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Deconstructive criticism
to do so now. These behaviors certainly seem to contradict his nonconformist attitude toward the wall. A similar problem occurs in the poem’s association of primitiveness, in the form of the “old-stone savage” to which the neighbor is compared in line 40, with tradition, which the neighbor also represents. By associating these two elements, the poem creates an uncomfortable and unstable link between the primitive and the traditional. Since the nineteenth century, Western culture has cherished the romantic view that the primitive is in harmony with nature, not aligned with tradition against it. Finally, the main idea the poem criticizes—good fences make good neighbors— is actually valid within the action of the poem: it is the activity of mending the wall that brings the men together, presumably inspiring the poem’s creation, and lets them be neighbors through the bonding activity of shared work. Evidently, this is the only time the two men meet at all. Even the poem’s title suggests this idea if we read mending as an adjective rather than a verb: “Mending Wall” then becomes a wall that mends (for example, that mends relationships) rather than a wall that is mended. Now that we’ve shown how the poem quietly collapses the binary opposition(s) supporting its own main theme, the final step of our deconstruction is to con‑ sider the implications of this collapse. It would seem, for example, that the meaning, importance, and power of conformity and the meaning, importance, and power of nonconformity are not as easily placed in opposition as “Mending Wall” initially appears to suggest. The poem calls for a rational abandonment of a seemingly empty tradition, an attitude easily associated with the scientific and technological progress that occurred during the five decades preceding the poem’s publication in 1914. Yet the value of that tradition, and the dubious nature of the attempt to abandon it, form a powerful counterweight against that call. Perhaps this conflict in the text suggests that much of the power of tradition lies in its ability to influence our attitudes without our being aware of its presence. One reason the unresolvable conflict between progressivism and conservatism occurs in the poem is that some of the terms used to evoke their difference— especially nature and primitive—themselves evoke mixed feelings in our culture. For example, we associate nature with goodness—innocence, purity, simplicity, health, intuitive wisdom—yet nature usually stands in the way of the scientific and technological progress we value so highly. Mountains are blown up to build our roads; forests are destroyed to foster our business enterprises; and air, soil, and water are polluted to promote our industries. Similarly, Western culture associ‑ ates the primitive with the goodness of nature, yet it also associates the primitive with ignorance, the unknown, and the sinister, and this association evokes fear
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