Dirty Dancing Analysis: "Cookalein", "Dirty Dancing" and Pastoral Literature

In 1978, a cartoonist named Will Eisner published a graphic novel titled A Contract With God.

The graphic novel comprises four short stories that portray the lives of poor, miserable Jews living in a tenement apartment building -- 55 Dropsie Avenue -- in the Bronx in New York City.

The fourth story, titled "Cookalein" loosely portrays Eisner's own family in the year 1932, when Eisner was 15 years old. His father was enjoying an affair with a non-Jewish woman and so sent his wife and two sons (one of whom was 15-year-old Willie Eisner) away to spend a few summer weeks in a vacation house in the Catskill Mountains. The vacation house was of a kind called by the American-Yiddish word cookalein, which is strictly translated as cook alone but sensibly translated as self-cook. Such a vacation house was equipped with a kitchen so that the renters could save money by cooking all their own meals.

During the vacation, Willie was taken into a barn by an older woman, Miss Minks, and seduced. He ejaculated prematurely, and then the woman's husband came into the barn, slapped her and fucked her in front of Willie.

As a consequence of that experience happening within the circumstances of his parents loveless marriage, Willie's emotional trauma persisted long after this summer vacation.

The story "Cookalein" has a subplot that involves a poor young man, Benny, and a poor young woman, Goldie. Both have come to the same Catskills vacation place intending to find a rich spouse. In order to do so, each pretends to be rich. They meet each other and court each other. While in a forest together, they approach sexual intimacy.

Then, however, each discovers that the other is actually poor.

Benny becomes so angry at his discovery that Goldie is actually poor that he tries to rape her. However, he suffers from sexual impotency in his attempt.

A medical intern, Herbie, becomes involved in the Benny-Goldie situation. Eventually Goldie becomes engaged to Herbie and so will become a doctor's wife.

Meanwhile, Bennie begins courting the daughter of a diamond seller, and it seems that he will become a rich husband.

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On the Graphic Novel blog, an essayist with the pen name blueskeys has published an article titled "Cookalein in Dirty Dancing? The article includes the following passage:

.... The similarities between the [Dirty Dancing] movie and the [Cookalein] story are rather uncanny. Of course, the most generic similarity between the two is plot of the story — people leaving their “normal” lives to retreat to resorts for the entirety of the summer. However, it goes much deeper than that.

Look at the character of Miss Minks in “Cookalein”, an older woman who thoroughly enjoys engaging in sexual relations with someone much younger than her. Now look at the character of Vivian Pressman, the older woman in Dirty Dancing who dances with Johnny and pays him for more “dance lessons”. See any similarities?

Now let’s look at the characters of Robbie from Dirty Dancing and Benny from “Cookalein”. Robbie is a waiter in the movie who plans on attending medical school. While engaged in a relationship with Baby’s sister, he rapes the lead female dance instructor and does nothing about it because “some people count, some people don’t.” It can be inferred that Robbie was with Baby’s sister as a way to gain good credentials from their father, a well-known and successful doctor.

Then there was Benny, who did not work in the camp, but came to the camp looking for a woman that he could marry so he could gain power and wealth. When he meets Goldie and thinks she has money, everything is hunky-dory. Then he finds out that she is just as poor as he is, and he rapes her and moves on to seducing a woman whose father is very successful and wealthy. Again, sound somewhat familiar?

There are many characters and plots that can be examined and crossed between the story and the movie; however, the stark difference between the two is the treatment of love. Dirty Dancing is, in essence, a love story. Baby and Johnny, two people from very different social statuses, fall wildly in love and in the end, their love prevails. Typical Hollywood.

“Cookalein” has a much harsher view on life, and the outcome is not all rainbows and butterflies. The motive of almost every character in this story is to attain wealth or power by marriage and falsifying emotions of love. The characters are driven by lust for wealth and lust for the warmth of a body that they are not married to ...

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Of course, neither story is influenced by the other. "Cookalein" was published in 1978, nine years before Dirty Dancing was released. And certainly Eleanor Bergstein took none of her story from "Cookalein".

A similarity between the two stories is encapsulated, however, in a clause in the above passage's first paragraph:

.... people leaving their “normal” lives to retreat to resorts for the entirety of the summer.

When people leave their homes and go to a summer resort, there will be opportunities for sexual adventures. The vacationers meet new people and will not be monitored by their usual neighbors who know their normal whereabouts, behavior and activities. Vacationers have plenty of leisure time to try unusual relationships

In the "Cookalein" story, Willie was able to seclude himself with Miss Mink, and Bennie and Goldie were able to pretend that they were rich.

In the Dirty Dancing story, Baby was able to spend hours dancing with Johnny, and Lisa was able to meet secretly with Robbie at the golf course.

On summer vacations, unusual couplings are more likely to happen -- for example, older, richer women with younger, poorer men -- or Christians with Gentiles -- or three-sided or even four-sided romantic relationships.

Also, characters who are away from home can disguise their identities more easily. For example, in Dirty Dancing, Baby Houseman essentially disguises herself as Penny Johnson.

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Essayist Desmond White, in an article titled Making Love the Will Eisner Way: Intercourse Discourse in A Contract with God, makes the following point:

A recurring trope in Shakespeare is to move characters from their respective civilization to “the forest”, where inhibitions are eliminated and primal emotional forms manifest. From a literary standpoint, it’s fitting to push repressed New Yorkers into the Northern woodlands.

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The Woodlands website includes an article titled Woodlands and forests in Shakespeare's plays, which includes the following passages:

He [Shakespeare] uses woodland settings in many other plays and the forest carries deeply symbolic meanings - it is a place where he can explore opposites (wild versus civilised); woodlands are places where Shakespeare established temporary relief from a rigid order to which we must all return, and woodlands represent a world to which we can escape - at least for a while.

The forest is used by Shakespeare for clandestine activities - often secret marriages or plots to switch identities. It is also often a place of sanctuary. In A Midsummer Night's Dream the woodland is used as a setting for the escapism of the subplot with the fairies Titania and Oberon, as well as the comic play within the play acted by the 'Mechanicals'. But the woodland scenes are much more than just escapism - their portrayal is making an attack on Puritanism and the fairy folk reflect pagan traditions which pre-date the Puritans.

Shakespeare strongly links his harmless fairies to the good things of the forest and the freedom and fertility of the natural world. According to the church at the time fairies were evil spirits, whereas Shakespeare makes his fairy characters very positive and unthreatening and part of that appeal is their love of nature and their being at home in the woodland where natural laws prevail.

Shakespeare often associates woodlands with danger and mystery but also they are places of pleasure. As Quince says in A Midsummer Night's Dream, " This green plot shall be our stage."

Another Shakespeare play that takes place in such a setting is As You Like It, which tells the romantic adventures of some aristocrats who find themselves away in Arden Forest for a while. This play features the romantic recouplings of four characters -- Rosalin, Orlando, Celia and Oliver -- and also features a woman, Rosalin, disguising herself as a boy.

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Of course, Shakespeare was not the only dramatist to place his characters temporarily into the countyside. I am reminded, for example, also of Anton Chekhov and his play titled A Month in the Country and of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest.

Such stories are categorized into a genre called Pastoral Literature, which is described by the website Study as follows:

If you've ever lived in a city, you've probably found yourself fantasizing about wide open spaces without crowded trains, traffic noises, and the other trappings of urban life. In other words, you've experienced a strong desire to get 'back to nature.' Of course, those who don't live in cities know that country life isn't always a cakewalk, especially if your livelihood depends on the land. Changes in the weather and the season make all the difference when you live off the land, and we all know that nature isn't always kind.

The tension between an idealized view of nature and a more realistic one is a major theme in English literature. In fact, this theme gave rise to its own branch of literature. Pastoral literature is, to put it simply, literature that deals with people living off the land, dealing with all of the challenges and blessing of nature. In many cases, pastoral literature tends to show a more optimistic view of this lifestyle, as works in this branch of literature are often intended for urban audiences. ...

The Encyclopedia Britannica article titled Pastoral Literature includes the following passages:

Pastoral literature, class of literature that presents the society of shepherds as free from the complexity and corruption of city life. Many of the idylls written in its name are far remote from the realities of any life, rustic or urban. Among the writers who have used the pastoral convention with striking success and vitality are the classical poets Theocritus and Virgil and the English poets Edmund Spenser, Robert Herrick, John Milton, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Matthew Arnold. ...

The pastoral convention sometimes uses the device of “singing matches” between two or more shepherds, and it often presents the poet and his friends in the (usually thin) disguises of shepherds and shepherdesses. Themes include, notably, love and death. ...

The first English novels, by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge, were written in the pastoral mode. Apart from Shakespeare, playwrights who attempted pastoral drama included John Lyly, George Peele, John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, John Day, and James Shirley. ....

The “modern” pastoral ... dwelled on the innocence of the contemporary rustic (though not on his miseries). In England the controversy was reflected in a quarrel between Alexander Pope and Ambrose Philips, though the liveliest pastorals of the period were by John Gay, whose mode was burlesque (and whose Beggar’s Opera is ironically subtitled “A Newgate Pastoral” — Newgate being one of London’s prisons)

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Dirty Dancing and "Cookalein" both might be categorized as pastoral literature, with the similar settings of Catskills summer resorts. In both stories, residents of New York City experience sexual adventures while away on summer vacations.

Several scenes in Dirty Dancing take place out in the woods -- for example, 1) Baby's and Johnny's post-performance drive from the Sheldrake Hotel to Kellerman's Mountain House, and 2) the following idyllic woodland scene.