"Little Nemo in Slumberland" dated July 26, 1908:
Transcript of Tweets by @LittleNemo1905 (OCTOBER 25, 2020):
I've always thought it strange how the famous #WalkingBed episode of July 26, 1908 ends. – 1/31
As the strip draws to a conclusion, the walking bed is leaping from rooftop to rooftop… only to get its long spindly posts wrapped around the steeple of a church, causing the bed to propel forward and toss Nemo from its frame. – 2/31
But it's never really made a whole lot of sense to me… Why that direction? Why bound towards the only building in sight with no logical landing place? What gives? – 3/31
I was pleasantly surprised then, when, in his McCay biography, John Canemaker (2018) suggests that tripping over the church steeple is intentional, reflecting McCay's personal beliefs about organized religion and, more importantly, his status as a Freemason. – 4/31
An "agnostic who believed in reincarnation (p. 42), both McCay and his father were Freemasons and, as Canemaker posits, one of the things that likely attracted the rebellious "young bohemian artist" (p. 42) to the fraternity… - 5/31
…was the strong opposition that it frequently encountered from organized religions, in particular the Roman Catholic Church. – 6/31
Though not a religion itself, Freemasonry did offer McCay a sort of "free approach to spirituality" (p. 42) that embraced all religious belief in a supreme being and emphasized the importance of qualities like charity, brotherhood, idealism, and humanity (Canemaker, 2018). – 7/31
We also know that McCay never shied away from the chance to, as Canemaker puts it, "use his irreverent, iconoclastic humor to twit the Pecksniffian hypocrisy of religious leaders and practitioners" (p. 45). – 8/31
Many examples of this appear in his #DreamOfTheRarebitFiend strips including December 2, 1904 and June 17, 1905. – 9/31 (Fig 2&3). – 9/31
So, with this in mind, what might this famous episode of #LittleNemo actually trying to say to us? Is it no more than a simply little joke, or is it something more? – 10/31
Jeet Heer calls the ending a "masonic joke": "The bed stumbles against a church steeple, causing Nemo to fall back into waking life: the idea being, as per Masonic doctrine, that organized religion is a stumbling block to the imagination and freedom" (2007). – 11/31
For Heer, Nemo's wakefulness is in direct opposition to his imagination and freedom, which makes a lot of sense given our experiences with #LittleNemo in Slumberland so far. – 12/31
But, that said, there is a difference (albeit subtle) between Canemaker's positioning of the joke as "anticlerical" and Heer's as "masonic". – 13/31
I want to argue that while both readings are equally defendable with an isolated reading of the strip’s conclusion, but that taking in the entire episode's narrative tilts it towards the "anticlerical" transforming a simple “joke” into more of an intentional dig. – 14/31
One thing that we know for certain about Nemo's waking life, is that he often attends Sunday School; staples of organized churches in the Christian denomination (though not exclusively). – 15/31 (Fig 1)
Permitting the likely assumption that Nemo's Sunday School is a Christian one, a reader can infer that his family is also a Christian family and, more than that, a practicing Christian family who attend weekly services. – 16/31
Just a couple of days ago, the brilliant @explodingarrow discussed the ways in which Nemo's bed acts to create (or fail to create) a sense of safety. @gipperfish also spoke about Nemo's lack of control over the journey that his bed-as-vehicle takes him on through this strip. – 17/31
The anti-clerical reading here builds on both of these ideas to suggest that the bed is both "safe space" and "vehicle"; one representative of Nemo's Christian faith and journey towards "salvation". – 18/31
If we assume that Nemo will be waking up shortly to attend Church/Sunday School, the bed's journey towards the steeple becomes more understandable; his mind is subconsciously propelling him there. – 19/31
As the bed trots along its journey, it becomes taller reaching as if towards the sky… towards Heaven, perhaps? In response, the spatial design of the page is forced to accommodate the ever-growing bed; as it gets taller, so too do the panels that are expected to contain it. – 20/31
Visually and spatially, the bed has transformed into a metaphorical representation of the promises of organized Christian religions; attend Church, renounce your sins, and you will be saved. – 21/31
This promise goes unfulfilled though in the strip. Rather than growing taller and taller and taller until it reaches the gates of Heaven, it turns tail and heads towards the church… - 22/31
Must one worship in the walls of a church to be freed? Is Nemo's bed not as much a site of spiritual transformation in this moment as a church pew? – 23/31
Herein lies the laughing hypocrisy that McCay intends to reveal with his "joke”, as this reading sees it. – 24/31
Organized religions fail to truly reveal the meaningful spiritual power of faith because they get in the way… they don't provide answers or guidance to spiritual enlightenment, but rather just trip us up in bureaucracy and lip service. – 25/31
It makes me wonder if the bed, as vehicle towards salvation, brings him to the church and stumbles over its steeple because it wants to go there… or if Nemo's subconscious mind directs it there because of his family's influence. – 26/31
In #ThePoeticsofSlumberland, Scott Bukatman (2012) writes, "Nemo's family will never see his bed as anything other than a bed, while for Nemo the bed is a vehicle, sometimes metaphorical and sometimes literal…" (p. 96),… - 27/31
…which might explain why he is dragged from this potentially spiritual place week in and week out into the brick and mortar walls of church, a place that his family believed they could seek the favour of God and the promise of eternal salvation. – 28/31
McCay, a mason, lived by the dictum of religious tolerance and none of the masonic degrees denounce Christian salvation, or indeed mention plans of salvation in any sense. – 29/31
Furthermore, as a man who believed in reincarnation, the question of salvation was less prescient than it would likely have been for his readers. – 30/31
Ultimately, this reading of the strip see's the #Walking Bed as an allegory for the young children readers of #LittleNemo that acts as its own kind of "Sunday School" and provides its own Sunday "lesson" about salvation. – 31/31