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Alexis Burnett
English 3320
Dr. McMurray
December 11, 2012
The Self in American Literature
From the 17th to the 20th Centuries
There is no absolutely personal way of arriving at what the formula for what
our personal identity consists; the narratives of family, society and state define the
contours of this self-identity. But the family, society and the state are abstract entities
whose identity derives from historical records and narratives of literature; our selfidentity has a basis in the literature we have produced. Thus, the difficult question of
who we really are can be best treated of by resorting to an examination of the
literature which has nourished our culture.
The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Spanish and French accounts of travels were the first references to America in
literature of any sort in the sixteenth century; “various books and pamphlets
about…discoveries”, by these adventuring foreigners, were in languages not
accessible to common people (Armstrong 4). The circulation of these literary
outpourings was extremely limited both due to the far-out nature of their content and
the limited interest people had in such reading and the lack of translations available in
English (Armstrong 24). The development of America as motif in literary
ruminations, thus, before the seventeenth century remained the bastion of a few
intrepid spirits and their personal adventures. With the narrative of John Winthrop,
describing Boston in mythological terms invoking “...providential and cleansing…”
(Armstrong 24) America becomes a place ordained with a certain forcefully
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impressive quality. The beginning of this spectacular dimension of being ordained by
God and being the center of attention emerges most strongly in Winthrop’s
exhortation of the Massachusetts bound Puritans. He says, among other strident
things, “the lord make it like that of New England: for wee must Consider that wee
shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us” (Winthrop 1).
The idea of establishing a New England, which Winthrop emblematized in his
sermon of the City upon a Hill (1630), in the American colony, bespeaks a connection
with the past on part of the Puritans. At the same time, the Puritans were fleeing the
tyranny of “governmental and religious” changes that had changed their relation to the
native England (Bremer 281). Winthrop was no champion of democracy, which he
called “the meanest and worst of all forms of Government [sic]” (Bremer 281). The
settlers, though loosely joined by a shared rejection of Arminianism, were always
divided on issues of doctrine (Armstrong 24).
The first “…vivid first person account…” of colonial American prose was
John Smith’s A true relation of such occurrences and accidents of note as hath
happened in Virginia since the first planting of that colony (1608) (Fender 14). It has
been alleged that there are strong tendencies of over-reportage of the splendid
performance of the new colonisers in America in the literature of the seventeenth
century (Hayes 77). There are strong passages of “…self-promotion and land
promotion…” to be found in John Smith’s work (Hayes 77), which goes on to prove
that both self esteem and social integration and prestige were seen as valuable
denotations of identity in seventeenth century America.
The eighteenth century was marked for its sharp increase in literature
production in the American colony, as in England, as the educational philosophy of
the trivium was replaced by a more rounded out modern syllabus (Hayes 338).
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Mechanical and natural philosophy, classical and contemporary rhetorical arts and
reading of contemporary English literature were made central to this educational
overhaul (Hayes 338). This world in transition from the nationalist self and valor
based model of self-esteem and a burgeoning conservatism of culture and general
resistance to the conservatism can be seen in the works of authors like Peter
Williamson and Eliza Bleecker (Hayes 162). Reverend Thomas Bray established
many lending libraries for the benefit of Anglican Parishes, though their access was
restricted to the families of colonial gentry (Hayes 349). The changing ethos of the
times is best evidenced in the thematic content of the works which surfaced in the
eighteenth century American literary scene. Alongside a huge number of captivity
texts, expounding allegedly true stories of escape from great tribulations there came
about a fascination with the erotic in literature (Hayes 160- 162). The change of
literatures in this period is indicative of change in the attitudinal make up of the
American people in response to their material historical conditions. The ideas of
individuality and the community came into sharp opposition to each other.
The Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries
The conflict between the libertarian tendencies of Anglicanism and the stark
disciplinarianism of the Puritans came to summarise the split between individualist
assertion of the will and the social condemnation of it. The rejection of festivity,
preached by the Puritans, was the main hegemony from the start in the America of the
1600s and continued to hold sway till the 1870’s; this is evidenced by the punishment
of absenteeism in school and working as usual on Christmas day in Boston schools of
the time (Bremer 342). Influential writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell can be seen as the Puritan
hegemons of American literature, and at the other end of the spectrum are Nathaniel
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Hawthorne, John Gorham Palfrey (Bremer 507). The burgeoning development of the
nineteenth brought with it the parties of enthusiasts and dissenters which plague every
epoch in history. James Fenimore Cooper’s Notions of the Americans (1828) and
Home as found (1838) is dire in its view of the young country’s lack of history
(Fender 26). This development is quite opposed to that of Thomas Jefferson’s
optimistic Notes on the state of Virginia (1784) which is a rugged defence of the
populations in America from hostile French scientists who speculated about the races’
degeneracy (Fender 25). The English still sneered at the lack of culture in America
but the new crop of writers and thinker there would now take issues with such
dismissal. Polemics and apologias like The poet (1844) by Ralph Waldo Emerson
were counterpoised by rejoinders like Herman Melville’s The confidence man (1857)
(Fender 27). It is not out of place to say here that the defence of social identity often
became a refuge for individual expression in such cases.
The advent of the twentieth century brought with it the first indications that
the society and the self were to be in such conflict that the notions of selfhood would
undergo immense modification, even fragmentation. The lack of attendant “…ruin”
on Theodore Dreiser’s “immoral” heroine in Sister Carrie (1900) was a precedent to
the twentieth century’s individualism in American literature (MacGowan 3). The
overarching moral landscape of the Puritans was all but stripped bare from the world
of literary introspection. More provocative works by the likes of T. S. Elliot, Allan
Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, Don DeLillo and Ernest Hemingway still
bristled with the resistive spirit of modernity’s belligerent industrialism and a
eccentric and individuated self-concept (MacGowan 2- 10).
Closing Remarks: An overview
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This split self, between modernity and religio-mystical tendencies of the past
continue to reflect themselves in modern American literature. It has been observed
that Chuck Palahniuk’s modernist novel Fight Club (1999) borrows the doppelganger
trope from early Gothic literature, specifically James Hogg’s Justified Sinner and R.
L. Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde (Jaén & Gutleben 83- 85). This new situation can best
be understood as the past continuing to be relevant in the present; the antagonisms of
society versus individuals is one that will continue unabated in our epoch where
development of technology often exceeds the pace of cultural adaptation. Just as
happened with the Puritan and Anglican settlers is poised to happen to us again, until
a newer more genuinely balanced stasis of meaning arrives; literature is the best way
to observe, influence and endure these coming upheavals.
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Works Cited
Armstrong, Catherine. Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century:
English Representations in Print and Manuscript. Burlington, VT: Ashgate
Publishing Company, 2007. Print.
Bremer, Francis, J. Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America. 1 (2006),
Volume 1. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-Clio, Inc., 2006, Print.
Fender, Stephen. American Literature in Context I: 1620-1830. New York, NY:
Methuen & Co., 1983. Print.
Hayes, Kevin, J. Ed. The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.
Jaén, Susana, O. & Gutleben, Christian. Eds. Refracting the Canon in Contemporary
British Literature and Film. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rodopi B.V.,
2004. Print.
MacGowan, Christopher. The Twentieth-Century American Fiction Handbook. New
York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010. Print.
Winthrop, John. Ferraro, Vincent Ed. “John Winthrop's City upon a Hill, 1630”.
Mount Holyoke College Website. N.D. Accessed on December 11, 2012.
< https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad /intrel/winthrop.htm >. Web.