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• 1 media/softrainy.jpeg 2023-03-13T07:57:51-07:00 Themes 26 image_header 2023-03-16T08:44:59-07:00

  Nature's Indifference

  Nature’s indifference to human suffering is a common theme in eco horror texts like "There Will Come Soft Rains," as this trope creates a sense of hopelessness and fear. Melissa Girard argues in ‘How autocratic our country is becoming’: The Sentimental Poetess at War, that both Teasdale’s poem and Bradbury’s short story show that mankind is unconnected to the natural world—so unconnected that nature would not care if we vanished. She also finds that the pastoral descriptions of nature in the poem show the irony of our comforting idea of nature in comparison to its heartless reality, stating “The poem undercuts those pastoral fantasies with the reality of a natural world dominated by indifference” (Girard 59). As a fond reader of Darwin, Teasdale clearly sees nature as soulless and just a manifestation of the process of evolution—not a beloved mother that will save humanity from itself. In the end, Teasdale’s takeaway is that humans should take a survivalist, Darwinist approach and adopt the ways of nature in order to survive, rather than growing apart from nature. In fact, Teasdale wrote this poem as a criticism of World War 1 (direct criticisms of the war were banned by the Sedition Act), which makes sense given that wars create destruction, which is at odds with human survival and reproduction. 

  
  Technological Progress

  This Darwinist view parallels Bradbury’s criticism of rapid technological progress—a very unnatural development that also does not save humans from themselves. The automatic house is no match for the fire, and its mechanical creations are of no use in the face of nuclear annihilation. Instead of solving societal problems, new technology brings convenience and complacency. The house is also hostile to nature: when the house encounters “lonely foxes and whining cats,” it does not let them in, when a leaf enters the house it is incinerated, and “If a sparrow brushed a window, the shade snapped up…not even a bird must touch the house!” (Bradbury 2). By showing humanity’s hostility to nature, Bradbury is saying that nature does not owe humanity anything, and gives justification for nature’s indifference towards human suffering. Nature's retribution for humanity hostilities towards nature is common trope in eco horror, and this is reflected in "There Will Come Soft Rains" when the tree destroys the house. 

  The Doomsday Clock

  The short story also makes a clear reference to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’s Doomsday Clock, since each event in the story starts with the house’s clock saying the current time. The Doomsday Clock was founded in 1947 by scientists in the Manhattan Project and gives a live status of how close humans are to “destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making” (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists). It is still running to this day, and is at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been. Just as the house’s clock “ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness,” Bradbury may have felt that no one was listening to the warnings of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. This view is backed up in the book Ambiguous Borderlands which explores the significance of shadow imagery in the Cold War. Erik Mortenson describes how “Such wholesale destruction challenged the prevailing American belief in progress, both social and technological. Advances, years in the making, could be swept away by a single detonation” (Mortenson 25). In a sense, to make real progress, it seems that humanity needs to slow down. But Mortenson argues that it was much easier for people to focus on the advantages of technological innovation and new consumer goods than destructive potential, which is what played out in real life as Bradbury saw. Nuclear fears had been repressed: Mortenson describes a distinct lack of nuclear literature during this time period. As the government promoted nuclear technology, people focused on the benefits of the new technology more than they worried about the harms.  

   

  
  Atomic Shadows

  One of the main ways Bradbury creates horror is through eerie, realistic imagery of the effects of nuclear disaster. Bradbury references the atomic shadows of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, describing, “The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places…the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn…a woman bent to pick flowers…a small boy…and opposite him a girl” (Bradbury 2). These shadows capture the lives of humans at the instant of detonation—this is not destruction, it is complete annihilation leaving shadows of what was. The eeriness of the shadows is derived from how unnatural they are—how they preserve a person’s essence and actions during a single moment, but completely erase the person. Mortenson writes that “Rather than death being the evacuation of the shadow, of the soul, from the body, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was the body that fled while the shadow remained. The soul became trapped on concrete” (Mortenson 30). Instead of having a still, limp body left behind, we have a record of the person’s “soul” in the middle of action on the wall. This reversal creates an eerie feeling that helps to further Bradbury’s criticism of technological progress and trust in the natural order.