46 pages • 1 hour read
Rod SerlingThe Monsters Are Due on Maple Street
Fiction | Play | YA | Published in 1960A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Mob Psychology & Mass Hysteria
“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is primarily concerned with the fallout of culturally pervasive paranoia. The episode presents the formation of hysterical mobs as a natural result of paranoia: Terrorized people band together and egg each other on; the situation escalates, and the mob’s activities become increasingly impulsive, irrational, and aggressive. What began as a search for the cause of the power failure becomes a search for someone to blame. This, in turn, breeds more fear: The people of Maple Street come to fear a hidden interloper, but they also fear being falsely accused by their peers. To protect themselves from reprisal, neighbors begin accusing one another. For example, when Charlie is cornered for shooting Pete Van Horn, he deflects blame onto Tommy to save himself. What results is a vicious cycle that escalates until it destroys Maple Street.
The culture of scapegoating that develops on Maple Street also results in compulsory conformity. The aliens are described as looking “just like humans…but they [aren’t]” (6). When hunting for the aliens, the neighbors begin searching for odd behavior in their neighbors. Les Goodman is the first suspect because his car starts by itself.
In response, Charlie and the others begin describing him as strange and eccentric. Les’s “oddball” behavior is harmless at best—”I don’t sleep very well at night sometimes. I get up and take a walk and I look up at the sky. I look at the stars!” (11)—and vaguely defined at worst. When Charlie says, “He was always an oddball” (7), he doesn’t present any further details. His accusation that Les is an oddball doesn’t mean anything. The Maple Street mob isn’t just punishing nonconformity, they are actively searching for any small detail that differentiates one person from the rest of the group.
Liberty Versus Security
When one regards “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” as an allegory for McCarthyism, this episode begins to resemble a dialectical narrative. Dialectical storytelling is an approach to fiction that pits two perspectives against one another and attempts to synthesize a philosophical conclusion from this conflict. Ultimately, the episode is a treatise that favors social liberty and criticizes surveillance, but it does not completely disregard the conservative perspective that favors security.
Charlie’s actions and beliefs favor security over social liberty. He is framed as wrong to persecute his neighbors. He and the rest of the mob are characterized as paranoid and terrorized to the point of delusion. However, their perspective isn’t necessarily a strawman argument. The episode’s twist ending validates their fear of aliens: Invaders are on Earth, and they are hostile subversives. This implies that Charlie and the mob are correct to be frightened of them; their folly is in scapegoating their neighbors.
Another sympathetic aspect of Charlie’s position is the way he argues his point. His accusations of his neighbors are both nonsensical and overly hostile, but his general philosophy around security is motivated by a desire to protect himself and his neighborhood: “No more talk, Steve. You’re going to talk us into the grave! You’d let whatever’s out there walk right over us, wouldn’t yuh? Well, some of us won’t!” (13). While his actions and attitude are explicitly framed as wrongheaded, lines like this one elevate Charlie from a strawman villain to a fallible antagonist. Charlie is hostile and unreasonable, but he is acting out of an earnest desire for safety and security.
Steve’s desire for nonviolence, rationality, trust, and civility is framed as productive and aspirational. His perspective favors social liberty and privacy over security. He opposes the monster hunt and attempts to quell it several times. When his neighbors’ suspicions fall on him, he remains firm in his values, even at personal cost. When his wife offers to ease the mob’s suspicions by letting them search their house, Steve forbids it: “Show them nothing! If they want to look inside our house—let them get a search warrant” (12). He is also the only person on Maple Street who doesn’t succumb to hysteria.
Steve’s main folly is revealed in the twist ending: He was wrong to scoff at the neighborhood “monster kick,” even though that is implicitly what any reasonable person would do. However, Steve’s attitude toward scapegoating his neighbors is still validated, even if he was wrong to think the aliens didn’t exist: Turning against one another is exactly what the invaders wanted.
Fear of the Unknown
In “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” the fear of the unknown sews discord. Lack of knowledge breeds fear and suspicion, which spirals into the formation of an angry mob. Maple Street’s residents are initially “flustered” by the bizarre power failure. This escalates to fear when Tommy suggests that the power outage was initiated by hostile aliens: “That was the way they prepared for the landing. They sent four people. A mother and a father and two kids who looked just like humans…but they weren’t” (6). Though they initially find this absurd, Maple Street’s residents are unsettled. There is no quick way to dismiss Tommy’s theories. For want of another explanation, Charlie and the others transition from entertaining the alien idea to accepting it wholeheartedly. Not knowing what caused the power outage is so disturbing that the group would prefer to believe it was caused by monsters with no evidence. Fear naturally breeds wild speculation. By the end of the episode, the neighbors are so riled up they begin accusing one another seemingly at random.
DON: Charlie has to be the one—Where’s my rifle—
WOMAN ONE: Les Goodman’s the one. His car started! Let’s wreck it.
MRS. GOODMAN: What about Steve’s radio—He’s the one that called them—MR. GOODMAN: Smash the radio. Get me a hammer. Get me something.
STEVE: Stop—Stop—
CHARLIE: Where’s that kid—Let’s get him.
MAN ONE: Get Steve—get Charlie—They’re working together. (16)
These accusations are all proven wrong in the end: There are no aliens on Maple Street, and everyone who lives there is innocent of sabotage. Even though there are indeed alien subversives, they barely had to intervene to create this situation. “Throw them into darkness for a few hours and then you just sit back and watch the pattern. […] They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find…and it’s themselves. All we need to do is sit back…and watch” (17). Thus, fear of the unknown is the thing that truly tears Maple Street apart.
