The chapter "knife grinder" is the first time (I think) that race is brought up as an issue in the novel. The first Gypsy we meet is the knife grinder, and it is obvious Jason doesn't know who Gypsies are, describing the knife grinder just as "an old man in a tweed cap...His suit had no obvious color. He had no obvious color..." When Jason brings this up with his parents, his father is shown to be quite racist, calling Gypsies "layabouts who pay nothing to the state and flout every planning regulation in the book." It is clear that Jason's mother does not share the same sentiments as his father, and the two again get into an argument about Jason's mother doing business with the knife grinder. The scene in the village hall once again demonstrates the racism of many of the villagers, who think eating hedgehog is uncivilized and believe that the Romani coming into the village would only lead to chaos. We see Jason again isolated from the rest of the village in his views. He does not share the racist ideas of many of the villagers.
Later, Jason gets lost in the woods hiding from Ross Wilcox and stumbles into a Gypsy camp. Here, Jason gets a better understanding of the Gypsies. They are not as bad as many of the villagers led him to believe. He does make an interesting point about how the Gypsies and villagers are similar. He says he had been "thinking how the villagers wanted the gypsies to be gross, so the grossness of what they’re not acts as a stencil for what the villagers are." About the Gypsies, he says "I'd been thinking how Gypsies wanted the rest of us to be gross, so the grossness of what they're not acts as a stencil for what they are." He realizes that the villagers and Gypsies share a dislike for each other and becomes a sort of ambassador for both sides. I found it fitting that he ended up gaining friends from the Gypsies, people who, like him, have often been marginalized.
There's definitely a strong strain of racism in the villagers' denunciation of the Gypsies (made all the more evident when the villagers at the town meeting first assure us they aren't at all prejudiced, before launching into a string of ethnic stereotypes and bigotry!). But, despite the fact that Romany people have been in England for hundreds of years at this point, there's also an aspect of xenophobia (as there often is in European racism--where "outsiders" are seen as "encroaching" on Europe). The Gypsies are painted as a group of "foreigners" who aren't "really English" and therefore have no right to live on the outskirts of "real Englishmen's" towns.
ReplyDeleteThe hysteria over the Gypsy camp also calls to mind the residents of Fingerbone fretting over the transients who come through their town. The Gypsy community doesn't seem to try to assimilate, and it's this refusal to even want to be "English" that seems to infuriate the villagers. The transient lifestyle once again is an affront to the more settled community.