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American Literature
An Introduction to American Literary History and Authors
Synopsis
Shang Xiaojin
Table of Contents
Spring Semester
Lecture One: Early American and Colonial Period to 1776
Lecture Two: The Age of Reason and Revolutionary Writers, 1776-1820
Lecture Three: Philip Freneau and the Rise of Romanticism
Lecture Four: Early Romantic Poetry (Bryant and Longfellow)
Lecture Five: Early Romantic Fiction (Washington Irving)
Lecture Six: Early Romantic Fiction (James F. Cooper))
Lecture Seven: Transcendentalism (Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau)
Lecture Eight: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Scarlet Letter
Lecture Nine: Herman Melville and Moby Dick
Lecture Ten: Edgar Allan Poe and the Fall of the House of Usher
Fall Semester
Lecture one: Romantic poets (Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman)
Lecture Two: The Rise of Realism in America (Howells and Stow)
Lecture Three: Mark Twain and Henry James
Lecture Four: Naturalism and Naturalistic Writers (Jack London)
Lecture Five: Naturalism and Naturalistic Writers (Theodore Dresier)
Lecture Six: The Emergence of Modernist Literature (Modern Poetry)
Lecture Seven: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Lecture Eight: Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald
Lecture Nine: William Faulkner and Southern Tradition
Lecture Ten: John Steinbeck and the 1930s
Lecture One: Early American and Colonial Period to 1776
I. Native American Oral Tradition
American literature begins with the orally transmitted myths, legends, tales, and lyrics (always
songs) of Indian cultures. There was no written literature among the more than 500 different
Indian languages and tribal cultures that existed in North America before the first Europeans
arrived. Though these tribal cultures spoke as many as more than 350 languages, no Indian tribe
had a written language until Sequoyah invented a syllabary for an Indian tribe in 1821.
Accordingly, there was no written literature among these divergent tribal cultures until late 18th
century. Native cultures were sustained almost entirely through the oral tradition. Native American
oral literature is quite diverse. Narratives from quasi-nomadic hunting cultures like the Navajo are
different from stories of settled agricultural tribes such as the pueblo-dwelling Acoma; the stories
of northern lakeside dwellers such as the Ojibwa often differ radically from stories of desert tribes
like the Hopi. Tribes maintained their own religions -- worshipping gods, animals, plants, or
sacred persons. Systems of government ranged from democracies to councils of elders to
theocracies. These tribal variations enter into the oral literature as well. Virtually all Indian tribes
had a rich store of oral literature in the forms of songs, prayers, chants, rituals, legends, myths and
tales.
Still, it is possible to make a few generalizations.
Indian stories, for example, glow with reverence for nature as a spiritual as well as physical
mother. Nature is alive and endowed with spiritual forces; main characters may be animals or
plants, often totems associated with a tribe, group, or individual.
One major characteristic of traditional literature that sets it apart from the modern literature is that
it was an organic part of everyday life. In oral traditions, stories were told not merely to entertain
or to instruct, they were told to be believed. Many of these are cycle stories related to tribal life
experience: planting, hunting, fishing, or birth, puberty and death. They are not only “told” but
also “sung” as chants and songs, sometimes, dramatized in ritual dances. They have a performance
dimension.
Also, for the Indians, literature is functional. Songs were sung to increase the fertility of the fields,
to assure a successful hunt, or to win over a lover. Stories and songs play an important part in
native communities, and those who make and perform them are among the most valued members
of the community. They remind the people of who and what they are, why they are in this
particular place, and how they should continue to live here. Literature in Native American
communities has always been central to man's existence.
II. The Literature of Colonial America (Colonial Period to 1776:)
In 1492, Christopher Columbus, a Genoese navigator, discovered the new world. After
Columbus's discovery, every country in Europe jumped on the Americas bandwagon. Henry VII of
England sent John Cabot to explore the coast of New England. In 1500, Pedro Cabral, a Portugese
captain, discovered South America. Florence sent Amerigo Vespucci, who travelled several times
to the new continent in order to catalog the geography. In 1507, the German geographer Martin
Waldsmuller named the land mass America after it’s founder, Amerigo Vespucci.
Initial English attempts at colonization were disasters. The first colony was set up in 1585 at
Roanoke, off the coast of North Carolina; all its colonists disappeared, and to this day legends are
told about blue-eyed Croatan Indians of the area.
The first permanent English settlement in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia,
as a trading post in 1607. Then, in 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was formed. The English
settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts began the main stream of what we recognize as the
American national history.
Two Important New England Settlements
The Plymouth Colony
Flagship Mayflower arrives - 1620
Leader - William Bradford
Settlers known as Pilgrim Fathers
The Mayflower Compact provides for
social, religious, and economic freedom,
while still maintaining ties to Great Britain.
The Separatists - Pilgrims
The Massachusetts Bay Colony
Flagship Arbella arrives - 1630
Leader - John Winthrop
Settlers are mostly Puritans
The Arbella Covenant clearly establishes
a religious and theocratic settlement,
free of ties to Great Britain.
The Congregational Puritans
Captain John Smith was an English soldier and sailor now chiefly remembered for his
role in establishing the first permanent English settlement in North America. His writings
constitute Jamestown's main record. Smith was an incurable romantic, and he seems to have
embroidered his adventures. To him we owe the famous story of the Indian maiden, Pocahontas.
Whether fact or fiction, the tale is ingrained in the American historical imagination. The story
recounts how Pocahontas, favorite daughter of Chief Powhatan, saved Captain Smith's life when
he was a prisoner of the chief.
America did not achieve its literary independence until the second half of 19th century. The
colonial American cannot be said to have a distinctive literature of its own. Diaries, histories,
journals, letters, travel books, sermons occupy a major position in the literature of the early
colonial period. These early writings usually deal with their life and faith in the new world.
Literature in the period of American revolution (before, during and after) was predominantly
public and utilitarian. The more typical forms of writing include essays, pamphlets and political
document and state papers. These writings mainly served the purpose of social reform,
political/revolutionary propaganda. Military victory fanned nationalistic hopes for a great new
literature. Yet with the exception of outstanding political writing, few works of note appeared
during or soon after the Revolution. On the whole, early American writings are an imitation or
derivation of English literary traditions. They are heavily religious or political in content, some
wrote in support of the colonial expansion and some in support of the revolution. All of the works
written during this period are utilitarian, polemical, or didactic. Stylistically, these early writings
are simple, direct, honest and clear. Symbolism is a commonly employed technique. The puritans
placed unusual stress on plainness in writing because they were unusually interested in influencing
the simple-minded people.
III The Heritage of Puritanism
The term "Puritan" first began as a taunt or insult applied to those who criticized or wished to
"purify" the Church of England. The Puritans were actually the more extreme Protestants within
the Church of England who thought the English Reformation had not gone far enough in
reforming the doctrines and structure of the church. The puritans were more radical in their
religious stance, as they claimed, they would try to purify their religious beliefs and practices and
restore the purity of the church.
American Puritanism was one of the most enduring shaping influences in American culture and
literature. It is more than a religious creed, rather, with the passage of time, it has almost become a
state of mind, a part of the national cultural atmosphere that the American breathes.
Basic Puritan Beliefs
A too-simple, but convenient summary of Calvinist theology is contained in the famous Five
Points which are given below:
1. Total depravity. This asserts the sinfulness of man through the fall of Adam, and the utter
inability of man to work out his own salvation. God is all; man is nothing, and is the source of
all evil. God meant all things to be in harmony; man, by his sinful nature, creates disharmony,
and deserves nothing but to be cast away.
2. Unconditional election. God, under no obligation to save anyone, saves, or “elects” whom he
will, with no reference to faith or good works. Since all things are present in the mind of God
at once, He knows beforehand who will be saved; and thus election or reprobation is
predestined. But no man can share in this foreknowledge, and all must assent to the Divine
will.
3. Limited atonement. Christ did not die for all, but only for those who are to be saved. If He had
not died on the Cross, none could be saved; and thus we have another evidence of God’s love
toward mankind.
4. Irresistible grace. God’s grace is freely given, and can neither be earned nor refused. Grace is
defined as the saving and transfiguring power of God, offering newness of life, forgiveness of
sins, the power to resist temptation, and a wonderful peace of mind and heart. It is Augustine’s
concept of the “restless soul having found rest I God,” and is akin to Luther’s insistence on a
sense of spiritual union with Christ as the prime requisite to salvation.
5. Perseverance of the Saints. Those whom God has chosen have thenceforth full power to do
the will of God, and to live uprightly to the end. It is the logical and necessary conclusion to
the absolute Sovereignty of God. If man could later reject the gift of grace after having once
felt its power in his life, he would be asserting his power over that of God, and in Calvinism
this is impossible.
Scholars have long pointed out the link between Puritanism and capitalism: Both rest on ambition,
hard work, and an intense striving for success. Although individual Puritans could not know, in
strict theological terms, whether they were "saved" and among the elect who would go to heaven,
Puritans tended to feel that earthly success was a sign of election. Wealth and status were sought
not only for themselves, but as welcome reassurances of spiritual health and promises of eternal
life.
Poets and Selected Readings
Ann Bradstreet: She is best known for “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America”, a
collection of her poems. This work was the first volume of original poetry written in the American
Colonies. Many of the poems in “The Tenth Muse” deal with science and with Bradstreet's moral
and religious ideas. However, her best poems describe home life in colonial New England. They
include "Contemplations" and "On the Burning of Her House." Bradstreet also wrote sensitive
poetry to her husband and children, including "To My Dear and Loving Husband" and
"Meditations Divine and Moral."
Edward Taylor: the best of the Puritan poets, wrote metaphysical verse worthy of comparison
with that of the English metaphysical poet George Herbert. His variety of verse included funeral
elegies, lyrics, a medieval "debate," and a 500-page “Metrical History of Christianity” (mainly a
history of martyrs).
Lecture Two: The Age of Reason and Revolutionary Writers, 1776-1820
I. Characteristics of the 18th Century
Dawn of liberalism: freedom from restraint; age of revolution in America and France;
experimentation in science; economic concept of laissez-faire; the presence of the frontier.
The Enlightenment originated in Europe and came late to American colonies in the 18th century,
though it lasted for only a brief period in the colonies, it had exerted a great impact on the people’s
thinking. The 18th-century American Enlightenment was a movement marked by an emphasis on
rationality rather than tradition, scientific inquiry instead of unquestioning religious dogma, and
representative government in place of monarchy. Enlightenment thinkers and writers were devoted
to the ideals of justice, liberty, and equality as the natural rights of man.
A Definition:
The Enlightenment: An intellectual movement which began in England in the seventeenth century,
but then spread to have eventual influence over all sections of the world. The term
"Enlightenment," rooted in an intellectual skepticism to traditional beliefs and dogmas, denotes an
"illumined" contrast to the supposed dark and superstitious character of the Middle Ages. From its
inception, the Enlightenment focused on the power and goodness of human rationality. Some of
the more characteristic doctrines of the Enlightenment are: 1) Reason is the most significant and
positive capacity of the human; 2) reason enables one to break free from primitive, dogmatic, and
superstitious beliefs holding one in the bonds of irrationality and ignorance; 3) in realizing the
liberating potential of reason, one not only learns to think correctly, but to act correctly as well; 4)
through philosophical and scientific progress, reason can lead humanity as a whole to a state of
earthly perfection; 5) reason makes all humans equal and, therefore, deserving of equal liberty and
treatment before the law; 6) beliefs of any sort should be accepted only on the basis of reason, and
not on traditional or priestly authority; and 7) all human endeavors should seek to impart and
develop knowledge, not feelings or character.
http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/enlight-body.html
1. Faith in natural goodness - a human is born without taint or sin; the concept of tabula rasa or
blank slate.
2. Perfectibility of a human being - it is possible to improve situations of birth, economy, society,
and religion.
3. The sovereignty of reason - echoes of Rene Descartes' cogito ergo sum or I think, therefore, I
am (as the first certitude in resolving universal doubt.)
4. Universal benevolence - the attitude of helping everyone.
5. Outdated social institutions cause unsociable behavior - religious, social, economic, and
political institutions, which have not modernized, force individuals into unacceptable behavior.
Deism: men of Enlightenment reconciled religion and science and created a new set of beliefs.
Rational religion; God considered to be like a clockmaker; the world or the clock operates on its
own mechanical and physical laws; if we understand these laws, we will understand the maker;
scientific curiosity, revolution, growth in nationalism, growth in materialism, the age of the gifted
amateur, and belief in progressivism.
The hard-fought American Revolution against Britain (1775-1783) was the first modern war of
liberation against a colonial power. The triumph of American independence seemed to many at the
time a divine sign that America and her people were destined for greatness. Military victory
fanned nationalistic hopes for a great new literature. Yet with the exception of outstanding political
writing, few works of note appeared during or soon after the Revolution.
II Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin, whom the Scottish philosopher David Hume called America's "first great man
of letters," embodied the Enlightenment ideal of humane rationality. Practical yet idealistic,
hard-working and enormously successful, Franklin recorded his early life in his famous
Autobiography. Writer, printer, publisher, scientist, philanthropist, and diplomat, he was the most
famous and respected private figure of his time. He was the first great self-made man in America,
a poor democrat born in an aristocratic age that his fine example helped to liberalize.
In many ways Franklin's life illustrates the impact of the Enlightenment on a gifted individual.
Self-educated but well-read in John Locke, Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, and other
Enlightenment writers, Franklin learned from them to apply reason to his own life and to break
with tradition -- in particular the old-fashioned Puritan tradition -- when it threatened to smother
his ideals. While a youth, Franklin taught himself languages, read widely, and practiced writing
for the public. When he moved from Boston to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Franklin already had
the kind of education associated with the upper classes. He also had the Puritan capacity for hard,
careful work, constant self-scrutiny, and the desire to better himself. These qualities steadily
propelled him to wealth, respectability, and honor. Never selfish, Franklin tried to help other
ordinary people become successful by sharing his insights and initiating a characteristically
American genre -- the self-help book.
Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack, begun in 1732 and published for many years, made Franklin
prosperous and well-known throughout the colonies. In this annual book of useful encouragement,
advice, and factual information, amusing characters such as old Father Abraham and Poor Richard
exhort the reader in pithy, memorable sayings.
Franklin's Autobiography is, in part, another self-help book. Written to advise his son, it covers
only the early years. The most famous section describes his scientific scheme of selfimprovement. Franklin lists 13 virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry,
sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. He elaborates on each
with a maxim; for example, the temperance maxim is "Eat not to Dullness. Drink not to
Elevation." A pragmatic scientist, Franklin put the idea of perfectibility to the test, using himself
as the experimental subject. Autobiography establishes in literary form the first example of the
fulfillment of the American Dream. Franklin demonstrates the possibilities of life in the New
World through his own rise from the lower middle class as a youth to one of the most admired
men in the world as an adult. Furthermore, he asserts that he achieved his success through a solid
work ethic. He proved that even undistinguished persons in Boston can, through industry, become
great figures of importance in America. When we think of the American Dream today--the ability
to rise from rags to riches through hard work--we are usually thinking of the model set forth by
Franklin in this autobiography.
There are a number of "firsts" associated with the Autobiography. It is considered the first popular
self-help book ever published. It was the first and only work written in American before the 19th
century that has retained bestseller popularity since its release. It was the first major secular
American autobiography. It is also the first real account of the American Dream in action as told
from a man who experienced it firsthand. This form would be copied numerous times throughout
American history, most notably by such writers as Horatio Alger.
III Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence
Best known as the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson was the
third president of the United States. He was a man of many talents--an architect, an inventor, a
scientist, and a collector of books and artifacts of American history. He could read more than five
languages and was the U.S. minister to France for several years.
Elected to the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, Jefferson was appointed on
June 11, 1776, to head a committee of five in preparing the Declaration of Independence. He was
its primary author, although his initial draft was amended after consultation with Benjamin
Franklin and John Adams and altered both stylistically and substantively by Congress. Jefferson's
reference to the voluntary allegiance of colonists to the crown was struck; also deleted was a
clause that censured the monarchy for imposing slavery upon America. Based upon the natural
rights theory, the Declaration of Independence made Jefferson internationally famous. Years later
that fame evoked the jealousy of John Adams, who complained that the declaration's ideas were
"hackneyed." Jefferson agreed; he wrote of the declaration, "Neither aiming at originality of
principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to
be an expression of the American mind."
Read and analyze the Declaration of Independence.
Lecture Three
Philip Freneau and the Rise of Romanticism
I Philip Freneau (1752-1832)
The Poet of the American Revolution,” “The Father of American Literature,” and “Pioneer of
the New Romanticism Movement” refers to none other that Philip Freneau (Dict. Of Amer. Bio.).
His highly controversial and powerful words helped shape our country into what is now as
become. His strong political ties and ideals have left him branded as a “political propagandist,”
but more importantly in recent decades as a “gifted and versatile lyric poet” (Vitzthum 164).
Freneau believed that his main function in life was to write poetry, and not to become a soldier.
With that he chose not to join his countrymen and fight, instead he sought the comfort of the sea.
In 1776, while America was declaring its independence, Freneau accepted a secretaryship to a
prominent planter on the Caribbean Island of Santa Cruz (Stovall 221). Over the next two years
he wrote some of his best poetry, and became a pioneer of the romantic movement.
As a poet and editor, Freneau adhered to his democratic ideals. His popular poems, published in
newspapers for the average reader, regularly celebrated American subjects. "The Virtue of
Tobacco" concerns the indigenous plant, a mainstay of the southern economy, while "The Jug of
Rum" celebrates the alcoholic drink of the West Indies, a crucial commodity of early American
trade and a major New World export. Common American characters lived in "The Pilot of
Hatteras," as well as in poems about quack doctors and bombastic evangelists.
Freneau commanded a natural and colloquial style appropriate to a genuine democracy, but he
could also rise to refined neoclassic lyricism in often-anthologized works such as "The Wild
Honeysuckle" (1786), which evokes a sweet-smelling native shrub. Not until the "American
Renaissance" that began in the 1820s would American poetry surpass the heights that Freneau had
scaled 40 years earlier.
Brief summary of his life and art:
1. Poet of American Independence: Freneau provides incentive and inspiration to the revolution by
writing such poems as "The Rising Glory of America" and "Pictures of Columbus."
2. Journalist: Freneau was editor and contributor of The Freeman's Journal (Philadelphia) from
1781-1784. In his writings, he advocated the essence of what is known as Jeffersonian democracy
- decentralization of government, equality for the masses, etc.
3. Freneau's Religion: Freneau is described as a deist - a believer in nature and humanity but not a
pantheist. In deism, religion becomes an attitude of intellectual belief, not a matter of emotional of
spiritual ecstasy. Freneau shows interest and sympathy for the humble and the oppressed.
4. Freneau as Father of American Poetry: His major themes are death, nature, transition, and the
human in nature. All of these themes become important in 19th century writing. His famous
poems are "The Wild Honey-Suckle" (1786), "The Indian Burying Ground" (1787), "The Dying
Indian: Tomo Chequi" (1784), "The Millennium" (1797), "On a Honey Bee" (1809), "To a
Caty-Did" (1815), "On the Universality and Other Attributes of the God of Nature," "On the
Uniformity and Perfection of Nature," and "On the Religion of Nature" (the last three written in
1815).
Read and Analyze the Wild Honey-Suckle:
II The Rise of Romanticism in America
Romanticism: a definition
This term has two widely accepted meanings. In historical criticism, it refers to a European
intellectual and artistic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that sought
greater freedom of personal expression than that allowed by the strict rules of literary form and
logic of the eighteenth-century neoclassicists. The Romantics preferred emotional and imaginative
expression to rational analysis. They considered the individual to be at the center of all experience
and so placed him or her at the center of their art. The Romantics believed that the creative
imagination reveals nobler truths — unique feelings and attitudes — than those that could be
discovered by logic or by scientific examination. Both the natural world and the state of childhood
were important sources for revelations of "eternal truths." "Romanticism" is also used as a general
term to refer to a type of sensibility found in all periods of literary history and usually considered
to be in opposition to the principles of classicism. In this sense, Romanticism signifies any work
or philosophy in which the exotic or dreamlike figure strongly, or that is devoted to individualistic
expression, self-analysis, or a pursuit of a higher realm of knowledge than can be discovered by
human reason. Prominent Romantics include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, John
Keats, Lord Byron, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
American Romanticism: A Brief Survey
The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to England, France,
and beyond, reached America around the year 1820, some 20 years after William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge had revolutionized English poetry by publishing Lyrical Ballads. In
America as in Europe, fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles. Yet there was an
important difference: Romanticism in America coincided with the period of national expansion
and the discovery of a distinctive American voice. The solidification of a national identity and the
surging idealism and passion of Romanticism nurtured the masterpieces of "the American
Renaissance." In literature it was America's first great creative period, a full flowering of the
romantic impulse on American soil. Surviving form the Federalist Age were its three major
literary figures: Bryant, Irving, and Cooper. Emerging as new writers of strength and creative
power were the novelists Hawthorne, Simms, Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe; the poets Poe,
Whittier, Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, Dickinson, and Whitman; the essayists Thoreau, Emerson,
and Holmes; the critics Poe, Lowell, and Simms....
Romanticism was affirmative and appropriate for most American poets and creative essayists.
America's vast mountains, deserts, and tropics embodied the sublime. The Romantic spirit seemed
particularly suited to American democracy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the
common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values.
Certainly the New England Transcendentalists -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau,
and their associates -- were inspired to a new optimistic affirmation by the Romantic movement.
In New England, Romanticism fell upon fertile soil.
Lecture Four: Early Romantic Poets
The Fireside Poets
William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell
Holmes, and John Greenleaf Whittier constituted a group sometimes called the Fireside Poets.
They earned this nickname because they frequently used the hearth as an image of comfort and
unity, a place where families gathered to learn and tell stories. These tremendously popular poets
also were widely read around the hearthsides of 19th-century American families. The consensus of
American critics was that the Fireside Poets first put American poetry on an equal footing with
British poetry.
Critical opinions:
They represented the elite educated society in New England.They were conventional, wealthy,
highly cultured, interested in the advanced European art forms in literature, and they also had
strong sense of morality.
They were conservative and imitative, using European literary forms and polite literary language
to talk about what was natively American.They insisted on traditional meters, stanza forms,
stereotyped metaphors and superficial symbolism.
Modern critics often criticize them for their language is not native, their subject matter is only of
one kind, and they are not complicated enough to be enjoyed and studied.
I William Cullen Bryant(1794-1878)
William Cullen Bryant was a young lawyer when his poem "Thanatopsis" first appeared in the
North American Review in 1817. Inspired by the romantic lyrics of William Wordsworth, Bryant
found his subject in the American landscape, especially that of New England. By 1825, critics on
both sides of the Atlantic called him the finest poet in the United States. But reputation alone
could not support his family, and in 1826 Bryant joined the New York Evening Post. By 1840,
Bryant had largely abandoned poetry to become one of the country's leading advocates for
abolition. From 1856 on, the Evening Post was a Republican paper, supporting the arming of
abolitionist settlers in Kansas, deriding the Dred Scott decision, and celebrating John Brown as a
martyr. In 1860, Bryant introduced Abraham Lincoln before the audience at Cooper Union in New
York. Later, Bryant and the Evening Post influenced Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation
Proclamation.
Bryant gained public recognition first and is best remembered for “Thanatopsis,” published in
1821 but written when he was a teenager. Still widely anthologized, this poem offers a democratic
reconciliation with death as the great equalizer and a recognition that the “still voice” of God is
embodied in all processes of nature. During a busy life as a lawyer and editor of the New York
Evening Post, Bryant wrote accomplished, elegant, and romantic descriptions of a nature suffused
with spirit.
Read and analyze To A Water Fowl
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, professor of modern languages at Harvard, was the best-known
American poet of his day. He was responsible for the misty, ahistorical, legendary sense of the
past that merged American and European traditions. He wrote three long narrative poems
popularizing native legends in European meters "Evangeline" (1847), "The Song of Hiawatha"
(1855), and "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858). Longfellow also wrote textbooks on
modern languages and a travel book entitled Outre-Mer, retelling foreign legends and patterned
after Washington Irving's Sketch Book. Although conventionality, sentimentality, and facile
handling mar the long poems, haunting short lyrics like "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport" (1854),
"My Lost Youth" (1855), and "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls" (1880) continue to give pleasure.
Longfellow was the best known of the Fireside Poets, and it was with him that American poetry
began its emergence from the shadow of its British parentage. His poetic narratives helped create a
national historical myth, transforming colorful aspects of the American past into memorable
romance. They include Evangeline (1847), which concerns lovers who are separated during the
French and Indian War (1754-1763), and The Song of Hiawatha (1855), which derives its themes
from Native American folklore. No American poet before or since was as widely celebrated during
his or her lifetime as Longfellow. He became the first and only American poet to be honored with
a bust in the revered Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey in London, England.
"Hiawatha," rightly regarded as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's greatest, most characteristic, and
most original poem, has for Americans the marked merit of being entirely concerned with tales of
the aboriginal inhabitants of the North American continent. It is, from beginning to end, a metrical
version of legends originating with the Algonquin family of Indians, of which the Ojibways or
Chippewas were the most prominent tribe. Yet Hiawatha himself was not of this family, but was
an authentic historical person, neither a myth nor a demigod, who was a great chief among the
Onondagas in the fifteenth century, not only the framer of a code of laws by which they were long
bound but also the successful negotiator of the remarkable treaty by which the Five Nations,
afterwards the Six Nations, were confederated; best known to us as the Iroquois.
Read an Analyze A Psalm of Life
Lecture Five: Early Romantic Fiction-Washington Irving (1783-1859)
Washington Irving (1783-1859): American author, short story writer, essayist, poet, travel book
writer, biographer, and columnist.
The Sketch Book of Geoffrye Crayon (Irving's pseudonym) contains his two best remembered
stories, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." "Sketch" aptly describes Irving's
delicate, elegant, yet seemingly casual style, and "crayon" suggests his ability as a colorist or
creator of rich, nuanced tones and emotional effects. In the Sketch Book, Irving transforms the
Catskill Mountains along the Hudson River north of New York City into a fabulous, magical
region.
American readers gratefully accepted Irving's imagined "history" of the Catskills, despite the fact
(unknown to them) that he had adapted his stories from a German source. Irving gave America
something it badly needed in the brash, materialistic early years: an imaginative way of relating to
the new land.
No writer was as successful as Irving at humanizing the land, endowing it with a name and a face
and a set of legends. The story of "Rip Van Winkle," who slept for 20 years, waking to find the
colonies had become independent, eventually became folklore. It was adapted for the stage, went
into the oral tradition, and was gradually accepted as authentic American legend by generations of
Americans.
Irving discovered and helped satisfy the raw new nation's sense of history. His numerous works
may be seen as his devoted attempts to build the new nation's soul by recreating history and giving
it living, breathing, imaginative life. For subjects, he chose the most dramatic aspects of American
history: the discovery of the New World, the first president and national hero, and the westward
exploration. His earliest work was a sparkling, satirical History of New York (1809) under the
Dutch, ostensibly written by Diedrich Knickerbocker (hence the name of Irving's friends and New
York writers of the day, the "Knickerbocker School").
Achievements:
1. Irving is the first belletrist in American literature, writing for pleasure at a time when writing
was practical and for useful purposes.
2. He is the first American literary humorist.
3. He has written the first modern short stories.
4. He is the first to write history and biography as entertainment.
5. He introduced the nonfiction prose as a literary genre.
6. His use of the gothic looks forward to Poe.
(from Perkins, et. al. The American Tradition in Literature. 6th Ed. One Volume)
Irving exemplifies the new American literature by taking a German folklore and adding American
scenery and events. For example, in the story Rip Van Winkle mentions the Kaatskill mountains
and the Hudson river and describes these things as "magical". Another example of Irvings subject
matter is the manner in which he introduces the American revolution into the story.
Rip Van Winkle is a fantasy tale about a man who somehow stepped outside the main stream of
life. Yhe story reveals the author’s ambiguous attitude toward change, as we know change has one
of major themes in his works. The story seems to suggest there had been peace and harmony in
life before the war of Independence. However, after the war, the tempo of life quickened. People
wanted to get money and power. Rip Van is actually character who is caught, confusedly, between
two worlds. On the other hand, he is an interesting character who seems to be a challenge to the
much-cherished value, the work ethic.
Irving's sociopolitical opinions do not become readily apparent until Rip wakes up from his sleep.
Rip is confused and asks questions seeking his identity in the same way that the young country
was seeking it's identity. Rip seeks the truth much as the new country was. Several allegories are
presented. For example, the primary symbol is the sign on the tavern. While the exterior paint and
personage had changed, the substance was unaltered; the sceptor had become a sword and the
crown a cocked hat. "[For] Rip... the changes and empires made but little impression on him; but
there was one species of government under which he had long groaned... petticoat government."
Irving’ use of Dame van Winkle of a symbol representing mother England and her subsequent
death after the revolution, asks the question, "Has anything really changed?"
Read and comment on A Legend of Sleepy Hollow
See how the characters contrast with each other: Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones, compile a list of
Ichabod's traits: where he's from, what he does, eats, reads, and the like. Taken as a whole, what
do these traits infer about his social identity? How does his antagonist, Brom van Brunt, contrast
with Ichabod in the contest for Katrina van Tassel?
Lecture Six: Early Romantic Fiction -James Feminore Cooper
From http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/LIT/cooper.htm
An biographical introduction:
James Fenimore Cooper, like Irving, evoked a sense of the past and gave it a local habitation and a
name. In Cooper, though, one finds the powerful myth of a golden age and the poignance of its
loss. While Irving and other American writers before and after him scoured Europe in search of its
legends, castles, and great themes, Cooper grasped the essential myth of America: that it was
timeless, like the wilderness. American history was a trespass on the eternal; European history in
America was a reenactment of the fall in the Garden of Eden. The cyclical realm of nature was
glimpsed only in the act of destroying it: The wilderness disappeared in front of American eyes,
vanishing before the oncoming pioneers like a mirage. This is Cooper's basic tragic vision of the
ironic destruction of the wilderness, the new Eden that had attracted the colonists in the first place.
Personal experience enabled Cooper to write vividly of the transformation of the wilderness and of
other subjects such as the sea and the clash of peoples from different cultures. The son of a Quaker
family, he grew up on his father's remote estate at Otsego Lake (now Cooperstown) in central New
York State. Although this area was relatively peaceful during Cooper's boyhood, it had once been
the scene of an Indian massacre. Young Fenimore Cooper grew up in an almost feudal
environment. His father, Judge Cooper, was a landowner and leader. Cooper saw frontiersmen and
Indians at Otsego Lake as a boy; in later life, bold white settlers intruded on his land.
Natty Bumppo, Cooper's renowned literary character, embodies his vision of the frontiersman as a
gentleman, a Jeffersonian "natural aristocrat." Early in 1823, in The Pioneers, Cooper had begun
to discover Bumppo. Natty is the first famous frontiersman in American literature and the literary
forerunner of countless cowboy and backwoods heroes. He is the idealized, upright individualist
who is better than the society he protects. Poor and isolated, yet pure, he is a touchstone for ethical
values and prefigures Herman Melville's Billy Budd and Mark Twain's Huck Finn.
Based in part on the real life of American pioneer Daniel Boone -- who was a Quaker like Cooper
-- Natty Bumppo, an outstanding woodsman like Boone, was a peaceful man adopted by an Indian
tribe. Both Boone and the fictional Bumppo loved nature and freedom. They constantly kept
moving west to escape the oncoming settlers they had guided into the wilderness, and they became
legends in their own lifetimes. Natty is also chaste, high-minded, and deeply spiritual: He is the
Christian knight of medieval romances transposed to the virgin forest and rocky soil of America.
The unifying thread of the five novels collectively known as the Leather-Stocking Tales is the life
of Natty Bumppo. Cooper's finest achievement, they constitute a vast prose epic with the North
American continent as setting, Indian tribes as characters, and great wars and westward migration
as social background. The novels bring to life frontier America from 1740 to 1804.
Cooper's novels portray the successive waves of the frontier settlement: the original wilderness
inhabited by Indians; the arrival of the first whites as scouts, soldiers, traders, and frontiersmen;
the coming of the poor, rough settler families; and the final arrival of the middle class, bringing
the first professionals -- the judge, the physician, and the banker. Each incoming wave displaced
the earlier: Whites displaced the Indians, who retreated westward; the "civilized" middle classes
who erected schools, churches, and jails displaced the lower- class individualistic frontier folk,
who moved further west, in turn displacing the Indians who had preceded them. Cooper evokes
the endless, inevitable wave of settlers, seeing not only the gains but the losses.
Cooper's novels reveal a deep tension between the lone individual and society, nature and culture,
spirituality and organized religion. In Cooper, the natural world and the Indian are fundamentally
good -- as is the highly civilized realm associated with his most cultured characters. Intermediate
characters are often suspect, especially greedy, poor white settlers who are too uneducated or
unrefined to appreciate nature or culture. Like Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, Herman Melville,
and other sensitive observers of widely varied cultures interacting with each other, Cooper was a
cultural relativist. He understood that no culture had a monopoly on virtue or refinement.
Cooper accepted the American condition while Irving did not. Irving addressed the American
setting as a European might have -- by importing and adapting European legends, culture, and
history. Cooper took the process a step farther. He created American settings and new,
distinctively American characters and themes. He was the first to sound the recurring tragic note in
American fiction.
Cooper and his portrayal of Indians
Cooper was one of the first writers who began to write about Indians. Very little was accurately
known at that day with regard to the Indians and their tribal distinctions. During the colonial
period, the Indians filled a very prominent position in the foreground, whether as friends or foes.
After the Revolution, the change was signal. They immediately dropped into the background.
They were forgotten. The majority of the people scarcely remembered their existence. Even the
best educated men of the generation, born immediately after the Revolution, knew very little about
them. Very little was written about them. Still less was printed and read on subjects connected
with them. Such was the general state of things when Cooper determined to write a romance
essentially Indian in character and incidents.
Cooper’s Indian characters successfully captured the imagination of his readers; the stoic, wise,
and noble "red man" (i.e. Chingachgook) in his novels has a great appeal and is one of the most
enduring images of the Native American in American literature. While Cooper's Indians
undeniably made an important impact on American fiction, they have been the subject of much
literary debate. The most common charge leveled against Cooper is that the Indians did not
resemble any that could be found in life; simply, they were wildly unrealistic. Cooper did not have
much first-hand knowledge of American Indians. So far as we can tell, he had little personal
contact with Indians. All he knew of Indians comes from reading. In spite of this, Cooper and his
Indian characters will go down in American literary history as part of their cultural heritage.
Read selections from The Last of Mohicans
It was written in 1826, and is an adventure set in the forests of North America during the Seven
Years War (1756 - 1763) between Great Britain and France. The plot revolves around the efforts of
Alice and Cora Munro to join their father, who is the commander of Fort William Henry near Lake
Champlain. Their course is blocked by Magua, the leader of a group of Huron Indians who are
allied to the French. His schemes are frustrated by Uncas, the last of the Mohicans, his father
Chingachgook, and Natty Bumppo. The book is characterized by a series of thrilling attacks,
captures, flights and rescues.
Lecture Seven: Transcendentalism
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau
I Transcendentalism and American Renaissance
Even more than most "isms," American Transcendentalism defies neat definition, now and in the
nineteenth century. A loose collection of eclectic ideas about literature, philosophy, religion, social
reform, and the general state of American culture, transcendentalism had different meanings for
each person involved in the movement, including those who attended the Transcendental Club.
Even today it is difficult to say definitively whom can be considered a transcendentalist, and
readers still might disagree about the ideas and legacy of this distinctively American movement
with so many foreign roots. Yet all agree that that transcendentalism, however defined, did flourish,
primarily in Concord and Boston, in the nineteenth century and that its influence on American
culture and literary was profound.
A workable definition:
American transcendentalism was an important movement in philosophy and literature that
flourished during the early to middle years of the nineteenth century (about 1836-1860). It began
as a reform movement in the Unitarian church, extending the views of William Ellery Channing
on an indwelling God and the significance of intuitive thought. It was based on "a monism holding
to the unity of the world and God, and the immanence of God in the world" (Oxford Companion
to American Literature 770). For the transcendentalists, the soul of each individual is identical
with the soul of the world and contains what the world contains. Transcendentalists rejected
Lockean empiricism, unlike the Unitarians: they wanted to rejuvenate the mystical aspects of New
England Calvinism (although none of its dogma) and to go back to Jonathan Edwards' "divine and
supernatural light," imparted immediately to the soul by the spirit of God.
Romanticism takes on different characteristics in different cultures, as each country endowed the
movement with distinctive national traits. Early in the nineteenth century, Unitarianism, a rational
religion produced by the English Enlightenment, paved the way for the emergence in the United
States of a literary and philosophical movement, Transcendentalism, whose chief proponent was
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). Like the English Romantics, Transcendentalists valued the
individual over the group, intuition, feeling over reason, and nature over civilization. Influenced
by German philosophers like Kant, indebted to New England's Puritan traditions, and thus
ultimately derived from Plato, the wellspring of Western idealistic philosophy, Transcendentalism
also owed much to Asian mysticism, which heavily influenced both Emerson and Henry David
Thoreau). Its dominant outlook, however, was Romantic.
Transcendentalism marks the peak of American romanticism. It inspired a whole new generation
of famous authors and produced a literary flowering that is known as American renaissance or
New England flowering. Transcendentalism was a religious, philosophical and literary movement.
Besides Puritanism, its intellectual influence includes neo-Platonism, German idealist philosophy
and Oriental mysticism.
II Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Emerson was the spokesman for the American Transcendentalists and one of the major writers of
the mid-19th century. His influence among his contemporaries and those who followed
immediately after him was enormous. He was born into a Boston minister family. The family later
removed to Concord (later the center of transcendentalist movement). At the age of 17 he entered
the Harvard and later became a Unitarian minister but resigned his position in the church in 1832
since he had no real faith in both the church and the religion he preached. His first wife was rich
and left much money behind when she died in 1831. So, he no longer needed to hold any steady
job and began his literary life as a lecturer, essayist, and poet. He traveled to Europe and met many
of the romantic writers of his time, including Wordsworth, Carlyle and Coleridge and thus brought
back with him the influence of European romanticism. With people like Thoeau, Margaret Fuller,
Emerson formed a transcendental club and helped to found and edit the transcendentalist journal
The Dial. He traveled far and wide in the United States, Canada and England, taught and spread
his Transcendentalist doctrine. Emerson published his first book Nature in 1836, which was later
called “the manifesto of American transcendentalism”. However, two speeches in the next two
years, The American Scholar and The Divinity School Address, made him famous. The American
Scholar was called “our intellectual declaration of independence”. Emerson’s writings fall into
two types: essay and poetry. His poetry was of uneven quality, but highly individual.
Emerson's philosophy has been called contradictory, and it is true that he consciously avoided
building a logical intellectual system because such a rational system would have negated his
Romantic belief in intuition and flexibility. In his essay "Self-Reliance," Emerson remarks: "A
foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Yet he is remarkably consistent in his call for
the birth of American individualism inspired by nature. Most of his major ideas -- the need for a
new national vision, the use of personal experience, the notion of the cosmic Over-Soul, and the
doctrine of compensation -- are suggested in his first publication, Nature (1836).
Emerson loved the aphoristic genius of the 16th-century French essayist Montaigne, and he once
told Bronson Alcott that he wanted to write a book like Montaigne's, "full of fun, poetry, business,
divinity, philosophy, anecdotes, smut." Spiritual vision and practical, aphoristic expression make
Emerson exhilarating; one of the Concord Transcendentalists aptly compared listening to him with
"going to heaven in a swing." Much of his spiritual insight comes from his readings in Eastern
religion, especially Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism.
The British critic Matthew Arnold said the most important writings in English in the 19th century
had been Wordsworth's poems and Emerson's essays. A great prose-poet, Emerson influenced a
long line of American poets, including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington
Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost.
Read selections from Nature and Self-Reliance. And Comment on Emerson’s understanding of
nature and the principle of self-reliance.
III Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Emerson’s truest disciple
Henry David Thoreau, of French and Scottish descent, was born in Concord and made it his
permanent home. From a poor family, like Emerson, he worked his way through Harvard.
Throughout his life, he reduced his needs to the simplest level and managed to live on very little
money, thus maintaining his independence. In essence, he made living his career. A nonconformist,
he attempted to live his life at all times according to his rigorous principles. This attempt was the
subject of many of his writings.
Thoreau's masterpiece, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), is the result of two years, two
months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847) he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on
property owned by Emerson. In Walden, Thoreau consciously shapes this time into one year, and
the book is carefully constructed so the seasons are subtly evoked in order. The book also is
organized so that the simplest earthly concerns come first (in the section called "Economy," he
describes the expenses of building a cabin); by the ending, the book has progressed to meditations
on the stars.
In Walden, Thoreau, a lover of travel books and the author of several, gives us an anti-travel book
that paradoxically opens the inner frontier of self-discovery as no American book had up to this
time. As deceptively modest as Thoreau's ascetic life, it is no less than a guide to living the
classical ideal of the good life. Both poetry and philosophy, this long poetic essay challenges the
reader to examine his or her life and live it authentically. The building of the cabin, described in
great detail, is a concrete metaphor for the careful building of a soul. In his journal for January 30,
1852, Thoreau explains his preference for living rooted in one place: "I am afraid to travel much
or to famous places, lest it might completely dissipate the mind." In Walden, Thoreau not only
tests the theories of Transcendentalism, he re-enacts the collective American experience of the
19th century: living on the frontier. Thoreau felt that his contribution would be to renew a sense of
the wilderness in language.
Thoreau is the most attractive of the Transcendentalists today because of his ecological
consciousness, do-it-yourself independence, ethical commitment to abolitionism, and political
theory of civil disobedience and peaceful resistance. His ideas are still fresh, and his incisive
poetic style and habit of close observation are still modern. Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience,"
with its theory of passive resistance based on the moral necessity for the just individual to disobey
unjust laws, was an inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi's Indian independence movement and Martin
Luther King's struggle for black Americans' civil rights in the 20th century.
Read selected passages from Walden.
Lecture Eight: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Scarlet Letter
I Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Novelist and short story writer, a central figure in the American Renaissance. Nathaniel
Hawthorne's best-known works include THE SCARLET LETTER (1850) and THE HOUSE OF
THE SEVEN GABLES (1851).
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, to a family that had been
prominent in the area since colonial times. A rich lore of family and local history provided much
of the material for Hawthorne's works. When Nathaniel was four, his father died on a voyage in
Surinam, Dutch Guinea, but maternal relatives recognized his literary talent and financed his
education at Bowdoin College. Among his classmates were many of the important literary and
political figures of the day: writer Horatio Bridge, future Senator Jonathan Ciley, Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, and future President Franklin Pierce. These prominent friends supplied
Hawthorne with government employment in the lean times, allowing him time to bloom as an
author.
Like James Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne was extremely concerned with conventionality; his first
pseudonymously published short stories imitated Sir Walter Scott, as did his 1828 self-published
Fanshawe. Hawthorne later formally withdrew most of this early work, discounting it as the work
of inexperienced youth. From 1836 to 1844 the Boston-centered Transcendentalist movement, led
by Ralph Waldo Emerson, was an important force in New England intellectual circles. The
Transcendentalists believed that human existence transcended the sensory realm, and rejected
formalism in favor of individual responsibility. Hawthorne's fiancee Sophia Peabody drew him
into "the newness," and in 1841 Hawthorne invested $1500 in the Brook Farm Utopian
Community, leaving disillusioned within a year.. As America's first true psychological novel, The
Scarlet Letter would convey these ideals; contrasting puritan morality with passion and
individualism.
Bowdoin classmate Senator Jonathon Ciley appointed Hawthorne as measurer of Salt and Coal at
Boston Custom-House, but he lost his post in 1849 for political reasons. This dismissal prompted
Hawthorne to return to writing, and the satirical "The Custom House" became the critically
acclaimed prologue to The Scarlet Letter. The autobiographical essay served as a literary device,
with the appearance of a mysterious scarlet letter, and laid out Hawthorne's definition of the
romance as distinct from the novel. Hawthorne wrote feverishly. Ticknor & Fields agreed to
publish the work, and Hawthorne's powerful friends provided favorable reviews.
The Scarlet Letter attained an immediate and lasting success because it addressed spiritual and
moral issues from a uniquely American standpoint. In 1850, adultery was an extremely risque
subject, but because Hawthorne had the support of the New England literary establishment, it
passed easily into the realm of appropriate reading. The Scarlet Letter represents the height of
Hawthorne's literary genius; dense with terse descriptions. It remains relevant for its philosophical
and psychological depth, and continues to be read as a classic tale on a universal theme.
IIHawthorne’s Art:
Influences
1. Salem - early childhood, later work at the Custom House.
2. Puritan family background - one of his forefathers was Judge Hathorne, who presided over the
Salem witchcraft trials, 1692. (New England history)
3. Belief in the existence of the devil. (Puritan heritage)
4. Belief in determinism
Romance:
In the Custom House preface of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne discusses part of his concept or
definition of the romance novel. He explains that life seen through moonlight is the subject of the
novel. If the writer is sitting in a room in the moonlight and looks around at the familiar items on
the floor—a wicker carriage or a hobby horse, for example—he can discern a quality of
“strangeness and remoteness” in these familiar objects. And so he has found a territory in which
the familiar becomes enchanted and “the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory,
somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet,
and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.” Hawthorne believes that “ … at such an hour,
and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all lone, cannot dream strange things, and make
them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.”
Symbolism:
Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of the most prolific symbolists in American literature, and a study of
his symbols is necessary to understanding his novels. Generally speaking, a symbol is something
used to stand for something else. In literature, a symbol is most often a concrete object used to
represent an idea more abstract and broader in scope and meaning—often a moral, religious, or
philosophical concept or value. Symbols can range from the most obvious substitution of one
thing for another, to creations as massive, complex, and perplexing as Melville’s white whale in
Moby Dick. The chief symbol in The Scarlet Letter is the scarlet letter "A", which openly
symbolizes Hester's adultery. By the end of the novel, the townspeople think that Hester's scarlet
"A" stands for Ability, for she has become a generous helper for the poor and downtrodden and a
wise counselor for their problems.
III Analysis of the Scarlet Letter
LITERARY/HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth century New England, and Hawthorne successfully depicts
the Puritanism that was found there. Hawthorne attempts to give a genuine picture of the times by
presenting a realistic setting and real puritanical social and moral codes. He also includes actual
historical figures like Governor Bellingham, Governor Winthrop, Mr. John Wilson, and Mistress
Hibbins, who are treated as fictional characters. The introduction of these historical figures, along
with the presentation of Puritanical society and beliefs, and the reference to witches, witchcraft
and superstitious beliefs, successfully creates an evocative setting and a historical background for
the story, that is, a puritan community (Boston), in the 17th century New England. It is a moralistic
and gloomy place where the citizens dress in dull colors and lack any liveliness. They do not
indulge themselves in joy, laughter and pleasure. Even on holidays, they cannot relax and enjoy
themselves. They have harsh, stern social laws. Those who break a social or moral code are
severely punished. We know, Hester Prynne, because of her part in adultery, she was publicly
humiliated as she was forced to stand on the scaffold with her baby in her arms and also wear a
scarlet A on her bosom. Then, she was imprisoned and, later when released, she was actually made
a social outcast and thus suffered a lot from her sense of shame, guilt as well as the agony of
isolation, insult, and contempt.
The Scarlet Letter is a psychological romance. Hawthorne proposes to study the effects of sin
on the lives of his characters. Far ahead of his time, he delves into human alienation and what it
does to the soul. Doubt and self-torture provide psychological shadows in the character of
Dimmesdale. Rebellion and defiance in the face of repressive laws can be seen in his heroine,
Hester Prynne. She may be forced to wear the scarlet letter, but she mocks that sentence with her
elaborate embroidery. The Puritan concern with man’s depravity and its effect on individual
characters is intertwined throughout the plot. What happens when a person has an excess of
passion or intellect? When a balance of the two is not achieved in an individual, what is the end
result? Within the framework of the romance, Hawthorne lays out his evidence of the
psychological conflicts within and around his characters.
Unity and Structure: Certain artistic laws must be faithfully executed so that the reader can
follow the trail. There must be unity and structure, literary devices, and a subject kept ever in the
reader’s sight. In The Scarlet Letter, the scaffold scenes provide the unity and structure, and the
literary devices include symbols, colors of light and darkness, irony, and the consistent subject of
guilt to provide artistic wholeness. While Hawthorne can go beyond the probable and use the
marvelous, he must also do so without chaos; hence, he must provide artistic balance
Analyze the principal characters and comment on the novel’s theme and structure.
Lecture Nine: Herman Melville and Moby Dick
Herman Melville (1819-1891) American author, best-known for his novels of the sea and his
masterpiece MOBY-DICK (1851), a whaling adventure dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne. "I have
written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb," Melville wrote to Hawthorne. The work
was only recognized as a masterpiece 30 years after Melville's death. TYPEE (1846), a
fictionalized travel narrative, was the author's most popular book during his lifetime.
In search of adventures, Melville shipped out in 1839 as a cabin boy on the whaler Acushnet. He
joined later the US Navy, and started his years long voyages on ships, sailing both the Atlantic and
the South Seas. During these years he was a clerk and bookkeeper in general store in Honolulu
and lived briefly among the Typee cannibals in the Marquesas Islands. Another ship rescued him
and took him to Tahiti. In his mid-20's Melville returned to his mother's house to write about his
adventures.
Life among these natives and other exotic experiences abroad provided Melville with endless
literary conceits. Armed with the voluminous knowledge obtained from constant reading while at
sea, Melville wrote a series of novels detailing his adventures and his philosophy of life. Typee
was followed by Omoo (1847) and Mardi and a Voyage Thither (1849), two more novels about his
Polynesian experiences. Typee, an account of Melville's stay with the cannibals, was first
published in Britain, like most of his works. The narrator, a crew member of a whale ship, calls
himself "Tom". He spends four months among a group of islanders on Nukuheva in the Pacific
Ocean and learns to make a distinction between a savage and cannibal. Tattooing he
rejects.Redburn, also published in 1849, is a fictionalized account of Melville’s first voyage to
Liverpool. His next novel, White-Jacket; or The World in a Man-of-War, published in 1850, is a
generalized and allegorical account of life at sea aboard a warship.
In 1847 Melville married Elisabeth Shaw, daughter of the chief justice of Massachusetts. After
three years in New York, he bought a farm, "Arrowhead", near Nathaniel Hawthorne's home at
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and became friends with him for some time. Melville had almost
completed Moby-Dick when Hawthorne encouraged him to change it from a story full of details
about whaling, into an allegorical novel.
Through the lens of literary history, his first five novels are all seen as an apprenticeship to what is
today considered Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or The Whale, which first appeared in 1851.
A story of monomania aboard a whaling ship, Moby-Dick is a tremendously ambitious novel that
functions at once as a documentary of life at sea and a vast philosophical allegory of life in general.
No sacred subject is spared in this bleak and scathing critique of the known world, as Melville
satirizes by turns religious traditions, moral values, and the literary and political figures of the day.
Inspired by the achievement of Hawthore, Melville wrote his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. He worked
at his desk all day not eating anything till 4 or 5 o'clock, and bursting with energy he shouted:
"Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand!" When the novel was published, it did not bring him
the fame he had acquired in the 1840s. Readers of Typhee and Omoo were not expecting this kind
of story, and its brilliance was only noted by some critics. Through the story Melville meditated
questions about faith and the workings of God's intelligence. He returned to these meditations in
his last great work, BILLY BUDD, a story left unfinished at his death. Its manuscript was found in
Melville's desk when he died.
Moby Dick
"Call me Ishmael," says the narrator in the beginning of Moby-Dick. We don't know is it his real
name and exactly when his story is taking place. He signs abroad the whaler Pequod with his
friend Queequeg, a harpooner from the South Sea Islands. Then the mood of the story changes.
The reader is confronted by a plurality of linguistic discourses, philosophical speculations, and
Shakespearean rhetoric and dramatic staging. Mysterious Captain Ahab, a combination of
Macbeth, Job, and Milton's Satan, appears after several days at sea. Melville named the character
after the Israelite king who worshiped the pagan sun god Baal. Ahab reveals to the crew that the
purpose of the voyage is to hunt and kill the snow-white sperm whale, known as Moby-Dick, that
had cost Ahab his leg on a previous voyage. The captain has his own faith and sees the cosmos in
contention between two rival deities. "Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as
Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the
scar; I know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance." Ahab has
nailed a goldpiece to the mast and offers it as a reward to the first man who sights the creature.
Starbuck, the first mate, tries to dissuade Ahab from the quest. The novel culminates when
Moby-Dick charges the boat which sinks. Ahab is drowned, tied by the harpoon line his
archenemy. In his end Ahab takes his crew with him. The only survivor is the narrator, who is
rescued by a passing ship.
Analysis of Major Characters
Ishmael
Despite his centrality to the story, Ishmael doesn’t reveal much about himself to the reader. We
know that he has gone to sea out of some deep spiritual malaise and that shipping aboard a whaler
is his version of committing suicide—he believes that men aboard a whaling ship are lost to the
world. It is apparent from Ishmael’s frequent digressions on a wide range of subjects—from art,
geology, and anatomy to legal codes and literature—that he is intelligent and well educated, yet he
claims that a whaling ship has been “[his] Yale College and [his] Harvard.” He seems to be a
self-taught Renaissance man, good at everything but committed to nothing. Given the mythic,
romantic aspects of Moby-Dick, it is perhaps fitting that its narrator should be an enigma: not
everything in a story so dependent on fate and the seemingly supernatural needs to make perfect
sense.
Ahab
Ahab, the Pequod’s obsessed captain, represents both an ancient and a quintessentially modern
type of hero. Like the heroes of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, Ahab suffers from a single fatal
flaw, one he shares with such legendary characters as Oedipus and Faust. His tremendous
overconfidence, or hubris, leads him to defy common sense and believe that, like a god, he can
enact his will and remain immune to the forces of nature. He considers Moby Dick the
embodiment of evil in the world, and he pursues the White Whale monomaniacally because he
believes it his inescapable fate to destroy this evil. According to the critic M. H. Abrams, such a
tragic hero “moves us to pity because, since he is not an evil man, his misfortune is greater than he
deserves; but he moves us also to fear, because we recognize similar possibilities of error in our
own lesser and fallible selves.”
Moby Dick
In a sense, Moby Dick is not a character, as the reader has no access to the White Whale’s
thoughts, feelings, or intentions. Instead, Moby Dick is an impersonal force, one that many critics
have interpreted as an allegorical representation of God, an inscrutable and all-powerful being that
humankind can neither understand nor defy. Moby Dick thwarts free will and cannot be defeated,
only accommodated or avoided. Ishmael tries a plethora of approaches to describe whales in
general, but none proves adequate. Indeed, as Ishmael points out, the majority of a whale is hidden
from view at all times. In this way, a whale mirrors its environment. Like the whale, only the
surface of the ocean is available for human observation and interpretation, while its depths conceal
unknown and unknowable truths. Furthermore, even when Ishmael does get his hands on a
“whole” whale, he is unable to determine which part—the skeleton, the head, the skin—offers the
best understanding of the whole living, breathing creature; he cannot localize the essence of the
whale. This conundrum can be read as a metaphor for the human relationship with the Christian
God (or any other god, for that matter): God is unknowable and cannot be pinned down.
Themes
The Limits of Knowledge
As Ishmael tries, in the opening pages of Moby-Dick, to offer a simple collection of literary
excerpts mentioning whales, he discovers that, throughout history, the whale has taken on an
incredible multiplicity of meanings. Over the course of the novel, he makes use of nearly every
discipline known to man in his attempts to understand the essential nature of the whale. Each of
these systems of knowledge, however, including art, taxonomy, and phrenology, fails to give an
adequate account. The multiplicity of approaches that Ishmael takes, coupled with his compulsive
need to assert his authority as a narrator and the frequent references to the limits of observation
(men cannot see the depths of the ocean, for example), suggest that human knowledge is always
limited and insufficient. When it comes to Moby Dick himself, this limitation takes on allegorical
significance. The ways of Moby Dick, like those of the Christian God, are unknowable to man,
and thus trying to interpret them, as Ahab does, is inevitably futile and often fatal.
The Deceptiveness of Fate
In addition to highlighting many portentous or foreshadowing events, Ishmael’s narrative contains
many references to fate, creating the impression that the Pequod’s doom is inevitable. Many of the
sailors believe in prophecies, and some even claim the ability to foretell the future. A number of
things suggest, however, that characters are actually deluding themselves when they think that
they see the work of fate and that fate either doesn’t exist or is one of the many forces about which
human beings can have no distinct knowledge. Ahab, for example, clearly exploits the sailors’
belief in fate to manipulate them into thinking that the quest for Moby Dick is their common
destiny. Moreover, the prophesies of Fedallah and others seem to be undercut in Chapter 99, when
various individuals interpret the doubloon in different ways, demonstrating that humans project
what they want to see when they try to interpret signs and portents.
The Exploitative Nature of Whaling
Lecture Ten: Edgar Allan Poe and the Fall of the House of Usher
Life and Art
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) :One the greatest and unhappiest of American poets, a master of the
horror tale, and the patron saint of the detective story. Edgar Allan Poe first gained critical acclaim
in France and England. His reputation in America was relatively slight until the French-influenced
writers like Ambroce Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, and representatives of the Lovecraft school
created interest in his work.
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to parents who were itinerant actors. His
father David Poe Jr. died probably in 1810. Elizabeth Hopkins Poe died in 1811, leaving three
children. Edgar was taken into the home of a Richmond merchant John Allan. The remaining
children were cared for by others. Poe's brother William died young and sister Rosalie become
later insane. At the age of five Poe could recite passages of English poetry. Later one of his
teachers in Richmond said: "While the other boys wrote mere mechanical verses, Poe wrote
genuine poetry; the boy was a born poet."
Never legally adopted, Poe took Allan's name for his middle name. Poe attended the University of
Virginia (1826-27), but was expelled for not paying his gambling debts. This led to quarrel with
Allan, who refused to pay the debts. Allan later disowned him.
In 1836 Poe married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm. She bust a blood vessel in 1842, and
remained a virtual invalid until her death from tuberculosis five years later. After the death of his
wife, Poe began to lose his struggle with drinking and drugs. He had several romances, including
an affair with the poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who said: "His proud reserve, his profound
melancholy, his unworldliness - may we not say his unearthliness of nature - made his character
one very difficult of comprehension to the casual observer." In 1849 Poe become again engaged to
Elmira Royster, who was at that time Mrs. Shelton. To Virginia he addressed the famous poem
'Annabel Lee' (1849) - its subject, Poe's favorite, is the death of a beautiful woman.
The dark poem of lost love, 'The Raven,' brought Poe national fame, when it appeared in 1845.
"With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in
reverence: they must not - they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations,
or the more paltry commendations, of mankind." (from The Raven and Other Poems, preface,
1845) In a lecture in Boston the author said that the two most effective letters in the English
language were o and r - this inspired the expression "nevermore" in 'The Raven', and because a
parrot is unworthy of the dignity of poetry, a raven could well repeat the word at the end of each
stanza. Lenore rhymed with "nevermore." The poems has inspired a number of artists. Perhaps the
most renowed are Gustave Doré's (1832-1883) melancholic illustrations.
Poe's work and his theory of "pure poetry" was early recognized especially in France, where he
inspired Jules Verne, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Paul Valéry (1871-1945) and Stéphane
Mallarmé (1842-1898).
In his supernatural fiction Poe usually dealt with paranoia rooted in personal psychology, physical
or mental enfeeblement, obsessions, the damnation of death, feverish fantasies, the cosmos as
source of horror and inspiration, without bothering himself with such supernatural beings as
ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and so on.
The Fall of the House of Usher
Poe's first collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, appeared in 1840. It contained one of
his most famous work, 'The Fall of the House of Usher.' In the story the narrator visits the
crumbling mansion of his friend, Roderick Usher, and tries to dispel Roderick's gloom. Although
his twin sister, Madeline, has been placed in the family vault dead, Roderick is convinced she lives.
Madeline arises in trance, and carries her brother to death. The house itself splits asunder and
sinks into the tarn.
Character Analysis
Narrator
- Poe meticulously, from the opening paragraph through to the last, details the development of the
narrator's initial uneasiness into a frenzy of terror, engendered by and parallel to Usher's terrors.
- In contrast to Roderick, the narrator appears to be a man of common sense. He seems to have a
good heart in that he comes to help a friend from his boyhood. He is also educated and analytical.
He observes Usher and concludes that his friend has a mental disorder.
Roderick Usher
Roderick Usher, the head of the house, is an educated man. He comes from a rather wealthy
family and owns a huge library. He had once been an attractive man and "the character of his face
had been at all times remarkable" However, his appearance deteriorated over time. Roderick had
changed so much that "[the narrator] doubted to whom [he] spoke" (p. 667). Roderick's altered
appearance probably was caused by his insanity. The narrator notes various symptoms of insanity
from Roderick's behavior: "in the manner of my friend I was struck with an incoherence -- an
inconsistency...habitual trepidancy, and excessive nervous agitation...His action was alternately
vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision...to that...of the lost
drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium" (p. 667). These are "the features of the mental
disorder of [the narrator's] friend" (p. 672). Roderick's state worsens throughout the story. He
becomes increasingly restless and unstable, especially after the burial of his sister. He is not able
to sleep and claims that he hears noises. All in all, he is an unbalanced man trying to maintain an
equilibrium in his life.
Madeline Usher
Lady Madeline, twin sister of Roderick Usher, does not speak one word throughout the story. In
fact, she is absent from most of the story, and she and the narrator do not stay together in the same
room. At the narrator's arrival, she takes to her bed and falls into a catatonic state. He helps bury
her and put her away in a vault, but when she reappears, he flees. Poe seems to present her as a
ghostlike figure. Before she was buried, she roamed around the house quietly not noticing
anything. According to the narrator, Lady Madeline "passed slowly through a remote portion of
the apartment, and, without having noticed [his] presence, disappeared". Overall, Madeline Usher
appears to be completely overcome by mental disorder.
Story of Consciousness
- As in other of Poe's gothic tales, the delusiveness of the experience is rendered in and through
the consciousness of the narrator, so that we participate in his Gothic horror while we are, at the
same time, detached observers of it. In the image of the house as skull or death's head and the
merging of the narrator's face with the face of the house, which is also Usher's face in the pool, we
see once again in Poe the subtly ironic paralleling of narrative construction of the tale to its visual
focal point. and by having the face-like house of Usher sink into its own image, the final collapse
into that void which is both the self and the universe simultaneously is complete. Nothing at all
may have happened in the conventional sense in the outside world- only in the inner world of the
narrator's mind.
Use of Analogy
According to Poe's definition, an analogy is a similarity of structure perceived by intuition, a
similarity that helps us to get at the truth about the physical universe, or at the beauty of the artistic
universe. Poe used the principle of analogy very effectively in The Fall of the House of Usher
when he compares the mansion and the family, finding an identical pattern in each, and when he
makes the events in the book being read correspond to those going on in the house.
Unity of Effect
According to Poe, the guiding principle in tale writing should be the intended effect. "A skillful
artist has constructed a tale. He has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents, but
having deliberately conceived a certain single effect to be wrought, he then invents such incidents,
he then combines such events, and discusses them in such a tone as may best serve him in
establishing this preconceived effect. If his very first sentence tend not to the out-bringing of this
effect, then in his very first step has he committed a blunder. In the whole composition there
should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one
pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill a picture is at length painted
which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest
satisfaction. The idea of the tale, its theses, has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed an end demanded, yet, in the novel, altogether unattainable."
-
The Usher family and the Usher mansion are analogous, - stained with time, used up.
crumbling from within, awaiting collapse. Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline, identical
twins, are almost two faculties of the same soul, and they can be interpreted together as the
soul of which their mansion is the body. All three decline together, and the inference is that
the disappearance of one means the disappearance of the others, which in fact is what comes
to pass. The Fall of the House of Usher is a mosaic of incidents, psychological attitudes,
symbols, all cemented into place in a unified structure according to the prescription of an
exacting and skillful art. Poe's theory of the short story demands unity of effect, and here he
achieves it as nowhere else.
-
Lecture one: Romantic poets (Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman)
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an American lyrical poet, and an obsessively private writer -only seven of her some 1800 poems were published during her lifetime. Dickinson withdrew from
social contact at the age of 23 and devoted herself in secret into writing.
Emily Dickinson, whose odd and inventive poems helped to initiate modern poetry, is an enigma,
a mystery, a paradox. Only ten of her poems were published in her lifetime. We know of her work
only because her sister and two of her long-time friends brought them to public attention. Most of
the poems we have were written in just six years, between 1858 and 1864. She bound them into
small volumes she called fascicles, and forty of these were found in her room at her death. She
also shared poems with friends in letters. From the few drafts of letters that were not destroyed, at
her instruction, when she died, it's apparent that she worked on each letter as a piece of artwork in
itself, often picking phrases that she'd used years before. Sometimes she changed little, sometimes
she changed a lot.
Themes:
Love: Though she was lonely and isolated, Emily appears to have loved deeply, perhaps only
those who have "loved and lost" can love, with an intensity and desire which can never be fulfilled
in the reality of the lovers' touch.
Nature: A fascination with nature consumed Emily. She summed all her lyrics as "the simple news
that nature told,“; she loved "nature's creatures" no matter how insignificant - the robin, the
hummingbird, the bee, the butterfly, the rat.
Faith And Doubt: Emily's theological orientation was Puritan, but she reacted strenuously against
two of them: infant damnation and God's sovereign election of His own. There was another force
alive in her time that competed for her interests: that was the force of literary transcendentalism.
This explains a kind of paradoxical or ambivalent attitude toward matters religious. She loved to
speak of a compassionate Savior and the grandeur of the Scriptures, but she disliked the hypocrisy
and arbitrariness of institutional church..
Pain And Suffering: Emily displays an obsession with pain and suffering; there is an eagerness in
her to examine pain, to measure it, to calculate it, to intellectualize it as fully as possible.
Death: Many readers have been intrigued by Dickinson's ability to probe the fact of human death.
She often adopts the pose of having already died before she writes her lyric.
Style
Concreteness - Even when she is talking of the most abstract of subjects, Emily specifies it by
elaborating it in the concreteness of simile or metaphor. She was regarded as one of the precursors
of American imagist movement in the 20th century
Variations of meters common in hymn writing, especially iambic tetrameter (eight syllables per
line, with every second syllable being stressed).
off-rhymes: examples of off-rhymes include ocean with noon and seam with swim in the lines
“Than Oars divide the Ocean, / Too silver for a seam — / Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon / Leap,
plashless as they swim”
defamiliarization: Dickinson used common language in startling ways, this technique would, as
she put it, “distill amazing sense / From ordinary Meanings” and from “familiar species.”
frequent use of dashes, sporadic capitalization of nouns, unconventional punctuation
Dickinson’s short poetic lines, condensed by using intense metaphors and by extensive use of
ellipsis, contrasted sharply with the style of her contemporary Walt Whitman, who used long lines,
little rhyme, and irregular rhythm in his poetry.
Dickinson's works have had considerable influence on modern poetry. Her frequent use of dashes,
sporadic capitalization of nouns, off-rhymes, broken metre, unconventional metaphors have
contributed her reputation as one of the most innovative poets of 19th-century American literature.
Later feminist critics have challenged the popular conception of the poet as a reclusive, eccentric
figure, and underlined her intellectual and artistic sophistication.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
American poet, journalist and essayist, best known for LEAVES OF GRASS (1855), which was
occasionally banned, and the poems 'I Sing the Body Electric' and 'Song of Myself.' Whitman
incorporated natural speech rhythms into poetry. He disregarded metre, but the overall effect has a
melodic character. Harold Bloom has stated in The Western Canon (1994) that "no Western poet,
in the past century and half, not even Browning, or Leopardi or Baudelaire, overshadows Walt
Whitman or Emily Dickinson."
Walt Whitman was born in Long Island, New York, the son of a Quaker carpenter. Whitman's
mother was descended from Dutch farmers. In Whitman's childhood there were slaves employed
on the farm. Whitman was early on filled with a love of nature.
Between 1841 and 1851 Whitman edited various periodicals and newspapers. It was, apparently,
during this period that he began to compose the poems which were later published as Leaves of
Grass.
In 1862 Walt’s brother George was wounded in the Civil War. When Whitman traveled to Virginia
to visit him, he saw large numbers of the wounded in hospitals. The Civil War was a major event
in Whitman’s career, stirring both his imagination and his sensibility and making him a dresser of
spiritual wounds as well as of physical ones as he worked as a volunteer in hospitals. Lincoln’s
assassination (1865) also moved Whitman deeply, and several poems bear testimony of his intense
grief.
Whitman was truly a representative of his age and reflected its varied crosscurrents. His poetry
shows the impact of the romantic idealism which reached its zenith in the years before the Civil
War and also shows something of the scientific realism which dominated the literary scene after
1865. Whitman harmonizes this romanticism and realism to achieve a true representation of the
spirit of America. The growth of science and technology in his time affected Whitman deeply, and
he responded positively to the idea of progress and evolution. American patriotism in the
nineteenth century projected the idea of history in relation to cosmic philosophy: it was thought
that change and progress form part of God’s design. The historical process of America’s great
growth was therefore part of the divine design, and social and scientific developments were
outward facets of real spiritual progress. Whitman shared in this idea of mystic evolution. Leaves
of Grass symbolizes the fulfillment of American romanticism as well as of the sense of realistic
revolt against it.
Whitman visualized the role of a poet as a seer, as a prophetic genius who could perceive and
interpret his own times and also see beyond time. The ideal poet, thought Whitman, portrays the
true reality of nature and comprehends and expresses his genuine self. He holds a mirror to his self
and to nature; he also illuminates the meaning and significance of the universe and man’s relation
to it. An ideal poet, he believed, is the poet of man first, then of nature, and finally of God; these
elements are united by the poet’s harmonious visionary power. Though the poet is concerned
primarily with the world of the spirit, he accepts science and democracy within his artistic fold,
since these are the basic realities of the modern world, especially that of nineteenth-century
America. Recognition of the values of science and democracy is indirectly an acknowledgement
of the reality of modern life. Whitman’s ideal poet is a singer of the self; he also understands the
relation between self and the larger realities of the social and political world and of the spiritual
universe. He intuitively comprehends the great mysteries of life—birth, death, and
resurrection—and plays the part of a priest and a prophet for mankind.
Leaves of Grass
Leaves of Grass belongs to no particular accepted form of poetry. Whitman described its form as
“a new and national declamatory expression.” Whitman was a poet bubbling with energy and
burdened with sensations, and his poetic utterances reveal his innovations. His poetry seems to
grow organically, like a tree. It has the tremendous vitality of an oak. Its growth follows no regular
pattern: “Song of Myself,” for example, seems at first almost recklessly written, without any
attention to form. Whitman’s poetry, like that of most prophetic writers, is unplanned,
disorganized, sometimes abortive, but nevertheless distinctively his own.
Whitman’s major concern was to explore, discuss, and celebrate his own self, his individuality and
his personality. Second, he wanted to eulogize democracy and the American nation with its
achievements and potential. Third, he wanted to give poetical expression to his thoughts on life’s
great, enduring mysteries—birth, death, rebirth or resurrection, and reincarnation.
Language and Style
The use of the poetic "I". Speaking in the voice of "I", Whitman becomes all those people in his
poems, and yet remains "Walt Whitman", hence a discovery of the self in the other with such
identification.
The use of free verse. Free verse is poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. A looser
and more open-ended syntactical structure is frequently favored.
The use of parallelism and phonetic recurrence. Whitman believed that poetry should be spoken,
not written, and this basic criterion governed the concept and form of his poetry.
The use of colorful words and vivid images.
Read poems by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman
Lecture Two The Rise of Realism in America (Howells and Stow)
The second half of the 19th century has been called the positivist age. It was an age of faith in all
knowledge which would derive from science and scientific objective methods which could solve
all human problems. In the visual arts this spirit is most obvious in the widespread rejection of
Romantic subjectivism and imagination in favor of Realism - the accurate and apparently
objective description of the ordinary, observable world, a change especially evident in painting.
Positivist thinking is evident in the full range of artistic developments after 1850- from the
introduction of realistic elements into academic art, from the emphasis on the phenomenon of light,
to the development of photography and the application of new technologies in architecture and
constructions.
Realism: a Definition
Broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a literary
technique practiced by many schools of writing. Although strictly speaking, realism is a technique,
it also denotes a particular kind of subject matter, especially the representation of middle-class life.
A reaction against romanticism, an interest in scientific method, the systematizing of the study of
documentary history, and the influence of rational philosophy all affected the rise of realism.
According to William Harmon and Hugh Holman, "Where romanticists transcend the immediate
to find the ideal, and naturalists plumb the actual or superficial to find the scientific laws that
control its actions, realists center their attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here
and now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence.
The Rise of Realism in America
The U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) between the industrial North and the agricultural, slave-owning
South was a watershed in American history. The innocent optimism of the young democratic
nation gave way, after the war, to a period of exhaustion. American idealism remained but was
rechanneled. Before the war, idealists championed human rights, especially the abolition of
slavery; after the war, Americans increasingly idealized progress and the self-made man. This was
the era of the millionaire manufacturer and the speculator, when Darwinian evolution and the
"survival of the fittest" seemed to sanction the sometimes unethical methods of the successful
business tycoon. Business boomed after the war. War production had boosted industry in the North
and given it prestige and political clout. It also gave industrial leaders valuable experience in the
management of men and machines. The enormous natural resources -- iron, coal, oil, gold, and
silver -- of the American land benefited business. In 1860, most Americans lived on farms or in
small villages, but by 1919 half of the population was concentrated in about 12 cities. Problems of
urbanization and industrialization appeared: poor and overcrowded housing, unsanitary conditions,
low pay (called "wage slavery"), difficult working conditions, and inadequate restraints on
business. Labor unions grew, and strikes brought the plight of working people to national
awareness. Farmers, too, saw themselves struggling against the "money interests" of the East, the
so-called robber barons like J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. From 1860 to 1914, the United
States was transformed from a small, young, agricultural ex-colony to a huge, modern, industrial
nation. A debtor nation in 1860, by 1914 it had become the world's wealthiest state, with a
population that had more than doubled, rising from 31 million in 1860 to 76 million in 1900. By
World War I, the United States had become a major world power.
William Dean Howells (1837-1920)
A Brief Assessment
A prolific writer, Howells is regarded as "the father of American Realism." Although not an
exciting writer, he broke new grounds which led to the achievements of Mark Twain and Henry
James. In Howells' view, writing should be "simple, natural, and honest" and should not delve into
"romantic exaggeration." His famous definition of the function of a writer indicates his limitations
as a Realist writer and of Realism as he conceived of it: "Our novelists, therefore, concern
themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and seek the
universal in the individual rather than the social interests."
Life and Works
William Dean Howells, author, editor, and critic, was born on 1 March 1837 in Martinsville, now
Martin's Ferry, Ohio, the second son of eight children born to Mary Dean Howells and William
Cooper Howells, a printer and publisher. As the family moved from town to town, including a
year-long residence at a utopian commune in Eureka Mills, later described in his New Leaf Mills
(1913), Howells worked as a typesetter and a printer's apprentice, educating himself through
intensive reading and the study of Spanish, French, Latin, and German. After a term as city editor
of the Ohio State Journal in 1858, Howells published poems, stories, and reviews in the Atlantic
Monthly and other magazines.
Howells became first the assistant editor (1866-71) and then the editor (1871-1881) of the Atlantic
Monthly, a post that gave him enormous influence as an arbiter of American taste. Publishing
work by authors such as Mark Twain and Henry James, both of whom would become personal
friends, Howells became a proponent of American realism, and his defense of Henry James in an
article for The Century (1882) provoked what was called the "Realism War," with writers on both
sides of the Atlantic ocean debating the merits of realistic and romantic fiction.
Widely acknowledged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the "Dean of
American Letters," Howells was elected the first president of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters in 1908, which instituted its Howells Medal for Fiction in 1915. By the time of his death
from pneumonia on 11 May 1920, Howells was still respected for his position in American
literature. However, his later novels did not achieve the success of his early realistic work, and
later authors such as Sinclair Lewis denounced Howells's fiction and his influence as being too
genteel to represent the real America
Although he wrote over a hundred books in various genres, including novels, poems, literary
criticism, plays, memoirs, and travel narratives, Howells is best known today for his realistic
fiction, including A Modern Instance (1881), on the then-new topic of the social consequences of
divorce; The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), his best-known work and one of the first novels to
study the American businessman; and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), an exploration of
cosmopolitan life in New York City as seen through the eyes of Basil and Isabel March, the
protagonists of Their Wedding Journey (1871) and other works. Other important novels include
Dr. Breen's Practice, (1880), The Minister's Charge and Indian Summer (1886), April Hopes
(1887), The Landlord at Lion's Head (1897), and The Son of Royal Langbrith (1904).
Howells wrote his most famous literary criticism in *Harper's Magazine* in a column entitled
"The Editor's Study". These essays, written from 1886-1890, were collected and published in book
form in 1891 under the title Criticism and Fiction. The best known chapter in this excellent and
too overlooked book, chapter 24, was titled "The Prudishness of the Anglo- Saxon Novel". It
contains the argument Howells (regretably) may be most famous for--that is, that American
novelists could confine themselves to material that would not offend the innocence of a young girl,
and should therefore do so.
Genteel Tradition: A term coined by critic George Santayana to describe the literary practice of
certain late nineteenth-century American writers, especially New Englanders. Followers of the
Genteel Tradition emphasized conventionality in social, religious, moral, and literary standards.
Some of the best-known writers of the Genteel Tradition are R. H. Stoddard and Bayard Taylor.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) is best known today as the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
which helped galvanize the abolitionist cause and contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War.
Uncle Tom's Cabin sold over 10,000 copies in the first week and was a best seller of its day. After
the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe became an internationally acclaimed celebrity and an
extremely popular author. In addition to novels, poetry and essays, she wrote non-fiction books on
a wide range of subjects including homemaking and the raising of children, and religion. She
wrote in an informal conversational style, and presented herself as an average wife and mother.
In 1832 Harriet moved with her family to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Lyman Beecher became
President of Lane Theological Seminary. At that time, Cincinnati was considered the western
frontier of the United States. In Cincinnati, Harriet met and married Calvin E. Stowe, a professor
at Lane. Six of the Stowes' seven children were born in Cincinnati.
Cincinnati was just across the river from Kentucky, a slave state. It was in Cincinnati that Harriet
first became aware of the horrors of slavery. Cincinnati was one of the largest cities in the country,
twice the size of Hartford at that time. When Harriet and Calvin learned that their servant, Zillah,
was actually a runaway slave, Calvin and Henry Ward drove her to the next station on the
Underground Railroad. One night, Harriet's friend, Mr. Rankin, saw a young woman run across
the river over the ice with a baby in her arms. This story moved Harriet deeply and would later
become one of the most famous scenes in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
In Cincinnati, Harriet became a member of the Semi-Colon Club, a local literary society in which
members wrote articles which were read and discussed by other participants. Her experiences in
this club sharpened her writing style. During her early married years, Harriet began to publish
stories and magazine articles to supplement the family income. Uncle Tom's Cabin, which
appeared first in serial form in an abolitionist newspaper, The National Era, in 1851-52, was
written largely in Brunswick. In 1852 the story was published in book form in two volumes. Uncle
Tom's Cabin was a best seller in the United States, England, Europe, Asia, and translated into over
60 languages. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which deeply distressed Harriet, was
a factor in inspiring her to write Uncle Tom's Cabin. This Act made it a crime for citizens of free
states to give aid to runaway enslaved people.
Many readers criticized Harriet because she had never visited the South. However, she had heard,
from people she knew personally, first hand stories of conditions among the enslaved people. For
example, Harriet employed an African-American woman in Cincinnati who told her what is was
like to be a woman under slavery.
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Slavery, and the Civil War
According to legend, when Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862 he said, "So
you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War!"
The Civil War grew out of a mixture of causes including regional conflicts between North and
South, economic trends, and humanitarian concerns for the welfare of enslaved people. This war,
which pitted one section of the country against another, almost destroyed the United States.
Stowe’s main goal with Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to convince her large Northern readership of the
necessity of ending slavery. Most immediately, the novel served as a response to the passage of the
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it illegal to give aid or assistance to a runaway slave.
Under this legislation, Southern slaves who escaped to the North had to flee to Canada in order to
find real freedom. With her book, Stowe created a sort of exposé that revealed the horrors of
Southern slavery to people in the North. Her radical position on race relations, though, was
informed by a deep religiosity. Stowe continually emphasizes the importance of Christian love in
eradicating oppression. She also works in her feminist beliefs, showing women as equals to men
in intelligence, bravery, and spiritual strength. Indeed, women dominate the book’s moral code,
proving vital advisors to their husbands, who often need help in seeing through convention and
popular opinion.
Immediately after its publication Uncle Tom's Cabin was both lauded as a tremendous
achievement and attacked as one sided and inaccurate. Abolitionists and reformers praised the
book for its compassionate portrayal of people held in slavery. At the same time, others, who
claimed that slavery was sanctioned in the Bible, attacked Harriet and accused her of fabricating
unrealistic images of slavery. Uncle Tom's Cabin contributed to the outbreak of war because it
brought the evils of slavery to the attention of Americans more vividly than any other book had
done before. The book had a strong emotional appeal that moved and inspired people in a way that
political speeches, tracts and newspapers accounts could not duplicate.
Analysis of Uncle Tom
History has not been kind to Uncle Tom, the hero of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and one of the most
popular figures of nineteenth-century American fiction. After its initial burst of sensational
popularity and influence, Uncle Tom’s Cabin fell into neglect. Its circulation declined following
the end of the Civil War and Stowe’s death, and by the mid-1900s, the book was virtually out of
print. Not until the early 1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement reawakened an interest in
anti-slavery fiction, did the novel again become widely read. More than a hundred years after its
initial publication, however, Uncle Tom’s Cabin stood as a testament to a past set of standards and
expectations. The values and attributes that seemed admirable in its characters in 1852 frequently
appeared incomprehensible and even contemptible to twentieth-century readers. In particular, the
passive acceptance of slavery practiced by the novel’s title character seemed horrendously out of
line with the resolve and strength of modern black Civil Rights crusaders. The term “Uncle Tom”
became an insult, conjuring an image of an old black man eager to please his white masters and
happy to accept his own position of inferiority.
Although modern readers’ criticisms hold some validity, the notion of an “Uncle Tom” contains
generalizations not found within the actual character in the novel. First, Tom is not an old man.
The novel states that he is eight years older than Shelby, which probably places him in his late
forties at the start of the novel. Moreover, Tom does not accept his position of inferiority with
happiness. Tom’s passivity owes not to stupidity or to contentment with his position, but to his
deep religious values, which impel him to love everyone and selflessly endure his trials. Indeed,
Tom’s central characteristic in the novel is this religiosity, his strength of faith. Everywhere Tom
goes in the novel, he manages to spread some of the love and goodwill of his religious beliefs,
helping to alleviate the pain of slavery and enhance the hope of salvation. And while this
religiosity translates into a selfless passivity on Tom’s part, it also translates into a policy of warm
encouragement of others’ attempts at freedom. Thus, he supports Eliza’s escape, as well as that of
Cassy and Emmeline from the Legree plantation. Moreover, while Tom may not actively seek his
own freedom, he practices a kind of resistance in his passivity. When Legree orders him to beat
the slave girl in Chapter XXXIII, he refuses, standing firm in his values. He will submit to being
beaten for his beliefs, but he will not capitulate or run away.
Moreover, even in recognizing Tom’s passivity in the novel, and Stowe’s approving treatment of it,
one should note that Stowe does not present this behavior as a model of black behavior, but as a
heroic model of behavior that should be practiced by everyone, black and white. Stowe makes it
very clear that if the villainous white slaveholders of the novel were to achieve Tom’s selfless
Christian love for others, slavery would be impossible, and Tom’s death never would have
happened. Because Stowe believes that a transformation through Christian love must occur before
slavery can be abolished successfully, she holds up Tom’s death as nobler than any escape, in that
it provides an example for others and offers the hope of a more generalized salvation. Through this
death, moreover, Tom becomes a Christ figure, a radical role for a black character to play in
American fiction in 1852. Tom’s death proves Legree’s fundamental moral and personal inferiority,
and provides the motivating force behind George Shelby’s decision to free all the slaves. By
practicing selflessness and loving his enemy, Tom becomes a martyr and affects social change.
Although contemporary society finds its heroes in active agents of social change and tends to
discourage submissiveness, Stowe meant for Tom to embody noble heroic tendencies of his own.
She portrayed his passivity as a virtue unconnected to his minority status. Within the world of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Tom is presented as more than a black hero—he is presented as a hero
transcending race.
Read and comment on Chapter Seven.
Lecture Three
Mark Twain and Henry James
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Frontier humor and realism
Two major literary currents in 19th-century America merged in Mark Twain: popular frontier
humor and local color, or "regionalism." These related literary approaches began in the 1830s -and had even earlier roots in local oral traditions. In ragged frontier villages, on riverboats, in
mining camps, and around cowboy campfires far from city amusements, storytelling flourished.
Exaggeration, tall tales, incredible boasts, and comic workingmen heroes enlivened frontier
literature. These humorous forms were found in many frontier regions -- in the "old Southwest"
(the present-day inland South and the lower Midwest), the mining frontier, and the Pacific Coast.
Each region had its colorful characters around whom stories collected. Twain, Faulkner, and many
other writers, particularly southerners, are indebted to frontier pre-Civil War humorists such as
Johnson Hooper, George Washington Harris, Augustus Longstreet, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and
Joseph Baldwin.
Like frontier humor, local color writing has old roots but produced its best works long after the
Civil War. Obviously, many pre-war writers, from Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne
to John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell, paint striking portraits of specific American
regions. What sets the colorists apart is their self-conscious and exclusive interest in rendering a
given location, and their scrupulously factual, realistic technique.
Life and Works:
Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, grew up in the Mississippi River
frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri. Ernest Hemingway's famous statement that all of American
literature comes from one great book, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, indicates this
author's towering place in the tradition. Early 19th-century American writers tended to be too
flowery, sentimental, or ostentatious -- partially because they were still trying to prove that they
could write as elegantly as the English. Twain's style, based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial
American speech, gave American writers a new appreciation of their national voice. Twain was
the first major author to come from the interior of the country, and he captured its distinctive,
humorous slang and iconoclasm.
For Twain and other American writers of the late 19th century, realism was not merely a literary
technique: It was a way of speaking truth and exploding worn-out conventions. Thus it was
profoundly liberating and potentially at odds with society. The most well-known example is Huck
Finn, a poor boy who decides to follow the voice of his conscience and help a Negro slave escape
to freedom, even though Huck thinks this means that he will be damned to hell for breaking the
law.
Twain's masterpiece, which appeared in 1884, is set in the Mississippi River village of St.
Petersburg. The son of an alcoholic bum, Huck has just been adopted by a respectable family
when his father, in a drunken stupor, threatens to kill him. Fearing for his life, Huck escapes,
feigning his own death. He is joined in his escape by another outcast, the slave Jim, whose owner,
Miss Watson, is thinking of selling him down the river to the harsher slavery of the deep South.
Huck and Jim float on a raft down the majestic Mississippi, but are sunk by a steamboat, separated,
and later reunited. They go through many comical and dangerous shore adventures that show the
variety, generosity, and sometimes cruel irrationality of society. In the end, it is discovered that
Miss Watson had already freed Jim, and a respectable family is taking care of the wild boy Huck.
But Huck grows impatient with civilized society and plans to escape to "the territories" -- Indian
lands. The ending gives the reader the counter-version of the classic American success myth: the
open road leading to the pristine wilderness, away from the morally corrupting influences of
"civilization." James Fenimore Cooper's novels, Walt Whitman's hymns to the open road, William
Faulkner's The Bear, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road are other literary examples.
Huckleberry Finn has inspired countless literary interpretations. Clearly, the novel is a story of
death, rebirth, and initiation. The escaped slave, Jim, becomes a father figure for Huck; in
deciding to save Jim, Huck grows morally beyond the bounds of his slave-owning society. It is
Jim's adventures that initiate Huck into the complexities of human nature and give him moral
courage.
The novel also dramatizes Twain's ideal of the harmonious community: "What you want, above all
things, on a raft is for everybody to be satisfied and feel right and kind toward the others." Like
Melville's ship the Pequod, the raft sinks, and with it that special community. The pure, simple
world of the raft is ultimately overwhelmed by progress -- the steamboat -- but the mythic image
of the river remains, as vast and changing as life itself.
The unstable relationship between reality and illusion is Twain's characteristic theme, the basis of
much of his humor. The magnificent yet deceptive, constantly changing river is also the main
feature of his imaginative landscape. In Life on the Mississippi, Twain recalls his training as a
young steamboat pilot when he writes: "I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of
all the eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands on, that was the
chief."
Twain's moral sense as a writer echoes his pilot's responsibility to steer the ship to safety. Samuel
Clemens's pen name, "Mark Twain," is the phrase Mississippi boatmen used to signify two
fathoms (3.6 meters) of water, the depth needed for a boat's safe passage. Twain's serious purpose,
combined with a rare genius for humor and style, keep his writing fresh and appealing.
the Adventures of Tom Sawyer
While The Adventures of Tom Sawyer retains some of the fragmented, episodic qualities of
Twain’s earlier, shorter pieces, the novel represents, in general, a significant literary departure for
Twain. He toned down the large-scale social satire that characterized many of his earlier works,
choosing instead to depict the sustained development of a single, central character. Twain had
originally intended for the novel to follow Tom into adulthood and conclude with his return to St.
Petersburg after many years away. But he was never able to get his hero out of boyhood, however,
and the novel ends with its protagonist still preparing to make the transition into adult life.
Twain based The Adventures of Tom Sawyer largely on his personal memories of growing up in
Hannibal in the 1840s. In his preface to the novel, he states that “[m]ost of the adventures
recorded in this book really occurred” and that the character of Tom Sawyer has a basis in “a
combination . . . of three boys whom I knew.” Indeed, nearly every figure in the novel comes from
the young Twain’s village experience: Aunt Polly shares many characteristics with Twain’s mother;
Mary is based on Twain’s sister Pamela; and Sid resembles Twain’s younger brother, Henry. Huck
Finn, the Widow Douglas, and even Injun Joe also have real-life counterparts, although the actual
Injun Joe was more of a harmless drunk than a murderer.
Unlike Twain’s later masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer concerns itself primarily with painting an idyllic picture of boyhood life along the
Mississippi River. Though Twain satirizes adult conventions throughout The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer, he leaves untouched certain larger issues that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
explores critically. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer never deals directly with slavery, for example,
and, while the town’s dislike of Injun Joe suggests a kind of small-town xenophobia (fear of
foreigners or outsiders), Injun Joe’s murders more than justify the town’s suspicion of him.
Because it avoids explicit criticism of racism, slavery, and xenophobia, the novel has largely
escaped the controversy over race and language that has surrounded The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To this day, The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer remains perhaps the most popular and widely read of all.
Henry James (1843-1916) once wrote that art, especially literary art, "makes life, makes interest,
makes importance." James's fiction and criticism is the most highly conscious, sophisticated, and
difficult of its era. With Twain, James is generally ranked as the greatest American novelist of the
second half of the 19th century.
Henry James was born in New York City in 1843 and was raised in Manhattan. James's father, a
prominent intellectual and social theorist, traveled a great deal to Geneva, Paris, and London, so
Henry and his brother, William, accompanied him and virtually grew up in those locations as well.
As a child, James was shy, delicate, and had a difficult time mixing with other boys—his brother,
who was much more active, called him a sissy. William James, of course, went on to become a
great American philosopher, while Henry became one of the nation's preeminent novelists.
James is noted for his "international theme" -- that is, the complex relationships between naive
Americans and cosmopolitan Europeans. What his biographer Leon Edel calls James's first, or
"international," phase encompassed such works as Transatlantic Sketches (travel pieces, 1875),
The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879), and a masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady (1881). In
The American, for example, Christopher Newman, a naive but intelligent and idealistic self-made
millionaire industrialist, goes to Europe seeking a bride. When her family rejects him because he
lacks an aristocratic background, he has a chance to revenge himself; in deciding not to, he
demonstrates his moral superiority.
James's second period was experimental. He exploited new subject matters -- feminism and social
reform in The Bostonians (1886) and political intrigue in The Princess Casamassima (1885). He
also attempted to write for the theater, but failed embarrassingly when his play Guy Domville
(1895) was booed on the first night.
In his third, or "major," phase James returned to international subjects, but treated them with
increasing sophistication and psychological penetration. The complex and almost mythical The
Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) (which James felt was his best novel), and
The Golden Bowl (1904) date from this major period. If the main theme of Twain's work is
appearance and reality, James's constant concern is perception. In James, only self-awareness and
clear perception of others yields wisdom and self-sacrificing love. As James develops, his novels
become more psychological and less concerned with external events. In James's later works, the
most important events are all psychological -- usually moments of intense illumination that show
characters their previous blindness. For example, in The Ambassadors, the idealistic, aging
Lambert Strether uncovers a secret love affair and, in doing so, discovers a new complexity to his
inner life. His rigid, upright, morality is humanized and enlarged as he discovers a capacity to
accept those who have sinned.
The Portrait of A Lady
The Portrait of a Lady explores the conflict between the individual and society by examining the
life of Isabel Archer, a young American woman who must choose between her independent spirit
and the demands of social convention. After professing and longing to be an independent woman,
autonomous and answerable only to herself, Isabel falls in love with and marries the sinister
Gilbert Osmond, who wants her only for her money and who treats her as an object, almost as part
of his art collection. Isabel must then decide whether to honor her marriage vows and preserve
social propriety or to leave her miserable marriage and escape to a happier, more independent life,
possibly with her American suitor Caspar Goodwood. In the end, after the death of her cousin
Ralph, the staunchest advocate of her independence, Isabel chooses to return to Osmond and
maintain her marriage. She is motivated partly by a sense of social duty, partly by a sense of pride,
and partly by the love of her stepdaughter, Pansy, the daughter of Osmond and his manipulative
lover Madame Merle.
James skillfully intertwines the novel's psychological and thematic elements. Isabel's downfall
with Osmond, for instance, enables the book's most trenchant exploration of the conflict between
her desire to conform to social convention and her fiercely independent mind. It is also perfectly
explained by the elements of Isabel's character: her haphazard upbringing has led her to long for
stability and safety, even if they mean a loss of independence, and her active imagination enables
her to create an illusory picture of Osmond, which she believes in more than the real thing, at least
until she is married to him. Once she marries Osmond, Isabel's pride in her moral strength makes
it impossible for her to consider leaving him: she once longed for hardship, and now that she has
found it, it would be hypocritical for her to surrender to it by violating social custom and
abandoning her husband.
In the same way that James unites his psychological and thematic subjects, he also intertwines the
novel's settings with its themes. Set almost entirely among a group of American expatriates living
in Europe in the 1860s and 70s, the book relies on a kind of moral geography, in which America
represents innocence, individualism, and capability; Europe represents decadence, sophistication,
and social convention; and England represents the best mix of the two. Isabel moves from
America to England to continental Europe, and at each stage she comes to mirror her surroundings,
gradually losing a bit of independence with each move. Eventually she lives in Rome, the historic
heart of continental Europe, and it is here that she endures her greatest hardship with Gilbert
Osmond.
Narratively, James uses many of his most characteristic techniques in Portrait of a Lady. In
addition to his polished, elegant prose and his sedate, slow pacing, he utilizes a favorite technique
of skipping over some of the novel's main events in telling the story. Instead of narrating moments
such as Isabel's wedding with Osmond, James skips over them, relating that they have happened
only after the fact, in peripheral conversations. This literary technique is known as ellipses. In the
novel, James most often uses his elliptical technique in scenes when Isabel chooses to value social
custom over her independence—her acceptance of Gilbert's proposal, their wedding, her decision
to return to Rome after briefly leaving for Ralph's funeral at the end of the novel. James uses this
method to create the sense that, in these moments, Isabel is no longer accessible to the reader; in a
sense, by choosing to be with Gilbert Osmond, Isabel is lost.
Lecture Four Naturalism and Naturalistic Writers (Jack London)
Naturalism:
Like Romanticism, naturalism first appeared in Europe. It is usually traced to the works of Balzac
in the 1840s and seen as a French literary movement associated with Gustave Flaubert, Edmond
and Jules Goncourt, È Zola, and Guy de Maupassant. It daringly opened up the seamy underside
of society and such topics as divorce, sex, adultery, poverty, and crime. Naturalism is essentially a
literary expression of determinism. Associated with bleak, realistic depictions of lower-class life,
determinism denies religion as a motivating force in the world and instead perceives the universe
as a machine. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers had also imagined the world as a
machine, but as a perfect one, invented by God and tending toward progress and human
betterment. Naturalists imagined society, instead, as a blind machine, godless and out of control.
Naturalism flourished as Americans became urbanized and aware of the importance of large
economic and social forces. By 1890, the frontier was declared officially closed. Most Americans
resided in towns, and business dominated even remote farmsteads.
A Definition: The term naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific
principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. Unlike realism, which
focuses on literary technique, naturalism implies a philosophical position: for naturalistic writers,
since human beings are, in Emile Zola's phrase, "human beasts," characters can be studied through
their relationships to their surroundings. Zola's 1880 description of this method in Le roman
experimental (The Experimental Novel, 1880) follows Claude Bernard's medical model and the
historian Hippolyte Taine's observation that "virtue and vice are products like vitriol and
sugar"--that is, that human beings as "products" should be studied impartially, without moralizing
about their natures. Other influences on American naturalists include Herbert Spencer and Joseph
LeConte. Through this objective study of human beings, naturalistic writers believed that the laws
behind the forces that govern human lives might be studied and understood. Naturalistic writers
thus used a version of the scientific method to write their novels; they studied human beings
governed by their instincts and passions as well as the ways in which the characters' lives were
governed by forces of heredity and environment. Although they used the techniques of
accumulating detail pioneered by the realists, the naturalists thus had a specific object in mind
when they chose the segment of reality that they wished to convey.
Jack London (1876-1916)
Jack London, whose life symbolized the power of will, was the most successful writer in America
in the early 20th Century. His vigorous stories of men and animals against the environment, and
survival against hardships were drawn mainly from his own experience. An illegitimate child,
London passed his childhood in poverty in the Oakland slums. At the age of 17, he ventured to sea
on a sealing ship. The turning point of his life was a thirty-day imprisonment that was so
degrading it made him decide to turn to education and pursue a career in writing. His years in the
Klondike searching for gold left their mark in his best short stories; among them, The Call of the
Wild, and White Fang. His best novel, The Sea-Wolf, was based on his experiences at sea. His
work embraced the concepts of unconfined individualism and Darwinism in its exploration of the
laws of nature. He retired to his ranch near Sonoma, where he died at age 40 of various diseases
and drug treatments.
Martin Eden: first published in 1909, Martin Eden concerns a sailor and laborer who educates
himself so that he might become a part of the wealthy bourgeoisie. Martin Eden is a young,
uneducated, uncouth, but world-wise young man. At one point, he meets Ruth, a young lady from
the "upper middle class". Inspired by the college-educated society girl, Martin aspires to a
high-thinking life and is determined to gain Ruth’s love. Martin Eden believes he will make
himself worthy of Ruth Morris's love if he can educate himself and acquire the manners he has not
learned as a seaman. To gain Ruth's love he must gain her respect. Martin, unable to afford a
formal education, determines to educate himself. Our hero becomes a writer and expresses in his
works the views upon life he has learnt from his reading of Spencer. With every hour devoted to
writing, and still without an audience for his stories, Martin becomes a poor man and unacceptable
to the class conscious Ruth. In time, Martin is rejected by Ruth, her parents, and the socially
prominent friends of her family. His stories remain unpublished. The story sees Martin achieve
fame at last. Then, Ruth wants him back. She tries to win him back only after he achieves fame.
But Martin knows, and cannot forget, that Ruth's love and acceptance depend on his new fame.
Martin’s experience of rejection helps him see the falseness of fame and the falseness of her love.
Eden realizes that the woman he loves cares only for his money and fame. He also suffers from
class alienation, for he no longer belongs to the working class, since he has now become
financially successful. While he is robbed of connection to his own class, he also rejects the
materialistic values of the wealthy and realizes his quest for bourgeois respectability was hollow.
He sails for the South Pacific and commits suicide by jumping into the sea. The autobiographical
novel depicts the inner stresses of the American dream as London experienced them during his
meteoric rise from obscure poverty to wealth and fame. It looks ahead to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The
Great Gatsby in its revelation of despair amid great wealth.
Read and Analyze Chapter One of Martin Eden
Lecture Five Naturalism and Naturalistic Writers (Theodore Dreiser)
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, and baptized as Herman
Theodore Dreiser. He was the ninth of ten surviving children (three others died as infants) of
Säräh Schanab and Johann Dreiser. Dreiser's childhood coincided with the family's hard times.
Consequently, his earliest memories included the joblessness of his father and older siblings, as
well as the constant search for economic stability. His youth was emotionally unstable, and he had
few educational opportunities, which was a special hardship for such a bookish boy. This time was
further darkened by the strict Roman Catholic training he received in German American parochial
schools, an experience that informed his later critique of Catholicism and deeply influenced his
quest for alternative forms of religious experience.
Dawn (1931), an autobiography dealing with his first twenty years, is a classic of German
American literature. In it Dreiser gives a vivid picture of his German-speaking, Roman Catholic,
downwardly mobile family and offers a moving chronicle of the financial, social, and emotional
pressures facing working-class families in the late nineteenth century. Dreiser's autobiography
presents a somber version of the archetypal bilingual and bicultural experiences of first- and
second-generation Americans. He incorporated his memories into some of his best fiction, notably
Jennie Gerhardt (1911), in which he modeled the Gerhardt family on the Dreisers in Indiana.
Although Dreiser was a serious student, he never finished high school, and decided at age sixteen
to seek work in Chicago. There he held a number of nondescript jobs, until he was rescued by a
former teacher, Mildred Fielding, who paid his way to Indiana University at Bloomington for one
year (1889-90). Another kind of education began when he landed a job as a reporter in Chicago. In
June 1892, two months before his twenty-first birthday, he wrote his first news story for the
Chicago Globe. Three years later, he abruptly abandoned journalism by walking out of Joseph
Pulitzer's New York World, where as a space-rate reporter he was being paid, like the garment
worker in the city's sweatshops, by the inch.
In 1898 Dreiser married Sara Osborne White, a schoolteacher from Missouri. With her
encouragement and that of his friend Arthur Henry, a novelist and former editor of the Toledo
Blade, Dreiser began writing his historic first novel, Sister Carrie.
Dreiser had close relations with the liberal thinkers and artistic avant-garde of the 1910s. He
associated with leading political radicals like Max Eastman, Daniel DeLeon, and Floyd Dell;
supported the birth-control movement of Margaret Sanger; befriended the anarchist Emma
Goldman; and wrote for leftist journals such as The Masses, as well as for magazines with more
purely aesthetic goals, like Seven Arts. Dreiser was eclectic in his interests, and although generally
progressive in his social thought, he was too eccentric and independent a thinker to fit into any one
ideological mode.
The 1925 work An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, like London's Martin Eden, explores
the dangers of the American dream. Despite his awkward style, Dreiser, in An American Tragedy,
displays crushing authority. Its precise details build up an overwhelming sense of tragic
inevitability. The novel is a scathing portrait of the American success myth gone sour, but it is also
a universal story about the stresses of urbanization, modernization, and alienation. Within it roam
the romantic and dangerous fantasies of the dispossessed.
An American Tragedy is a reflection of the dissatisfaction, envy, and despair that afflicted many
poor and working people in America's competitive, success-driven society. As American industrial
power soared, the glittering lives of the wealthy in newspapers and photographs sharply contrasted
with the drab lives of ordinary farmers and city workers. The media fanned rising expectations and
unreasonable desires. Such problems, common to modernizing nations, gave rise to muckraking
journalism -- penetrating investigative reporting that documented social problems and provided an
important impetus to social reform.
Sister Carrie:
In the years since its inauspicious debut, however, Sister Carrie has come to be regarded as an
American classic. Many call it the first modern American novel, a precursor to the works of
Fitzgerald and Hemingway. It captures the exuberance and social transformation of
turn-of-the-century America. Littered with the nation's slang and its distinctive personalities, the
novel traces the vagaries of fortune in the developing capitalist society. Simultaneously a tale of
rags-to-riches and riches-to-rags, the novel confronts the reader with a vision of both the comic
and the tragic aspects of American capitalism.
Sister Carrie tells the story of two characters: Carrie Meeber, an ordinary girl who rises from a
low-paid wage earner to a high-paid actress, and George Hurstwood, a member of the upper
middle class who falls from his comfortable lifestyle to a life on the streets. Neither Carrie nor
Hurstwood earn their fates through virtue or vice, but rather through random circumstance. Their
successes and failures have no moral value; this stance marks Sister Carrie as a departure from the
conventional literature of the period.
Dreiser touches upon a wide range of themes and experiences in Sister Carrie, from grinding
poverty to upper-middle class comfort. The novel dwells on the moment as it is experienced; the
characters are plunged into the narrative without the reader being told much, if any, of their
histories. Their identities are constantly subject to change, reflecting the modern American
experience that had been ushered in by the developing capitalist economy. In the process of this
development, thousands of rural Americans rushed to the cities to find jobs and to build
themselves new lives and identities. Sister Carrie captures the excitement of that experience.
Lecture Six
The Emergence of Modernist Literature (Modern Poetry)
Many historians have characterized the period between the two world wars as the United States'
traumatic "coming of age," despite the fact that U.S. direct involvement was relatively brief
(1917-1918) and its casualties many fewer than those of its European allies and foes. John Dos
Passos expressed America's postwar disillusionment in the novel Three Soldiers (1921), when he
noted that civilization was a "vast edifice of sham, and the war, instead of its crumbling, was its
fullest and most ultimate expression." Shocked and permanently changed, Americans returned to
their homeland but could never regain their innocence. Nor could soldiers from rural America
easily return to their roots. After experiencing the world, many now yearned for a modern, urban
life. In the postwar "Big Boom," business flourished, and the successful prospered beyond their
wildest dreams. For the first time, many Americans enrolled in higher education -- in the 1920s
college enrollment doubled. The middle-class prospered; Americans began to enjoy the world s
highest national average income in this era, and many people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile. The typical urban American home glowed with electric lights and boasted a
radio that connected the house with the outside world, and perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine. Like the businessman protagonist of Sinclair Lewis's novel
Babbitt (1922), the average American approved of these machines because they were modern and
because most were American inventions and American-made.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and disillusioned with the savage war, the older generation
they held responsible, and difficult postwar economic conditions that, ironically, allowed
Americans with dollars -- like writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and
Ezra Pound -- to live abroad handsomely on very little money. Intellectual currents, particularly
Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism (like the earlier Darwinian theory of
evolution), implied a "godless" world view and contributed to the breakdown of traditional values.
Americans abroad absorbed these views and brought them back to the United States where they
took root, firing the imagination of young writers and artists. William Faulkner, for example, a
20th-century American novelist, employed Freudian elements in all his works, as did virtually all
serious American fiction writers after World War I.
The large cultural wave of Modernism, which gradually emerged in Europe and the United States
in the early years of the 20th century, expressed a sense of modern life through art as a sharp break
from the past, as well as from Western civilization's classical traditions. Modern life seemed
radically different from traditional life -- more scientific, faster, more technological, and more
mechanized. Modernism embraced these changes.
A Definition: A term for a wide range of tendencies in the arts of the early twentieth century.
Some date modernism from the 1890s to the Second World War; others use the term to more
narrowly to refer to a fifteen-year period following the First World War. For Virginia Woolf,
human nature changed radically "on or about December 1910" and a number of the key modernist
developments can be traced to this period. Pablo Picasso began work on the "Demoiselles
d'Avignon" in 1906, Igor Stravinsky's ballet "Sacre du Printemps" had its riotous premiere in 1913,
Ezra Pound's first volume of poetry appeared in 1915 and by 1914 James Joyce had completed his
novel "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'. For many people, however, 1922 is the key year
for modernist literature, with both the publication of Joyce's great modernist novel "Ulysses" and
Eliot's poem, "The Waste Land'. Modernism was colored by the crisis in religious belief and the
rise of scientism that accompanied the latter half of the nineteenth century and was intensified by
the cataclysmic First World War. Important precursors of modernism are the German thinkers,
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Karl Marx (1818-83), and the Austrian founder of
psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who together questioned the certainties that had
reinforced the traditional modes of social organization, religion and morality. Ezra Pound's desire
to "make it new" became a characteristic of the modernist revolt against traditional literary forms
and subject matter. The works of authors such as Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), James
Joyce(1882-1941) and T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) are characterized by the rejection of linear
chronological plot development, by a dependence on the poetic image as a vehicle for
communication, by experiments in narrative point of view, and by the use of myth as a basis for
their writing. These violations of conventional modes of realism are mirrored in the paintings of
Cubism, surrealism, Futurism and vorticism.
A list of the most discussed features of modernism:
1. In modern literature, the question “What is the story?” cannot be answered unless the other
question—“How is the story told?”—is addressed.
2. The uses of narrative points of view become a very sophisticated art form. In pre-modern
fiction (say in Charles Dickens), the author intervenes like God. Thus, the God-like
omniscient point of view is predominant in pre-modern fiction. In modern fiction, the first
person point of view—representing a give perspective—is used more often. Sometimes, even
when the third person—omniscient—point of view is adopted, the narrator confines his report
through the consciousness of one character (Henry James is a master of this point of view):
the use of point of view is called “limited omniscience.” Some other times, as in the case of
Hemingway, the point of view is external: the narrator reports events “objectively” without
telling us what he thinks or what the characters think.
3. Perspectivism—the belief that a truth is something relative to a perspective and therefore
reality is interpretable from many perspectives—is translated into various formal experiments.
William Faulkner, for instance, is a perspectivist fiction writer as he is known for his uses of
multi-perspectives.
4. Fragmentation and open-endedness become new structuring principles as a resistance to
totalized views of reality.
5. Interests in the psychological depths of characters are inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis.
Attempts to express the irrational workings of the unconscious result in new ways of
presenting characters. The method of stream-of-consciousness becomes characteristic of
modern writing.
6. Irony and ambiguity are favored rhetorical modes, which reflects a general disillusionment in
the social, economic and spiritual values of the Western world.
7. There is a broad dependence on the image in modern poetry. Imagism is a manifestation of
this preference.
8. Traditions in the recent past and existing systems of belief are resisted, but traditions in
antiquity become sources of inspiration. The purpose of invoking the ancient past (classicism)
is a way to respond to the present situations. Myths are often used to structure the works and
to blend the past with the present.
9. There is renewed interest in non-Western cultures, which can be seen in the African element
in Picasso, the Asian/Chinese element in Pound, and the anthropology in T. S. Eliot. Although
some of these inclusions are superficial and decorative, such as interest nonetheless signals
the opening up of American and European literature and art to international themes.
Modern Poetry (Imagism)
Imagism flourished in Britain and in the United States for a brief period that is generally
considered to be somewhere between 1909 and 1917. As part of the modernist movement, away
from the sentimentality and moralizing tone of nineteenth-century Victorian poetry, imagist poets
looked to many sources to help them create a new poetic expression.
For contemporary influences, the imagists studied the French symbolists, who were experimenting
with free verse (vers libre), a verse form that used a cadence that mimicked natural speech rather
than the accustomed rhythm of metrical feet, or lines. Rules of rhyming were also considered
nonessential. The ancient form of Japanese haiku poetry influenced the imagists to focus on one
simple image. Greek and Roman classical poetry inspired some of the imagists to strive for a high
quality of writing that would endure.
T. E. Hulme is credited with creating the philosophy that would give birth to the Imagism
movement. Although he wrote very little, his ideas inspired Ezra Pound to organize the new
movement. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is often given as one of the purest of his imagist
poems. Amy Lowell took over the leadership role of the imagists when Pound moved on to other
modernist modes. Her most anthologized poems include “Lilacs” and “Patterns.”
Other important imagist poets include Hilda Doolittle, whose poem “Sea Poppies” reflects the
Japanese influence on her writing, and her “Oread” is often referred to as the most perfect imagist
poem; Richard Aldington, who was one of the first poets to be recognized as an imagist, and
whose collection Images of War is considered to contain some of the most intense depictions of
World War I; F. S. Flint, who dedicated his last collection of imagist poems, Otherworld: Cadences
to Aldington; and John Gould Fletcher, whose collection Goblins and Pagodas is his most
representative work under the influence of Imagism.
Lecture Seven Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Ezra Pound was one of the most influential American poets of this century. From 1908 to 1920, he
resided in London, where he associated with many writers, including William Butler Yeats, for
whom he worked as a secretary, and T.S. Eliot, whose Waste Land he drastically edited and
improved. He was a link between the United States and Britain, acting as contributing editor to
Harriet Monroe's important Chicago magazine Poetry and spearheading the new school of poetry
known as Imagism, which advocated a clear, highly visual presentation. After Imagism, he
championed various poetic approaches. He eventually moved to Italy, where he became caught up
in Italian Fascism.
Pound furthered Imagism in letters, essays, and an anthology. In a letter to Monroe in 1915, he
argues for a modern-sounding, visual poetry that avoids "cliché and set phrases." In "A Few Don'ts
of an Imagiste" (1913), he defined "image" as something that "presents an intellectual and
emotional complex in an instant of time." Pound's 1914 anthology of 10 poets, Des Imagistes,
offered examples of Imagist poetry by outstanding poets, including William Carlos Williams, H.D.
(Hilda Doolittle), and Amy Lowell.
Pound's interests and reading were universal. His adaptations and brilliant, if sometimes flawed,
translations introduced new literary possibilities from many cultures to modern writers. His
life-work was The Cantos, which he wrote and published until his death. They contain brilliant
passages, but their allusions to works of literature and art from many eras and cultures make them
difficult. Pound's poetry is best known for its clear, visual images, fresh rhythms, and muscular,
intelligent, unusual lines, such as, in Canto LXXXI, "The ant's a centaur in his dragon world," or
in poems inspired by Japanese haiku, such as "In a Station of the Metro" (1916):
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a well- to-do family with roots in the
northeastern United States. He received the best education of any major American writer of his
generation at Harvard College, the Sorbonne, and Merton College of Oxford University. He
studied Sanskrit and Oriental philosophy, which influenced his poetry. Like his friend Pound, he
went to England early and became a towering figure in the literary world there. One of the most
respected poets of his day, his modernist, seemingly illogical or abstract iconoclastic poetry had
revolutionary impact. He also wrote influential essays and dramas, and championed the
importance of literary and social traditions for the modern poet.
As a critic, Eliot is best remembered for his formulation of the "objective correlative," which he
described, in The Sacred Wood, as a means of expressing emotion through "a set of objects, a
situation, a chain of events" that would be the "formula" of that particular emotion. Poems such as
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915) embody this approach, when the ineffectual, elderly
Prufrock thinks to himself that he has "measured out his life in coffee spoons," using coffee
spoons to reflect a humdrum existence and a wasted lifetime.
By this time Eliot had already achieved great success in 1917 with his first book of poems,
Prufrock and Other Observations (which included "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a work
begun in his days at Harvard). Eliot's reputation was bolstered by the admiration and aid of
esteemed contemporary poet Ezra Pound, the other tower of Modernist poetry. During Eliot's
recuperation from his breakdown in a Swiss sanitarium, he wrote "The Waste Land." A couple of
months later he gave Pound the manuscript in Paris. Thanks to Pound's heavy editing, as well as
suggestions (specifically about scenes relevant to their stormy, hostile marriage) from
Haigh-Wood, "The Waste Land," published in 1922, defined Modernist poetry and became
possibly the most influential poem of the century. Devoid of a single speaker's voice, the poem
ceaselessly shifts its tone and form, instead grafting together numerous allusive voices from Eliot's
substantial poetic repertoire; Dante shares the stage with nonsense sounds (a technique that also
showcases Eliot's dry wit). Believing this style best represented the fragmentation of the modern
world, Eliot focused on the sterility of modern culture and its lack of tradition and ritual. Despite
this pessimistic viewpoint, many find its mythical, religious ending hopeful about humanity's
chance for renewal.
Eliot was now the voice of Modernism, and in London he expanded the breadth of his writing. In
addition to writing poetry and editing it for various publications (he also founded the quarterly
Criterion in 1922, editing it until its end in 1939), he wrote philosophical reviews and a number of
critical essays. Many of these, such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent," have become classics,
smartly and affectionately dissecting other poets while subliminally informing us about Eliot's
own work. Eliot defined his preference for poetry that does away with the poet's own personality,
and poetry that uses the "objective correlative" of symbolic, meaningful, and often chaotic
concrete imagery.
Eliot joined the Church of England in 1927, and his work afterward reflects his Anglican attitudes.
The six-part poem "Ash Wednesday" (1930) and other religious works in the early part of the
1930s, while stellar in their own right, retrospectively feel like a warm-up for his epic "Four
Quartets" (completed and published together in 1943). Eliot used his wit, philosophical
preoccupation with time, and vocal range to examine further religious issues.
Eliot continued his Renaissance man ways by writing his first play, "Murder in the Cathedral," in
1935. A verse drama about the murder of Archbishop Thomas ? Becket, the play's religious themes
were forerunners of Eliot's four other major plays, "The Family Reunion" (1939), "The Cocktail
Party" (1949), "The Confidential Clerk" (1953), and "The Elder Statesman" (1959). Religious
verse dramas cloaked in secular conversational comedy, Eliot belied whatever pretensions his
detractors may have found in his Anglophilia. He leapt ahead with this anti-pretension with "Old
Possum's Book of Practical Cats" (1939), a book of verse for children that was eventually adapted
into the Broadway musical "Cats."
As one might expect from his work, Eliot was unhappy for most of his life, but his second
marriage in 1957 proved fruitful. When he died in 1965, he was the recipient of a Nobel Prize
(1948), author of the century's most influential poem, and arguably the century's most important
poet. Perhaps due to the large shadow he casts, relatively few poets have tried to ape his style;
others simply find him cold. Still, no one can escape the authority of Eliot's Modernism, one as
relevant today as it was in 1922. While Eliot may not have as much influence on poets today as
some of his contemporaries, he has had a far greater impact on poetry.
About The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T.S. Eliot started writing "Prufrock Among the Women" in 1909 as a graduate student at Harvard.
He revised it over the next couple of years, changing the title to "The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock" along the way. First published in the Chicago magazine Poetry in June 1915, "Prufrock"
later headlined Eliot's first book of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). The collection
established Eliot's reputation as a Modernist poet to be reckoned with, and "Prufrock" detailed
many of the techniques and themes
Eliot would expand with "The Waste Land" and later works: vocal fragmentation and allusiveness,
a precision of imagery borrowed from the 19th-century French Symbolists, a condemnation of the
sterility of the modern world, and a dry, self-conscious wit.
The poem is very much a young man's work, though its speaker, through dramatic monologue, is a
presumably middle-aged man. The farcical "J. Alfred Prufrock" name echoes Eliot's style at the
time of signing his name "T. Stearns Eliot," and we can assume that Eliot shared at least some of
Prufrock's anxieties over women, though he clearly satirizes Prufrock's neuroses (and, thus, his
own) at points in the poem. However, this remains a dangerous assumption, as Eliot famously
maintained in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that the "progress of an artist is a
continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
Brief Introduction to Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost, b. San Francisco, Mar. 26, 1874, d. Boston, Jan. 29, 1963, was one of America's
leading 20th-century poets and a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. An essentially pastoral
poet often associated with rural New England, Frost wrote poems whose philosophical dimensions
transcend any region. Although his verse forms are traditional--he often said, in a dig at archrival
Carl Sandburg, that he would as soon play tennis without a net as write free verse--he was a
pioneer in the interplay of rhythm and meter and in the poetic use of the vocabulary and
inflections of everyday speech. His poetry is thus both traditional and experimental, regional and
universal.
Frost's importance as a poet derives from the power and memorability of particular poems. "The
Death of the Hired Man" (from North of Boston) combines lyric and dramatic poetry in blank
verse. "After Apple-Picking" (from the same volume) is a free-verse dream poem with
philosophical undertones. "Mending Wall" (also published in North of Boston) demonstrates
Frost's simultaneous command of lyrical verse, dramatic conversation, and ironic commentary.
"The Road Not Taken" and "Birches" (from Mountain Interval) and the oft-studied "Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening" (from New Hampshire) exemplify Frost's ability to join the pastoral
and philosophical modes in lyrics of unforgettable beauty.
Frost's poetic and political conservatism caused him to lose favor with some literary critics, but his
reputation as a major poet is secure. He unquestionably succeeded in realizing his life's ambition:
to write "a few poems it will be hard to get rid of."
Read and comment on selected poems.
Lecture Eight: Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald
Although American prose between the wars experimented with viewpoint and form, Americans
wrote more realistically, on the whole, than did Europeans. Novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote of
war, hunting, and other masculine pursuits in a stripped, plain style; William Faulkner set his
powerful southern novels spanning generations and cultures firmly in Mississippi heat and dust;
and Sinclair Lewis delineated bourgeois lives with ironic clarity. The importance of facing reality
became a dominant theme in the 1920s and 1930s: Writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and the
playwright Eugene O'Neill repeatedly portrayed the tragedy awaiting those who live in flimsy
dreams.
The Lost Generation
American poet Gertrude Stein actually coined the expression "lost generation." Speaking to Ernest
Hemingway, she said, "you are all a lost generation." The term stuck and the mystique
surrounding these individuals continues to fascinate us. Seeking the bohemian lifestyle and
rejecting the values of American materialism, a number of intellectuals, poets, artists and writers
fled to France in the post World War I years. Paris was the center of it all. Significant members
included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Peirce, and Gertrude
Stein herself. More generally, the term is being used for the generation of young people coming of
age in the United States during and shortly after World War I. For this reason, the generation is
sometimes known as the World War I Generation or the Roaring 20s Generation.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Few writers have lived as colorfully as Ernest Hemingway, whose career could have come out of
one his adventurous novels. Like Fitzgerald, Dreiser, and many other fine novelists of the 20th
century, Hemingway came from the U.S. Midwest. Born in Illinois, Hemingway spent childhood
vacations in Michigan on hunting and fishing trips. He volunteered for an ambulance unit in
France during World War I, but was wounded and hospitalized for six months. After the war, as a
war correspondent based in Paris, he met expatriate American writers Sherwood Anderson, Ezra
Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. Stein, in particular, influenced his spare style.
After his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) brought him fame, he covered the Spanish Civil War,
World War II, and the fighting in China in the 1940s. On a safari in Africa, he was badly injured
when his small plane crashed; still, he continued to enjoy hunting and sport fishing, activities that
inspired some of his best work. The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short poetic novel about a poor,
old fisherman who heroically catches a huge fish devoured by sharks, won him the Pulitzer Prize
in 1953; the next year he received the Nobel Prize. Discouraged by a troubled family background,
illness, and the belief that he was losing his gift for writing, Hemingway shot himself to death in
1961.
Hemingway is arguably the most popular American novelist of this century. His sympathies are
basically apolitical and humanistic, and in this sense he is universal. His simple style makes his
novels easy to comprehend, and they are often set in exotic surroundings. A believer in the "cult of
experience," Hemingway often involved his characters in dangerous situations in order to reveal
their inner natures; in his later works, the danger sometimes becomes an occasion for masculine
assertion.
Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway became a spokesperson for his generation. But instead of painting its
fatal glamour as did Fitzgerald, who never fought in World War I, Hemingway wrote of war, death,
and the "lost generation" of cynical survivors. His characters are not dreamers but tough
bullfighters, soldiers, and athletes. If intellectual, they are deeply scarred and disillusioned.
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 for his "mastery of the art of modern narration,"
Hemingway used a spare and tight journalistic type of prose. He used the objective, detached point
of view and his vocabulary and sentence structure are deceptively simple. He has written about
failure, moral bankruptcy, death, deception, and sterility in the post World War I society. His
"code-heroes" are characters with inner moral discipline who are usually involved with rituals like
bullfighting, big-game hunting, and fishing.
His hallmark is a clean style devoid of unnecessary words. Often he uses understatement: In A
Farewell to Arms (1929) the heroine dies in childbirth saying "I'm not a bit afraid. It's just a dirty
trick." He once compared his writing to icebergs: "There is seven-eighths of it under water for
every part that shows."
Hemingway's fine ear for dialogue and exact description shows in his excellent short stories, such
as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." Critical
opinion, in fact, generally holds his short stories equal or superior to his novels. His best novels
include The Sun Also Rises, about the demoralized life of expatriates after World War I; A
Farewell to Arms, about the tragic love affair of an American soldier and an English nurse during
the war; For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), set during the Spanish Civil War; and The Old Man and
the Sea.
Hemingway's Iceberg Theory
"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he
knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as
strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to
only one-eighth of it being above water."
- Death In the Afternoon, Scribner's, 1932, Chap. 16, 192.
Grace Under Pressure
"DP: `Exactly what do you mean by `guts'?'
EH: `I mean, grace under pressure.'"
--Ernest Hemingway, an interview with Dorothy Parker, New Yorker, 30 November 1929
Fizgerald and the Roaring Twenties
To many, World War 1 was a tragic failure of old values, of old politics, of old ideas. The social
mood was often one of confusion and despair. Yet, on the surface the mood in America during the
1920s did not seem desperate. Instead, Americans entered a decade of prosperity and
exhibitionism that prohibition, the legal ban against alcoholic beverages,did more to encourage
than to curb. Fashions were extravagant; more and more automobiles crowded the roads,
advertising flourished; and nearly every American home had a radio . Fads swept the nation.
People danced the Charleston, and they sat upon the flagpoles. This was the Jazz Age, when New
Orleans musicians moved “up the river” to Chicago, and the theatre of New York’s Harlem
pulsed with the music that had become a symbol of the times. These were the Roaring Twenties.
The roaring of the decade served to ask a quiet pain, the sense of loss that Gertrude Stein had
observed in Paris. F. Scott. Fitzgerald portrays the Jazz Age as a generation of “ the beautiful and
the damned”, drowning in their pleasures.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald's life resembles a fairy tale. During World War I, Fitzgerald enlisted
in the U.S. Army and fell in love with a rich and beautiful girl, Zelda Sayre, who lived near
Montgomery, Alabama, where he was stationed. Zelda broke off their engagement because he was
relatively poor. After he was discharged at war's end, he went to seek his literary fortune in New
York City in order to marry her.
His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), became a best- seller, and at 24 they married. Neither
of them was able to withstand the stresses of success and fame, and they squandered their money.
They moved to France to economize in 1924 and returned seven years later. Zelda became
mentally unstable and had to be institutionalized; Fitzgerald himself became an alcoholic and died
young as a movie screenwriter.
Fitzgerald's secure place in American literature rests primarily on his novel The Great Gatsby
(1925), a brilliantly written, economically structured story about the American dream of the
self-made man. The protagonist, the mysterious Jay Gatsby, discovers the devastating cost of
success in terms of personal fulfillment and love. Other fine works include Tender Is the Night
(1934), about a young psychiatrist whose life is doomed by his marriage to an unstable woman,
and some stories in the collections Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922),
and All the Sad Young Men (1926). More than any other writer, Fitzgerald captured the glittering,
desperate life of the 1920s; This Side of Paradise was heralded as the voice of modern American
youth. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), continued his exploration of the
self-destructive extravagance of his times.
Fitzgerald's special qualities include a dazzling style perfectly suited to his theme of seductive
glamour. A famous section from The Great Gatsby masterfully summarizes a long passage of time:
"There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men
and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars."
The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald was the most famous chronicler of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed “the Jazz
Age.” Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest literary documents of this period,
in which the American economy soared, bringing unprecedented levels of prosperity to the nation.
Prohibition, the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol mandated by the Eighteenth
Amendment to the Constitution (1919), made millionaires out of bootleggers, and an underground
culture of revelry sprang up. Sprawling private parties managed to elude police notice, and
“speakeasies”—secret clubs that sold liquor—thrived. The chaos and violence of World War I left
America in a state of shock, and the generation that fought the war turned to wild and extravagant
living to compensate. The staid conservatism and timeworn values of the previous decade were
turned on their ear, as money, opulence, and exuberance became the order of the day.
Like Nick in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald found this new lifestyle seductive and exciting, and,
like Gatsby, he had always idolized the very rich. Now he found himself in an era in which
unrestrained materialism set the tone of society, particularly in the large cities of the East. Even so,
like Nick, Fitzgerald saw through the glitter of the Jazz Age to the moral emptiness and hypocrisy
beneath, and part of him longed for this absent moral center. In many ways, The Great Gatsby
represents Fitzgerald’s attempt to confront his conflicting feelings about the Jazz Age. Like Gatsby,
Fitzgerald was driven by his love for a woman who symbolized everything he wanted, even as she
led him toward everything he despised.
Major theme
The Decline of the American Dream in the 1920s
On the surface, The Great Gatsby is a story of the thwarted love between a man and a woman. The
main theme of the novel, however, encompasses a much larger, less romantic scope. Though all of
its action takes place over a mere few months during the summer of 1922 and is set in a
circumscribed geographical area in the vicinity of Long Island, New York, The Great Gatsby is a
highly symbolic meditation on 1920s America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of the
American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess.
Fitzgerald portrays the 1920s as an era of decayed social and moral values, evidenced in its
overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure. The reckless jubilance that led to
decadent parties and wild jazz music—epitomized in The Great Gatsby by the opulent parties that
Gatsby throws every Saturday night—resulted ultimately in the corruption of the American dream,
as the unrestrained desire for money and pleasure surpassed more noble goals. When World War I
ended in 1918, the generation of young Americans who had fought the war became intensely
disillusioned, as the brutal carnage that they had just faced made the Victorian social morality of
early-twentieth-century America seem like stuffy, empty hypocrisy. The dizzying rise of the stock
market in the aftermath of the war led to a sudden, sustained increase in the national wealth and a
newfound materialism, as people began to spend and consume at unprecedented levels. A person
from any social background could, potentially, make a fortune, but the American
aristocracy—families with old wealth—scorned the newly rich industrialists and speculators.
Additionally, the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, which banned the sale of alcohol,
created a thriving underworld designed to satisfy the massive demand for bootleg liquor among
rich and poor alike.
Fitzgerald positions the characters of The Great Gatsby as emblems of these social trends. Nick
and Gatsby, both of whom fought in World War I, exhibit the newfound cosmopolitanism and
cynicism that resulted from the war. The various social climbers and ambitious speculators who
attend Gatsby’s parties evidence the greedy scramble for wealth. The clash between “old money”
and “new money” manifests itself in the novel’s symbolic geography: East Egg represents the
established aristocracy, West Egg the self-made rich. Meyer Wolfshiem and Gatsby’s fortune
symbolize the rise of organized crime and bootlegging.
As Fitzgerald saw it (and as Nick explains in Chapter IX), the American dream was originally
about discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness. In the 1920s depicted in the novel,
however, easy money and relaxed social values have corrupted this dream, especially on the East
Coast. The main plotline of the novel reflects this assessment, as Gatsby’s dream of loving Daisy
is ruined by the difference in their respective social statuses, his resorting to crime to make enough
money to impress her, and the rampant materialism that characterizes her lifestyle. Additionally,
places and objects in The Great Gatsby have meaning only because characters instill them with
meaning: the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg best exemplify this idea. In Nick’s mind, the ability to
create meaningful symbols constitutes a central component of the American dream, as early
Americans invested their new nation with their own ideals and values.
Nick compares the green bulk of America rising from the ocean to the green light at the end of
Daisy’s dock. Just as Americans have given America meaning through their dreams for their own
lives, Gatsby instills Daisy with a kind of idealized perfection that she neither deserves nor
possesses. Gatsby’s dream is ruined by the unworthiness of its object, just as the American dream
in the 1920s is ruined by the unworthiness of its object—money and pleasure. Like 1920s
Americans in general, fruitlessly seeking a bygone era in which their dreams had value, Gatsby
longs to re-create a vanished past—his time in Louisville with Daisy—but is incapable of doing so.
When his dream crumbles, all that is left for Gatsby to do is die; all Nick can do is move back to
Minnesota, where American values have not decayed.
Lecture Nine William Faulkner and the Southern Tradition
The American south includes the southeastern states and the southern states along the Gulf of
Mexico. American south is a unique region with its distinctive culture, tradition and history.
Essentially speaking, American south was an agrarian society, where people had strong sense of
the past, the tradition. They attached great importance to family ties, to the rural way of living, and
had deep roots in the earth, a harmonious relationship with the land, the natural world. Compared
with people in other parts of the country, the southerners were more conservative and more
religious. The South is known as the Bible Belt, the region of the country where the Bible still has
a great influence. Some southerners were the fundamentalists, who read the Bible literally as if
every word in it is absolutely true and factual. Also, the southerners are known as a hot-blooded
people. They are a violent people, fond of guns and hunting. They are always ready to defend their
honor. When one family is angry with another, they would fight till every member in the other
family is killed. And the feud might last for generations.
Southern myths:
1. Chevalier heritage: the southerners held that their ancestors were not Puritans but noble
chevaliers who came from England to settle down in the New World. In reality, there were
many southerners who came to settle down in the South. There were indeed some aristocrats
who had settled in some southern states. But the southerners held that everyone who came to
the south was a chevalier. This myth created a pride in the region.
2. Plantation aristocracy: the chevalier society that settled down in the South developed into a
plantation aristocracy. The aristocrat was a gentleman who owned the land, the plantation. The
myth gradually developed. As southerners tended to believe, every southern white farmer
owned hundreds of slaves on a big farm when in reality, there were also many poor whites in
the south with neither slaves or much land. There is the myth of white supremacy White
masters were superior to the black slaves. Blacks were considered to be an inferior and
animal-like race.
3. Southern belles: women in the South are described as gracious, refined belles. They should
know how to paint, sing and play the piano. They were believed to be weak, vulnerable,
delicate and pure. (think of Gone with the Wind, faint excited) Men considered it their duty to
protect and take care of their women. They were chivalrous, gallant and gentlemanly towards
southern women.
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
"[I] discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I
would never live long enough to exhaust it, and that by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal
I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top. It opened up
a gold mine of other people, so I created a cosmos of my own." - WF
Winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, Faulkner's recognition as a writer came years after
he had written his best work. Today he is regarded as an important interpreter of the universal
theme of "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself." He grew up in Oxford,
Mississippi, which became the prototype of Jefferson, in the mythical county of Yoknapatawpha,
the setting of many of his works. Sometimes difficult to read, Faulkner experimented in the use of
stream-of-consciousness technique and in the dislocation of narrative time. His fiction discusses
issues of sex, class, race relations, and relations with nature.
Born to an old southern family, William Harrison Faulkner was raised in Oxford, Mississippi,
where he lived most of his life. Faulkner created an entire imaginative landscape, Yoknapatawpha
County, mentioned in numerous novels, along with several families with interconnections
extending back for generations. Yoknapatawpha County, with its capital, "Jefferson," is closely
modeled on Oxford, Mississippi, and its surroundings. Faulkner re-creates the history of the land
and the various races -- Indian, African-American, Euro-American, and various mixtures -- who
have lived on it. An innovative writer, Faulkner experimented brilliantly with narrative chronology,
different points of view and voices (including those of outcasts, children, and illiterates), and a
rich and demanding baroque style built of extremely long sentences full of complicated
subordinate parts.
The best of Faulkner's novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930),
two modernist works experimenting with viewpoint and voice to probe southern families under
the stress of losing a family member; Light in August (1932), about complex and violent relations
between a white woman and a black man; and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), perhaps his finest,
about the rise of a self-made plantation owner and his tragic fall through racial prejudice and a
failure to love.
Most of these novels use different characters to tell parts of the story and demonstrate how
meaning resides in the manner of telling, as much as in the subject at hand. The use of various
viewpoints makes Faulkner more self-referential, or "reflexive," than Hemingway or Fitzgerald;
each novel reflects upon itself, while it simultaneously unfolds a story of universal interest.
Faulkner's themes are southern tradition, family, community, the land, history and the past, race,
and the passions of ambition and love. He also created three novels focusing on the rise of a
degenerate family, the Snopes clan: The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion
(1959).
Read and analyze A Rose for Emily
Summary of "A Rose for Emily" by Fatima
This story is narrated through a third person's point of view. The story is told from the
townspeople. The story starts off with Ms. Emily's funeral. It states that "the men through a sort of
respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of
her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at
least ten years." As we can see, Ms. Emily was sort of like a mystery to citizens of the town. The
author continuously uses symbolism in the story. When the deputation came to her house for her
taxes, Faulkner describes how the house and Ms. Emily looks. "only Miss Emily's house was left,
lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an
eyesore among eyesores", this statement explains how the house gives off such a depressing mood.
"Her skeleton was small and spare;", this line shows us how her appearance showcases death also.
When Ms. Emily was younger, her deceased father used to force away all the young men that was
in love with her. The summer after her father death, she fell in love with a Yankee by the name of
Homer Barron. Everyone in the town was whispering about their relationship and wondering if
they were married. After a while they stop seeing Homer and decided that they got married. The
townspeople then proceeds by saying that Ms. Emily then died a while after. They didn't know she
was sick.
After they buried her, they knew that there was one room that wasn't opened. So after they
decently buried her they went to see upon the room. When they opened the room they was
greeted by great amounts of dust. They also explain that the "room decked and furnished as for a
bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the
dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished
silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured." They also saw a man's collar, tie, suit,
shoes, and discarded socks. "Then shockingly, laying right there in the bed was the man. For a
long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had
apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was
left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and
upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust. Then we noticed
that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and
leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of
iron-gray hair.
Lecture Ten John Steinbeck and the 1930s
The world depression of the 1930s affected most of the population of the United States. Workers
lost their jobs, and factories shut down; businesses and banks failed; farmers, unable to harvest,
transport, or sell their crops, could not pay their debts and lost their farms. Midwestern droughts
turned the "breadbasket" of America into a dust bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly described in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens, shanty
towns, and armies of hobos -- unemployed men illegally riding freight trains -- became part of
national life. Many saw the Depression as a punishment for sins of excessive materialism and
loose living. The dust storms that blackened the midwestern sky, they believed, constituted an Old
Testament judgment: the "whirlwind by day and the darkness at noon."
The Depression turned the world upside down. The United States had preached a gospel of
business in the 1920s; now, many Americans supported a more active role for government in the
New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Federal money created jobs in public
works, conservation, and rural electrification. Artists and intellectuals were paid to create murals
and state handbooks. These remedies helped, but only the industrial build-up of World War II
renewed prosperity. After Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941,
disused shipyards and factories came to bustling life mass- producing ships, airplanes, jeeps, and
supplies. War production and experimentation led to new technologies, including the nuclear
bomb. Witnessing the first experimental nuclear blast, Robert Oppenheimer, leader of an
international team of nuclear scientists, prophetically quoted a Hindu poem: "I am become Death,
the shatterer of worlds."
John Steinbeck (1902-1968) American novelist, story writer, playwright, and essayist. John
Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. He is best remembered for THE
GRAPES OF WRATH (1939), a novel widely considered to be a 20th-century classic. The impact
of the book has been compared to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Steinbeck's
epic about the migration of the Joad family, driven from its bit of land in Oklahoma to California,
provoked a wide debate about the hard lot of migrant laborers, and helped to put an agricultural
reform into effect.
John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902. He attended Stanford
University without graduating, and though he lived briefly in New York, he remained a lifelong
Californian. Steinbeck began writing novels in 1929, but he garnered little commercial or critical
success until the publication of Tortilla Flat in 1935. Steinbeck frequently used his fiction to delve
into the lives of society’s most downtrodden citizens. A trio of novels in the late 1930s focused on
the lives of migrant workers in California: In Dubious Battle, published in 1936, was followed by
Of Mice and Men in 1937, and, in 1939, Steinbeck’s masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath.
During the early 1930s, a severe drought led to massive agricultural failure in parts of the southern
Great Plains, particularly throughout western Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle. These areas had
been heavily overcultivated by wheat farmers in the years following World War I and were
covered with millions of acres of loose, exposed topsoil. In the absence of rain, crops withered and
died; the topsoil, no longer anchored by growing roots, was picked up by the winds and carried in
billowing clouds across the region. Huge dust storms blew across the area, at times blocking out
the sun and even suffocating those unlucky enough to be caught unprepared. The afflicted region
became known as the “Dust Bowl.”
By the mid-1930s, the drought had crippled countless farm families, and America had fallen into
the Great Depression. Unable to pay their mortgages or invest in the kinds of industrial equipment
now necessitated by commercial competition, many Dust Bowl farmers were forced to leave their
land. Without any real employment prospects, thousands of families nonetheless traveled to
California in hopes of finding new means of survival. But the farm country of California quickly
became overcrowded with the migrant workers. Jobs and food were scarce, and the migrants faced
prejudice and hostility from the Californians, who labeled them with the derisive epithet “Okie.”
These workers and their families lived in cramped, impoverished camps called “Hoovervilles,”
named after President Hoover, who was blamed for the problems that led to the Great Depression.
Many of the residents of these camps starved to death, unable to find work.
The Grapes of Wrath:
When Steinbeck decided to write a novel about the plight of migrant farm workers, he took his
task very seriously. To prepare, he lived with an Oklahoma farm family and made the journey with
them to California. When The Grapes of Wrath appeared, it soared to the top of the bestseller lists,
selling nearly half a million copies. Although many Oklahomans and Californians reviled the book,
considering Steinbeck’s characters to be unflattering representations of their states’ people, the
large majority of readers and scholars praised the novel highly. The story of the Joad family
captured a turbulent moment in American history and, in the words of critic Robert DeMott,
“entered both the American consciousness and conscience.” In 1940, the novel was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize and adapted to the screen. Although Steinbeck went on to have a productive literary
career and won the Novel Prize for Literature in 1962, none of his later books had the impact of
The Grapes of Wrath. He died in 1968.
Today, readers of The Grapes of Wrath often find fault with its excessive sentimentality and
generally flat characterizations, which seem at odds with Steinbeck’s otherwise realistic style of
writing. However, in writing his novel, Steinbeck attempted not only to describe the plight of
migrant workers during the Depression but also to offer a pointed criticism of the policies that had
caused that plight. In light of this goal, Steinbeck’s characters often emerge as idealized
archetypes or epic heroes; rather than using them to explore the individual human psyche, the
author presents them as embodiments of universal ideals or struggles. Thus, the novel stands as a
chronicle of the Depression and as a commentary on the economic and social system that gave rise
to it.
narrator · An anonymous, all-knowing, historically aware consciousness that is deeply
sympathetic, not only to the migrants but to workers, the poor, and the dispossessed generally.
point of view · The narrative shifts dramatically between different points of view. In some
chapters the narrator describes events broadly, summarizing the experiences of a large number of
people and providing historical analysis. Frequently, in the same chapters, the narrator assumes the
voice of a typical individual, such as a displaced farmer or a crooked used-car salesman,
expressing that person’s individual concerns. When the narrator assumes the voice of an
anonymous individual, the words sometimes sound like what an actual person might say, but
sometimes they form a highly poetic representation of the anonymous individual’s thoughts and
soul. The chapters focusing on the Joad family are narrated primarily from an objective point of
view, representing conversations and interactions without focusing on any particular character.
Here, the characters’ actions are presented as an observer might witness them, without directly
representing the characters’ thoughts and motivations. At certain points, however, the narrator
shifts and presents the Joads from an omniscient point of view, explaining their psychologies,
characters, and motivations in intimate detail.