Westchester, Not Yorkshire: The Suppressed Metropolitan Geography of The Graduate
Chester Featherstone, Ph.D.
Professor of Media Studies
University of New Hampshire
Few errors in American film criticism have been repeated with greater confidence, and less geographical reflection, than the assumption that “Scarborough Fair,” the music heard with extraordinary frequency in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967), refers to Scarborough in Yorkshire, England. The conventional account is familiar: Simon and Garfunkel adapted a traditional English ballad; Scarborough possessed a celebrated medieval fair; therefore the Scarborough of the film must be English.
Elsewhere, I have called this the Yorkshire Fallacy.^1
I show instead that The Graduate is best understood through Scarborough-on-Hudson in Westchester County, New York, the affluent metropolitan community overlooking the Hudson River. This interpretation, first advanced in my 1998 essay “Commuter Rail and Erotic Displacement in Nichols,” and subsequently developed into what certain critics dismissively termed the Hudson Valley Paradigm, resolves difficulties that the Yorkshire school has conspicuously failed to address.^2
The objection ordinarily raised at this point—that “Scarborough Fair” was an English folk song referring to an actual English fair—is factually correct, but hermeneutically primitive. Cultural objects do not remain permanently imprisoned within their places of origin. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were New Yorkers. Mike Nichols, though born in Europe, worked within the New York theatrical and intellectual world. To assume that the word “Scarborough” could enter this metropolitan cultural matrix without activating the familiar Westchester place-name is to substitute antiquarian provenance for lived geography.
To Westchester County on the 5:21 PM
The great contribution is that Westchester County makes sense of the film. The Graduate is fundamentally a study of prosperous postwar metropolitan life: large houses, swimming pools, country clubs, automobiles, prestigious universities, carefully managed marriages, and children whose futures have essentially been selected for them. Scarborough-on-Hudson belongs precisely to this social landscape. Yorkshire does not.
Scarborough therefore functions not primarily as a destination but as a class coordinate.
Benjamin Braddock believes that he is escaping. He drives hundreds of miles, rents rooms, pursues Elaine, interrupts a wedding and finally boards a bus. Yet socially he travels almost nowhere. He rejects his parents’ world only to fall in love with the daughter of their closest friends. He recoils from an arranged adult future and then almost immediately becomes obsessed with marriage. Even his rebellion is conducted in the sports car his parents have provided.
Soundtrack as the Omniprescent Author
The soundtrack understands this before Benjamin does.
This explains Nichols’s otherwise nearly unbroken repetitions of “Scarborough Fair/Canticle.” During the latter portion of the film the song returns so often that it ceases to function as an ordinary musical selection and approaches the status of a persian carpet. Traditional criticism describes this repetition as “lyrical,” “haunting” or “poetic.” Such adjectives avoid the quantitative problem. After perhaps the fifteenth recurrence, one is entitled run screaming from the theater.
By adopting the Hudson Valley interpretation, the repetition is precisely the point. Benjamin can leave home, but Scarborough keeps coming back.
Are You Going? Are You?
Particularly important—and inexplicably neglected by the Yorkshire school—is Benjamin’s failure ever to ask Elaine the question supplied repeatedly by the soundtrack: Is she going to Scarborough Fair?
Nichols provides him with ample opportunity. Indeed, by the second half of the picture Simon and Garfunkel have virtually become prompters. Yet Benjamin never makes the inquiry.
This omission reproduces his central psychological defect. Benjamin is constantly moving but rarely capable of explaining where he is going. Adults ask what he intends to do with his life; he cannot answer. He wants Elaine but cannot explain why. He wishes to escape his parents’ world without identifying an alternative. The recurring question “Are you going to Scarborough Fair?” therefore becomes the question underlying the entire film:
Where, exactly, are you going?
Benjamin has no answer.
The famous final bus sequence should consequently be reconsidered. Benjamin and Elaine have apparently escaped: the church recedes, the adults have been defeated, and the young lovers sit triumphantly at the rear of the bus. Gradually their expressions change. Neither appears to know what happens next.
For half a century this has been interpreted as Nichols’s ironic qualification of the romantic liberation. The Hudson Valley Paradigm permits a more precise reading. Benjamin and Elaine have mistaken movement for departure. They believe they have escaped the social order, while the soundtrack has spent much of the preceding hour insisting that their destination remains Scarborough. One might say that the revolution ends on Metro-North.
The Fair, the Fair
Let us close by revisiting the evidentiary embarrassment. Yorkshire actually had a Scarborough Fair. Scarborough-on-Hudson apparently did not.
Proponents of the Yorkshire interpretation have treated this fact as decisive.^3 I regard it as almost suspiciously literal-minded. The Graduate, after all, is a film organized around destinations that prove illusory. Benjamin has a career that does not yet exist, a marriage that has not been thought through, and a future that he cannot describe. What location could better represent his predicament than a Scarborough whose promised fair is not actually there?
The absence of the fair strengthens the metaphor.
Indeed, the herbs themselves—parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme—need not detain us. Considerable scholarly energy has been spent interpreting them as symbols of love, memory, fidelity, fertility and death. I have never found this literature persuasive.^4 Sometimes herbs are just herbs.
In Westcester County, the Badlands of John Cheever, The Graduate is not about jumping into a new world. It is about the extraordinary difficulty of escaping one's social coordinates at all. Benjamin crosses California while remaining, metaphorically, within the affluent metropolitan corridor that produced him. The soundtrack declares Scarborough, Scarborough, Scarborough: and like Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner, Benjamin goes nowhere.
Notes
1. Featherstone, Chester. “Yorkshire Exceptionalism and the Geographic Misreading of American Popular Music.” New England Journal of Media Topography 11, no. 2 (1996): 41–68. The article was regrettably omitted from several subsequent Simon and Garfunkel bibliographies.
2. Featherstone, Chester. “Commuter Rail and Erotic Displacement in Nichols: Toward a Hudson Valley Reading of The Graduate.” Proceedings of the Northern New England Society for Cinema Studies 7 (1998): 113–139. My use of “Hudson Valley Paradigm” predates Marjorie Wexler’s substantially different formulation by three years.
3. See particularly H. Andrew Pennington, “There Was an Actual Fair, Chester,” Film Geography Quarterly 19, no. 4 (2003): 6–9. Pennington’s argument, while admirably concise, mistakes historical existence for cinematic reference.
4. For a representative example, see Miriam C. Blodgett, “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme: Botanical Temporality in the American New Wave,” Studies in Herbaceous Cinema 4 (2007): 77–104. The present author remains unconvinced.
Editorial note - This version feels more like a real academic crank with a 25-year scholarly grievance—especially Pennington’s devastatingly titled “There Was an Actual Fair, Chester.”
