Sin Justified : Welsh Nonconformism in Three Short Stories by Dylan Thomas

Abstract

Dylan Thomas is best known for his poetry, the prose text A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and the play Under Milk Wood. His ability as a writer of short stories has gone largely unnoticed and where reference is made, it is usually to his collection Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Thomas’s short stories contain layered religious imagery and my hypothesis claims that these depictions of Welsh Nonconformist communities are negative in a way that reminds of his countryman Caradoc Evans’s controversial collection My People. I will establish the term Welsh Nonconformism, separate from Welsh Nonconformity, as a latent ideology charged by theological and sociocultural forces. The limited research on Thomas’s short stories has not fully interpreted the meaning in these texts, failing to consider the theological diversity in Welsh Nonconformity and its impact on the wider culture. This thesis attempts to comprehensively break down the role of Welsh Nonconformism and deconstructs the imagery in a time when extremism, isolationism, and reactionary politics are becoming increasingly relevant to address.

Three short stories are singled out: “The Tree”, “The Burning Baby”, and “The Peaches". This sample provides a range of theme, style, and tone across time that showcases Thomas’s work. A close reading supported by historical contextualization is applied to each story with reference to the 1769 standard text of the early seventeenth-century King James Version of the Bible and relevant Protestant, and specifically Nonconformist, theological works primarily from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When applicable, older texts and scholarly work on Christian thought that gave rise to these theologies are utilized in the analysis for clarification.

The analysis indicates that Thomas’s representations of Welsh Nonconformism are more balanced than expected, with mostly negative, but also some sympathetic and more nuanced, depictions. Welsh Nonconformism proves to be an effective and functional term for ascertaining this ideological and regional phenomenon. Thomas does not present a uniform attack against organized religion or a complete condemnation of the culture that he grew up in, but a robust critique with a few caveats. His other short stories could serve from a historically theological and socio-cultural reading, and other frameworks could be applied as themes of class, sexuality, and gender are equally prevalent in, and important to, the construction of these narratives.