THEME 5: CONFORMITY QUESTIONED

Conformity questioned implies choices about following customs, guidelines, rules or laws. Individuals question conformity with the group and it is either fool or hero who chooses his own road; only the bravest (or most insightful) in questioning conformity stand up for their principles.

It's true, some laws and customs do lose validity with the passage of time and become rituals without meaning. Robert Frost takes this up in his Mending Wall where he and his neighbour meet every year to mend their common wall; in it they share their mutual self interest and responsibility. But the poet reflects on the ritual of the annual event. His neighbour is portrayed as conforming to his father's dictum: "Good fences make good neighbours" in justification for events now. But it is inferred that while questioning this justification, Frost goes along with the repairs anyway. Conformity can be questioned while adhering to it too.

Making a critical choice is both tantalising and anguishing. In another poem, The Road Not Taken, Frost hypothesises on what might have occurred had he taken the road more well travelled, "I took the one less traveled by, /And that has made all the difference". He regrets he had to make a choice, "sorry I could not travel both." But this is a fact of life: every life is made up of choices and the road to conformity is often parodied as the road to mediocrity or laziness. Dugan does this in To a Trainee Accountant, where he mocks the safety of the suburban life and the predictability of a measured life. It may well be safer to take it, and in the interests of those you love too of course. To make wise choices, we should know what presuppositions we bring to them and the criteria we use on which to make choices. This is the moral of the poem.

The poet realises too that some choices are irreversible, despite appearances to the contrary; we might think we can return but more often in fact the moment cannot be recaptured: "Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back." His rather philosophical reflections are appealing and lift the narrative to a higher plane, making the poem more universal and appealing. Choices and questioning conformity is a fascinating topic.

Finally, a third consideration about questioning conformity comes in another of Frost's poems, After Apple-Picking, where he says we may tire of our own choices: "Of apple-picking: I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired." Making choices is meaningless unless we can carry them out and sustain them. Conformity at least offers support for common choices: whereas individualism needs the courage of our convictions and any support one can find to maintain that choice. It may well be true that in questioning conformity we are testing our own capacities to carry out our choices. ®G, Smith 1999

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