he imagines himself to be.

The hint that all is not as it seems is the big meal on page 415, which continues Porter's theme of gluttony. "The children ravened and gorged and reached their hands into the sugar bowl to sprinkle sugar on everything they ate..."

Earlier in this same section, Porter begins a theme where she contrasts passages of idyllic scenery with suffering servitude: "In the large square room the whole family was gathering at a long table covered with a red checkered cotton cloth, with heaped-up platters of steaming food at either end. A crippled and badly deformed servant girl was setting down pitchers of milk."

Here Porter uses language to show how out-of-place Ottilie appears to be. (Her displacement is addressed more directly on page 417: "The crippled servant girl brought in more food and gathered up plates and went away in her limping run, and she seemed to me the only individual in the house... But the servant, she was whole, and belonged nowhere.")

On Sundays, the entire family goes to a community gathering while Ottilie stays home and prepares the Sunday spread. On page 421: "Her muteness seemed nearly absolute; she had no coherent language of signs. Yet three times a day she spread that enormous table with solid food, freshly baked bread, huge platters of vegetables, immoderate roasts of meat, extravagant tarts, strudels, pies--enough for twenty people."

It is later revealed that Ottilie is a member of the family that, due to her condition, has been designated a servant, one who is better off forgotten.

This makes it all the more ironic that Father Mueller fancies himself a socially conscious Marxist. On page 422 he reads from "Das Kapital," which is ironic as he is the richest man in their area and has bought up all the land to rent to other farmers. In his mind, he sees this is a public service, but then uses this as political leverage to get his son-in-law elected as sheriff.

The narrator addresses the cognitive dissonance between his socialist thoughts and his capitalist actions: "And here was this respectable old farmer who accepted (socialism's) dogma as a religion--that is to say, its legendary precepts were just, right, proper, one must believe in them, of course, but life, everyday living, was another and unrelated thing." (422)

Mueller doesn't even practice his principles in his own home as witnessed in the treatment of Ottilie: "It was not a society or a class that pampered its invalids and the unfit." (427)

It seems that the narrator is the first person to even reach out to her on a human level, which exposes Father Mueller's principles as a sham.