In modern history, there are few television shows that have become as successful as LOST. When Damon Lindeloff and J.J. Abrams created the television show for ABC, they fashioned many of the characters to be either direct parallels or opposites to different historical figures or literary characters. The most fascinating allusions to an historical figure is the character John Locke.
To avoid any confusion for the reader, John Locke, the fictional LOST character, will be referred to in this work as simply Locke. Alternatively, the real-life historical figure will be referred to as John Locke. Thus we will have Locke from LOST, and John Locke from history. This will similarly keep in fashion with the television series, as most of the characters in LOST refer to him as simply Locke.
John Locke and Locke were two completely different people. John Locke, the historical figure, was an English philosopher. Locke, on the other hand was a regional salesman for a cardboard box company. The two men are vastly different in philosophy, character, and in personality. When J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindeloff created LOST, they simply took the historical figure of John Locke and created a character that was exactly his opposite in every way.
John Locke was born in England on August 29, 1632. He is known by many as the Father of Liberalism. Locke by contrast is a very conservative man. His character depends totally on what he feels is a predetermined and set form of values, and virtually all of his decisions in the show are based on what he feels is his destiny, as if something has already made his decisions for him and he is simply trying to embrace them.
John Locke, being known as the Father of Liberalism founded many modern ideas that society uses today. A phrase he popularized, Tabula Rasa, is latin for “blank slate.” In Roman times, the romans would use a small wax tabula, or tablet. In essence it was used much like a white board or dry erase board is used today. The Romans would use a hot tool to inscribe whatever they were writing. When they no longer needed the inscription, they could heat the wax and erase all markings on it, thus having a blank slate.
The usage of the term Tabula Rasa, or Blank Slate, is to describe mankind as being their own independently thinking entities. According to John Locke, humans are born without a predetermined set of ideals. All personality traits, political philosophies, and habits are learned and acquired by the person’s own life experiences and outside stimuli. According to this type of thesis statement, people are no more inclined to be one way or another when they are born. They adopt their own ways of thinking independent of supposed genetic disposition.
Locke, on the other hand, has a repeated theme throughout the series of having a destiny. Many things that he chooses are based solely on what he considers faith. Much of his own intuition turns out to be for the other characters benefit, while other decisions are very detrimental to the harmony among the survivors on the island.
One such example is an episode called “Deus ex Machina”. In this episode, Locke and a character named Boone are trying to open a mysterious hatch buried in the ground. Locke has been obsessed with opening it and has recruited Boone to help him open the lock on the hatch. After several failed attempts to open it, they wander into the jungle and find a crashed Beechcraft plane in the middle of the jungle. The plane has crashed and rested on the edge of a cliff above them. Locke is immediately obsessed with the plane and with learning its origin, Locke convinces Boone that something or someone wants them to climb the cliff and explore the plane and there will be answers to their problem with opening the hatch in the jungle. Boone reluctantly agrees to climb to the cliff. Once inside the plane, Locke yells from below that he should explore the cockpit, which is hanging off the edge of the cliff. After getting into the cockpit, the plane’s weight shifts and Boone’s weight forces the plane to fall off the cliff. Boone is seriously injured and dies in the following episode. When the other survivors on the island demand answers from Locke as to why Boone died, Locke replies that Boone was “a sacrifice that the island demanded.”
Locke is not set up in LOST to be a villain or any kind of antagonist. The series never really has a definite antagonist throughout the entire show. Rather, Locke is portrayed as a philosophical leader who may often be misguided, but ultimately has everyone’s best interests at heart. His intentions may usually be pure, though the results are not always in everyone’s best interest, such as the case with Boone.
Locke is a character that has many complex layers to him. Some of them make for very interesting story elements. One of these elements takes a historical event that happened to John Locke. In the first season of LOST, a major plot element in Locke’s character development is when Locke finally meets his father, Anthony Cooper. As a preface, it is important to know that throughout LOST, each episode has a series of flash-backs to tell the stories of the characters on the island before the plane crash in the series pilot that puts them all on the island. In this particular episode, the same one where Boone dies, Locke becomes very committed to finding more about his past. He was an orphan and never knew his parents, so he hires a private investigator and finds his father, Anthony Cooper. Anthony Cooper welcomes him into his home and they begin a new relationship.
Over a few weeks, Locke and his father build a bond and they spend a great deal of time together hunting and playing games and getting to know one another. On one occasion, Locke shows up early to a hunting trip with his father and sees him on dialysis. Anthony Cooper confides in him that he needs a kidney transplant but does not feel very confident that he will get one, since the waiting list for a new kidney is very long. Anxious to do something to grow the bond with his father, Locke volunteers to give up a kidney. At the hospital they are seen holding hands as father and son and it is very evident that the bond is very strong between them. After the surgery, Locke wakes up and sees that Anthony Cooper is no longer at his side in the bed next to him at the hospital. It is revealed to Locke by a nurse that he has gone home for private care. In a rage, Locke drives to his father’s house, where the previously friendly guard at the gate tells him that he has orders not to let Locke past. Locke’s father pretended to love him just long enough to con him out of one of his kidneys.
The John Locke from history had a very different relationship with an Anthony Cooper. Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, was a prominent English politician and was the main patron of John Locke. John Locke actually moved in with Anthony Cooper as his attendant physician. During the course of their friendship, Anthony Cooper developed a liver infection called a hydatid cyst that was beginning to give him great difficulty. A hydatid cyst is a type of disease brought on by parasites, similar to tapeworms. Anthony Cooper reluctantly agreed to have a surgery to remove the cyst, after a strong persuasion by John Locke to do so.
Though they were never ratified, John Locke and Anthony Cooper drafted the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. They embodied many of the ideologies that John Locke stood for, but focused too greatly on ideologies instead of actual governing principles. As a consequence, they were left unratified and were simply abandoned altogether by 1700.
Locke, the character on LOST, is sometimes seen as a shepard and caretaker for some of the other characters. In season 2, an episode called “Abandoned” shows this side very well. One of the other survivors named Claire has just given birth on the island. When the plane crashed, she was pregnant and on her way to Los Angeles to give birth and give the baby up for adoption. Since she had no choice other than to have the baby on the island, she feels alone and distraught as a single mother with no one else to rely on other than herself to take care of this newborn baby boy. Locke, seeing her in such a state, takes his knife, gathers some wood, and makes a cradle out of bamboo for the baby.
During the episode, she is having difficulty keeping her infant son from crying. She shakes him on her shoulder, feeds him, puts him down, picks him up, rocks him, and pretty much anything someone would think of to calm a baby down, but she has no success. Seeing this, Locke comes over, takes a blanket and wraps the child in a tight, binding fashion to swaddle the child. He then explains that when people are infants, they like the feeling of being constricted. It makes them feel safe and secure. It isn’t until they are older that they develop the need and desire to be less restricted and free. While it is good advice for a parent, it also raises some interesting philosophical points.
When a person is a child, they like to be told what to do. In this sense, they like having direction and counsel. It is important for a child’s psychological and philosophical development. As John Locke puts it, everyone is born with a blank slate, or Tabula Rasa, and they develop their own personality through time, life experience and their own sensory input. When children grow older, they develop the desire and need to be free and independent. It is a common dismay among parents that their teenage children will sometimes rebel against their instruction.
John Locke, the historical figure wrote a treatise in 1693 titled Some Thoughts Concerning Education. There are many councils to parents concerning the raising of children in its words. Among them, he states in section 12 this counsel to parents concerning swaddling: “Narrow breasts, short and stinking breath, ill lungs, and crookedness, are natural and almost constant effects of hard bodice, and clothes that pinch. That way of making slender wastes, and fine shapes, serves but the more effectually to spoil them. Nor can there indeed but be disproportion in the parts, when the nourishment prepared in the several offices of the body cannot be distributed as nature designs. And therefore what wonder is it, if, it being laid where it can, on some part not so braced, it often makes a shoulder or hip higher or bigger than its just proportion? ’Tis generally known, that the women of China, (imagining I know not what kind of beauty in it) by bracing and binding them hard from their infancy, have very little feet. I saw lately a pair of Chinashoes, which I was told were for a grown woman: they were so exceedingly disproportion’d to the feet of one of the same age among us, that they would scarce have been big enough for one of our little girls. Besides this, ’tis observ’d, that their women are also very little, and short-liv’d; whereas the men are of the ordinary stature of other men, and live to a proportionable age. These defects in the female sex in that country, are by some imputed to the unreasonable binding of their feet, whereby the free circulation of the blood is hinder’d, and the growth and health of the whole body suffers. And how often do we see, that some small part of the foot being injur’d by a wrench or a blow, the whole leg or thigh thereby lose their strength and nourishment, and dwindle away? How much greater inconveniences may we expect, when the thorax, wherein is placed the heart and seat of life, is unnaturally compress’d, and hinder’d from its due expansion?”(Locke 12)
Though society may not attribute small feet and the like to swaddling, John Locke was convinced that many physical abnormalities among people were because they were simply wrapped too tightly in blankets. John Locke simply counseled people to not wrap or bind their infants at all.
