American Literature (0)

The making of a new nation . The Enlightenment in America. The emergence of the notion of the American Dream. The great Enlighteners: Crèvecoeur, Jefferson , Paine , Franklin.
The American Enlightenment is the intellectual thriving period in the United States in the mid-to- late 18th century (1715–1789), especially as it relates to American Revolution on the one hand and the European Enlightenment on the other . Influenced by the scientific revolution of the 17th century and the humanist period during the Renaissance , the Enlightenment took scientific reasoning and applied it to human nature , society, and religion . American Enlightenment - a gradual but powerful awakening that established the ideals of democracy , liberty , and religious tolerance in the people of America.
If there were just one development that directly caused the American Revolution and uplifted the intellectual culture of the continent while it was only a British colony , it would be the American Enlightenment. Broadly, the Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that changed the fundamental perspective of the masses, urging them to foster skepticism and apply scientific principles in matters of religion and morality . Its chief values were: Liberty, Democracy, Republicanism, Religious Tolerance. The movement gained momentum with the publication of landmark texts like Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason , and the Jefferson Bible , but the most influential thinker was undoubtedly John Locke , whose ideas spread to the colonies and across Europe . Main Ideas of the American Enlightenment: The Enlightenment caused a shift in the cultural and social attitudes of the people, bringing in some new and radical ideas. Republicanism: The doctrine of republicanism asserts a system of a government that is elected by the people of the nation. The roots of this ideology go back to ancient Greece, when the concept of a democratic government was examined by philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. Individual Liberty: “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness ” developed as the motto of this era, which forms the cornerstone of the U.S. Constitution today . Since the colonies had very few individual rights , they declared certain fundamental rights that they deemed “inalienable.” Democracy: The colonies had no say in the formation of the government, and had no representation in the law-making process . Consequently, they were attracted to the idea of democracy, where the government is “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln later expressed in his Gettysburg Address. Religious Tolerance: Much impetus for the ideas of religious tolerance came from the rule of King George II, who was a staunch Catholic and did not allow freedom of religion to Protestants in New England . Voltaire was among the first to denounce Christianity and other organized religions as mere ploys to support monarchy. What emerged was Deism, which was more or less a new religion that considered reason its foundation. In Deism, there is no interference by a deity, and man controls his own destiny .
These ideas stirred the masses into action , as the people dreamed of carving their own futures. Adopted by the Founding Fathers, Enlightenment ideals became the vision for modern-day America, where these ideologies are deeply rooted in the nation. The Enlightenment was important America because it provided the philosophical basis of the American Revolution. The Revolution was more than just a protest against English authority ; as it turned out, the American Revolution provided a blueprint for the organization of a democratic society. And while imperfectly done , for it did not address the terrible problem of slavery, the American Revolution was an enlightened concept of government whose most profound documents may have been the American Declaration of Independence and United States Constitution. To feel the full impact of the Enlightenment on America one needs only to look at the first inaugural address of Thomas Jefferson, who, along with Benjamin Franklin, is considered to be the American most touched by the ideas of the Enlightenment.
Attempts to reconcile science and religion resulted in a widespread rejection of prophecy, miracle and revealed religion in preference for Deism - especially by Thomas Paine in "The Age of Reason" and by Thomas Jefferson in his short Jefferson Bible - from which all supernatural aspects were removed. Benjamin Franklin was influential in America, England, Scotland , and France , for his political activism and for his advances in physics.
The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, a set of ideals in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success , and an upward social mobility achieved through hard work . In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement " regardless of social class or circumstances of birth . The idea of the American Dream is rooted in the United States Declaration of Independence which proclaims that "all men are created equal" and that they are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights" including "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." (Mark Twain 's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn )
De Crevecoeur, Hector St. John (1735- 1813 ): Franco-American Writer . With the publication of his Letters from an American Farmer ( 1782 ), Hector St. John de Crevecoeur became one of the eighteenth-century’s most influential commentators on American life and manners. While not born in America, Crevecoeur traded his French citizenship for an American one in 1765 , taking up residence in New York . He had traveled throughout New England and its coastal region before claiming his new identity , however , and before seriously embarking upon his life as a farmer in Orange County, New York, in 1778, Crevecoeur traveled extensively inland through the Ohio Valley and on to the banks of the Mississippi . Drawing upon his travel experiences and his life as a farmer, Crevecoeur was the first to seriously attempt a definition of American character with his Letters. The key word for Crevecoeur was “new,” which separated and distinguished Americans from things European. In Letters, Crevecoeur thus blended his collection of facts and observations into a fictional portrait of an industrious farmer, one whose natural response to the land became identified with the general character of a new American people. Yet while Crevecoeur echoed Jefferson, Thomas’s agrarian ideals, his letters also acknowledged the realities of frontier savagery and southern slavery. After taking a post as a French consul in 1783, Crevecoeur published little in English, though he did publish a French revision of Letters (1787) and a final book on his American experiences: Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie et dans l’état de New-York (1801).
Letters from an American Farmer is an excellent example of how a New World American thinks about the many changes occurring and that have occurred during the era of Enlightenment. Crevecoeur’s essay is an enlightened perspective that shows how the people of that time are feeling about being a part of the new world and its current workings. Although the writer is originally from Normandy, and later Canada, he seems to truly grasp the changes in American society and how vastly different it is from Europe . Crevecoeur explains that America is a literal melting pot for people of all religions. He states that “the Americans become as to religion what they are as a country , allied to all”. When Crevecoeur describes the religions of the nation he makes note of the fact that even if the people of a certain “sect” do not practice the same religion as the newcomers, that “neither the government nor any other power interferes”, showing the great tolerance that America has for all. The “indifference” of America is quite different from the way society is in Europe during the 1700-1800’s. During the Enlightenment the people of America appear to come to the realization that although religions may be different in some ways , they are also similar in others . The social class divisions in America during the Enlightenment are also quite different than that of Europe. “It is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who posses everything, and of a herd of people who have nothing ”. During the period of enlightenment the people of America came to realize that if they work hard enough that what they earn is for them to keep . There are no Kings or Dictators ruling the lower class. There is a huge amount of personal and financial freedom to be gained in American during this time. Crevecoeur states that “each person works for himself ”. American became a class-less society during the Enlightenment period where each individual was allowed as much room to grow as needed.
The Age of Romanticism . The early romantic writers . Washington Irving as a transitional figure from the traditions of the Enlightenment to those of Romanticism.
Romanticism (or the Romantic era/Period) was an artistic , literary , and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1840. Partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, it was also a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts , music, and literature , but had a major impact on historiography, education and the natural sciences. Its effect on politics was considerable and complex ; while for much of the peak Romantic period it was associated with liberalism and radicalism, in the long term its effect on the growth of nationalism was probably more significant. In the U.S, romantic Gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) and Rip Van Winkle (1819), followed from 1823 onwards by the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper , with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape descriptions of an already- exotic mythicized frontier peopled by " noble savages", similar to the philosophical theory of Rousseau , exemplified by Uncas, from The Last of the Mohicans. There are picturesque " local color " elements in Washington Irving's essays and especially his travel books . Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre and his balladic poetry were more influential in France than at home, but the romantic American novel developed fully with the atmosphere and melodrama of Nathaniel Hawthorne 's The Scarlet Letter (1850). Later Transcendentalist writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence and imagination, as does the romantic realism of Walt Whitman . The poetry of Emily Dickinson — nearly unread in her own time—and Herman Melville 's novel Moby- Dick can be taken as epitomes of American Romantic literature. By the 1880s, however, psychological and social realism was competing with romanticism in the novel.
The first great American writer of this period was Washington Irving, whose Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, first published in 1819, was a sensation in England and helped build the United States' reputation for creative literature. Over the remainder of his career , which included Tales of the Alhambra and many other books, Irving was the most famous and most widely respected literary figure in America. Thanks in part to developments in publishing technology , Irving also was one of the few Americans to make substantial money from writing. By 1829, he had made more than $23,000 from his writing, and he eventually bought the plates from which his works were published in order to protect his own rights to proceeds from them. A transitional figure, Irving somewhat ironically contributed to America's literary independence while producing work that was distinctively European in content and style. Like his contemporary James Fenimore Cooper, Irving proved that Americans could write European literature as well as Europeans could . His masterful use of personae, stylized prose , and use of European legend all demonstrate the strong influence of the Old World on his work. Indeed, the sketches and tales in The Sketch Book show Irving's affection for the antiquity of Europe and for the past in general. This attention to the past, as Irving scholar William P. Kelly has noted, was one reason for Irving's success with his American audience . Kelly points out that Americans, recently severed from their European heritage , were struggling with an identity crisis at the time they were reading Irving's work, which itself looks both forward and backward. (xii). Irving is a major figure in the history of the short story in America. Indeed, Fred Lewis Pattee begins his book The Development of the American Short Story with Irving and identifies The Sketch Book, which contains "Rip Van Winkle" and the "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," as the starting point for this literary form in the United States. Pattee notes that the short story suited Irving, who tended to write in "spurts and dashes": "He did not deliberately choose the shortened form: he fell into it automatically because of his temperament , his natural indolence that forbade long-continued efforts, his powerful yet volatile emotions , and his early literary training in the school of Addison and Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson " (6). Another striking characteristic of Irving's writing is the preponderance of visual imagery . A painter himself, Irving often drew verbal pictures in his essays and stories , and the title of his most famous work makes a double reference to visual art: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon.
James Fenimore Cooper as the creator of the American historical novel. The depiction of the struggle of Native Americans against white colonisers in his Leather Stocking Tales (lecture). The creation of the American national epic in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha.
James Fenimore Cooper was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. He lived most of his life in Cooperstown, New York, established by his father William. Cooper was a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church and in his later years contributed generously to it. He attended Yale University for three years but was expelled for misbehavior. Before embarking on his career as a writer he served in the U.S. Navy as a Midshipman which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among naval historians his works on early U.S. naval history have been widely received but were sometimes criticized by Cooper's contemporaries. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece .
Cooper's portrayal of Native Americans and the white settlers in The Leatherstocking Tales shows us a prime example of how acculturation operates in various types, steps, and on various levels. It is so comprehensive and credible that many see it as what had charmed the reading public at home and abroad and " determined how the world was to regard the American Indian" for a long time. By the time Cooper started writing The Leatherstocking Tales, the native population had been virtually eliminated from the upstate New York area, and "the frontier had been pushed across the Missouri ." Cooper himself had little or no personal contact with Native Americans, just like the vast majority of his contemporary readers, who, to borrow Randall C. Davis 's words , "accepted without hesitation the distinction between 'savagism' and 'civilization' as an explanation for Native Americans' perceived inabilities to assimilate neatly into Euro-American society." Though widely viewed as a sympathizer, if not a staunch advocate, for Native Americans, "Cooper was ambivalent about the westering advance of the society to which he belonged." Perhaps that is the reason why he did not clearly reveal in The Leatherstocking Tales his stand on the cultural clashes between the whites and the natives, especially the removal of the native from their lands. He seems to be more concerned with the ways of acculturating the native into the white society. While believing in the superiority of the Western civilization and the justification for dispossessing the "uncivilized" Native Americans, the typical mentality in the 19th century America, Cooper did not advocate a total elimination of the Native American way of life. But his solution to the cultural clashes between the two is the Native American appropriation to the Western culture through "acculturation," rather than " assimilation ." The former calls for a voluntary or forced acquisition of the culture of the dominant group, a kind of cultural modification from one group of people to another, or more specifically, a process of cultural adaptation by the subordinate people toward the dominant people's culture within the context of social advancement in American society at that time. The latter indicates the disappearance of group identity through nondifferential association and exogamy, which requires a mutual effort of both dominant and ethnic groups. Cooper was keenly aware that, to his contemporaries, that was something to be wished for but entirely non-feasible. His perception of the encounters between the European colonizers and their colonized natives convinced him that the acculturation occurring during the process of the Western overseas expansion was basically a confrontation between two different racial and cultural identities, or rather a unidirectional imposition upon the " host " but conquered society. Disgusted with attempts to justify colonialization by creating stereotypical images of the " savage ," Cooper was more interested in the encounter and contrast between the static man of primeval nature and the representative of an [103] advancing civilization. Even though he used some clichés of the time in portraying the "uncivilized" traits of his Native American characters , Cooper became the first American novelist who featured Native Americans and their culture prominently but credibly in his work. At least , Cooper tried to declare that the acculturation that took place in the White-Native American encounters was a two-way appropriation, even in a limited sense . He wanted to show that while acculturation mostly occurred in the form of Native Americans gradually conforming to white cultural standards, the white colonists could and did appropriate certain elements of native culture, particularly those practical elements which proved useful under colonial conditions . Such an acculturation was a conscious move on the part of the white colonists because, as David Murray observes, " Given the context of radical inequality of power between the two cultures , representation and comprehension of Indians by whites involves an appropriation, even an expropriation, parallel to the economic expropriation which is its context." They believed that it would lead to a greater knowledge of the natives by the colonists, which in turn would lead to a greater ability to exploit the natives and eventually to a complete appropriation of them. It is widely documented that Cooper admitted his support for what the white settlers did in their westward expansion-he actually acknowledges in The Pioneers, the first of the Leatherstocking Tales to be written but the next to last in the sequence of events , that "the Europeans, or, to use a more significant term, the Christians , dispossessed the original owners of the soil " - and justified it by saying that it was part of the noble mission of Christianity and therefore "part of a universal moral progress which it was the special destiny of American to manifest." However, it is equally undeniable that he appreciated some aspects of the native culture. On the one hand, Cooper saw acculturation as ultimately desirable and encouraged it in his fiction , but he revealed the distinct limits to its potential on the other, because he was not certain whether a two-way acculturation would ever be accomplished and work out well for both cultures. While exploring the multi-level cultural clashes between the European settlers and the Native Americans, Cooper creates some acculturated natives and whites, who enter a middle ground between the conflicting cultures and, while retaining their own cultural identities, appropriate the best elements of each other's culture.
The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem , in trochaic tetrameter, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, featuring an Indian hero . It is loosely based on the legends and ethnography of the Ojibwe (Chippewa, Anishinaabeg) and other Native American peoples as contained in Algic Researches (1839) and additional writings by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an ethnographer and United States Indian agent . In sentiment, scope, overall conception, and many particulars, Longfellow's poem is very much a work of American Romantic literature, not a representation of Native American oral tradition . Longfellow insisted, "I can give chapter and verse for these legends. Their chief value is that they are Indian legends." Longfellow had originally planned on following Schoolcraft in calling his hero Manabozho, the name in use at the time among the Ojibwe of the south shore of Lake Superior for a figure of their folklore , a trickster -transformer. But in his journal entry for June 28, 1854, he wrote, "Work at 'Manabozho;' or, as I think I shall call it, 'Hiawatha'—that being another name for the same personage." Hiawatha was not "another name for the same personage" (the mistaken identification of the trickster figure was made first by Schoolcraft and compounded by Longfellow), but a probable historical figure associated with the founding of the League of the Iroquois, the Five Nations then located in present -day New York and Pennsylvania. Because of the poem, however, "Hiawatha" became the namesake for towns, schools and a telephone company in the western Great Lakes region, where no Iroquois nations historically resided.
The late romantic authors . Two sides of Edgar Allan Poe’s genius . Poe’s hard, logical intellect responsible for his writing literary criticism and detective stories.
Many of the late Romantic writers only began writing after the most prominent early Romantics (Wackenroder and Hardenberg) had died. Thus the ' decay ' Huch laments in late Romanticism - renouncing the balance between mind and nature, giving up the spiritual side in favour of indulging in natural drives , leaning towards simplistic folklore and myth , demonstrating lack of receptivity and self-destructive tendencies - is the culturally mediated difference in approach of a new generation of writers. John Keats, Percy Bysshe, Shelley Lord Byron .
Poe – the literary critic and theoretician. The southern literary messenger – the best magazine of its kind. He was very independent, perceptive and articulate (was able to express himself very well), wasn’t afraid to criticize. Poe objected to narrow nationalism. The poverty of the arts in America was a direct result of the national pre-occupation with money. He was rather harsh on minor authors. Longfellow hated him. The first modern literary theoretician - used a lot of psychology (psychological system – logical), in direct contrast with romanticism. The work of art should be evaluated from the point of view of the author ’s intention , what the author intended. He stood somehow aloof – somehow on the side. He was ahead of his time. He mentally anguished landscapes, far from nature or society. He seemed to European – his contemporaries could not understand his ideas. The first group of writers who started to appreciate his writing was the French symbolists, especially Baudelaire. They proclaimed Poe their predecessor. Major influence on later writers – he can be called the first detective stories writer. Moreover Poe was interested in scientific discoveries (motifs, inventions ). Existentialist – life has no hope but people can make choices. Only death gives a salvation. He grew up in Virginia (southern state) – the society was rather aristocratic in structure, there were planters at the top of the structure, white people without any means , and slaves. Poe supported the agrarian democracy. The agriculture of Virginia has been declining for decades, because tobacco had exhausted the land. As a result farmers became very poor , they were forced to move. Virginia – the land of decay. One of the dominant moods was that of decadents and pessimism. Poe had neither land, slaves – he was poor. Poe defended slavery, he defended the right of poverty. He regarded abolitionism as an attack on property. He was very sceptical about democracy, he believed that in America it meant mob-rule (rule of crowds). Yet he thought he belonged to upper class of society. Southern chivalrick idea – the famous southern myth (the southerners believed that they’re somehow superior to the northerners, Yankees.) 1. His admiration for human intellect on the one hand and a sense of its tragic impedance 2. The highly logical structure of his works and a desire to create an emotional effect. His stories are very logical, yet emotional (crash) 3. Sympathy with the individual but contempt for the mob 4. The motifs of decay, death and destruction present a sharp contrast to the general optimistic spirit of American national life but they are in keeping with the decadent atmosphere of Virginia. Poe was hurt by American reality . Money worship and hostility towards the art and culture. Criticises the dull routine of the American philistine (an ordinary person who doesn’t care about anything intellectual, cultural). Poe’s heroes try to escape their inhuman surroundings. His contempt for business civilization that drives into the world of pure art. He was the first one to do that. Art itself can become a way of life. Aspects of his thought that can be deduced from his work: 1. Scientific rationalism – essay called “Eureka”(I have found , discovered ). Poe attempts to explain the universe based on Newtonian principles. The origin of the universe, might be hinting at the big bang theory. Philosophical binary oppositions: attraction and repulsion, variety and unity , gravitation and diffusion . According to Poe the universe has a mathematical beauty and precision in which one can see the hand of God. Art is man’s instrument for making some order out of the chaos of existence. Opposite side of Poe’s art is his aestheticism. The purpose of art is pleasure not the truth . The object of poetry is “rhythmical creation of beauty”. Informational poetry, poetry of ideas, didactic was illegal according to Poe. Essay “the poetic principal”. Principals are mostly symbolist. A poem is just a poem and nothing else , written only for the poem’s sake, for the sake of beauty. Poe the prose writer - was forced to starts writing shot stories because he was poor. It was a success. Won a competition – “MS. Found in a bottle” (MS – manuscript). The story is characteristic of his art in general. The opening is almost realistic, becomes weirder and weirder. Closing passages are fantastic. Poe’s favourite trajectory. The theme of solitary adventure . Also the encounter of physical and psychological horrors. To produce strong, emotional effect on the reader. Poe came to conclusion that The most basic human emotion is fear , so he turned to the supernatural. His stories became much more popular than his poems . His stories were More or less successful. Poe’s stories became popular because of Climactic arrangement of the events and the poetic style, appropriate for their mood. Poe’s style: vocabulary is not natural, extremely formal . He prefers the literary, bookish layer of vocabulary. Unnatural way. Names are outlandish, fantastic. Repetition – he repeats certain rhythms, motifs. He classified his stories into 3 categories: 1.Grotesque – include a kind of grim , dark humour 2.Arabesque – mostly horrors and strong emotions, fear. 3.Ratiocinative – rational , logical analysis in reconstructing the order of events. Each category represented a different intention. He developed mastered, perfected stories. The short story of psychological effect. Tales of the grotesque and arabesque – contains some of his most famous stories “The Fall of the House of Usher”. Typical of a gothic story – gloomy, dark, murky. The feeling of intolerable loneliness . One such story is “The Man of the Crowd” – the secret of a man who seems to be strangely alienated from human fellowship, the narrator chases the man, still the man remains a mystery. The narrator’s feverish in the man’s identity symbolises human desire for self-discovery. Poe adored the idea of the Doppelganger, uses this motif to stress the complexity of human nature. Another Poe’s favourite topic is the impossibility for the artist to escape from the practical world – “William Wilson”, something haunts the narrator to chase him from country to country, he’s been haunted by himself. The theme of Death fascinated Poe. He’s interested in death with all its horrors. “Berenice” – a man digs out the body of his dead pride, pulls out her teeth. Metempsychosis – the belief in the transmigration of the soul . “Ligea” – a revenant (she has returned from earlier ages , centuries ). – Arabesque. Grotesque – “The Mask of the Red Death”. Other favourite themes and symbols are death and fleeting time(time runs fast ) – imply the inevitable triumph of death over mankind. Poe is never optimistic. He tries to avoid the world of shroud calculation and callousness (being disrespectful of other people’s emotions). Ratiocinative – more optimistic. Poe shows the triumph of human intellect. “A Decent into the Maelström”. Other tales display the power of sharp logic . Detective stories where the protagonist is called Auguste Dupin – the first great detective in the world’s literature. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue ”, “The Story of the Purloined Letter” (purloined – stolen) - two systems of detection. Method of deduction. Poe ignores the moral aspect of crime . Poe the poet – in his poetry Poe is preoccupied not so much with meaning as with sound . He chooses his words, especially in rhymes, because of how they sound. He tries to be logical. The best subject matter should be death of the beautiful women . The essence of poetry is beauty, the best mood is sadness . The aim of his poetry is to elevate the human mind, to bring it to ecstasy. Man can perceive superior beauty. Poems and short stories should be short enough to be read in one sitting. Poe produced not more than 15 poems. He revised them all his life. The final versions are perfect (ed). His poems are a romantic manifesto because they speak of lands that are nowhere – “out of space , out of time”.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s preoccupation with guilt and conscience. His belief that the roots of the philistinism and hypocrisy characteristic of New Englanders are to be found in early Puritan settlements.
Power of Guilt in The Scarlet Letter - If a character does something wrong but no one knows, that character can both gain and lose from what they have done. This happens multiple times in The Scaret Letter. Characters commit evil deeds, some are caught, some are not. For those that aren 't caught, they have a decision to make. To turn themselves in or to live their lives as if it never happened . For those that choose to live on as if it never happened they are faced with a tough road ahead. They have to deal with the guilt of what they've done. All the while, they must watch to see if anyone is on to them or suspects them of the crime they have commited. However they are rewarded. They get to live on as a regular member of society rather than be imprisoned or even worse , put to death. These are examples of characters who have commited crimes without confessing. Arthur Dimmesdale is a minister, a father, a sinner and a man who feels incredible guilt. He commits adultery with Hester before the book begins. As the book begins it is revealed he is the true father of Hester's child Pearl . Dimmesdale, afraid of losing his status and being humiliated , does not confess his crime. For this this he is rewarded and greatly punished . He is rewarded by keeping his status in the community. He continues to preach to his flock , for which he gains great acclaim. He is able to see Hester and Pearl whenever he wants. He is also free to leave anytime he wants. He has his freedom and his reputation. However, he also has something he doesn't want, his conscience. How unfortunate it is a person can get away from being caught for a crime. A crime that is punishable by death. Yet, he can't enjoy it. Most people would leave town, sorry for that they've done, but ecstatic they got away to start a new life. Not Dimmesdale, not Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. He beats himself up over it. Usually thats an analogy, but not this time. The rest of his life is a descent into madness brought on by constant self-induced suffering, which is later more than self-induced when Chllingworth figures it out. Dimmesdale locks himself in a closet beating himself relentlessly with chains and a whip. He also cuts the letter "A" into his skin like how Hester has to wear it on her dress . As if this wasn't enough he also goes on near life-threatening fasts. To top it all off, his inner conflict manifests itself into the outside world. This happens when he develops a heart condition and which causes him to clutch his chest very often. These are all examples of his pennance, but it still is not enough. Dimmesdale tries many times to tell others of his sin but always falls just short. He tries to tell the people at his church that he is a sinner like them. The people there assume he is just trying to be modest now that he is receiving great acclaim for his sermons. Another time he goes up to the scaffold where Hester and Pearl stood. He makes a noise, wanting people to come out and look at him to force him into a confession, but alas no one looks. Just then Hester and Pearl arrive and they stand there with him and Pearl asks "Wilt thou stand here with Mother and me, tomorrow noontide?" Dimmesdale refuses. Hester convinces him to run away with her and Pearl and he accepts. After he delivers his final sermon he runs over to the scaffold finnally admits what he has done and dies . Overall he is punished much greater than he is rewarded. Hester Prynne commits the biggest sin of the book, for which she is caught. We can only speculate what would have happened if she didn't confess and wasn't caught. However there were sins she committed that she didn't confess. First, she didn't tell who her accomplice was in committing adultery. For not confessing this she is rewarded and punished. She is rewarded by keeping Dimmesdale as a freind and a confidant. She is punished however by having to watch her husband , posing as Roger Chillingworth slowly kill Dimmesdale. Her decision to not tell who the father of Pearl was may or may not have been the best move. Perhaps if they knew who the father was they would have killed Hester and Pearl. Dimmesdale would have surely been put to death. In the end, it may have been the right choice, or maybe not, that could easily be debated. She also commited a crime when she aided in hiding who Roger Chillingworth was. Once again this desicion led to both good things and bad. Had she told everyone who Chillingworth really was she might have been put to death for adultery as one of the reasons for not killing her was she though her husband was dead. She did however pay for not confessing she knew who Chillingworth in the same way she paid for not confessing who the father of Pearl was. She had to watch her close freind Dimesdale be hunted down by Chillingworth. Then slowly tortured until his life was worse than death. Overall Hester not confessing her crimes may or may not have worked out, we can't tell from the information in the book. Roger Chillingworth, as he is now called, is also a sinner. He commits the most sins of anyone in the whole book. He starts by marrying Hester without love. He says "We have wronged each other. Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into an unnatural relation with my decay." He feels like he didnt deserve such a young, beautiful wife and doesn't blame her for cheating on him. He does blame whoever she did it with. Which is why he commits his next sin. He sins when he comes back into Boston saying is name is Roger Chillingworth. His real last name is Prynne, like Hester. He uses this lie to gain access to the town in a way he wouldn't have been able to if he used his true identity. Thanks to this false name, he has the freedom to hunt down whoever commited adultery with his wife. He takes this opportunity and spends every waking moment looking for the criminal . He foreshadows it by saying he shall see it in the man's heart. When he examines Dimmesdale in his sleep and feels his heart, Hawthorne writes Chillingworth feels how "Satan comports himself when a precious is lost to heaven and won into his kingdom". So far not confessing who his identity is really paying off for him, and theres much more to come. After he discovers for certain that Dimmesdale is the father of the child , he makes it his mission to put Dimmesdale through hell , or as close to that as he can get. Dimmesdale, so afraid everyone will discover for him for the liar and sinner he is, he doesn't notice Chllingworth as an enemy. He is so afraid of the whole town, he lets his biggest enemy move in with him. After this Chillingworth and Dimmesdale are not the same. Chillingworth turns inhuman torturing Dimmesdale non-stop. Dimmesdale turns into a wreck with heart problems among many others. He eventually succumbs to the torture on the scaffold and dies. Chllingworth also sinned and didn't confess when Dimmesdale died after slow mental torture by Chillingworth. Overall not confessing worked out very well for Chillingworth. He married Hester without love and didn't confess, which didn't work out well for him. However lying about his identity gave him the opportunity to commit his next sin which he also didn't confess. Unlike Dimmesdale, Chillingworth gained more than he lost by lying. As you can see by these examples if you commit a crime and no one knows about it, it's up to you to move on with your life or fall into a pit of guilt. If you can escape the guilt, there are great rewards. You can accomplish things you wouldn't normally be able to. You can settle the score with anyone who has wronged you. Or you can run away and start your life over. If you can't escape the guilt, your life will be come a living hell. You will be tormented by what you have done and won't be able to live your life. You could run away but your guilty conscience would catch up quickly. So in conclusion if you commit a crime and you aren't caught, good things can come to you by not telling anyone it was you. However, terrible things often follow .
In The Scarlet Letter Hypocrisy is evident everywhere . The characters of Hester, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, and the very society that the characters lived in, were steeped in hypocrisy. Hawthorne was not subtle in his portrayal of the terrible sin of hypocrisy; he made sure it was easy to see the sin at work. Parallels can be drawn between the characters of The Scarlet Letter and of today’s society. Just because this book is set in colonial times, does not mean its lessons are not applicable to the world we live in.The first character, Hester Prynne, is guilty of adultery and of hypocrisy. She “ loves ” Dimmesdale yet she says nothing while for seven years Dimmesdale is slowly tortured. This love she felt that was so strong, that it made her break sacred vows must have disappeared. Why else would she condemn her supposed love to the hands of her vengeful husband. Dimmesdale is continually tortured by his inner demons of guilt that gnaw at his soul, and Chillingworth makes sure these demons never go away. Hester allows this to happen . Physically and mentally the minister begins to weaken, slowly he becomes emaciated, and he punishes himself constantly. Only when Hester knows that if Chillingworth is aloud to continue , that Dimmesdale will surely go insane if she does not reveal her secret. Why did Hester wait so long? She did not reveal who her lover was on the scaffolding when she had the perfect opportunity to. Also, she did not tell her husband who her lover was. Why did Hester Prynne keep secrets that ended up hurting everyone. Hester can atone for her sin of adultery, but every day that she keeps the secret of her lover, and the true identity of Rodger Chillingworth a secret she is committing a sin. If Hester would have “Take heed how thou deniest to him---who, perchance, hath not the courage to grasp it for himself---the bitter, but wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy lips !”(Dimmesdale 47) things would have been infinitely better for everyone. Everyone Hester Prynne loves, she does in a hypocritical way. She loves Pearl enough to sacrifice to feed and clothe her, but she does not love Pearl enough to give her a father. Hester loves Dimmesdale, but she does not love him enough to expose his sin publicly, and she conceals her knowledge of Chillingworth. Either you love something whole-heartedly, or you don’t. Hawthorne might have portrayed Hester in a more favorable light then the other characters, but still she should have to wear a scarlet H in addition to her A. The second character, Arthur Dimmesdale is the epitome of hypocrisy. Hawthorne intended his name to have symbolic meaning. Dimmesdale meaning dim or not very bright . Arthur might be bright in the areas of theology, but when it comes to hypocrisy, he is a fool. Dimmesdale says very near the beginning of the book “What can thy silence do for him, except to tempt him---yea, compel him, as it were---to add hypocrisy to sin?”(Dimmesdale 47) He knows what will happen to him if he endures his sin in private, but he is too weak at this point in the book to admit it. The tapestries of biblical adultery, which are found in Arthur’s room are hypocritical. These are supposed to help him atone for his sins by making him feel guilty, but he feels no better. Arthur goes and preaches every week on how bad sin is, and how he is the worst sinner of them all. These partial confessions just make him more of a hypocrite. Dimmesdale knows how the parishioners will interpret these confessions, he is not blind to their looks of adoration. Dimmesdale enjoys being viewed as a saint, when he knows he is a truly a sinner. The years of torture the minister receives, are brought on by his own doing. If his supposed commitment to the community had stopped him from admitting his sin, he would have not been tortured. His love of the community is very similar to Hester Prynne’s love of Pearl. Dimmesdale only loves his community enough to preach in it, but he is preacher harboring a great sin, and so he cannot truly guide his community spiritually. Dimmesdale’s and Hester’s love are alike in their limitations. While Dimmesdale does speak up for Hester keeping her Pearl “Truth in what Hester says, and in the feeling which inspires her! God gave her the child, and gave her, too, an instinctive knowledge of its nature and requirements ,---both seemingly so peculiar,---which no other moral being can posses. And, moreover, is there not a quality of awful sacredness in the relation between this mother and this child.”(Dimmesdale 78) but he cannot love her enough to be her husband. The scene at the scaffolding at night is a truly disgusting scene of hypocrisy. Arthur seizes the opportunity to go up on the scaffolding and feel better about his sin, but when he sees a fellow man of the cloth walking by, he cowers. Would it not have been better to have his sin revealed? Then when Hester and Pear stand with him Pear asks “Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noontide?”(Pearl 105)The minister is given another chance to redeem himself, but he cowers yet again! Dimmesdale is selfish, he tries to atone in private, by whipping himself and fasting. This accomplishes nothing, he knows in his heart that no punishment in private will get him forgiveness from the lord. Yet he continues his practices of private punishment, so he temporarily feels better about himself. Another occurrence of hypocrisy was when Hester finally revealed the true identity of Rodger Chillingworth. Dimmesdale was overcome with anger , how could Arthur have been mad? Hester had finally conquered her weakness of character, and told him the truth. Dimmesdale could only see that she had been harboring a terrible secret in her heart. After that, the agreement to run away to the Old World was another instance of a character weakness of Arthur. He had not atoned for his sins, but he would still run away with Hester. He even interpreted the flood of sunshine to mean that God himself approved of their plan. Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter is the ultimate incarnation of hypocrisy. He represents how the Puritan ideals had been twisted into something that reeked of hypocrisy. Dimmesdale pretended to be a good, just, and wise minister, in reality, he was a bad, unjust, and foolish. Dimmesdale recognizes the danger of hypocrisy, but his character is too weak to avoid the pitfall of hypocrisy. The third character of Roger Chillingworth is a man who at one point was guided by intellect, and not his emotions. He pretends to be Dimmesdale’s friend , but inflicts grievous wounds upon the reverend. At the beginning of The Scarlet Letter Rodger returns to his wife, only to find her being publicly condemned for adultery, his emotions began to take over. At that point, his only goal in life is revenge . When he eventually figures out who Hester’s lover was, he begins to torture Dimmesdale in such a way that he does not know he is being tortured. Chilingworth’s emotions rule him, his single -minded pursuit of revenge overtakes him. He is supposed to be a scholar, a man of reason. Revenge for the betrayal of Hester is the driving force in his life. The actual torture he inflicts is purely mental, and is successful in breaking Dimmesdale’s body and soul down. During one instance Chillingworth sees what he has become “The unfortunate physician, while uttering these words, lifted his hands with a look of horror, as if he had beheld some frightful shape, which he could not recognize, usurping the place of his own image in a glass. IT was on of those moments ---which sometimes occur only in the interval of year ---when a man’s moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind’s eye. Not improbably he had never viewed himself as he did now.”(Hawthorne 118) He sees just how far evil he has become, but still Chillingworth continues his vengeful work.The Puritan society itself was a lesson in hypocrisy. Supposedly, they were firm believers in the Bible, but the Bible advocates forgiveness and toleration. The whole society’s basis was on religious enlightenment. Yet, why was it that the first thing that was to be built in Boston was a prison ? Why is the first building thought of a place of punishment? Another example of religious hypocrisy happened early in the book. Hawthorne described some gossiping housewives that were talking about Hester's punishment. Each one of the housewives was advocating harsher punishment for Hester. “The magistrates are God-fearing gentleman, but merciful overmuch,---that is the truth,” added a third autumnal matron. “At the very least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead. Madam Hester would have winced at that, I warrant me.”(Housewife 36). Religion is often the source of much hypocrisy. A great example of God being perverted into something else, were the Crusades . Christian soldiers were told to go and kill “in the name of God”, so they went off into the holy lands and killed the infidel. Fanaticism to a deity is not a good thing. The terrorists of 9/11 killed so many people did so “in the name of God” also. Their creed actually does not call for anything like that. Perversion of God by those who hold power is a sin. Its impossible to truly believe in a religion, and feel justified in killing or persecuting others. The infamous Bill Clinton fiasco was made into big issue because of fundamentalists in government. Newt Gingrich (a former prominent Republican) was much to busy thumping his Bible to even read it. He called for Clinton’s head, even thought Newt liked to philander too. This man was exactly like Arthur Dimmesdale in some respects. Both of them were guilty of a sin they themselves were condemning. Hypocrisy was present in Puritan society and it endures still even today. Hypocrisy is the major theme in The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne’s work was meant to highlight the hypocrisy in Puritan society, and in the people that make up the society. The Scarlet Letter was meant to expose just how much of a sin hypocrisy is, and just how it causes so much pain and suffering.
Herman Melville’s concern with evil. The combination of scientifically strict treatment of facts of life with fantastic circumstances in Moby Dick.
In the writings of Herman Melville, "...the intellectual and moral world appeared as consisting not merely in a duality of good and evil, truth and falsehood, but in endless and soul-defying ambiguities." These uncertainties would bring about the whole suspense of the novels in themselves. They were also the very reason why the contemporaries of the time isolated his writings as precarious. In fact, Melville expands upon this idea with his method of presenting his characters as symbols of things much larger and more complex. In his writings, Melville portrays aspects of nature as evil or destructive. This use of representation and detail help to note Melville as one of the most respected authors of all time. The loved and loathed writer Herman Melville touches on many issues ranging from morality and human nature to biblical themes and metaphysics. Among other themes, many of Melville's works address one of the deepest questions ever posed to humanity: specifically, what is good and what is evil? Melville has faced the issue of good and evil in numerous ways, but here we will be concerned with two approaches. The first, a more symbolic and upfront approach, which Melville takes in his most famous novel, Moby Dick, where Captain Ahab represents evil and the white whale Moby Dick represents good. Second, we will consider the vague approach Melville takes in his famous short story, Bartleby the Scrivener, where the narrator struggles with how to handle his troublesome, yet polite employee , Bartleby. In Moby Dick, good and evil are faced upfront. The book ends in a valiant battle between good and evil, where the crew led by Captain Ahab fights Moby Dick in a significant battle. Although the white whale ends up winning, there is more to the picture than good overcoming evil. Melville shows that although the whale, symbolically white, is mostly representative of good, no one thing is purely good or purely evil. The whale ends up killing the entire crew save the narrator, an act that is hardly benevolent. In the same manner , Captain Ahab is not entirely evil. Once the captain throws his pipe overboard, he takes a turn for the worse. Melville shows us that the captain has become so overwhelmed by the one thing he seeks, namely revenge on Moby Dick, that he cannot enjoy the little things in life he once did. Although he is not purely evil, he has become entirely consumed by a quest for revenge. This approach to good and evil, where the line is blended into a large area of grey , is also echoed in Melville's short story, Bartleby the Scrivener. In the short story, the unnamed narrator hires a new employee, Bartleby, who seems like a reasonable worker at first. Soon after being hired , Bartleby begins employing a curious method of refusing to do work. Each time the narrator asks Bartleby to complete any sort of task, Bartleby politely responds that he "would prefer not to." Although the narrator usually has a hot temper , he cannot find it in himself to get mad at Bartleby, especially after he realizes the sad situation of Bartleby, who turns out to be living in the narrator's office. The narrator is in quite a dilemma , he tries firing Bartleby to no avail, because he simply won't leave the office. The narrator moves offices and then he is called back to deal with Bartleby by the new occupants of the office. The usually quick tempered narrator bonds with Bartleby, which is ironic because Bartleby has been such a hassle to the narrator. In this manner, Melville represents good and evil as another big grey line, only this time in a less direct way. Bartleby isn't treating his employer in a "good" way. At the same time he is always polite and happens to be down on his luck , being homeless . Would it be "evil" to bring police into the matter since Bartleby is unfortunate, or is that a "good" response, being that Bartleby is causing harm to the man and his business? This sort of dilemma which Melville paints does an excellent job of capturing good and evil. Melville shows that there can be many cases where you simply cannot do the "right" thing. Therefore, whatever you do is not the "wrong" thing either. By addressing good and evil this way, Melville teaches the tough lesson that the world isn't black and white, even though it's easier to think it is.
The cetology of Moby-Dick is the zoological classification and study of the properties of whales (i.e. cetology) introduced by United States author Herman Melville in his 1851 novel Moby-Dick. Although the novel is a work of fiction, Melville included sequences of chapters concerned largely with an objective discussion of the properties of whales. The observations, voiced through the narrator Ishmael, were largely drawn from Melville's own first-hand experiences in whaling in the 1840s and include observations of various species from the order of Cetacea. The chapters in which Melville discusses whales in a scientific manner, though connected with the story of Captain Ahab and the Pequod, are often omitted in abridged versions of the novel.
Melville's observations are not a complete scientific study, even by standards of the day. Nevertheless, because of the general lack of knowledge about whales in the middle 19th century, the taxonomy in the novel provides a glimpse of the knowledge of whales by the whaling fleet and naturalists of the era. Though 19th century science is of only historical interest , his command of the English language , or at least of its Yankee version, is unimpeachable, so his definitions cannot be dismissed lightly. Melville somewhat famously asserts in the novel that the whale is a "spouting fish with a horizontal tail." His use of the word "fish" here, however, is not meant a denial of the mammalian characteristics of the order Cetacea, but rather simply as an ad hoc definition as an animal that dwells in the sea; however, he goes on to dismiss Linnaeus' classification as "humbug". He attempts a taxonomy of whales largely based on size, based on his assertion that other characteristics, such as the existence of a hump or baleen, make the classification too confusing. Borrowing an analogy from publishing and bookbinding, he divides whales into three "books", called the Folio Whale (largest), Octavo Whale, and the Duodecimo Whale (smaller), represented respectively by the sperm whale, the orca (which he calls the grampus), and the porpoise. Each such book is then divided into "chapters" representing a separate species. By the current taxonomy of Cetacea, Melville's classification is inaccurate and incomplete as well, presenting only a fraction of the nearly ninety species of Cetaceans known today. In the case of some species, in particular the blue whale (which Melville calls the "sulphur-bottom whale") very little was known at the time. The classification is thus heavily weighted toward whales hunted for oil and other uses, and presents a picture of the common knowledge of whales at the time of the novel. Since Melville presents the study within a fictional context, voiced by a fictional character in the narrative , it is arguable whether or not Melville intended the classification as a serious scientific contribution. Moreover, Melville includes the larger members of the Cetaceans, as well as the porpoises (dolphins). It is quite possible that in the case of the Duodecimo whales (porpoises), Melville has unknowingly combined many disparate species into a single "chapter".
Transcendentalism and its importance for the development of the Americans’ outlook. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry David Thoreau. Literature of Abolitionism. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a powerful exposure of slavery.
Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the 1830s and 1840s in the Eastern region of the United States as a protest to the general state of culture and society, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian church taught at Harvard Divinity School. Among the transcendentalists' core beliefs was the inherent goodness of both people and nature. Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions —particularly organized religion and political parties —ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual. They had faith that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. It is only from such real individuals that true community could be formed . Transcendentalism was in many aspects the first notable American intellectual movement. It certainly was the first to inspire succeeding generations of American intellectuals, as well as a number of literary monuments. Rooted in the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant (and of German Idealism more generally), it developed as a reaction against 18th Century rationalism, John Locke's philosophy of Sensualism, and the predestinationism of New England Calvinism. Its fundamental a variety of diverse sources such as: Vedic thought, various religions, and German idealism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837 , which Oliver Wendell Holmes , Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence". Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print . His first two collections of essays – Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844 – represent the core of his thinking , and include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience . Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects , never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for humankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." His essays remain among the linchpins of American thinking,[citation needed] and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that have followed him. When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was "the infinitude of the private man.“ Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of fellow Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862 ) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. Thoreau's books, articles , essays, journals , and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and "Yankee" love of practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change , and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs. He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi , and Martin Luther King, Jr. Thoreau is sometimes cited as an anarchist, and though Civil Disobedience seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government—"I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government"—the direction of this improvement points toward anarchism: "'That government is best which governs not at all'; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have." Richard Drinnon partly blames Thoreau for the ambiguity , noting that Thoreau's "sly satire , his liking for wide margins for his writing, and his fondness for paradox provided ammunition for widely divergent interpretations of 'Civil Disobedience.'
Abolitionism - used as a single word, was a movement to end slavery, whether formal or informal. The term has become adopted by those seeking the abolishment of any perceived injustice to a group of people. In 1796, John Gabriel Stedman published the memoirs of his five-year voyage to the Dutch -controlled Surinam in South America as part of a military force sent out to subdue bosnegers, former slaves living in the inlands. The book is critical of the treatment of slaves and contains many images by William Blake and Francesco Bartolozzi depicting the cruel treatment of runaway slaves. It was an example of what became a large body of abolitionist literature. Historians and literary critics find the roots of English nineteenth-century abolitionist literature in the preceding century. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals such as compassionate humanitarianism and a new concept of liberty, combined with a growing religious zeal which stressed the perfectibility of mankind and the brotherhood of all races , caused profound changes in how the English thought and wrote about slavery. A great deal of scholarship has devoted itself to tracing the growth of antislavery sentiment in English poetry and literature from the eighteenth century, especially in that century's romantic idealization of the “noble savage.” However halting and sporadic these changes in racial attitudes expressed in literature were, most critics agree that by the end of the eighteenth century abolitionism had gained considerable momentum and had become a cause championed by many of England's most respected and influential Romantic writers. By 1770 abolitionism was no longer confined to isolated literary individuals or radical Quakers who for decades had denounced the British slave trade and slavery itself. Thomas Chatterton expressed his disgust for slavery in his 1770 African Eclogues, poems that condemned the inhumanity of English slavers and stressed the innocence of Africans. Two years later, Lord Mansfield ruled that liberty was a hallmark of the British Constitution and that any slave brought to England would automatically be freed. In 1787 the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was established with the express goal of gaining popular acceptance and political legislation for the abolition of the British slave trade, which by the end of the eighteenth century was responsible for supplying nearly 50,000 slaves annually to British, French, Spanish , and Portuguese colonies in the New World. Over the next few years, numerous English poets and authors—among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, William Blake, Anne Yearsley, Hannah More, and William Cowper—helped further the cause of the Abolition Society by writing poems and essays meant to prod parliamentary debate and the reform of the slave trade. Although these literary efforts were instrumental in gaining support from the public and for petitions for legislative reform, the abolition drives of the late 1780s and early 1790s were repeatedly unsuccessful because of the influence of the pro-slavery West Indian lobby and the 1793 war between England and France, which strengthened conservative opinion against what was considered the radicalism of abolitionism. Finally, in 1807, the continued efforts of the Abolition Society and abolitionist authors had their desired effect when Britain formally abolished the slave trade.The outlawing of the British slave trade in 1807 did not mean an end to English abolitionist writing. Despite the new law, English slavers continued to buy African slaves and ship them to the New World, and slavery continued to be permitted in British colonies in the Caribbean , facts frequently noted in abolitionist essays and poems. After 1807, abolitionist writers such as William Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, and Thomas DeQuincey increasingly directed their attention toward ending slavery altogether, at home and abroad, delivering speeches, publishing slaves' narratives, and writing poetry and prose exposing the brutality and inhumanity of slavery. As in the Abolition Society's parliamentary petition drives of the 1780s and 1790s, women abolitionist writers played a major role in voicing public disapproval of slavery. English abolitionism gained its greatest victory in 1833 when slavery was abolished throughout the British empire .The period between 1787 and 1833 represented the zenith of English abolitionist literature, but even after 1833 English authors continued to denounce the existence of slavery in the New World, targeting especially the United States. Writers such as Frances Trollope, Walter Savage Landor, and Charles Dickens expressed scorn that the new nation could so passionately point to their revolutionary heritage of liberty and equality while allowing the enslavement of more than half a million black slaves in the South. Others, such as the author of the anonymous 1852 novel Uncle Tom in England, which was published months after Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic Uncle Tom's Cabin, sought to shame the United States by unfavorably comparing the social hierarchy in America to that in Britain. After slavery in North America was made illegal in 1863, English abolitionist literature all but came to an end. Although this genre of writing has sometimes been criticized today for its own brand of racism and imperialism , it certainly had great influence in expressing and rallying popular support for the end of slavery in the Western world. The strength of Uncle Tom's Cabin is its ability to illustrate slavery's effect on families , and to help readers empathize with enslaved characters. Stowe's characters freely debated the causes of slavery, the Fugitive Slave Law, the future of freed people, what an individual could do, and racism. Writing in the 1950s, poet Langston Hughes called the book a "moral battle cry for freedom." According to legend, Abraham Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862 by saying "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." Whether the story is true or not, the sentiment underscores the public connection between Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Civil War. The Civil War rose from a mixture of causes including regional conflicts between North and South, economic forces, and humanitarian concerns for the welfare of enslaved people. The four year war pitted one section of the country against another and almost destroyed the United States. Uncle Tom's Cabin contributed to the outbreak of war by personalizing the political and economic arguments about slavery. Stowe's informal, conversational writing style inspired people in a way that political speeches, tracts and newspapers accounts could not. Uncle Tom's Cabin helped many 19th-century Americans determine what kind of country they wanted. Immediately after its publication, Uncle Tom's Cabin was both lauded as an achievement and attacked as inaccurate: The most liberal abolitionists felt the book was not strong enough in its call to immediately end slavery, disliked Stowe's tacit support of the colonization movement, and suggested that Stowe's main character Tom was not forceful enough. More moderate anti-slavery advocates and reformers praised the book for putting a human face on those held in slavery, emphasizing the impact slavery had on families, and helping the public understand and empathize with the plight of enslaved mothers. Pro-slavery forces claimed that slavery was sanctioned in the Bible, that Tom was too noble, and accused Stowe of fabricating unrealistic, one-sided images of Southern slavery. Stowe responded to her critics by writing The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, an annotated bibliography of her sources. Researching and writing The Key reinforced Stowe's anti-slavery sentiments and turned her into an abolitionist. Her second anti-slavery novel, Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), was much more forceful and advocated an immediate end to slavery. During the Civil War, Stowe criticized British businesses that continued to trade with Southern cotton suppliers, and was impatient with President Lincoln's willingness to postpone freeing people held in slavery. The Influence and Popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin - Uncle Tom's Cabin made Stowe an international celebrity . When she traveled to Britain in 1853 to secure copyright protection for her novel Dred, she was rushed excitedly by crowds on the streets and invited by nobility to their estates. She was presented with a 26 volume leather bound petition signed by British women living all over the world, including the Duchess of Sutherland, the Countess of Shaftsbury, and chambermaids and bakers' wives, begging their American sisters to immediately abolish slavery. Stowe was invited to anti-slavery rallies, where she hid behind Victorian propriety and had her husband or her brother present comments on her behalf. Queen Victoria was eager to meet the famous author, but was urged by advisors not to receive such a controversial figure. Instead, as Stowe's sister Mary related in a letter, the Queen arranged to pass Stowe's carriage on the road, so the two women could silently nod to each other. Stowe's three European tours brought her similar acclaim. She was welcomed by ex-patriot American writers in Italy and forged long term friendships. The power of her celebrity and influence made other social reform groups appeal for her support. Sometimes she agreed, as when she contributed editorials to the New York newspaper, The Independent, or sent items to anti-slavery fund-raising fairs. Other times she declined, as when she refused Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony's request to edit their women's suffrage newspaper The Revolution. Uncle Tom's Cabin: from 1852 to Today - Uncle Tom's Cabin struck a nerve and found a permanent place in American culture. Translated into more than sixty languages , it is known throughout the world. After a century and a half this classic anti-slavery novel remains an engaging and powerful work, read in college and high school courses dealing with literature, history, and issues of race and gender . Pulitzer prize-winning author Jane Smiley notes that literature should help us face responsibilities not avoid them. Stowe's words changed the world: her bravery as she picked up her pen inspires us to believe in our own ability to effect positive change. Uncle Tom's Cabin, with its compelling story, challenges us to confront America's complicated past and connect it to today's issues.
Walt Whitman’s poetry as an expression of the ideals and spirit of democratic America.
Whitman’s poetry is democratic in both its subject matter and its language. As the great lists that make up a large part of Whitman’s poetry show, anything—and anyone—is fair game for a poem. Whitman is concerned with cataloguing the new America he sees growing around him. Just as America is far different politically and practically from its European counterparts, so too must American poetry distinguish itself from previous models. Thus we see Whitman breaking new ground in both subject matter and diction. In a way, though, Whitman is not so unique. His preference for the quotidian links him with both Dante , who was the first to write poetry in a vernacular language, and with Wordsworth, who famously stated that poetry should aim to speak in the “language of ordinary men.” Unlike Wordsworth, however, Whitman does not romanticize the proletariat or the peasant. Instead he takes as his model himself. The stated mission of his poetry was, in his words, to make “[a]n attempt to put a Person, a human being ( myself , in the latter half of the 19th century, in America) freely, fully, and truly on record .” A truly democratic poetry, for Whitman, is one that, using a common language, is able to cross the gap between the self and another individual, to effect a sympathetic exchange of experiences. This leads to a distinct blurring of the boundaries between the self and the world and between public and private. Whitman prefers spaces and situations—like journeys, the out-of-doors, cities—that allow for ambiguity in these respects. Thus we see poems like “Song of the Open Road” and “ Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” where the poet claims to be able to enter into the heads of others. Exploration becomes not just a trope but a mode of existence. For Whitman, spiritual communion depends on physical contact, or at least proximity. The body is the vessel that enables the soul to experience the world. Therefore the body is something to be worshipped and given a certain primacy . Eroticism, particularly homoeroticism, figures significantly in Whitman’s poetry. This is something that got him in no small amount of trouble during his lifetime . The erotic interchange of his poetry, though, is meant to symbolize the intense but always incomplete connection between individuals. Having sex is the closest two people can come to being one merged individual, but the boundaries of the body always prevent a complete union. The affection Whitman shows for the bodies of others, both men and women, comes out of his appreciation for the linkage between the body and the soul and the communion that can come through physical contact. He also has great respect for the reproductive and generative powers of the body, which mirror the intellect’s generation of poetry. The Civil War diminished Whitman’s faith in democratic sympathy. While the cause of the war nominally furthered brotherhood and equality, the war itself was a quagmire of killing. Reconstruction , which began to fail almost immediately after it was begun , further disappointed Whitman. His later poetry, which displays a marked insecurity about the place of poetry and the place of emotion in general (see in particular “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”), is darker and more isolated. Whitman’s style remains consistent throughout, however. The poetic structures he employs are unconventional but reflect his democratic ideals. Lists are a way for him to bring together a wide variety of items without imposing a hierarchy on them. Perception, rather than analysis, is the basis for this kind of poetry, which uses few metaphors or other kinds of symbolic language. Anecdotes are another favored device . By transmitting a story, often one he has gotten from another individual, Whitman hopes to give his readers a sympathetic experience, which will allow them to incorporate the anecdote into their own history. The kind of language Whitman uses sometimes supports and sometimes seems to contradict his philosophy. He often uses obscure, foreign , or invented words. This, however, is not meant to be intellectually elitist but is instead meant to signify Whitman’s status as a unique individual. Democracy does not necessarily mean sameness. The difficulty of some of his language also mirrors the necessary imperfection of connections between individuals: no matter how hard we try, we can never completely understand each other. Whitman largely avoids rhyme schemes and other traditional poetic devices. He does, however, use meter in masterful and innovative ways, often to mimic natural speech. In these ways, he is able to demonstrate that he has mastered traditional poetry but is no longer subservient to it, just as democracy has ended the subservience of the individual.
The innovations in the poetic technique and subject matter in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass ( seminar ).
Leaves of Grass: Democratic Themes - When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer I Hear America Singing In his Preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman states, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem”. Whitman was the ultimate Transcendentalist/ Romantic. He united democratic themes and subject matter with free verse form. In Leaves of Grass, Whitman celebrates unity of all life and people. He embraces diversity of geography, culture, work, sexuality, and beliefs. Whitman’s impact solidifies American dreams of independence, freedom, and fulfillment, and transforms them for larger spiritual meaning. Whitman values hard work and being humble and non-egotistical. His ideals are things such as good health, soul, and the love of nature. Whitman expresses his celebration of working class democracy through the “varied carols” of men and women who take pride in their occupations in the poem “I Hear America Singing”. For example, he writes: I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat , the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck... (lines1-5) Whitman writes about the diversity of work here and the people who take pride in what they do. His use of imagery creates a vivid picture of hard working people. Whitman modified standard “King’s English” diction and abandoned traditional rhyme schemes and formal meters. Free verse is apparent throughout Whitman’s works, which he patterned after ancient poetic forms, incantations, and praises from The Bible (Psalms) and Homer . He attempts to mirror the patterns of spoken language. Whitman’s values are reflected in his subject matter and style. In “Song of Myself #1,” for example, Whitman writes: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. (l.1-3) Whitman celebrates unity of all life and people. His belief in equality for all people is also depicted in these lines. The following line reflects Whitman’s love of nature: My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air...(l.6) For Whitman to say he was formed from nature shows just how much he believed he was one with nature. The “I” has become identified with every element in the universe. Whitman was a bundle of contradictions because the form was loose enough to allow for long lists and catalogs abundant in detail, but also flexible to include delicate moments of lyricism and oratory. Whitman extended cadence of poetic lines through parallelism, alliteration and assonance. For example, in “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” he writes: When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams , to add, divide , and measure them, When I heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room...(l.1-4) Whitman uses parallelism in this poem when he repeatedly states “When” at the beginning of each line. Whitman suggests that the working class is valued highly in his opinion because the astronomer in this poem seems to be a hard worker who earns his applause in the lecture-room. The poem has no periods or ending punctuation except at the end. It is all one long sentence. Whitman is the father of Modern Poetry; his work suggests the revolutionary power of democracy and literary art. When Whitman stated “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” I believe he meant that the diversity of geography, culture, beliefs and work all combine to create a wonderful country. Whitman’s subject matter and style tie together to reflect his values of a working class democracy, humbleness and the enjoyment of life. Whitman’s impact has solidified American dreams (of independence, freedom, and fulfillment) and transcends, transforms them for a larger spiritual meaning.
Emily Dickinson’s sensuous and intimate poetry (seminar).
Dickinson left no formal statement of her aesthetic intentions and, because of the variety of her themes, her work does not fit conveniently into any one genre. She has been regarded, alongside Emerson (whose poems Dickinson admired), as a Transcendentalist. However, Farr disagrees with this analysis, saying that Dickinson's "relentlessly measuring mind ... deflates the airy elevation of the Transcendental". Apart from the major themes discussed below, Dickinson's poetry frequently uses humor , puns, irony and satire.Flowers and gardens - Farr notes that Dickinson's "poems and letters almost wholly concern flowers" and that allusions to gardens often refer to an "imaginative realm ... wherein flowers [are] often emblems for actions and emotions". She associates some flowers, like gentians and anemones, with youth and humility; others with prudence and insight. Her poems were often sent to friends with accompanying letters and nosegays. Farr notes that one of Dickinson's earlier poems, written about 1859 , appears to "conflate her poetry itself with the posies": "My nosegays are for Captives – / Dim – long expectant eyes – / Fingers denied the plucking, / Patient till Paradise – / To such, if they sh'd whisper / Of morning and the moor – / They bear no other errand, / And I, no other prayer".The Master poems - Dickinson left a large number of poems addressed to "Signor", "Sir" and "Master", who is characterized as Dickinson's "lover for all eternity ".[146] These confessional poems are often "searing in their self-inquiry" and "harrowing to the reader" and typically take their metaphors from texts and paintings of Dickinson's day. The Dickinson family themselves believed these poems were addressed to actual individuals but this view is frequently rejected by scholars. Farr, for example, contends that the Master is an unattainable composite figure, "human, with specific characteristics, but godlike" and speculates that Master may be a "kind of Christian muse ". Morbidity - Dickinson's poems reflect her "early and lifelong fascination" with illness, dying and death. Perhaps surprisingly for a New England spinster, her poems allude to death by many methods: "crucifixion, drowning, hanging, suffocation, freezing, premature burial, shooting, stabbing and guillotinage". She reserved her sharpest insights into the "death blow aimed by God" and the "funeral in the brain ", often reinforced by images of thirst and starvation. Dickinson scholar Vivian Pollak considers these references an autobiographical reflection of Dickinson's "thirsting-starving persona ", an outward expression of her needy self-image as small, thin and frail. Dickinson's most psychologically complex poems explore the theme that the loss of hunger for life causes the death of self and place this at "the interface of murder and suicide ". Gospel poems - Throughout her life, Dickinson wrote poems reflecting a preoccupation with the teachings of Jesus Christ and, indeed, many are addressed to him. She stresses the Gospels' contemporary pertinence and recreates them, often with "wit and American colloquial language".Scholar Dorothy Oberhaus finds that the " salient feature uniting Christian poets ... is their reverential attention to the life of Jesus Christ" and contends that Dickinson's deep structures place her in the "poetic tradition of Christian devotion" alongside Hopkins, Eliot and Auden. In a Nativity poem, Dickinson combines lightness and wit to revisit an ancient theme: "The Savior must have been / A docile Gentleman – / To come so far so cold a Day / For little Fellowmen / The Road to Bethlehem / Since He and I were Boys / Was leveled, but for that twould be / A rugged billion Miles –". The Undiscovered Continent - Academic Suzanne Juhasz considers that Dickinson saw the mind and spirit as tangible visitable places and that for much of her life she lived within them. Often, this intensely private place is referred to as the "undiscovered continent" and the "landscape of the spirit" and embellished with nature imagery. At other times, the imagery is darker and forbidding—castles or prisons, complete with corridors and rooms —to create a dwelling place of "oneself" where one resides with one's other selves.[149] An example that brings together many of these ideas is: "Me from Myself – to banish – / Had I Art – / Impregnable my Fortress / Unto All Heart – / But since myself—assault Me – / How have I peace / Except by subjugating / Consciousness . / And since We're mutual Monarch / How this be / Except by Abdication – / Me – of Me?".
Varieties of realism in American literature. Local colour fiction. Francis Bret Harte. W. D. Howells’s genteel realism.
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" (A Handbook to Literature 428). Many critics have suggested that there is no clear distinction between realism and its related late nineteenth-century movement, naturalism . As Donald Pizer notes in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, the term "realism" is difficult to define, in part because it is used differently in European contexts than in American literature. Pizer suggests that "whatever was being produced in fiction during the 1870s and 1880s that was new, interesting , and roughly similar in a number of ways can be designated as realism, and that an equally new, interesting, and roughly similar body of writing produced at the turn of the century can be designated as naturalism" (5). Put rather too simplistically, one rough distinction made by critics is that realism espousing a deterministic philosophy and focusing on the lower classes is considered naturalism. In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of time from the Civil War to the turn of the century during which William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction devoted to accurate representation and an exploration of American lives in various contexts. As the United States grew rapidly after the Civil War, the increasing rates of democracy and literacy , the rapid growth in industrialism and urbanization, an expanding population base due to immigration , and a relative rise in middle-class affluence provided a fertile literary environment for readers interested in understanding these rapid shifts in culture. In drawing attention to this connection, Amy Kaplan has called realism a " strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change" (Social Construction of American Realism ix). Realism was a movement that encompassed the entire country, or at least the Midwest and South, although many of the writers and critics associated with realism (notably W. D. Howells) were based in New England. Among the Midwestern writers considered realists would be Joseph Kirkland, E. W. Howe, and Hamlin Garland ; the Southern writer John W. DeForest's Miss Ravenal's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty is often considered a realist novel, too. Characteristics:Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. Selective presentation of reality with an emphasis on verisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made plot . Character is more important than action and plot; complex ethical choices are often the subject. Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament and motive; they are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past. Class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class. Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels avoid the sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances. Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact. Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important: overt authorial comments or intrusions diminish as the century progresses. Interior or psychological realism a variant form.
In literature, regionalism or local color refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features – including characters, dialects, customs, history, and landscape – of a particular region. American Literary Regionalism has been the subject of scholarship for the past several decades and has been a central site for scholarly debate on a variety of methodologies including Feminism and New Historicism. This sub- field of American literary studies has been traditionally located in the late-nineteenth century. Local Colorism or Regionalism as first appeared in the late 1860s and early seventies in America. Hamlin Garland defined local colorism as having “such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native.” The ultimate aim of the local colorists is, as Garland indicates, to create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. They tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life. They formed an important part of the realistic movement. Influences : Although it lost its momentum toward the end of the nineteenth century, the local spirit continued to inspire and fertilize the imagination of authors such as Willa Cather, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner.Mark Twain is a representative.
Bret Harte (1836- 1902 ), American author, essayist, humorist, and critic wrote The Luck of Roaring Camp (1870), one of his first and most successful works. Francis Brett Harte was born on 25 August 1836 in Albany, New York, the son of a teacher , Henry Harte and his wife Elizabeth Ostrander. Young Frank was frail as a child due to ill health, and the family moved often on account of his father's profession in seasonal teaching positions . Frank turned to books as his favourite indoor pursuit, studying the Bible and reading Byron, Dickens, and Poe among others. After his father's death the family moved to Oakland, California in 1853, and his mother remarried Colonial Andrew Williams . Harte taught for a while, and also worked in the mining industry. The weekly newspaper Northern Californian was Harte's first exposure to journalism, editing, and writing. When drunken Union members murdered countless Wiyot Indian men, women, and children in the Gunther's Island Massacre in 1860, Harte lashed out in editorial rage and barely escaped with his life when the locals ran him out of town. "Today we record acts of Indian aggression and white retaliation. It is a humiliating fact that the parties who may be supposed to represent white civilization have committed the greater barbarity." Harte made his way to San Francisco where he was soon working as a typesetter and contributing poems, articles, and short stories for the journal The Golden Era. He started signing his works as "Bret" or "The Bohemian". The income was barely enough to survive , and he ended up landing the position of superintendent's secretary of the United States Mint . The same year, 1862, he married Anna Griswold with whom he'd have four children. His position with the Mint afforded him much time to pursue his writing as a freelancer. He was a staunch pro-Union supporter of Abraham Lincoln and was allowed the freedom of expression he believed in so heartily, though a number of social blunders later on would cost him dearly. Harte expanded his literary scope with many items published in the The Californian, a slightly more sophisticated journal featuring serials, illustrations, poetry, political essays, satire, and parodies of other author's works. Much of his work was based on life in the Californian mining camps, though he also wrote many sardonic items such as "Neighborhoods I Have Moved From; by a Hypochondriac". He also tried his hand at book reviews , plays, and literary criticism. The Lost Galleon and Other Tales (1867) was one of his first major works. The same year he became editor of the literary journal The Overland Monthly where his famous stories of "The Luck of Roaring Camp" (1870) brought him widespread fame . Plain Language from Truthful James (1870) followed. He was no sooner a member of the literati in San Francisco when he and his family decided to head east again and settled in Boston. His well-earned positive reviews and accolades preceded him and he was soon well-acquainted with New England authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, among others. It also greatly helped that the journal Atlantic Monthly had contracted him for a year's worth of writing with a whopping advance of $10,000. He fulfilled his end of the deal finally though he was often late in submitting articles and his publisher William Dean Howells was not impressed. And his readers were turning elsewhere. After moving to his native New York to write freelance, his novel Gabriel Conroy (1876) and his collaboration with Mark Twain on the play Ah Sin (1878) proved unsuccessful in providing adequate income for the Harte family. He and Twain quarrelled bitterly amid rumours of his belligerence, spendthrift habits , drinking, and womanising which would haunt him for years to come. Harte had mastered the genre of gold rush fiction, capturing the corruption and greed in nostalgic prose, with vivid descriptions of the myriad characters he had known and the wild new frontier lands he had traversed. However he would never quite maintain the impetus of his first published successes. His financial stresses took a turn for the better when in 1878 he was recommended and duly appointed to the United States Consul, first in Crefeld, Germany , then Glasgow, Scotland until 1885. The strain was still there however as it was not lucrative enough to support Anna and the children joining him in Europe. After his service he spent the majority of his latter days in London. He mostly wrote in the same format as his early days but even when testing new material his audience was tiring of his romanticising. Drift from Two Shores (1878), Poetical Works (1880), In the Carquinez Woods (1883), Maruja (1885), The Queen of the Pirate Isle ( 1886 ), The Crusade of the Excelsior (1887), and The Argonauts of North Liberty (1888) were many of his prolific titles to follow. A Ward of the Golden Gate (1890), A Sappho of Green Springs ( 1891 ), Sally Dows (1893), A Protégée of Jack Hamlin's (1894), Poetical Works of Bret Harte (1896), The Three Partners ( 1897 ), Stories in Light and Shadow (1898), The Complete Poetical Works (1899), From Sand Hill to Pine (1900), Under the Redwoods (1901), and Openings in the Old Trail (1902) were some of his many later works. Though Anna moved to London in 1898 she did not live with Harte. He had been living, some say as a kept man, for a number of years at the estate of his friend and agent, Madame Hydeline Van de Velde. Francis Brett Harte died of throat cancer on 5 May 1902 at the Van de Velde estate in Camberley and lies buried in St. Peter's churchyard, Frimley, England. The gravestone is etched with one of his own poems "Death Shall Reap the Braver Harvest."
William Dean Howells, (genteel realism) a fearless and enthusiastic champion of the new school, felt that he must say what he observed and knew. Howells viewed realism as "nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material." In defense of the real, as opposed to the ideal, he wrote, "I hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the common, average man, who always 'has the standard of the arts in his power,' will have also the courage to apply it, and will reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in literature, in art, because it is not 'simple, natural, and honest,' because it is not like a real grasshopper. But I will own that I think the time is yet far off, and that the people who have been brought up on the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted, adventureful, good old romantic card-board grasshopper, must die out before the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper can have a fair field.“ Howells believed the future of American writing was not in poetry but in novels, a form which he saw shifting from "romance" to a serious form.
Mark Twain and his critique of American civilisation through the eyes of children.
Mark Twain shared a common understanding of U.S. identity and world mission. The national narrative originated in nineteenth-century history texts, which fuse Protestant-Christian and Enlightenment values. According to the textbooks, the Puritans came to the New World to establish religious freedom, and American civil liberties are a uniquely Protestant idea. The doctrine of Free Trade became part of the narrative, semantically shifting words like “freedom” to connote the marketplace rather than the social arena. By the end of the century the energies of 19th-century evangelical outreach crossed over into U.S. national self-fashioning, and history texts positioned the Founding Fathers as directors of a divinely mandated mission to spread American civilization around the globe . The contradiction lay in the fact that although the narrative indicated that it was America’s duty to help other nations gain freedom from oppressive colonial powers, it also suggested that only people of Anglo-Saxon descent were capable of fully enacting modern civilization.Twain supported American intervention in Cuba because he believed that we had practiced our values by helping Cubans free themselves from Spain . At first he also supported intervention in the Philippines , but when he realized our intent was “to subjugate, not to redeem,” the Filipinos , he changed his mind. He thought President McKinley’s claim that it was America’s duty to “civilize and Christianize” the Filipinos was “hogwash” and “pious hypocrisy,” and he was keenly aware of the racism that drove the debates—exemplified by Pennsylvania’s Representative Henry Dickinson Green’s declaration that he opposed a citizenship for Filipinos because “We cannot make them white. We cannot make them like our citizens.” Twain also recognized the damage annexation could do to our national reputation. By 1899 Mark Twain was very much a citizen of the world, and he knew that all eyes were on the U.S. as it pondered whether or not to annex. Opinions varied. Rudyard Kipling , speaking for the imperialists, urged the U.S. to “take up the white man’s burden” and help Britain spread western civilization around the world, while Europeans sneered that the Americans, who had berated them for dividing Africa and Asia among themselves, had fallen at the first temptation to get a colony of their own. Rubén Darío, speaking for Latin Americans, accused Teddy Roosevelt of believing “that progress is just eruption,/ that wherever you put bullets,/ you put the future, too.” And Apolinario Mabini, crafter of the Philippine constitution, warned the U.S. that “force … cannot annihilate the aspirations of eight million souls who are conscious of their own power, honor , and rights; blood will not drown them, it will only nourish their great ideas, the eternal principles.”Clearly, Mark Twain was not alone in thinking that the Americans had betrayed their founding values for what he labeled a “backseat” in the community of imperialist nations. That narrative still drives Americans’ understanding of national identity. We still believe we are a nation of white Protestants, despite massive evidence to the contrary, and our politicians have to avow their Christianity to be creditable. Our leaders invoke divine guidance when they dispatch troops, and we quarrel endlessly over the contents of American history texts. Moreover the rest of the world continues to fling our values back at us: in 2006 Iranian President Mahmound Ahmadinejad asked President Bush how it was possible to bomb Afghanistan and still profess “to be a follower of Jesus Christ…feel obliged to respect human rights, [and] present liberalism as a civilization model.” Twain called the Philippine-American War “a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater,“ adding , “I wish I could see what we are getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.” We’ve been stuck in a lot of quagmires since 1900. We’ve rarely benefited from them, and each time, policy decisions have eroded civil liberties at home and pummeled our reputation abroad. Now the fusions of marketplace, foreign policy, and religious ideologies have driven us into a world crisis, but our national narrative has not changed, and we are unable to break through to a clearer understanding of who we are and how we should be conducting ourselves on the world stage.
Henry James’s psychological realism.
All fiction is in part autobiography, and any autobiography is partly a fiction—a great novelist is perhaps most of all. Like one of his characters, Henry James was an artist reconnoitering socity, a “passionate pilgrim ” in search of experience. Born into a wealthy cultured family, Henry James one of the few authors in American literary history who did not have to worry about money. His father, Henry James, Sir was an imminent philosopher and reformer, and his brother, William James, was to be the famous philosopher and psychologist. His early up bringing was usual—he was exposed to the culture influence of Europe at a very early age. James was a voluminous writer. His whole life was a long career of continual fertile peoductivity. The quantity of work filled up a good many volumes—novels, travel papers, critical assays, literary portraits, plays, autobiographies, and a series of critical prefaces on the art of fiction. In addition, he was a copious letters writer and left a number of notebooks.The creative life of Henry James can be divided in to three distinctive periods. In the first period (1865-1882), he produced a number of novels, among which, the most important include The American, Daisy Miller which won him international fame and which reveals James’ fascination with his “international theme”, and The portrait of a Lady, one of the greatest books that James ever wrote. The second period of his career extended from 1882 to 1895 , in which he dropped the “international theme” and wrote his tales of subtle studies of inter-personal relationships. Between 1895 and 1960, he wrote a few novellas and tales dealing with childhood and adolescence, which was a reveal of his earlier theme of innocence in a corrupted world. The most famous of these are the enigmatic The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew. In the first four years of the 20th century, James wrote three great novels The Ambassadors, The wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl which represented the summit of his art. In the last years of his life, he wrote some American impressions and some autobiographical matter, and left two novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the past unfinished. During his life time, his fame rested largely upon his handling of his major fictional theme, “the international theme”: the meeting of American and Europe, American innocent contact with Europe decadence, and its moral and psychological complications. In his whole writing career James was concerned with “point of view” which is at the center of aesthetic of the novel. To correspondent to life the author should avoid artificial omniscience as much as possible. He used a particular method of telling the story, that is, illumination of the situation and character through one or several minds. This method he called “point of view. Henry James was a special kind of psychological realism. He found George Eliot his ideal of the Philosophical novelist impressed by her looking into the minds and souls of her characters. His realism was a special kind of psychological realism. Few of his stories including big events or exciting actions, In fact, the characters in his finest novels watch more than they live in it. Things happened to them, but not as a result of their own actions. We are interested in how their minds respond to the events of the story. What do they see? How do they try to understand it? The changing consciousness of the character is the real story. In the late 19th century, most readers were not ready for such a new approach and so Henry James’ greatest novels were not very popular. But in 20th century literature, the “ stream consciousness” method has become quite common. Thanks to modern psychology and the writers like Henry James, we are now more interested in the workings of the mind. James is now firmly established as one of American’s major novelists and critical and as a psychological, realist of unsurpassed subtlety.