The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Sigmund Freud ostensibly said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” but Thurber’s imagery—rife with oversized guns, mortars, bomber planes, “pounding” cylinders, and other symbols of tumid masculinity—might have made his day. Every one of Mitty’s daydreams features at least one instance of phallic imagery, usually a vessel of explosive (or at least turbulent) power; and the repeated juxtaposition of this phallic aggression with his submissive, almost feminized real life provides much irony and humor.

Even in Mitty’s most sedate daydream (the surgery), a “huge, complicated machine” with “many tubes and wires” suffers a catastrophic malfunction, due to a “faulty piston” (Paragraph 6). As it reels toward breakdown, its pulsing sounds (“pocketa-pocketa”) erupt into an adenoidal squeak (“pocketa-queep”), suggesting a sort of mechanical emasculation (Paragraph 6). Mitty the surgeon springs manfully into action. Silencing a naysayer (“Quiet, man!”), he decisively thrusts a fountain pen into the faltering machinery to replace the impotent piston, saving the day (Paragraph 6). This pen(is?) might symbolize the fantasies themselves and the surrogate manhood they provide, replacing something weak, worn, and shambling with a sleek, potent efficacy. The fix will only “hold for ten minutes” (Paragraph 6)—about the length of one of Mitty’s daydreams.

Mitty’s actual, day-to-day life emasculates him at every turn. He cannot assert himself against his wife, who casually treats him as a child (“I’m going to take your temperature when I get you home”)—and his encounters with strangers always leave him feeling weak and flustered if not inept, cowardly, or absurd (Paragraph 14). His wife determines where he goes and what he wears, and even those who do not know him seem to intuit his essential weakness and insignificance, like the parking-lot attendant who “look[s] at Mitty closely” before snapping at him rudely, and whom Mitty can only answer with a timid “Gee. Yeh” (Mitty’s own “pocketa-queep”) (Paragraph 7).

At one point, recalling a humiliating encounter with a “grinning” garageman after his abject failure with the manly task of removing snow chains from his car, Mitty kicks at slush on the sidewalk: a meek symbolic rebellion against all who belittle and emasculate him. This is his only real-life act of violence in the story, and it is followed instantly by submission to his wife’s commands: “‘Overshoes,’ he said to himself, and he began looking for a shoe store” (Paragraph 8).

Mitty’s daydreams are quite different. Significantly, his ability to bend people, machines, even forces of nature (e.g., a hurricane) to his will always unfolds in front of others, usually admiring groups of men. An essential part of Mitty’s notion of manliness is its acknowledgement by other, lesser males—none of whom, in his daydreams, can hold a candle (or a fountain pen) to his macho prowess. Of course, these fantasies—and the fictions that spawned them—continually undermine his day-to-day self-regard with their ludicrous models of masculinity: a Fata Morgana he knows he can never attain.

Thurber offers no background on what the Mittys’ sex life may be like (if it exists), but the protagonist likely has no more control in bed than in the rest of his life. In his daydreams, of course, women are among the many things over which he has complete control: “Pretty” nurses are at his beck and call, and a “lovely, dark-haired girl” throws herself at him in the most public of places (Paragraph 10). In real life, by contrast, when a woman laughs at him on the street, he quickly makes himself scarce, rushing into an A&P, “not the first one he came to but […] one farther up the street” (Paragraph 11).

Mitty achieves a traditionally masculine sexual life only in ciphered form and in his imagination, where his repressed rage and longing for potency consistently take the form not of sex but of powerful phallic surrogates: “huge” machines, ships, aircraft, and especially military-grade firepower. In this, he anticipates Travis Bickle, the repressed antihero of Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, whose feelings of impotence and inconsequence foster an obsession with phallic weaponry, including combat knives, automatics, and a .44 Magnum. Mitty, to be sure, indulges this passion only in his head, but this allows him to enlarge significantly on Bickle’s phallic capacity: For instance, in two of his daydreams, Mitty’s personal handgun, a “Webley-Vickers 50.80,” would, according to that number, have a barrel caliber of over four feet.