Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Y AUTORES
NORTEAMERICANOS
HASTA EL SIGLO XX
UNIT 1
JOHN SMITH (1580-1631)
1. Introduction
Did Pocahontas actually save Captain John Smith, or did Smith make up the story
in order to gain popularity? Professor J. A. Leo Lemay of the University of Delaware
has recently written a book on the subject in which he argues convincingly that the
story is true. Lemay is the first scholar to have seriously studied the question in
over a hundred years, and due to his thoroughness and the modern conveniences
that make research so much easier in our century than in previous ones, I believe
that his book may well become the definitive work on the subject.
We start our introduction to John Smith history through this question due to the
importance Pocahontas has in his life history.
Now the question before us is whether John Smith, who is generally considered an
honest man and whose descriptions about Eastern Europe and early Virginia have
been shown to be accurate, lied when he said that Pocahontas saved his life. To
convict Smith of falsehood, we must find some strong motivation for him to act out
of character, some evidence that the story did not happen (or lack of evidence that
it did), and some reason to explain why no one seriously questioned the story for
250 years. On the contrary, we will see that Smith's motives were more likely to
cause him to hide the story than to advertise it, and that the evidence for the story
is overwhelming.
2. History
John Smith was the author of the first English book written in America: A true
relation of such occurrences and accidents of notes as hath happened in Virginia.
(published in London, June 1608). He wrote it as a personal letter to a friend in
England while being in Virginia. After this book, he wrote various ones about the
English colonization of America. (Map of Virginia 1612-, General history of
Virginia 1624-, The true travels 1630)
He was born into a farmers family in Willoughby (Lincolnshire). After his fathers
death, while being 16, he went to the Netherlands as a volunteer soldier to fight
for the Dutch independence. This marked the beginning of his military career. In
1600 he joined the Austrian army (The true travels, adventures and observations
of Captain John Smith in Europe, Asia, Africa and America (1630)) to fight against
the Turks and was promoted to captain while fighting in Hungary. In Transylvania
he was wounded, taken prisoner and sold to a Turk as a slave. This Turk send
captain Smith as a gift to his sweetheart in Istambul. This lady fell in love with him
and send him to her brother to be trained for the Turkish Imperial Service. Smith
killed him and run away back to Transylvania where he was rewarded.
1 Before this letter, he wrote A true relation of such occurrences and accidents of notes as hath
happened in Virginia (1608, his first book), and Map of Virginia (1612), and there is no trace of the
princess in any of them.
Advertisements for
Anywhere, 1631
the
Unexperienced
Planters
of
New
England,
or
of white beads around their necks. The Queen of Apomattoc brought him water to
washhis hands and another one brought him a bunch of feathers as a towel. They
feasted him and then, a consultation was held. He was condemned to death, but
Pocahontas, Powhatan Kings dearest daughter, sacrificed her life for his, taking his
head in her arms and laying hers upon him.
4.1. Smith like author
His way of writing:
4.2. Vocabulary
He is the author of the first English work written in America: A true Relation of
Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia (written
to a friend. Published in London as a pamphlet in 1608).
Autobiographical work: The true travels, Adventures and Observations of
Captain John Smith in Europe, Asia and America (1630) Many critics doubt
about its authenticity.
READING: General History of Virginia, New England and the Summer Isles (1624)
[Book III, Chapter 2]
UNIT 2
WILLIAM BRADFORD (1590-1657)
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Yorkshire.
Spiritually moved by the nonconformist minister Richard Clyfton. At the age of 12
years old, he attended separatist meetings. He left his family home for Scrooby to
join a community separated form the Church of England. Strict Calvinist protestants
who supported the separation of church and state, covenanted churches that
swore loyalty to the group instead of the king. They were often persecuted as
heretics and traitors.
In 1608, The Scrooby congregation, fearful for their lives, goes to Holland. There he
becomes a weaver and marries the daughter of a Separatist elder.
Due to poor economic conditions, the Scrooby congregation decided to move to
New England in search of a better life and set themselves apart form the rest of the
world and establish the City of God on earth.
They regarded their journey to the promised land as a religious pilgrimage they
were called the Pilgrim Fathers. They were also labelled Puritans, since they
wanted to maintain a church of ancient purity(most English Puritans at that time
were non-separatists, they hoped to institute reforms).
In July 1620, they sailed to England and hired the merchant vessel Mayflower and
embarked from Southampton. They travelled with other emigrants recruited by the
English investors. The English investors financed the voyage and the settlement,
and the settlers invested their personal labour for seven years. After 66 days
at sea, finally they disembarked at the site of the future town of Plymouth on
December 11, 1620.
Bradford was one of the authors of the Mayflower Compact a civil convenant drawn
up by the Pilgrims (still on board) to guarantee co-operation because unity was
essential for the survival of the colony and the settlers who were outside the church
were included. The agreement provided for social and economic freedom, while still
maintaining ties with Great Britain.
Bradford was elected governor of Plymouth Colony and re-elected thirty times.
Self-educated man, learned several languages. Particularly skilled in Hebrew to see
with his own eyes the ancient oracles in their native beauty
WORKS
Little interest in Native culture, no attention to the beauty of the New World:
authors depiction on his arrival.
Balance between the wilderness and the support received from God.
The chief influence was the Bible. A biblical reference: there is a direct analogy
to Saints Paul shipwreck. Bradford points out a difference because these savage
barbarians did not provide them with food or shelter. The Wampanoag had
had previous contact with European explorers such as commercial exchanges
sometimes ending in violent disorder.
Pilgrims as the Israelites chosen people and America as the promised land but
a basic difference pointed out by Bradford (Moses could see from the Pisgah the
Promised Land in Deuteronomy ).
The genre of Puritan history enhances spiritual life by interpreting Gods design:
human history as a progress of mankind toward a predetermined end. Of Plymouth
Plantation is not a chronicle but a history the work is an intentionally ideological
document Bradford produced a good example of providentialist historiography.
Puritans officially condemned ornate speech (English Aristocracy) They promoted
humble modes to inform and instruct, not to please But Bradford was a true
Renaissance man, familiar with the literary fashion, his style was not so plain
(adjectives, length of sentences, comparisons, the words,...).
Puritan theology was designed to transform lives and to inspire action.
His attitude to native: savage barbarians were considered as excluded from
Redemption.
Opposition between wilderness and civilisation: horror of the wild (first passage)
transformed (second passage) in one year a result of colonisation.
1. Puritan Typology
Puritans saw human and social history as a cyclical succession of eras that
lead toward a single, glorious design conceived in the mind of God. The
Puritans saw their departure from England and Holland to a new promised
land in America as yet another historical manifestation of this history, with
themselves being the new Israelites chosen and favored by God. As you
read the selections from Of Plymouth Plantation, pay attention to Bradford's
efforts to associate the Plymouth colonists with the Israelites of Scripture.
2. Audience and Context
As you read the selections from Bradford's account of Plymouth Plantation,
you need to keep in mind Bradford's intended audience and the historical
context of the composition of the history. Of Plymouth Plantation was
written after the original settlement had been accomplished by the
Mayflower pilgrims ("old comers"), and after their intense suffering
and sacrifices had finally brought about security and prosperity for the
colony. Bradford writes not to the old comers but to the second and third
generations of colonists whom he believes have strayed away from the
original faith, piety, and spiritual fortitude of their parents and grandparents.
In the words of the critic Jesper Rosenmeier, "Bradford's aim [as a historian]
is not to portray the past with the fullest possible objectivity but to resurrect
a bygone holiness; a holiness that, he knows and never loses sight of, must
be resurrected by and in his audience." As you read the selections, keep
track of passages that seem to reflect Bradford's effort to inspire puritan
piety within a generation of spiritualists threatened by prosperity and
worldliness.
3. Conscious Craft
Hasty readers may find Bradford's prose to be dry and burdensome, and
in fact he deliberately chose to write his history in what was then called
the "plain style," in contrast to the deeply elaborate and ornate style
of "euphuism." And yet Bradford's style is anything but plain. The critic
E. F. Bradford first called attention to his use of emphatic couplings to
create a variety of sense and description, his use of syntactical balance and
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CALVINISM
Separation of Church and State
1. Total depravity: Every person bears the corruption due to Adam (light/
darkness)
2.Unconditional ellection: God chooses who is to be saved. To be a
memeber of the chuch doesnt mean you willbe saved.
3. Limited atonement: We were redeemed partially by Christ.
4. Irresistible and grace: no matter what you do if Jesus chooses you you
will be saved.
5. Perseverance of Saints: once a person has been chsen to be Saint that
person will follow the way iof Faith.
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Beliefs
Covenant
or Federal
Theology
and the
New
England
Way
The New
England
Way
Church
Membershi
p
The
Half-Way
Covenant
Several beliefs differentiated Puritans from other Christians. The first was
their belief in predestination. Puritans believed that belief in Jesus and
participation in the sacraments could not alone effect ones salvation; one
cannot choose salvation, for that is the privilege of God alone. All features
of salvation are determined by Gods sovereignty, including choosing
those who will be saved and those who will receive Gods irresistible
grace.
The concept of a covenant or contract between God and his elect
pervaded Puritan theology and social relationships. In religious terms,
several types of covenants were central to Puritan thought.
The Covenant of Works held that God promised Adam and his progeny
eternal life if they obeyed moral law. After Adam broke this covenant,
God made a new Covenant of Grace with Abraham (Genesis 18-19).
Covenant of Grace. This covenant requires an active faith, and, as
such, it softens the doctrine of predestination. Although God still chooses
the elect, the relationship becomes one of contract in which punishment
for sins is a judicially proper response to disobedience. Covenant
of Redemption. The Covenant of Redemption was assumed to be
preexistent to the Covenant of Grace. It held that Christ, who freely
chose to sacrifice himself for fallen man, bound God to accept him as
mans representative. Having accepted this pact, God is then committed
to carrying out the Covenant of Grace.
The concept of the covenant also provided a practical means of
organizing churches. Since the state did not control the church, the
Puritans reasoned, there must be an alternate method of of establishing
authority.
Thus the ultimate authority in both political and religious spheres was
God's word, but the commitments made to congregation and community
through voluntary obedience to covenants ensured order and a functional
system of religious and political governance. This system came to be
called the Congregational or "New England Way."
Unlike Anglican and Catholic churches of the time, Puritan churches did
not hold that all parish residents should be full church members. A true
church, they believed, consisted not of everyone but of the elect. As a
test of election, many New England churches began to require applicants
for church membership to testify to their personal experience of God in
the form of autobiographical conversion narratives. Since citizenship
was tied to church membership, the motivation for experiencing
conversion was secular and civil as well as religious in nature. Gods
covenant that bound church members to him had to be renewed and
accepted by each individual believer, although this could be seen as a
dilution of the covenant binding God and his chosen people.
The children of first-generation believers were admitted to limited
membership in the Congregational church, on the grounds that as
children of the elect, they would undoubtedly experience conversion
and become full members of the church. Not all underwent a conversion
experience, however, thus leaving in doubt the future of their children,
the grandchildren of the original church members.
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only as heretic but as traitors to the king. The Scrooby Congregation decided
to move again from Holland (where they went running away from England)
in search of a better life, to New England. They regarded their journey to
the promised land as a religious pilgrimage (they were called later the Pilgrim
Fathers). They bought a small ship, the Speedwell, and in England they hired a
merchant vessel, the Mayflower. The Speedwell leaked badly so they travelled
in the Mayflower alone. All the passengers had received financial baking
from a consortium of London merchants. They sighted land at Cape Cod and
disembarked at the site of the future town of Plymouth (1620).
William Bradford is one of the authors of the Mayflower Compact a civil
covenant or agreement in order to guarantee cooperation within their
unsharpened community.
He was elected governor of the Plymouth Colony, and he was re-elected 30
times.
He was a self-educated man, who had learned several languages.
He wrote a journal, some poems and a series of dialogues.
Book I: events that led the Scrooby Community to leave England from
Holland, and gave clear account of the pilgrims voyage and the colonys
beginnings. He finished it around 1650, although it was not published till
1857.
Book II: in the form of annals. Reflects the author disappointment at the
gradual decline of the once cohesive community, which he considered in
danger of dissolution.
JOHN SMITH
Explored
Individual self: 1 pers and 3 pers.
Political Intent
Secular contents
Classical Sources
Fact and fiction
Informative and entertaining
Ornate Style
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WILLIAM BRADFORD
Settler
Cohesive community: 3rd pers pl. (they)
Religious
Spiritual contents
Biblical Sources
Providential interpretation of facts
Didactic
Plain Style
UNIT 3
ANNE BRADSTREET (1612-1672)
* HER WORK
Her book was also the first book in American literature to be published
by a woman.
Her brother-in-law had it printed in London under the pretentious title of
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America. (1650)
Later on, Anne revised the volume, added a considerable number of
new pieces and wrote a poem as a preface to the second edition Several
Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, which was not
published after her death.
At present, she is considered the grandmother of American poetry.
* BIOGRAPHY
* CRITICS
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Two aspects:
On the one hand: Her public were devout and strict puritans, she was the
dutiful daughter of a prominent man and she was the submissive wife of
all-known colony official.
The other hand: Her private self, emotionally attached to her family as a
wife, mother and grandmother.
She is in continuity unresolved conflicts, of tensions between her
religious and her inner feelings. A self-division based on the tensions
between what she thought she ought to feel (Puritan theology told her
what she had to believe) and what she really felt.
Her later poems show how difficult it was for her to control some of her
impulses.
They share some experiences (ill, health, inner spiritual crises, a deep
sense of religion combined with a genuine concern for secular
problems, and the difficulties of writing in a male-dominated
intellectual world.) and poetic themes (e.g. Speaking about their
poems as their children).
Both of them adhered to the major aesthetic conventions of their
time, and wittily repudiated prejudices against women poets,
Bradstreet using the convention of ironic self-deprecation and Sour
Juana resorting to paradox and polemic
THE AUTHOR TO HER BOOK
Anne Bradstreet wrote this poem as the new preface to the second edition of
her collection of verses, posthumously published in Boston under the title of Several
Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning (1678).
Bradstreet responded to Woodbridges birth metaphor which was common
among seventeenth-century writers.
1. In this poem there is an extend metaphor. The speaker of The Author to Her
Book is the poet, likened a mother whose child is her book of poems. The specific
metaphor of book as offspring can be traced back to Plato. Some examples of this:
15
The effect of this pun is the duality of the childs feet and the metrical of the
lines.
3. If we scan the metre of this poem we could see that is a metric pattern known as
iambic, formed by an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Iambic is
the most common pattern in English poetry.
The poem is written in heroic couplets, also called rhyming couplets because
rhyme on consecutives lines, in pairs (aa,bb,cc,dd). The effect of this metrical
pattern is the sense of movement.
4. If we analyse the poet attitude towards her child/book we could see she regard
it with kindness, tenderness and a certain indulgence toward its faults.
5. Like most artists, Bradstreet probably had mixed feelings about her book, but
some of her fears were clearly determined by the fact that she was a literary
woman writing in a patriarchal society. Comment on the tone of her poem, we
could pay attention to the flash of anger expressed in lines 15-16. Then in line 7
she was bushed and at finally she was a protector mother.
6. I think Bradstreet it wasnt genuinely modest. She was artfully claiming
artlessness. The poet, well aware with of her societys reaction to women who
ventures to write poems in a society when she has to take care of her family.
She has to seem modest.
7. We could see some irony in the entire poem. Especially in lines 13 and 14.
The meaning is contrary to the words. She critics and apologise of her book/child
when she was really prideful.
8. She is just trying to be playful and amusing. She makes a funny apologise of
her poem. And the effect is that readers who are so perceptive to understand ironic
discourse then could read under the words of socially constrained text.
9. In seventeenth-century women were conditioned by social rules. They were very
submissive to their husbands. They are very modest.
10. Comment on the way the poet links motherhood and artistic creativity we could
paying attention to the fact that her child/book is fatherless.
In the first line, she calls attention to the fact that her book/child sprang from her
mind, not her womb, and was conceived without the intervention of any masculine
force. This could be interpreted as a sign of independence.
VOCABULARY
Artlessness: naturalidad
Lacks: carece
Offspring: descendencia
Rambling brad: mocoso consentido
Stressed: tnica
Unstressed: tona
Venture: arriesgar
Womb: entraas
16
17
18
of direction. She turns to the Bible and finds comfort in the promise of a permanent
house in heaven.
It is written in rhymed iambic tetrameters (four feet).
On my Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet
In Classical times, an elegy was any poem on any subject written in elegiac
metre. Since the Renaissance, an elegy has been a meditative poem on the death
of a person. Bradstreet does not break abruptly with the tradition of Christian
elegies, which are supposed to close with consolation and the affirmation that
death is part of a divine plan, but she does not easily accept with pious resignation
the death of her own grandchildren as a part of the providential scheme.
The author expresses how hard it is for her to reconcile the deep love she
feels for her deceased grandson and her duty to maintain her faith in spite of her
suffering. In the first stanza, she reveals a sorrow which threatens to overwhelm
her because she seems to be left alone to struggle with despair. In the second
stanza the poet appears to be able to master her brief and accept the divine will,
although it could be argued that such acceptance is not really complete. If the irony
of the poem is emphasized, it can be interpreted as a direct criticism of the
goodness of God.
This elegy is written in rhymed iambic pentameters.
UNIT 4
MARY ROWLANDSON (c. 1637 1711)
From A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
INTRODUCTION
From the violent and brutal clash between Indians and British colonist in
Massachusetts during King Philips War (1675-1676) grew a new literary
genre: Indian Captivities. Some colonist who had been prisoners of the Indian
wrote autobiographical accounts of their experiences. These tales became the
first best-sellers in America literature. These accounts of captivity continued to
be successful until the 19th century. The early examples of the genre emphasized
devotional aspects while later tales focused mainly on adventures aspects.
The text were about to study belongs to this genere: A Narrative of the Captivity
and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.
Rowlandsons account of her 3-mongh capture by a hostile Indian force during king
Philips War became one of the most popular narratives of its type in Britain and in
America during the 17th and 18th centuries, going through 30 editions after its first
publication in 1682.
BIOGRAPHY
Mary White was born about 1637 in South Petherson (Somerset), England. She
arrived to America with her nine siblings when she was only a child.
Her father, John White and his family moved to the frontier settlement of Lancaster
where her father was one of the founder.
Around 1656 she married the Reverend Joseph Rowlandson, the first minister of the
church of Lancaster. She had four children, one of whom died in infancy.
After the release of Mary Rowlandson and her two surviving children (the youngest
one died on the attack), they live in Boston for a year.
19
20
She uses four narratives modes: description (of people, objects, geographical
settings, etc). Report (of actions) speech (either direct or reported) and comment
(moralizing disquisition of digression), focusing more on the report and comment
modes.
MARY ROWLANDSON (1637-1711)
The captivity narrative grew out of the violent struggle between the Natives
and the English colonists. As they moved away from their religious roots, they
became more politically influential in a society which had to justify western
expansion.
Mary Rowlandson created a prototype which stands out as the major
contribution to the captivity genre.
A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson is a
detailed autobiographical account of the eleven weeks and five days a woman
settler from Massachusetts Bay Colony was held captive by a group of Natives. In
Lancaster, twelve citizens were killed, including Rowlandsons eldest sister, one of
her brothers-in-law and one nephew. Her husband and another brother-in-law
survived because they were in Boston appealing to the colonial government to
protect Lancaster from raids.
Among the 24 colonists that were kidnapped were Mary Rowlandson and her
three children. Sarah, her six-years-old daughter, was fatally wounded by a bullet
and died nine days after the capture.
Rowlandson and her captors travelled over 150 miles, in a forced migration
questing for food and shelter at various encampments, until she was released for a
twenty pound ransom. That summer, her two children were also ransomed.
Mary Rowlandson began her narrative in 1677 or 1678, that is, one or two
years after her captivity, although it was not published until 1682, under the title
which stressed its religious dimension: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. The
didactic purpose of the narrative is obvious throughout the whole text. When the
author claimed to have written it exclusively for the edification of her surviving
children and friends, she was abiding by the Puritan rule that writing should aim at
educating readers to understand and execute Gods will.
Rowlandson is celebrated by her role in the development of both the
captivity narrative and American womens autobiography.
Modern literary critics have noted how Rowlandsons Narrative is indebted
in tone and content to the tradition of the American jeremiad; The prophet
Jeremiah, who attributed the misfortunes of the Israelites to their abandonment of
the covenant with God, and called on them to repent so as to restore the covenant
and have a happier future.
Of the woman captivities during the early period of colonization only
Rowlandson had the erudition to write her own story. The narratives of Hannah
Swart, Hannah Dunstan and Elizabeth Hanson were transcribed and revised by
educated clergymen who tended to transform them into pieces of devotional
literature. Mary Rowlandson had the support of clergymen such as Increase Mather,
who probably wrote the anonymous preface that accompanied the first editions.
The Reverend Joseph Rowlandsons final sermon, The possibility of Gods forsaking
people, was added as an afterword or appendix
Puritan spiritual leaders were aware of the process of secularization of their
society and they wanted the New England colonists to interpret King Philips War
in supernatural terms, not as the natural reaction of a starving people who were
making their last efforts to retain their land. According to the orthodox Puritan
version of the story, the Natives did not go into battle out of their own initiative,
but were sent by an angry God whenever it was necessary to punish the faults and
21
sins committed.
Divine providence is all-pervading principle throughout the Narrative of
which God is the centre. She also notes how God always supported her during her
spiritual and physical trial and, therefore, credits Him and not the Natives for not
having been sexually abused in word or action. When a Native gave her a copy of
the Bible he had plundered in a raid, she did not feel grateful to him, but to God.
Whereas she depended on the food the Natives gave her for material survival,
scrutinizing the Bible in order to find Gods messages assured her spiritual survival
during her captivity. Consequently, when she later recorded her experiences,
she did not miss any opportunities to allude to whatever scriptural passages she
regarded as relevant, often interpreting them in a prophetical manner.
Thus, if a writer like John Smith (who was not puritan) ornamented
his captivity account with learned quotations from Greek and Latin authors,
Rowlandson restricted herself to the words of the Bible. Thus, she identified with
Job in his afflictions, Daniel in the den of lions, Jonah in the whale, and Moses
wandering in the desert. About one third of the biblical references in the Narrative
come from the Psalms. Rowlandson mentioned the book of Psalms as a spiritual
resource so often because she found in King Davids way of dealing with religious
struggles a very useful model to express her deep anger against her enemies and
her confidence in divine retribution. She did nor feel the need to give complete
quotations because she assumed that her readers would be familiar with the biblical
passages she echoed.
The early Puritan settlers did not perceive the Natives as human beings.
The attackers are portrayed as a company of hell-hounds and ravenous beasts
by the author (this is the symbolic role of the attackers as a malign force, that is,
as the representatives of the forces of Satan, who threatened the Puritan hopes
of establishing a kingdom of God in the New World); as time goes by she uses the
more neutral word Indians, and less often Heathen or Pagans. She also gives
evidence of their virtues and to tell the difference between her various captors.
Rowlandson expresses her happiness when she sees Quanopen and often records
his acts of kindness, such as providing food for her, even fetching water himself so
that she could wash, and then giving her a glass to she how she looked.
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UNIT 5
JONATHAN EDWARDS (1703-1758)
23
24
The third part of the sermon, the Application, consisting of a series of users
which try to render abstract principles as concrete as possible by applying
them to the practical affairs of life. At the end of the sermon, there is a
simple conclusion which avoids any flourish.
25
26
UNIT 6
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-1790)
1. Introduction
Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston in 1706, and showed his restless character
very early in life. Among other activities and posts, he became printer, editor,
leader of debating club, writer, scientist, inventor. He embodied the American
Enlightenment ideals: he was practical, hard-working, rational, and successful.
He was the first self-made man in America, despite his poor origins, and the
most famous and respected private figure of his time. His books were attempts
to share his way to success with others, like Poor Richards Almanack, which used
to be published annually from 1732, and his Autobiography, first published in its
complete form in 1868.
2. Benjamin Franklin
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Benjamin Franklin was born in Milk Street, Boston, on January 6, 1706. His father,
Josiah Franklin, was a tallow chandler who married twice, and of his seventeen
children Benjamin was the youngest son. His schooling ended at ten, and at twelve
he was bound apprentice to his brother James, a printer, who published the New
England Courant. To this journal he became a contributor, and later was for a
time its nominal editor. But the brothers quarreled, and Benjamin ran away, going
first to New York, and thence to Philadelphia, where he arrived in October, 1723.
He soon obtained work as a printer, but after a few months he was induced by
Governor Keith to go to London, where, finding Keith's promises empty, he again
worked as a compositor till he was brought back to Philadelphia by a merchant
named Denman, who gave him a position in his business.
On Denman's death he returned to his former trade, and set up a printing house
of his own from which he published The Pennsylvania Gazette, to which he
contributed many essays, and which he made a medium for agitating a variety
of local reforms. In 1732 he began to issue his famous Poor Richard's Almanac
for the enrichment of which he borrowed or composed those pithy utterances of
worldly wisdom which are the basis of a large part of his popular reputation. In
1758, the year in which he ceases writing for the Almanac, he printed in it Father
Abraham's Sermon, now regarded as the most famous piece of literature produced
in Colonial America.
Meantime Franklin was concerning himself more and more with public affairs.
He set forth a scheme for an Academy, which was taken up later and finally
developed into the University of Pennsylvania; and he founded an "American
Philosophical Society" for the purpose of enabling scientific men to communicate
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their discoveries to one another. He himself had already begun his electrical
researches, which, with other scientific inquiries, he called on in the intervals of
money-making and politics to the end of his life. In 1748 he sold his business in
order to get leisure for study, having now acquired comparative wealth; and in a
few years he had made discoveries that gave him a reputation with the learned
throughout Europe. In politics he proved very able both as an administrator and as
a controversialist; but his record as an office-holder is stained by the use he made
of his position to advance his relatives.
His most notable service in home politics was his reform of the postal system;
but his fame as a statesman rests chiefly on his services in connection with the
relations of the Colonies with Great Britain, and later with France. In 1757 he was
sent to England to protest against the influence of the Penns in the government of
the colony, and for five years he remained there, striving to enlighten the people
and the ministry of England as to Colonial conditions. On his return to America
he played an honorable part in the Paxton affair, through which he lost his seat in
the Assembly; but in 1764 he was again despatched to England as agent for the
colony, this time to petition the King to resume the government from the hands of
the proprietors.
In London he actively opposed the proposed Stamp Act, but lost the credit for this
and much of his popularity through his securing for a friend the office of stamp
agent in America. Even his effective work in helping to obtain the repeal of the
act left him still a suspect; but he continued his efforts to present the case for the
Colonies as the troubles thickened toward the crisis of the Revolution. In 1767
he crossed to France, where he was received with honor; but before his return
home in 1775 he lost his position as postmaster through his share in divulging
to Massachusetts the famous letter of Hutchinson and Oliver. On his arrival in
Philadelphia he was chosen a member of the Continental Congress and in 1777
he was despatched to France as commissioner for the United States. Here he
remained till 1785, the favorite of French society; and with such success did he
conduct the affairs of his country that when he finally returned he received a place
only second to that of Washington as the champion of American independence. He
died on April 17, 1790.
The first five chapters of the Autobiography were composed in England in 1771,
continued in 1784-5, and again in 1788, at which date he brought it down to 1757.
After a most extraordinary series of adventures, the original form of the manuscript
was finally printed by Mr. John Bigelow, and is here reproduced in recognition of its
value as a picture of one of the most notable personalities of Colonial times, and of
its acknowledged rank as one of the great autobiographies.
2.3 Most important non-literature facts
Franklin was a self-taught young man who never went to University and, through
his own efforts, achieved the kind of education that only the upper classes could
afford. He learned languages and read the works of the most important English
Enlightenment writers.
Under their influence, Franklin broke with the narrow sectarian aspects of Puritan
tradition, and embraced10 a quite moderate form of free-thinking Deism11. In spite
of his Deism, he developed some typical Puritan habits: constant self-scrutiny,
devotion to hard work and publy duty, and a string desire to better himself and his
community.
10 To embrace means to huge, to hold tight, to accept, to include.
11 [Deismo : Doctrina que reconoce a un dios como autor de la naturaleza, pero sin admitir revelacin ni
culto externo]
29
Apart of publishing his own works, Franklin also started a lucrative career as a
printer and tradesman by reprinting works of the Classics.
He served as American minister plenipotentiary to France, during the American
War of Independence. As a member of the American delegation to the Paris peace
conference, he was one of the negotiators and signed the Treaty of Paris (1783).
Also are important, the time he was president of the Council od Pennsylvania, and
his help in writing the Declaration of Independence, or his presidency of an antisalavery asociation and his promotion of universal public education.
3. Franklin Works
The first one, written when the author was Pennsylvanias colonial agent in
London, is divided into 5 chapters and covers the years from his birth to his
marriage (17061730).
The second section only advances the story through one year (1731),
because it is basically a description of the authors efforts to achieve moral
perfection and an analysis of the principles o conduct or precepts necessary
to be successful.
In the third section, he concentrates on the application of such principles;
he also records his promotion of civic causes and the progress of his political
career.
The fourth section centers on the dispute between the Proprietaries adn the
Pennsylvania Assembly, and the evantual resolution of the dispute in favour
of the latter, who succeeded in having the tax exemption of the former 12
abolished.
He addressed the first section to his son William and the latter sections to the
Public because he felt that his son had betrayed him by remaining loyal to England
during the American Revolution.
3.2 Vocabulary
30
Extract from the Autobiographys second and most famous section, in which the
78-year-old author looks back at his youthful years and describes his plan for selfimprovement through the practice of virtue.
Line13
Word
______
Translation
Clarifying matters
01
08
10
12
13
20
20
25
28
37
41
42
bold
mere
slipping
steady
contrivd14
for the sake of
rather more
dullness
trifling
deceit
forbear
deserve
osado, arrojado
mero, puro, simple
fallar, errar
preparado, listo
planear, tramar
por razones de
bastantes ms
estupiez
trivial
engao, fraude
abstenerse
merecer, ganar
courageous, audacious
46
47
57
venery
relacin sexual
weaknessdebilidad
kept up
mantener
hunting (archaic)
58
60
63
unremitting
to gain
prattling
perpetual, unending
63
66
72
88
90
punning
endeavor
alloted
weed
bed
persistente
adquirir, ganar
charlar
juego de palabras
iniciativa, esfuerzo
asignar, distribuir
malas hierbas
siembra
ftil, trivial
deception, dishonesty
refrain from, avoid
to deserve
to keep up
chatter, babble, speak
foolishly
to pun
to allot
to weed
area for growing plants
31
32
UNIT 7
OLAUDAH EQUIANO (1745 1797)
Slavery as a social, economic and political institution flourished in the 18 th Century,
when a series of laws defined it by race. Slavery dehumanized its victims: not
regarding blacks as human beings made it easier for people of the Age of Reason
to deprive them of full human rights. Among the many rights denied to slaves was
literacy.
The slave narrative as a successful new literary genre began in the 18 th
Century and was developed in the 19th, when it began to have an influence upon
the American novel. It was rediscovered in the 1960s because of its intense
appeal for African-Americans fighting for Civil Rights.
Most American critics would agree that the father of African-American
literature was Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography became the prototype of the
numerous slave narratives of the 19th Century.
Equiano spent most of his time at sea, and thus enjoyed many more
opportunities for development than if he had been confined on a plantation. His
first master did not honour his promise to allow Equiano to purchase his freedom
and sold him to Captain James Doran, who made Equiano sink into particularly
cruel West Indian slave trade. He went from master to master till Robert King
bought him. He allowed Equiano to purchase his own freedom for forty pounds. He
went to England, where he expected to encounter less racial discrimination, and
33
spent much of the rest of his life in London supporting himself with different jobs.
Always restless for adventure, he travelled to Turkey and Italy as personal
servant to an English gentleman, and sailed on exploratory expeditions to the
Arctic and Central America. Like many other abolitionists of that time, he began
rejecting the slave trade; only later did he envision the gradual abolition of slavery
itself.
He had recommended racial intermarriage as a means of dissolving racial
barriers, and he married a white Englishwoman. He began to contribute to the
abolitionist cause. He brought to the public the case of the slave ship Zong, whose
captain ordered 132 sick slaves to be chained together and thrown overboard so
that the Liverpool owners could claim insurance money for their loss. Equiano was
already well known in London newspapers when his two volume autobiography
came out. He wrote it in 1788, 22 years after he had bought his freedom, and
published it during the height of the antislavery controversy in England (1789). He
addressed his narrative to the members of the Parliament of Great Britain and
sent them copies of it. The author stated in the introduction that its main purpose
was to excite in august assemblies a sense of compassion of the miseries which
the slave-trade has entailed on my unfortunate countrymen.
The widespread popularity which Equianos narrative enjoyed, rivalled only
by Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe, was not solely attributed to the support it
received from the antislavery movement. Both are examples of travel literature, in
which the protagonist is a successful self-made man who discovers strange objects
and people in exotic lands. In both works the physical journey is paralleled by a
journey of spiritual progress (from ignorance to knowledge, and ultimately to
salvation through the experience of conversion).
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa,
the African, Written by Himself: the author emphasized in the title of his
autobiography that he had written it himself, and this was a way of asserting his
authorship and an expression of his desire to refute claims that blacks had no
ability to write. The fact that he used his two names, both the African ad the one
imposed upon him n the Western World, supports the thesis that his double identity
was an extremely serious concern for the author. Still commenting on the title, it
should be noted that, when referred to himself using the epithet the African,
Equiano used the definite article (the) instead of the indefinite which other writers
of African descent were currently using. Apart from the title, the portrait used as
the frontispiece of Equianos autobiography also merits attention. It displays an
African elegantly dressed as an English gentleman and holding and open Bible.
He refreshed and supplemented his own memories with information he
acquired from conversations with other Africans and he felt free to borrow
extensively from other texts, notably from historical sources and the abolitionist
literature of his time.
Equiano used the doctrines of both Christianity and the Enlightenment to
argue for the abolition of slavery. In his book he emphasized his astonishment at
the immorality of the first whites he encountered, and later depicted himself as an
honest and worthy individual.
Apart from Christianity, Equiano immersed himself in other literary
traditions prevalent in Western culture, such as the picaresque novel. He is a
picaresque hero or anti-hero, who travels from place to place and rises in society
as he learns from different sources of experience.
34
35
intellectually inferior.
He addressed his narrative to the "Parliament of Great Britain", because they didnt want to
listen directly to him, and said
he wanted to let them now how slaves suffered.
The job was reprinted (36 editions) many times and translated into several
languages, its success is only comparable to that of Robinson Crusoe, travel
literature, successful self-made man, discovers, the physical journey is paralleled
to the spiritual progress.
Title: "The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African,
written by himself", saying in
the title he had written it, so black were able. Double identity, African and occidental one,
because it was very important for
him. Portrait, himself, refined and devout (with a bible)
In his narrative, tries to offer an honest recollection of his childhood in Africa, refreshed his
memories talking to other
Africans and reading.
Borrowed from other texts, historical sources and abolitionist literature of the time, like the
trope of the Talking Book
In slave narratives, conversion to Christianity was assimilation into the dominant culture and
equal access to the hope
of eternal salvation.
They made parallels between Israelits and slaves and slaves as biblical figures who were
deliverers
Equiano used the doctrines of Christianity and of Enlightment to argue for the abolition of
slavery, he extolled Christianity
without denigrating his African heritage.
Also, other literary traditions as the picaresque novel, in 1st part of the novel, he depicts
himself as a picaresque hero,
travelling from place to place and learning from everywhere he could.
He laughs at himself and at his misfortunes.
Narrative: 3 part structure, each with a different form, style and tone.
1: sympathetic survey of Ibo culture, his capture and his life as a slave.
2: Gains freedom in 1766, his character changes and full responsible of his life as a mature
Christian man, not a
picaresque hero anymore.
3: Tone more pious, style like the spiritual biographies of John Wesley
Equianos vivid narrative reached an international audience and made the horrifying facts of
slavery known worldwide,
though he took care in not over-impressed his public, not to be blamed of exaggerating from
the supporters of slavery,
he talked to both supporters and abolitionists.
36
UNIT 8
PHILLIS WHEATLEY (1753 1784)
She was assigned only very housekeeping tasks on account of her frail health.
Phillips was raised almost as a member of the family along with the Wealtleys 8
year old twin children. John and Susanna Wheatley would encourage her to read
her poems at their social gatherings, where she would impress their guests with
her uncommon intelligence.
She first published On Messrs, Hussey and Coffin. The first poem she
published in Boston, and one which made her famous, was an elegy on the death of
the evangelical preacher George Whitefield.
One of the Wheatleys children took Phillis to London for health reasons and
also to seek support for her book. Before her departure, she wrote Farewell to
America, anticipating her sea journey. It was considered as a sentimental piece
but this poem was also her most direct expression of resistance to enslavement.
She stayed in England where she prepared her book for the press and met a
number of notables such as the Earl of Dartmouth, Benjamin Franklin and the Lord
Mayor of London.
Phillis was granted freedom by her master a few weeks after her return to
Boston If the poet celebrated how her much admired satirical playwright Terence
37
(who had been taken to Rome as a slave) broke his iron bands by means of the
power of his pen, she must have been aware of the fact that she had achieved the
same goal in a rather similar way, by her own writing ability.
Phillis Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was her first
collection of poems published in English by a black person. The poems that
appeared in London were not exactly the same that appeared in Boston; her
American patriotic poems had to be left out, two religious poems were omitted,
other were altered and some new were added.
In the Preface the collection was presented as the work of a native of
Africa whose genius had unanimously impressed the many members of the English
nobility and gentry she had met in London. This promotion as strongly determined
how her work has been read from that time, as she was cast aside as an oddity as
literary history and her poetry was relegated to a marginal status. Phillis case was
used by abolitionists as a challenge to the assumption of African inferiority based
on supposed lack of artistic ability.
This book was a slim volume written in a style much like that of Alexander
Pope. She followed the neoclassical conventions of dominant English verse in the
18th Century: the use of innovation, hyperbole, inflated ornamentation and an
overemphasis on personification. Her fusion of pagan and Christian traditions is
characteristic of English neoclassical literature. Freedom was a recurrent theme
which she articulated throughout her work: political, artistic and spiritual freedom
through religion and ultimately death. Although Phillis considered sin a much worse
bondage than enslavement, she did not refrain from explicitly voicing her
vindication of the blacks natural right to freedom from slavery.
On Being Brought from Africa to America
This short poem has sometimes been cited as an instance of Wheatleys
denigration of her native African homeland and of her alleged full acceptance of
dominant discourses in colonial Boston. However readers will perceive how
Wheatley used certain stylistic strategies to undermine such discourses by
conveying her message subversively.
In the first quatrain, the poet expresses her gratitude for being introduced
to Christianity. Although the attitude expressed in the first quatrain may sound
subservient, she basically deplores the paganism of her homeland.
In the second quatrain the author suddenly adopts and accusatory tone that
abruptly reverses the movement of the poem. She makes a direct challenge to
racial prejudice through and allusion to injustice in line 5 some view our sable race
with scornful eye which is morally censorious of those who show contempt for
blacks because of the colour of their skins.
The lasts two lines contain a radical refutation of some 18 th Century racist
notions according to which the souls of black people were everlastingly doomed.
The poet explicitly denies any connection between spiritual darkness and skin
colour.
By italicizing the terms Christians, Negroes and Cain, the poet links them
rhetorically so as to tell her readers that both Christians and Negroes, like Cain are
the descendants of Adam and Eve, and thus not only inheritors of the original sin,
but also equally able to be redeemed or saved by God. The biblical allusion
reinforces their common suffering under bondage (in Egypt then and in America
now). This last part of the poem also contains a pun on the name of Cain,
pronounced cane, both susceptible to be refind or purified; Cain by being
turned into a saved soul and cane by being transformed into sugar.
It is written in heroic couplets that are iambic pentameters which rhyme on
consecutive lines, in pairs. We should note how each metrical line has ten syllables,
that is, five feet of two syllables each: the first syllable is unaccented or
unstressed, and the second one is accented or stressed. In regard to form, Phillis
did not try to be original, but made efforts to master her models (Pope).
38
39
40
41
UNIT 10
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1789-1851)
Once political independence from the British had been won, Americans wished for
an independent national literature as a way of asserting their new cultural freedom.
Such a role was played by James Fenimore Cooper, the first to succeed in the field
of long fiction by using typically American materials, motifs and settings and a
distinct powerful narrative voice which no longer sounded like a mere colonial echo
of the Old World discourse. His folk epic of the settlement of America has exerted
a long-lasting influence even upon those who have actually never read his writings
and many of the popular myths he helped to shape still haunt the American
imagination. Today Cooper is considered of the utmost importance as the profound
thinker and social critic who raised key issues of political theory in works addressed
to the general public.
42
43
civilization.
This book formulates a theory of racial difference which is linked to
the ideology of savagism. Through the novel, racial purity or purity of blood is
an important value. Natty recurrently boasting that there is no cross in his blood is
a genuine white raised by the Mohicans after the death of his English parents. The
fact that he is the prototypical White Indian, that is, a man of European descent
who has all the skills of the Indian and partakes the virtues of both groups, does
not affect his racial purity at all. The miscegenation issue is raised in the novel
by the presence of Cora Munro, who is of black-white mixed ancestry, having
been born to Colonel Munros first wife, the crossbred daughter of a West Indian
gentleman and a slave. The duality of a dark heroin (Cora) and a fair one (Alice,
born to Munros Scottish second wife) has become an issue of debate. Among
the reasons suggested by critics to explain Coras death, there seems to be a
consensus about the politics of racial separatism. The potential marriage between
the dark heroin and Uncas would have harmoniously united three main racial
strands of colonial America, but their deaths eliminate that possibility.
Cooper had a great concern for visual accuracy and intensity in his narrative
description and he skilfully unified vivid descriptions with the report of fast-paced
actions in order to achieve colour and suspense. Since report, which is the essential
mode of fiction, is chiefly marked by the use of action verbs.
In the early Puritan narratives all the events were not the result of
unexplained chaos but part of the divine plan, and their publication was an act of
Christian duty. But the 19th Century, however, what basically remained was a total
and almost incomprehensible violence (often depicted for commercial purposes)
which filled readers with a burning hatred of the Native Peoples.
Echoes of Miltons Paradise Lost have been perceived in the satanic Magua,
who is compared to the Prince of Darkness, brooding on his own fancied wrongs
and plotting evil. Coopers extensive use of Miltonic allusion proves that the English
poet provided him with a model to depict Magua with the grandeur of the Fallen
Angel.
Irving has often been contrasted with Cooper, whose narrative voice conveys a
more powerful self-assurance and whose writings have always been considered
more combative. Although both writers were for a time expatriate American
celebrities in Europe, and both were influenced by Sir Walter Scott, in many ways
Cooper appears as the antithesis of Irving.
UNIT 11
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803 1882)
He is one of the great writers of the American Renaissance. The Immense
popularity he already enjoyed in his lifetime was mainly due to the attraction that
many of his fellow citizens felt for the liberal ideas he passionately propounded.
Still concerned about their intellectual dependence upon the European past, they
welcomed his proposal to construct a new culture based upon direct contact with
nature, hoping that an unmediated approach to the beautiful scenery of their own
country would set them free from any oppressive foreign domination. He actively
helped a number of his contemporary writers through practical advice, personal
connections, financial support and editorial efforts. He always represented himself
44
Hamatreya:
Composed in 1845 and first published in Poems (1847). It was inspired by
his reading of one of the late Hindu scriptures, Vishnu Purana. Emerson transforms
the name of Maitreya into Hamatreya, and uses him as the speaker of his poem,
which deals with the issue of ownership. The landlords see their crops as a result of
their work, rather than as a result of natures processes.
The Earth-Song, a poem within Hamatreya, is Natures answer to the
landlords assertions of ownership: it is actually Nature that has the ownership of
man. There is a change in line, stanza and diction. The lines are shortened and are
broken into stanzas; the language becomes more formal. This change brings
attention to the contrast between the landlords and Natures viewpoint.
In the last stanza of the poem, Hamatreya speaks about himself. He is so
completely converted to Natures way of thinking that he adopts Natures language
structure. Natures though corresponds to Emersons and the Transcendentalists
45
UNIT 12
HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862)
1. Introduction
Although Henry Thoreau was considered a minor literary figure for quite a long
time, he has recently become one of the major American authors of the nineteenth
46
century. His mastery of the English language has been acclaimed by some critics.
His higly allusive prose, often dismissed in the past for being too difficult, now
is admired for being "beatiful, vigorous and supple15". Nowadays, his fame rests
almost entirely on Walden and the essay "Civil Disobedience".
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American writer, philosopher, and
naturalist who believed in the importance of individualism.
He attended Harvard University, where he studied the Classics and foreign
languages such as Italian, French, German and Spanish.
He became one of most influential writers and thinkers of the
Transcendentalist Movement, together with Emerson and Margaret Fuller.
Thoreaus best-known work is Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), which
embodies his philosophy and reflects his independent character. The book
records Thoreaus experiences in a hand-built cabin, where he spent two
years in partial seclusion, at Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts.
He was committed to the abolitionist cause, and was sent to jail for refusing
to pay poll tax. Resistance to Civil Government (or Civil Disobedience,
1849), was the result of that gesture, and in it Thoreau expressed the
superiority of moral law over social law.
47
17 Reading at "America Literature to 1900" by Teresa Gisbert and "Thoreau:The Man" by Bradley P. Dean
48
In 1846, while still at the pond, he climbed to the summit of Mt. Katahdin while
on a visit to the Maine woods and spent one night in jail for refusing to pay his
poll tax. He later worked these experiences into lectures that were later still
published as the "Ktaadn" chapter of The Maine Woods and the famous, influential
essay "Civil Disobedience." Although the essay was almost ignored in ones
Thoreaus lifetime, it was to become onte of the best-known political tracts in
history. It made a deep impression on Mahatma Gandhi, who used its theory of
civil disobedience for his campaign of passive resistance to oppressive state power.
Thoreaus thoughts also inspires the Reverend Martin Luther King and other civil
rigths activists fighting racial segregation in the United States.
After leaving the house at the pond Thoreau stayed with the Emerson family again
while Ralph Waldo Emerson lectured in England. Thoreau returned to his parents's
home in 1848 and continued living with them as a boarder for the remainder of
his life. At about this time he began the routine of morning and evening study and
writing, and afternoon walks that were the foundation upon which he may be said
to have built his creative life.
Thoreau made the first of four trips to Cape Cod in 1849, and he later delivered
lectures about his experiences that were posthumously published as Cape Cod.
The following year he traveled to Quebec and wrote up that experience in a lecture
titled "An Excursion to Canada," partially published in 1853 as A Yankee in Canada.
His famous book Walden; or, Life in the Woods (later shortened at his request to
Walden) was published in 1854, and in that same year he delivered his lectureessay "Slavery in Massachusetts" at an Independence Day meeting of the American
Anti-Slavery Society.
In 1856 Thoreau traveled to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to survey a large estate and
deliver three lectures. While there he visited Walt Whitman in nearby Brooklyn. In
1857 and 1858 he visited Cape Cod, the woods of Maine, and the White Mountains
of New Hampshire; and in the latter year he published what was to become the
second chapter of The Maine Woods, his essay "Chesuncook." In 1859 his father
died, and as a result he had to begin assuming more responsibility of the family's
plumbago business. The following year Thoreau lectured to his townsmen on "The
Succession of Forest Trees," and his lecture was shortly afterward published and
republished, receiving wider circulation than any of Thoreau's other writings during
his lifetime and cementing his reputation as a naturalist.
While counting tree rings on 3 December 1860 Thoreau contracted a cold that
quickly worsened into bronchitis. His lungs had long been tubercular, and Thoreau
was housebound for many weeks. During the summer of 1861 he traveled to
Minnesota in a vain effort to recover his health. Arriving back home he began
putting his affairs in order and began preparing for publication many of his late
lectures. He died of tuberculosis at his mother's home on Main Street in Concord on
6 May 1862, aged 44 years. He is buried in his family's plot near the graves of his
friends Hawthorne, Alcott, Emerson, and Channing on Author's Ridge in Concord's
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
3. Thoreau Works
49
He read the Dharma Shastra in 1841, when he was twenty-four, and the Bhagavad
Gita when he was twenty-eight.
One of the most interesting aspects of Thoreaus work is his social criticism, in
which he showed how deeply he cared about the problems of his contemporary
society. He believed that all reforms must begin with the individual, not with
society, but at the same time he realised that the reform of the individuals could
only occur if personal freedom was guaranteed by society.
A Week on the Concord And Merrimac Rivers (1849 )
This is a beautiful account of Thoreau's boat trip with his brother, John, from
August 31 to September 13, 1839. The book is carefully organized with one chapter
given to each day of a week - experiences of two weeks condensed in one. It is an
excellent celebration of nature.
"Resistance to Civil Government" or "Civil Disobedience" (1849)
For failing to pay poll tax, Thoreau was sent to jail. The famous and influential
essay is the result of that gesture. Its message is simple and daring - he
advocates "actions through principles." If the demands of a government or a
society are contrary to an individual's conscience, it is his duty to reject them.
Upholding moral law as opposed to social law "divides the individual, separating
the diabolical in him from the divine." Inspired by Thoreau's message, Mahatma
Gandhi organized a massive resistance of Indians against the British occupation of
India. Thoreau's words have also inspired the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the
peace marchers and the numerous conscientious-objectors to the Vietnam war.
Walden (1854)
Considered one of the all-time great books, Walden is a record of Thoreau's two
year experiment of living at Walden Pond. The writer's chief emphasis is on the
simplifications and enjoyment of life now. In one of the most useful studies of the
book, Walter Harding ("Five Ways of Looking at Walden," in Thoreau in Our Season,
edited by John Hicks, 1962, 44-57) discusses the broad appeal of this masterpiece
in terms of at least the following five approaches:
As a nature book.
As a do-it-yourself guide to simple life.
As a satirical criticism of modern life and living.
As a belletristic achievement.
As a spiritual book.
Thoreaus Poetry
Although Thoreau wrote a considerable number of poems, very few are regarded
as excellent. Among those which are well-known are "Light-Winged Smoke, Icarian
Bird," "I am a parcel of Vain Strivings Tied," "The Virgin," "A Winter and Spring
Scene," and "Low in the Eastern Sky." The common themes of Thoreau's poetry
are nature, impressions of life, and transcendental philosophy. It appears that
Thoreau's temperament was more suited to writing prose or, more appropriately,
poetic prose.
3.2 Walden
Walden is a complex and elusive text because it touches on a variety os subjects
and can be read at different levels. It is, among other things, the record of the
authors personal experience. Its long passages on political theory and moral
philosophy, however, turn it into much more than an authors autobiographical
piece.
50
Containig the history of the authors own relationship with nature, Walden shows
the characteristic precision of a natural history treatise written by a scientist. It
encompasses18 some of the typical features of pastoral poetry, and old literary
form which had evolved into a mode of thought that acquired an especially
poignant meaning when romanticism confronted the forces of the industrial
revolution.
The book is also a parody of the popular success manuals, for it mimics their
language while offering a different concept of true wealth, not based upon the
accumulation of goods, but upon time to enjoy life.
Walden can be read as a travel narrative which is in fact an inward journey of
exploration to better know and improve oneself, since the goal of the authors
pilgrimage is spiritual progress.
In short, Walden had been defined as a celebration of a simple life in harmony with
nature. He condensed his narrative within the frame of one year, progressing in
a circular pattern through the four seasons and ending in spring, thus involving
readers in the cycle of nature.
3.3 Vocabulary
From Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854).
First chapters extracts, Economy, cited in American Literature to 1900.
Line
Word
Translation
01
03
03
05
05
16
20
26
26
29
29
30
32
37
37
39
40
bulk
mayor parte de
shore
orilla, costa, ribera
ponnd
laguna
obstrude
imponer
affairs
cuestiones
egostism
egosmo
narrowness
estrechez de miras
strech
estirar, poner a prueba
seams
costuras
barns
graneros
cattle
ganado
rid of
deshacerse de
soil
tierra de cultivo
smothered deprimido
stifled
load
carga
tillage
tierra labrada
woodlot
cultivo de rboles
41
42
43
44
44
46
53
55
encumbrances
flesh
plowed
compost
fate
rust
thence
blundering oracle
to strech
cultivation
area of land for growing
trees
obstculo, molestia
carne, cuerpo
arada
to plow
abono
destino
xido
desde antao
orculo/profeta que comete
51
59
60
60
72
72
73
84
86
87
100
114
119
plucked
toil
clumsy
minks
muskrats
concealed
sprinkle
deed
fetch
to a great extent
hindrances
subtle
to pluck
to conceal
52
One of the most interesting aspects of Thoreaus work is his social criticism.
He believed that all reforms must begin with the individual, not with society, but at
the same time he realised that the reform of individuals could only occur if personal
freedom was guaranteed by society. He identified with Native Americans, for he felt
a special affinity with their attitude to nature.
When Thoreau died of tuberculosis, Emerson preached the eulogy at his
funeral. This funeral oration has become the most famous essay on Thoreau.
Emerson honestly came to think that Thoreau had wasted his talents in his solitary
observation of natural phenomena. Much of the rebellion that Thoreau gradually
developed against Emerson was due to his need to free himself from an imposing
intellectual father and master figure.
Emersons expression tends towards abstraction, whereas Thoreau presents
experience through concrete images. Emersons outbursts are in sharp contrast
with the matter-of-fact voice with which Thoreau turns the commonplace into the
mythical.
Thoreaus writings are highly allusive, his allusions not being restricted to
literary works, but extended to many features of his contemporary world. In
particular, as a witness to the industrial revolution, he felt both fascinated by
technology and threatened by an excessive dependence upon it.
Some parts of Walden can be read as a satirical criticism of modern life
written by a radical moral reformer.
UNIT 13
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804 1864)
53
54
mourning, these lonely conversations of the imagination with the conscience, this
pitiless analysis resulting from a perpetual examination of ones self, and from the
tortures of a heart closed before men and open to Godall these elements of the
Puritan character have passed into Mr. Hawthorne, or to speak more justly, have
filtered into him, through a long succession of generations. This is a very pretty
and very vivid account of Hawthorne, superficially considered; and it is just such a
view of the case as would commend itself most easily and most naturally to a hasty
critic. It is all true indeed, with a difference; Hawthorne was all that M. Montgut
says, minus the conviction. The old Puritan moral sense, the consciousness of sin
and hell, of the fearful nature of our responsibilities and the savage character of our
Taskmasterthese things had been lodged in the mind of a man of fancy whose
fancy had straightway begun to take liberties and play tricks with themto judge
them (Heaven forgive him!) from the poetic and sthetic point of view, the point of
view of entertainment and irony. This absence of conviction makes the difference;
but the difference is great.From Nathaniel Hawthorne (1879).
ALL Hawthornes work is one form or another of handling sin. He had the
Puritan sense of it in the blood, and the power to use it artistically in the brain.
With Tolstoi, he is the only novelist of the soul, and he is haunted by what
is obscure, dangerous, and on the confines of good and evil; by what is
abnormal, indeed, if we are to accept human nature as a thing set within
responsible limits, and conscious of social relations. Of one of his women he
says that she was plucked up out of a mystery, and had its roots still clinging to
her. It is what is mysterious, really, in the soul that attracts him. When we find
ourselves fading into shadows and unrealities: that is when he cares to concern
himself with humanity.
And, finding the soul, in its essence, so intangible, so mistlike, so unfamiliar with
the earth, he lays hold of what to him is the one great reality, sin, in order that
he may find out something definite about the soul, in its most active, its most
interesting, manifestations
To Hawthorne what we call real life was never very real, and he has given, as no
other novelist has given, a picture of life as a dream, in which the dreamers
themselves are, at intervals, conscious that they are dreaming. At a moment
of spiritual crisis, as at that moment when Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale
meet in the forest, he can render their mental state only through one of his ghostly
images: It was no wonder that they thus questioned one anothers actual bodily
existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet, in the dim
wood, that it was like the first encounter, in the world beyond the grave, of two
spirits, who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly
shuddering in mutual dread, as not wonted to this companionship of disembodied
spirits. To Hawthorne, by a strange caprice or farsightedness of temperament,
the supreme emotion comes only under the aspect of an illusion, for the
first time recognized as being real, that is, really an illusion. He himself,
as was perceptible by many symptoms, he says of Clifford, lay darkly behind his
pleasure and knew it to be a baby-play, which he was to toy and trifle with, instead
of thoroughly believing. To Clifford, it is mental ruin, a kind of exquisite imbecility,
which brings this consciousness; to Hester Prynne, to Arthur Dimmesdale, to
Donatello, to Miriam, it is sin. Each, through sin, becomes real, and perceives
something of the truth.
In this strange pilgrims progress, the first step is a step outside the bounds
of some moral or social law, by which the soul is isolated, for its own torture
and benefit, from the rest of the world. All Hawthornes stories are those
of persons whom some crime, or misunderstood virtue, or misfortune,
55
56
57
58
The colour pink of the ribbons is a mixture of white (associated with purity and
innocence) and red (linked with passion and the scarlet of depravity), it may
symbolize the inevitable coexistence of good and evil in human nature.
Although recent critics tend to consider this author as a sceptic or an agnostic
whose interest in Puritan conscience was intellectual and whose biblical allusions
were intended to question Providence, there is a strong Calvinistic strain in his
work, particularly evident in his distrust of human nature.
Meaning: what a work means for its author.
Significance: what a work signifies for its readers.
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Unit 14
Herman Melville (1819 1891)
(American Renaissance)
Melville could be irreverent sometimes, he was always far from being cheerful.
Ishmaels mocking allusion to Adam and Eve as the two orchard thieves.
The exciting adventures and remote settings of Melvilles sea novels. I am
tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote.
Both Hawthorne and Melville knew each other will and held their works in high
mutual esteem. Although Melville was a prolific writer who also published other
novels, short stories and poetry, he is mainly remembered nowadays as the author
of Moby-Dick, a masterpiece that many consider the greatest American novel of all
times.
Melville originally intended Moby-Dick to be a romance of adventure. Melville
deliberately fashioned Ishmael, the narrator of Moby-Dick, as a projection of
himself in many ways. Through him, he voices his own preoccupation with the
problem of innate depravity and original sin. Melvilles pessimistic spirit made him
particularly aware of the dark side of humanity and led him to consider the white
civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.
Melville was no believer, but a sceptic.
In his romance, he felt absolutely free to mix fact and fancy, and consequently he
used many different kinds of materials.
Some literary critics have pointed out that Melville is Americas most Shakespearian
writer. It was the English dramatist who made him understand the nature of
tragedy and incorporate it into his work. Apart from the influence of Shakespeare
and other literary classics, Moby-Dick presents features derived from subliterary
popular genres such as the sensational yellow novels that were widely read at
the time and the grotesque native humour that so many Americans enjoyed, mixed
with scientific discussions and philosophical speculations.
Confluence: literary phenomenon by which writers nurtured in the same
cultural atmosphere may be alike in many respects and develop similar traits not
attributable to the direct impact of one on the other. This concept can be useful
when considering Melvilles use of symbolic allegory, which is related to, but not
derived from Hawthornes.
White whale: may represent the spirit of evil, or it may be an agent for the
justice of heaven to punish Ahabs defiance of God, or the ultimate mystery
of the universe, if it is taken as a symbol of natures creative and destructive
powers. When the narrator anlyses the symbol of whiteness, he makes it stand for
nothingness, an absence of color, a colorless, all-color of atheism, an abstraction
60
61
aesthetic terms Melville lauds it for its features, devoting an entire chapter (42)
to the whiteness of the whale, while degrading those artists who falsely depict the
whale.
The theme of the excellence of the whale serves to place Ahab's quest against Moby
Dick as, at best, a virtually insurmountable task in which he is doomed to failure.
Melville constructs the whale as a figure that cannot be easily vanquished, if it can
be defeated at all.
The Whale as an Undefinable Figure: While Melville uses the whale as a
symbol of excellence, he also resists any literal interpretation of that excellence
by refusing to equate the species with any concrete object or idea. For Melville,
the whale is an indefinite figure, as best shown in "The Whiteness of the Whale"
(Chapter 42). Melville defines the whiteness as absence of color and
thus finds the whale as having an absence of meaning. Melville bolsters
this premise that the whale cannot be defined through the various stories that
Ishmael tells in which scholars, historians and artists misinterpret the whale in
their respective fields. Indeed, the extended discussion of the various aspects of
the whale also serve this purpose; by detailing the various aspects of the whale in
their many forms, Melville makes the whale an even more inscrutable figure whose
essence cannot be described through its history or physiognomy.
The recurring failed attempts to find a concrete definition of the whale leave the
Sperm Whale, and Moby Dick more specifically, as abstract and devoid of any
concrete meaning. By allowing the whale to exist as a mysterious figure, Melville
does not pin the whale down as an easy metaphorical parallel, but instead leaves a
multiplicity of various interpretations for Moby Dick.
A more personalized interpretation for the thematic significance of the inability
to define the whale relates to Ahab's comparison of Moby Dick to a mask that
obscures the unknown reasoning that he seeks. In this interpretation, the inability
to define a whale is significant not in itself, but because it stands in the way of
greater reasoning and understanding.
Moby Dick as a Part of Ahab: Throughout the novel, Melville creates a
relationship between Ahab and Moby Dick despite the latter's absence until the final
three chapters through the recurrence of elements creating a close relationship
between Ahab and the whale. The most significant of these is the actual physical
presence of the Sperm Whale as part of Ahab's body in the form of Ahab's ivory
leg. The whale is a physical part of Ahab in this instance; it is literally a part of
Ahab. Melville also develops this theme through the uncanny sense that Ahab has
for the whale. Ahab has a nearly psychic sense of Moby Dick's presence, and more
tragically, the idea of Moby Dick perpetually haunts the formidable captain. This
theme serves in part to better explain the depth of emotion behind Ahab's quest
for the whale; as a living presence that haunts Ahab's life, he feels that he must
continue on his quest no matter the cost.
The Contrast between Civilized and Pagan Society: The relationship between
Queequeg and Ishmael throughout Moby Dick generally illustrates the prevalent
contrast between civilized, specifically Christian societies and uncivilized, pagan
societies. The continued comparisons and contrasts between these two types of
societies is often favorable for Melville, particularly in the discussion of Queequeg,
the most idealized character in the novel, whose uncivilized and imposing
appearance only obscures his actual honor and civilized demeanor. In this respect,
Melville is fit simply to deconstruct Queequeg and place him in entirely sympathetic
terms, finding the characters from civilized and from uncivilized societies to be
62
virtually identical. Nevertheless, Melville does not include these thematic elements
simply for a lesson on other cultures; a recurring theme equates non-Christian
societies with diabolical behavior, particularly when in reference to Ahab. Ahab
specifically chooses the three pagan characters' blood when he wishes to temper
his harpoon in the name of the devil, while the most obviously corrupt character in
Moby Dick is conspicuously the Persian Fedallah, whom the other characters believe
to be Satan in disguise. With the exception of Queequeg, equating the pagan
characters with Satan does align with the general religious overtones of the novel,
one which presumes Christianity as its basis and moral ground.
The Sea as a Place of Transition: In Moby Dick, the sea represents a
transitional place between two distinct states. Melville shows this early on
in the case of Queequeg and the other Isolatoes (Daggoo and Tashtego), who
represents the transition from uncivilized to civilized society unbound by any
specific nationality, but in an overwhelming amount of cases this transitional
theme relates to the precarious line between life and death. There are a number
of characters who teeter at the brink between life and death, whether literally or
metaphorically, throughout Moby Dick. Queequeg again proves to be an example:
during his illness he prepares for death and in fact remains in his own coffin waiting
for illness to overtake him, but it never does (Chapter 110: Queequeg in his coffin).
The coffin itself becomes a transitional element several chapters later when the
carpenter converts it into a life-buoy and it thus comes to symbolize both the
saving of a life and the end of one (Chapter 126: The Life-Buoy).
Several of the minor characters in Moby Dick also exist in highly transitional states
between life and death. After Pippin jumps to his death from the whaling boat
and is saved only by chance, he loses his sanity and behaves as if a part of him,
the "infinite of his soul" had already died; essentially, the character becomes a shell
of a person waiting for death. Melville further elaborates this theme through the
blacksmith, who works on the sea primarily as a means to escape life. He came on
his journey to escape from the trappings of life after his family had died, and exists
on sea primarily as a passage before his eventual death.
Harbingers and Superstition: A recurring theme throughout Moby Dick is the
appearance of harbingers, superstitious and prophecies that foreshadow a tragic
end to the story. Even before Ishmael boards the Pequod, the Nantucket strangers
Elijah warns Ishmael and Queequeg against traveling with Captain Ahab. The
Parsee Fedallah also has a prophetic dream concerning Ahab's quest against Moby
Dick, dreaming of hearses (although he misinterprets the dream to mean that Ahab
will certainly kill Moby Dick). Indeed, the characters are bound by superstition and
myth: the only reason that the Pequod kills a Right Whale is the legend that a ship
will have good luck if it has the head of a Right Whale and the head of a Sperm
Whale on its opposing sides. An additional harbinger of doom found in Moby Dick
occurs when a hawk takes Ahab's hat, thus recalling the story of Tarquin and how
his wife Tanaquil predicted that it was a sign that he would become king of Rome.
The purpose of these omens throughout Moby Dick is to create a sense
of inevitability. Even from the beginning of the journey the Pequod's mission is
doomed by Captain Ahab, and the invocation of various omens serves to endow this
mission with a sense of grandeur and destiny. It is no suicide mission that Ahab
undertakes, but a grand folly of hubris.
Character List:
Captain Ahab: Ahab is the Captain of the Pequod, a grave older man reaching
his sixties who has spent nearly forty years as a sailor, only three of which he has
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spent on dry land (Melville alludes to Ahab as having a wife and son, but their
existence seems of little significance to Ahab). The novel is essentially the
story of Ahab and his quest to defeat the legendary Sperm Whale Moby
Dick, for this whale took Ahab's leg, causing him to use an ivory leg to
walk and stand. Ahab is a dour, imposing man who frightens his crew through
his unwavering obsession with defeating Moby Dick and his grand hubris. In many
respects Melville portrays Ahab as barely human, barely governed by human mores
and conventions and nearly entirely subject to his own obsession with Moby Dick.
Melville describes him in mostly alien terms: Ahab is a spectral figure haunting
Stubbss dreams and existing in a place away from the living. He is in some ways
a machine, unaffected by human appetites and without recognizable emotion. And
most importantly, he claims himself a God over the Pequod, but instead he may be
a Satanic figure through his somewhat blasphemous quest against the white whale.
Ishmael: Ishmael is the narrator of the novel, a simple sailor on the Pequod who
undertakes the journey because of his affection for the ocean and his need to go
sea whenever he feels "hazy about the eyes." As the narrator Ishmael establishes
him as somewhat of a cipher and an everyman, and in fact his role in the plot of
the novel is inconsequential; his primary task is to observe the conflicts around
him. Nevertheless, Melville does give his narrator several significant character
traits, the most important of which is his idealization of the Sperm Whale and
his belief in its majesty. Also, it is Ishmael who has the only significant personal
relationship in the novel; he becomes a close friend with the pagan harpooner
Queequeg and comes to cherish and adore Queequeg to a somewhat
improbable level open to great interpretation; Melville even describes their
relationship in terms of a marriage. Ishmael is the only survivor of the Pequod's
voyage, living to tell the tale of Moby Dick only because he is by chance on a
whaling boat when Moby Dick sinks the Pequod and is rescued by a nearby ship.
Starbuck: Starbuck is the chief mate of the Pequod, a Nantucket native and a
Quaker with a thin build and a pragmatic manner. In appearance, Starbuck is
quite thin and seems condensed into his most essential characteristics, and his
streamlined appearance well suits his attitudes and behavior. Melville portrays
Starbuck as both a strong believer in human fallibility and an idealist who believes
that these failings may be contained. Among the characters in Moby Dick, it
is only Starbuck who openly opposes Captain Ahab, believing his quest
against the great whale to be an impulsive and suicidal folly. However,
despite his open misgivings about Ahab and the open hostility between these
two characters that culminates when Ahab points his musket at Starbuck, the
conflicted Starbuck remains loyal to his captain even when he has the possibility
of vanquishing Ahab. If Ahab serves as the protagonist of the novel and Ahab the
narrator, Ishmael is the character whom Melville intends as the proxy for
the reader: the only character given a gamut of emotions ranging from pity
and fear to contempt, Starbuck is Melville's surrogate for an emotional response
from his audience.
Queequeg: Queequeg is a harpooner from New Zealand, the son of a king who
renounces the throne in order to travel the world on whaling ships and learn about
Christian society. Ishmael meets Queequeg when the two must share a bed at
the Spouter Inn in New Bedford before journeying to Nantucket to undertake the
journey on the Pequod. Melville portrays Queequeg as a blend of civilized
behavior and savagery. Certainly in his appearance and upbringing he is
uncivilized by the standards of the main characters of the novel, yet Melville
(through his narrator Ishmael) finds Queequeg to be incredibly noble,
courteous and brave. Melville uses Queequeg as a character in perpetual transition:
from savagery to civilization, and in the final chapters after he suffers from an
64
illness from which he wills himself recovered, in an uneasy stasis between life and
death. The relationship between Queequeg and Ishmael is the most intimate of the
novel, as the two become close companions.
Stubb: The second mate on the Pequod, Stubb is a Cape Cod native with a
happy-go-lucky, carefree nature that tends to mask his true opinions and beliefs.
Stubb remains comical even in the face of the imperious Ahab, and he even
dares to make a joke at the captain's expense. Although never serious, Stubb is
nevertheless a more than competent whaleman: his easygoing manner allows
Stubb to prompt his crew to work without seeming imposing or dictatorial, and it
is Stubb who kills the first whale on the Pequod's voyage. Nevertheless, Melville
does not portray Stubb as an idealized character; although competent and carefree,
Stubb is also the character who suggests that the Pequod robs the Rosebud of its
whales to secure their ambergris.
Flask: The third mate on the ship, Flask plays a much less prominent role than
either Starbuck or Stubb. He is a native of Martha's Vineyard with a pugnacious
attitude concerning whales. Melville portrays Stubb as a man whose appetites
cannot be sated, and in fact in attempting to sate these appetites Flask becomes
even more hungry.
Pippin: He is a young black man and a member of the Pequod crew who replaces
one of Stubb's oarsman but becomes incredibly frightened while lowering after a
whale and jumps from the boat. Although Stubb saves him the first time, he warns
him that he will not do so if he tries it again, and when he does Pip only survives
when another boat saves him. After realizing that the others would allow his death,
Pip becomes nearly insane. However, Ahab takes pity on him for his madness and
allows him use of his cabin.
Fedallah: He is one of the "dusky phantoms" that compose Ahab's special whaling
crew. The Asiatic and Oriental Fedallah, also called the Parsee, remains a "muffled
mystery" to the other characters and represents a sinister figure for the crew of
the Pequod; there are even rumors that he is the devil in disguise and wishes to
kidnap Ahab. Fedallah has a prophetic dream of hearses twice during the course
of the novel, yet both he and Ahab conceive that this means a certain end to Moby
Dick. Fedallah dies during the second day of the chase against Moby Dick, when he
becomes entangled in the whale line.
Peter Coffin: He is the innkeeper at the Spouter Inn where Ishmael stays on his
way to Nantucket.
Father Mapple: He is the famous preacher and a former harpooner who has left
sailing for the ministry. Renowned for his sincerity and sanctity, Father Mapple
enjoys a considerable reputation. Before leaving for the voyage on the Pequod,
Ishmael attends a service in which Father Mapple gives a sermon that considers the
tale of Jonah and the Whale.
Hosea Hussey: She is the owner of the Try Pots Inn and the cousin of Peter Coffin.
Ishmael and Queequeg stay at the Try Pots while in Nantucket before departing on
the Pequod.
Peleg: A retired sailor and former captain of the Pequod, he is a "fighting Quaker"
who owns the ship along with Bildad. Peleg is the character who first indicates the
dark conflict within Ahab by comparing him to the legendary vile king of the same
name.
65
Bildad: The owner of the Pequod along with Peleg, Bildad is also a "fighting
Quaker" who scolds the crew of the Pequod for profanity and regrets having to
leave the Pequod on its long voyage.
Elijah: He is a stranger that Ishmael and Queequeg pass while staying in
Nantucket who asks if they have met Old Thunder (Captain Ahab), and later asks
the two if they have sold their souls to the devil by agreeing to undertake a voyage
on the Pequod.
Bulkington: A sailor on the Pequod and a dangerous man just returned from a
voyage that lasted four years, he returns to the sea almost immediately because of
his affinity for life on the ocean.
Tashtego: He is an Indian from Martha's Vineyard who becomes the harpooner for
Stubb.
Daggoo: He is a gigantic African man who becomes the harpooner for Flask.
Dough-Boy: The steward of the Pequod, he serves dinner to the crew of the ship
but remains nervous whenever dealing with Queequeg and Tashtego.
Perth: He is the blacksmith on the Pequod who fashions the harpoon for Ahab.
Captain Mayhew: The captain of the Jeroboam, a Nantucket ship, his ship fell prey
to a mutiny by a shaker and now suffers from a contagious epidemic.
Gabriel: He is a Shaker on the Jeroboam who had been a great prophet before
leaving for Nantucket. While on the Jeroboam, he announces himself as the
archangel Gabriel and sparks a mutiny.
Macey: He is a member of the Jeroboam's crew that was killed by Moby Dick.
Derick De Deer: The captain of the German ship Jungfrau, he begs the Pequod for
oil and then engages in a competition with the Pequod for a Sperm Whale.
Dr. Bunger: The surgeon on the Samuel Enderby, a British ship, he warns Ahab
that Moby Dick would be best left alone and wonders whether Ahab is in fact
insane.
Captain Gardiner: The captain of the Rachel, he begs Ahab for assistance finding
a lost boat that contains his son and gives Ahab a substantial sighting of Moby Dick.
It is his ship that finds Ishmael after the sinking of the Pequod
Quotations from Moby-Dick
Unless otherwise noted, the speaker is the narrator
Chapter 1
The Loomings
Call me Ishmael.
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp,
drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before
coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially
whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral
principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically
knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as
I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish, Cato
throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. ...and so the universal
66
thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and
be content.
Chapter 2
The Carpet-Bag
But it's too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the
copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago.
Chapter 7
The Chapel
...how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless
maintain are dwelling in unspeakeable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all
the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city.
All these things are not without their meanings. But Faith like a jackal, feeds among
the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that
what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance...Methinks my body
is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will take it I say, it is
not me.
Chapter 8
The Pulpit
...for the pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the
pulpit leads the world.
Chapter 9
The Sermon
...if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying
ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.
Chapter 13 Wheelbarrow
It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these
Christians.
Chapter 16 The Ship
For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of
this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.
He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab ...Ahab has his humanities.
Chapter 17 The Ramadan
...Heaven have mercy on us all--Presbyterians and Pagans alike--for we are all
somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
Chapter 20 All Astir
...when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already
involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from
himself.
Chapter 23 The Lee Shore
...all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open
independence of her sea....
Chapter 24 The Advocate
For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked
terrors and wonders of God?
Chapter 26 Knights and Squires
...an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
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Chapter 28 Ahab
...moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the
nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.
Chapter 29 Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do
with aught that looks like death.
Chapter 33 The Speksynder
For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the
practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of
external arts and entrenchments....
Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies,
and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!
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Chapter 38 Dusk
Oh, life! 'tis in an hour like this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge, -as
wild, untutored things are forced to feed-Oh, life! 'tis now that I do feel the latent
horror in thee! (Starbuck).
Chapter 39 First Night-Watch
HA! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!--I've been thinking over it ever since, and
that ha, HA's the final consequence. Why so? Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest
answer to all that's queer; and come what will, one comfort's always left--that
unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated (Stubbs).
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing
(Stubbs).
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The Albatross
But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that
demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while
chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or
midway leave us whelmed
Chapter 54 The Town Ho's Story
Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours-watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men
finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood,
straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness;
and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and
make a little heap of dust of it.
Chapter 59 Brit
...as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there
lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of
the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never
return.
Chapter 61 The Line
All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks;
but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize
the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
Chapter 63 The Dart
To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must
start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil
Chapter 68 The Blanket
Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm
among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the
equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and
like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
Chapter 72 The Monkey-Rope
...I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a
joint stock company of two: that my free will had received a mortal wound; and
that another's mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited
disaster and death.
Chapter 73 Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk Over
Him
So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now,
on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight.
Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these
thunderheads overboard, and then you will float light and right
Chapter 74 The Sperm Whale's Head--Contrasted View
The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another
distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and
nothingness to him. Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see
the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is
smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great
telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make
him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.--Why then do you try
to "enlarge" your mind? Subtilize it.
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Chapter 106
Ahab's Leg
...all miserable events do naturally beget their like.. Yea, more than equally...since
both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity
of Joy. ...in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft-cymballing, round
harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for
ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of
sorrow in the signers.
Chapter 107
The Carpenter
Seat thy self sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted
man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the
same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of
unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
Chapter 109
Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin
...let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man (Starbuck).
Chapter 110
Queequeq in His Coffin
Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.
...whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or
books
Chapter 113
The Forge
In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou
should'st go mad, blacksmith; say why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou
endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go
mad? .. (Ahab).
Oh, Pip! thy wretched laugh;, thy idle but unresting eye; all thy strange
mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy of the melancholy
ship, and mocked it!
Chapter 114 The Gilder
...the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof; calms crossed
by storms, a storm for every calm.
There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through
fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:--through infancy's unconscious spell,
boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt..., then scepticism, then disbelief,
resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If.
Where lies the final harbor whence we unmoor no more?
...Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them:
the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it. Let
faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe (Ahab).
Chapter 125
The Log and Line
Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient
gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he
does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude (Ahab).
Chapter 127
The Life-Buoy
Now, then, Pip, we'll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous philosophies from
thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into thee!
(Ahab).
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Chapter 128
The Pequod Meets the Rachel
Hast seen the White Whale? (Ahab to Captain of Rachel).
Chapter 132
The Symphony
From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the
Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.
Chapter 134
The Chase the Second Day
Aye, aye, Starbuck, 'tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he will; and
would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has (Ahab to Starbuck).
Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. this whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed
by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates'
lieutenant; I act under orders (Ahab to Starbuck).
Chapter 135 The Chase the Third Day
The ship? Great God, where is the ship?" (unidentified crew member).
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Allusions in Moby-Dick
Chapter 1
Ishmael
1) Biblical--son of Abraham; an exile.
2) Ishmael ben Elisha--2nd century A.D. Jewish teacher of Galilee; outstanding
Talmudic teacher; compiled the 13 hermeneutical rules for interpreting the Torah;
founded a school which produced the legal commentary, Mekhilta.
Cato
A Shakespearean character in Julius Caesar; committed suicide by falling on his
sword.
Seneca and the Stoics
Seneca--among Rome's leading intellectual figures in the mid-1st century AD. He
and Epictetus were leading voices of Stoicism.
Stoics--1) Greek school of philosophy holding that human beings should be free
from passion and calmly accept all occurrences as the unavoidable result of divine
will.
Narcissus
Greek mythology--young man who fell in love with his own image in a pool of water
and either wasted away or fell into the pool and drowned.
Fates
1) Greek mythology--the three goddesses who govern human destiny. While one
sister dictates the events of an individual's life, another sister weaves them into a
tapestry on the Loom of Life, and the third sister stands ready with a pair of shears
to cut the thread, thus ending the life.
2) Predestination.
Tyre of Carthage
A principal port founded by the Phoenicians, among the greatest seafarers of the
ancient world.
Euroclydon
Biblical (Acts 27:14)--the tempestuous east wind that shipwrecked Paul off the
coast of Malta.
Moluccas
Spice Islands between Celebes and New Guinea.
Chapter 2
Black Parliament sitting in Tophet
1) Biblical (Jer. 7:31)--Tophet was a shrine in the valley of Hinnom south of ancient
Jerusalem where human sacrifices, especially those of children, were performed to
Moloch.
2) Hell.
Lazarus
Biblical (Luke 16: 19-31)--the diseased beggar in the parable of the rich man and
the beggar.
Sumatra
The second largest island of Indonesia lying in the Indian Ocean west of Malaysia
and Borneo by Sunda Strait.
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Chapter 3
Hyperborean
1) Greek--Hyperboa was one known to the ancient Greeks from the earliest times.
He lived in an unidentified country in the far north and was renowned as a pious
and divinely favored adherent of the cult of Apollo.
2) very cold; frigid; north wind.
Jonah
Biblical (Book of Jonah)--an intolerant, unwilling servant of God. He was called
by God to go to Nineveh and prophesy disaster because of the city's wickedness.
He did not want to go and took passage in a ship at Joppa going in the opposite
direction, thus escaping God's command. At sea, Jonah admits to the crew that it
is his fault that a storm is about to destroy the ship. They throw him overboard.
Jonah is swallowed by a great fish and stays inside it for three days and three
nights. He prays for deliverance. He is vomited onto land and goes to Ninevah, as
God had commanded. .
Chapter 4
Cretan labyrinth
Greek--the building containing a maze which Daedalus constructed for King Minos
of Crete as a place in which to confine the Minotaur. Those put in the maze could
not find their way out and were destroyed by the Minotaur. Theseus was the only
one to escape.
Chapter 6
Canaan
Biblical--Canaan was the land promised to Moses and his people by God after they
fled from Egypt. It was an opulent land of milk and honey.
Herr Alexander
Alexander the great, the military mastermind who conquered the majority of the
known world during the years 336-330 B.C. Because of his tactical genius, he was
able to accomplish his conquest without superiority of numbers.
Chapter 7
Pequod
The Pequod--also spelled Pequot and Pequoit--was an American Indian tribe which,
as Melville briefly mentions, was destroyed by the Puritans. Read Captain John
Mason's account of the Puritan attack of the Pequot fort.
cave of Elephanta
Elephanta is an isle off the western coast of India in Bombay Harbor famous for its
8th century temple caves carved out of rock, its walls sculpted with figures of Hindu
deities.
Chapter 8
Victory's plank where Nelson fell
Horatio Nelson (1758-1805) was a British naval officer and national hero. His ship,
Victory, was involved in a battle with the French. Someone on the French ship,
Redoutalde, shot Nelson and broke his spine. Nelson died as the British won by
annihilating the French.
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Chapter 16
Medes
Inhabitants of ancient Media, a country northwest of Persia and south of Caspian
Sea; an independent country and an empire at its height; conquered Babylon and
Assyria; overthrown by Persian Cyprus.
Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett died
British--Thomas Beckett was named archbishop of Canterbury by Henry and
became an uncompromising defender of the rights of the church against lay
powers; refused to seal the constitution of Clarendon and fled to France. Persuaded
Pope Alexander III to suspend bishops who crowned Prince Henry and force the
king to reconciliation. Beckett was murdered in the cathedral by four knights of
Henry's court. He was later canonized.
Chapter 18
Philistine
1) Biblical--a people who held the coastal area of southern Palestine and were
frequently at war with the Israelites in the period of the judges and the early years
of the monarchy.
2) A smug, ignorant, especially middle class, person, who is held to be indifferent
or antagonistic to artistic and cultural values; boorish; barbarous.
Chapter 19
Elijah the prophet
Biblical (I Kings)--Hebrew prophet of the 9th century B.C.; lived during the time of
Ahab, king of Israel. In his first recorded act, Elijah appeared before the evil King
Ahab and predicted a severe drought. The drought occurred. After more than three
years, the prophet came once more to Ahab and placed the blame for the famine
on the king's sinful policies. Later, Elijah came in the vineyard of Naboth after the
king had secured the land through the wickedness of his wife, Jezebel. Elijah placed
a terrible curse on King Ahab and his descendants, promising that the entire house
of Ahab would be exterminated. This prophecy was brutally fulfilled.
Chapter 24
Job (pronounced Jobe)
Biblical (Book of Job)--the upright, God-fearing and good man of Uz, who was made
to suffer greatly when God tested his faith and loyalty by allowing Satan to have
his way with him. Despite his undeserving misfortunes, Job remained steadfast and
faithful. In the end, God restored his substance to him and granted him happiness
and prosperity. Job's patience in the face of suffering is proverbial.
Alfred the Great
Ruler of Wessex, 870's, who drove the Norse out of England. He is famous for his
cleverness, as he paid the Vikings to leave England for a certain period of time,
during which he raised the proper military to defeat them.
Edmund Burke
English politician in the time of King George III; famous for defending liberty and
justice.
Chapter 26
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John Bunyan
1628-1688; English preacher; author of Pilgrim's Progress; one of the greatest
literary geniuses of the Puritan movement in England.
Cervantes
A soldier until his hand was maimed by gunshot wounds and he was unable to
fight; afterward, over his next twenty years, he became a brilliant author of novels,
plays, and tales.
Andrew Jackson
Seventh President of the U.S.A. (1829-1837); the first poor man to rise to become
President; known as the "people's President."
Chapter 32
Folio
book formed by folding a sheet of paper once; size of book is usually about 11
inches.
Chapter 35
Platonist
1) One who accepts and adheres to the philosophical thought of Plato.
2) Abstractionist .
Descartian vortices
1) Descartes the philosopher believed that everything had to be proven rationally;
he based his proof of identity on the theory, "I think; therefore, I am."
2) vortice--situation drawing into its center all that surrounds it (i.e. whirlpool
effect).
Pantheist
One who believes that God is all forces and powers of the universe; God in Nature,
or God is Nature.
Chapter 38
Iron Cross of Lombardy
An ancient crown, supposedly made from one of the nails from the True Cross,
used notably at the coronation of Holy Roman Emperors and at the coronation of
Napoleon in 1805.
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Chapter 47
Loom of Time
Greek mythology (see Fates in Chapter 1).
Chapter 54
Mark Antony and Cleopatra
One of the most famous romances in history. It is said that the marriage ruined
Mark Antony's life and ultimately caused him to take it.
Chapter 58
terra incognita
Latin--unknown land.
Chapter 70
the giant Holofernes and Judith
Judith is the title of a book in the Apochrypha as well as the name of a Jewess from
Bethulia. Holofernes was a general of the Assyrian king Nebuchadnezzar. To save
her city, Judith killed Holofernes in his drunken slumber and showed his head to her
countrymen. They then drove off the Assyrians.
Chapter 71
Neskyeuna Shakers
In 1776, Mother Anne Lee established the first settlement of American "Shakers"
(the Millennial Church or United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing)
at Niskayuna, a village in New York, on the Hudson River near Schenectady. The
shakers observed celibacy, held all property in common, and believed that Mother
Lee was Christ reincarnated. Their nickname, Shakers, derived from their peculiar
bodily movements during religious meetings. (Information found in editor's note
Moby Dick, edited by Charles Feidelson, Jr., MacMillan 1985, ISBN 0-02-336720-2,
p. 409.)
Gabriel
Biblical--masculine given name meaning "man of God"; an archangel who acts as
the messenger of God.
Chapter 73
Immanuel Kant vs. John Locke
Kant and Locke both expressed agreement with the idea that the State is formed by
a social contract--Individuals must give up some of their rights to enter into a social
contract in society. However, they differed on the application of the idea.
Kant does not recognize the right of individuals to revoke the contract.
Locke maintained that the state formed by the social contract was guided by the
natural law, which guarantees inalienable rights. He formulated the doctrine that
revolution in some circumstances is not only a right but an obligation. If the State
fails to protect the individuals' inalienable rights, then revolution is a duty.
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Chapter 80
sphinx
1) Egyptian mythology--a figure having the body of a lion and the head of a man,
ram, or hawk.
2) Greek mythology--a winged monster having the head of a woman and the body
of a lion that destroyed all who could not answer its riddle.
Chapter 82
Perseus
Greek--Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea coast and
a whale came to carry her away. Perseus killed the whale and married Andromeda.
St. George and his Dragon
Probably third century A.D. Christian martyr. Nothing definite is known about
his life. In time of Edward II adopted as patron saint of England. Among legends
developed about him was that of his conquest of a dragon to rescue the king's
daughter, Sabra.
Ezekiel 32:2
Biblical--"Son of man, take up a lamentation for Pharaoh king of Egypt, and say
unto him, Thou art like a young lion of the nations, and thou art as a whale in the
seas: and thou camest forth with thy rivers, and troubledst the waters with thy
feet, and fouledst their rivers."
I Samuel 5:2-4
Biblical--"Then they carried the ark into Dagon's temple and set it beside Dagon.
When the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, there was Dagon, fallen on his
face on the ground before the ark of the Lord! They took Dagon and put him back
in his place. But the following morning when they rose, there was Dagon fallen on
his face on the ground before the ark of the Lord! His head and hands had been
broken off and were lying on the threshold; only his body remained."
HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891)
He was a seaman and he used his experiences in his works: Typee, Omoo,
Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket
After reading Hawthornes short stories and also under his personal
influence, Melville entirely recast the book he had started under the working title of
The Whale, which would eventually become Moby Dick (1851). It took him another
year to labour to transform a light-hearted narrative of whaling adventures into a
deep exploration of human nature and evil. This book encompassed romance,
drama and epic as well as features typical of a number of lesser genres, such as
sermons, treatises on natural history, tall tales and technical manuals. Its sections
are differently structured.
Like Melville, Ishmael is a Presbyterian who speculates about basic issues of
Calvinist thinking, such as free will, predestination and damnation. Through his
narrator, Melville voices his own preoccupation with the problem of innate
depravity and original sin.
One of his sources was a magazine article entitled Mocha Dick: or the White
Whale of the Pacific, with details about the capture of a giant sperm whale which
had become legendary for its attacks on ships. Another important source was Owen
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UNIT 15
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882)
He contributed to the so-called flowering of New England both by writing
about the American scene and by dealing with general themes which appealed to a
very wide audience all over the world.
He came to be known as one of the Fireside Poets of the nineteenth century.
It has been argued that Longfellows advocacy of a sentimental masculinity, which
once was a key source of his broad appeal, eventually became the grounds for
decanonizing him. With the advent of Modernism, a movement which rejected the
scale of literary values he had held, starting with the sentimental.
This learned academic poet, praised in the past for his dexterous commando of
metre and rhyme has been turned against him in an age which prefers unrhymed
verse.
None of the exoticism, eccentricity, iconoclasm, nonconformity, spontaneity,
obliqueness and ambiguity that we appreciate nowadays is to be found in
Longfellows poetry. Partly because our age does not like didactic moralizing,
nowadays Longfellow is under attack.
Longfellows life had none of the dramatic excitement or thrilling adventure
which characterized so many of his contemporary fellow writers. Though deeply
religious, he was not interested in theological debates. He disliked extremes, and
was fond of harmony and concord in all his relations. There was nothing in his
conventional behavior and peaceful career which would have provided suitable
materials for a sensational biography.
Evangeline: a Tale of Acadie, although Evangeline Bellafontaine did not actually
exist, the poet made her standout as a symbol of the expulsion of 14,000 Frenchspeaking Protestants from what is now the Canadian province of Nova Scotia.
Both the melodramatic plot and the easy to memorize dactylic hexameters
in which this long narrative poem was written accounted for much of its popular
success.
The Song of Hiawatha has appeared in forty-five languages and in more than
eighty translations. Longfellow honestly viewed The Song of Hiawatha as a
faithful rendering of tribal legends, which he tried to honour. He could hardly
imagine the attacks it would receive by the end of the twentieth century, essentially
on the grounds that it has contributed to fostering stereotypes and romanticizing
the Native People.
A Psalm of life is Longfellows best-known short poem. It has often been derided,
burlesqued and ridiculed in modern times. It has been recently analysed as
an instance of how Longfellow tried to develop a domestic style of masculinity.
The choice of imagery has been deemed faulty, for cattle are not prone to
participate in battle, nor are battles fought in bivouacs. Critic Eric Haralson said
that the psychological posture of selfless working and waiting recommended by
Longfellow conformed more to period stereotypes of feminity and owed more to
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DICTION:
Formal: lofty and dignified
Informal: suitable for the normal conversation of educated people
Colloquial: everyday speech of ordinary people
Slang.
LITERARY TERMS:
Anaphora: repetition of a word or group of words in successive clauses.
Caesura: a pause or break inserted in a metrical line by a mark of
punctuation
Enjambement: the running over of the sense of structure of a line of verse
into the following one without a pause.
Example:
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave
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UNIT 16
EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809 1849)
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Poes conception of the writer as artist implies the consideration of art as an end
in itself, not as a means to convey any kind of political or moral message. He
contended that literary works must be judged exclusively by aesthetic criteria. As
a literary critic, he was the first to evaluate the poem per se in all its complexity,
disregarding the circumstances that gave rise to its composition.
He secretly married his cousin shortly before her 14th birthday. His professional
anxieties, combined with the problems of his private life, made him sink into a state
of severe depression.
Poe poked fun at the typical exaggerations of the American West and burlesqued
the genre. He classified his own fiction into the categories of grotesque and
arabesque, two terms borrowed from Sir Walter Scott.
Grotesque: were tales drawn upon a northern European tradition in which one
aspect of the character is heightened for a marked comic effect its essential
element is disharmony, a clash of opposites.
Arabesque: everything contributes to the single effect ot terror: setting,
characterization, plot, theme and style.
The Gothic tradition, characterized by the use of the fantastic, against the
rationality and order that dominated the Age of Reason. They were set amid the
dark atmosphere of haunted castles and wild picturesque landscapes (including
graveyards and ruins) during the medieval period. By the 19th century, Gothic no
longer implied medieval but simply referred to works intended to inspire terror
with macabre plots full of horror, violence, mystery and suspense, even though
they were not necessarily set in the Middle Ages.
The Masque of the Red Death:
The bubonic plague of the Middle Ages. The plague takes the unusual form of a red
rather than a black death, because the idea of mortality is linked with blood. It can
be read as an original aesthetic fable on the relationship between art and nature, a
thought-provoking theme for artists over the centuries. Prince Prospero represents
Poes ideal artist-hero. One month before the tale was published, Poe defined the
poet as a man of taste rather than of pure intellect or moral sense.
Biographical Background
Kenneth Silverman argues that Poe's work is shadowed by the deaths of three
women he loved intensely (in addition to Poe's best-known inspiration, his beloved
young wife Virginia):
1. his mother (when he was about 2 years old)
2. Jane Stanard (idealized mother of a school friend), who died insane at age
28 ("To Helen")
3. Frances Allan (his foster mother)
II. Major Phases of Poe's Career
A. 1827-1831. 3 slim volumes of poetry expressed a strong attachment to the
romantic myth of a pastoral and poetic ideal, made up of dreams and memories of
Eden.
B. 1831 marked a transition year: moved to Baltimore (1831-1835);
wrote "Israfel," "Romance," "To Helen"
1. His work during this period expressed a new commitment to a poetry of heartfelt
conviction in the face of life's burdens and sorrows.
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2. From 1831-41 Poe experienced a radical change; his works involved the theme
of death as a finality in a cosmic void of darkness and silence.
a. "Ligeia" appeared Baltimore American Museum in September 1838
b."The Fall of the House of Usher" appeared in September, 1839 in Burton's
Gentleman's Magazine
c. December 1839: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
C. 1841-1849: A return to poetry and essays and fiction on theme of psychic
transcendentalism. 1845 was his most successful year. Feb: The Raven appeared in
the February American Review after advance publication in the New York Evening
Mirror.
III. Types of Works
Through all these phases, Poe wrote
Satiric tales.
Parodies and burlesques.
Grotesques: tales where one aspect of the character is heightened for a
marked effect (note that this same concept was later used by Sherwood
Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio).
1.
2.
3.
Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature: "The various forms
of the grotesque are the most obvious and pronounced contradictions of any
kind of rationalism and any systematic use of thought" (185).
1.
Arabesques:
tales involving the supernatural; according to Paul
Reubens, "symbolic fantasies of the human condition."
2.Tales of ratiocination ("The Purloined Letter") that allow rational deduction
and logic to counter the irrationality of grotesques and arabesques.
3. Hoaxes
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restoration of our minds when they are "depressed." The power of these moments
comes from their revelation that "the mind is lord and master--outward sense/the
obedient servant of her will."
2. "The Fall of the House of Usher" hinges on questions of self-identity and the
powers of the mind for restoration" (Cambridge Literary History 659). In German
Romantic theory, the sublime derived precisely from the power of the mind over
nature; one of its essential qualities is the presence not only of appreciation of
nature's beauty but awe in its presence. The true sublime contains an element of
fear, of the possibility of danger that resides in nature.
In "Usher," the narrator's utter depression allows no sense of the "visionary"
qualities of dreariness that so powerfully moved Wordsworth . . . In this story the
pattern of differentiated repetition shows the power of things, the consciousness of
urban fragmentation against which Wordsworth was writing, but from within which
Poe writes."
3. Poe: "As to Wordsworth, I have no faith in him."
C. Themes
1. victimization, power and powerlessness
2. confrontations with mysterious presences
3. extreme states of being
4. dehumanization and its cure
5. relation of body and soul
6. memory of and mourning for the dead
7. need for spiritual transcendence and affirmation.
D. Beliefs
1. That the dead are not entirely dead to consciousness
2. That it is best to live in hopes that love can transcend death.
3. That one must apprehend the possibility of beauty beyond the grave.
IV. Poe and Plagiarism
A. p. 1527 "Letter to Mr. ---": "A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of
science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by
having for its object and indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem
only so far as this object is attained; romance presenting perceptible images with
definite, poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since
the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception."
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817): p. 172. "A poem is that species of
composition which is opposed to works of science by proposing for its immediate
object pleasure, not truth; and from all species (having this object in common
with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is
compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part."
B. A fierce opponent of literary plagiarism, Poe claims originality for his stanza form
in "The Raven": trochaic rhythm; octameter acatalectic alternating with heptameter
catalectic repeated in refrain of fifth verse.
This form was used by Elizabeth Barrett in "Lady Geraldine's Curse"; Poe had
dedicated "The Raven" to her because he had admired "Lady Geraldine's Courtship"
for its "fierce passion" and "delicate imagination."
Of Poe, Barrett said, "There is poetry in the man, though, now and then seen
between the great gaps of bathos. . . the "raven" made me laugh, though with
something in it which accounts for the hold it took upon people."
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V. "The Raven"
A. To Poe, Barrett wrote: "Your 'Raven' has produced a sensation, a "fit horror"
here in England. Some of my friends are taken by the fear of it and some by the
music. I hear of persons haunted by the "Nevermore," and one acquaintance of
mine who has the misfortune of possessing a "bust of Pallas" can never bear to look
at it in the twilight."
B. Symbolic raven parallels Coleridge's albatross, Shelley's skylark, Keats's
nightingale.
C. From a spectator's account: Poe wore black, and, adjusting the atmosphere to
suit the mood of his work, "would turn down the lamps till the room was almost
dark. Standing in the center of the apartment he would recite those wonderful lines
in the most melodious of voices. So marvelous was his power as a reader that the
auditors would be afraid to draw breath lest the enchanted spell be broken." Elmira
Royster Shelton: "When Edgar read 'The Raven,' he became so wildly excited that
he frightened me, and when I remonstrated with him he replied he could not help
it--that it set his brain on fire."
Genre:
"The Raven" - a grotesque narrative poem.
Summary:
During a cold, dark evening in December, a man is attempting to find some solace
from the remembrance of his lost love, Lenore, by reading volumes of "forgotten
lore." As he is nearly overcome by slumber, a knock comes at his door. Having first
believed the knock to be only a result of his dreaming, he finally opens the door
apologetically, but is greeted only by darkness. A thrill of half-wonder, half-fear
overcomes the speaker, and as he peers into the deep darkness, he can only say
the word "Lenore." Upon closing the door, another knock is immediately heard from
the chamber's window. The narrator throws open the shutter and window, and in
steps a large, beautiful raven, which immediately posts itself on the bust of Pallas
Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, above the entrance of the room. Amused
by the animal, the speaker asks it its name, to which the bird replies "Nevermore."
Believing "Nevermore" to be the raven's name, the narrator's curiosity is piqued,
but the speaker believes the name to have little relevancy to his question, for he
had never before heard of any man or beast called by that name. Although the bird
is peaceful, the narrator mutters to himself that it, like all other blessings of his
life, will soon leave him. Again the bird replies "Nevermore." Intrigued, the speaker
pulls a chair up directly before the bird to more readily direct his attention on the
wondrous beast, and to figure out the meaning of the bird's single monotonous
reply. While in contemplation in the chair, the speaker's mind turns to Lenore, and
how her frame will never again bless the chair in which he now reposes. Suddenly
overcome with grief, the persona believes that the raven is a godsend, intended to
deliver him from his anguish, but again comes the bird's laconic reply. The speaker
then viciously rebukes the bird, calling it now to be a "thing of evil," and asks it
whether there is "balm in Gilead," a biblical reference to respite in a land riven with
suffering. Again, the word "nevermore" is the only answer. Shouting maniacally
now, demanding that the bird take its leave, the narrator attempts to dispatch
the bird back to the "Plutonian shore" of Hell from whence it came. The bird, "the
emblem of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance," replies again "nevermore,"
and sits there on the bust of Pallas to this day, ever a torment to the speaker's
soul, and a reminder of his lost love.
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Genre:
"The Masque of the Red Death" is an arabesque. It "... represents Poe at the height
in that form of the arabesques in which he let his fancy create a mood of terror
wrought out of the symbolism of color"(Quinn 331).
Summary:
"The Masque of the Red Death" tells the story of a Prince Prospero who along with
his one thousand friends sought a haven from the plague that was ravishing their
country. They lived together in the prince's luxurious abbey with all the amenities
and securities imaginable. "There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there
were ballet dancers, there were musicians, there was beauty, there was wine.
All these and security were within. Without was the 'Red Death.'" (Poe 269). At
a masquerader's party a tall gaunt figure dressed in "grave cerements and [a]
corpse-like mask" enters. (Poe 273) Everyone is offended, but too frightened to
apprehend the figure. "When the revellers find courage to attack him, there is
nothing tangible within the ghastly cerements" (Quinn 331). This is symbolic of
the plague that kills without its presence being felt or seen - a specter, an angel of
death, with "illimitable dominion over all" (Poe 373).
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Importance:
An arabesque masterpiece that Poe wanted to include in a selection of his best
works. The work was overlooked by others.
Critical Opinions:
It is said about "The Masque of the Red Death" that "the resources of rhetoric have
rarely been so marvelously employed...With a restraint that is one of the surest
marks of genius, Poe gives no hint of the great moral the tale tells to those that can
think. For the others, he had no message" ( 331).
EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849)
Unlike most of his contemporaries, he was more interested in aesthetics
than in ethics. He did not rely primarily on local history and customs, but preferred
to deal with eccentric and sometimes even extravagant subject matter. Poe
explicitly condemned the heresy of didacticism. He was the most famous exponent
of the movement in America of the Art for Arts sake.
By borrowing themes from the popular culture of his time, by experimenting
with new techniques and by making very innovative use of the narrative
conventions he inherited, he created several fictional genres that would become
immensely successful. He has been hailed as the inventor of the science fiction tale.
Poe always had difficulty in holding a steady job. His virulent reviewing,
which made him popularly known as the tomahawk man, increased sales, but also
alienated friends, created enemies and often put the journals in a difficult position.
In 1842 his wife had a violent haemorrhage, the first sign of the
tuberculosis which would kill her five years later. Until Virginias death in 1847, Poe
suffered constant fear of losing her, and he was driven to alcohol and drugs in his
most painful moments. In fact, it was in this Philadelphia period that he wrote his
best short stories, such as The Masque of the Red Death.
In 1844 Poe moved to New York and joined the staff of the Evening Mirror,
which published The Raven, the poem that made him famous.
Although Poes stories display a rich diversity, the strong Gothic strain that
prevails in many of them explains why he is commonly associated with that
tradition. The Gothic tradition, characterized by the use of the fantastic, irrational
and supernatural, emerged in the eighteenth century as a reaction against
rationality and order that dominated the Age of Reason. The term Gothic was first
applied to the novels by English writers such as Walpole and Radcliffe because they
were set amid the dark atmosphere of haunted castles and wild picturesque
landscapes during the medieval period. By the nineteenth century Gothic no longer
implied medieval but simply referred to works intended to suspense, even though
they were not necessarily set in the Middle Ages. Since Poe both ridiculed and
admired nineteenth century Gothic tales, his own Gothic pieces were to certain
extent satires on the German and British examples of the genre.
THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1842)
Poe had in mind the Black Death. In this story, however, the plague takes the
unusual form of a red rather than black death, because the idea of mortality is
linked to blood. This relationship between blood and death points to Poes obsession
with Virginias illness at the time that he was writing the tale. Poe may also been
inspired by an incident reported to have happened ten years before. In 1832,
shortly after a cholera epidemic in Paris, one of the dancers appeared disguised as
the personification of the disease at a masked ball. Among the various sources for
Poes depiction of the appearance of the masked figure, it has been suggested that
he drew some details from the presence of Banquos ghost and the banquet scene
in Shakespeares Macbeth.
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UNIT 17
FREDERICK DOUGLAS (1818 1895)
Slave Narrative- the literary genre inaugurated in the 18th century had its period
of greatest production between 1820 and 1860. They became immensely popular
because such thrilling accounts of heroic journeys into freedom captivated the
imagination of readers immersed in the atmosphere of romanticism that was
pervading American culture.
The book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written
by Himself has become a classic in African American Literature.
He returned to America with funds provided by British admirers to purchase his
manumission and to start his own antislavery newspaper. Douglasss dedication
to promote abolitionism occupied him full-time and made him increasingly famous.
He was said to stand on the abolitionist platform like an African prince, majestic in
his wrath with the port and the countenance, and heroic assurance and almost
stature of the Roman Coriolanus.
All of Douglasss writings were linked to his political concerns. The place Douglass
holds now in American literature was earned with his contributions to non-fiction,
which are currently studied as examples of the autobiographical and the slave
narrative genres. The author intended his Narrative to be a literary work of art and
deliberately tried to embellish his style in the two following versions, although he
did so in a way that did not always suit modern taste. That is probably the main
reason why readers today invariable prefer the original version, where the writer
demonstrated his superb command of many rhetorical figures:
Irony - figure of speech in which what is stated is not what is meant. The
user of irony assumes that his reader or listener understands the concealed
meaning of his statement. Perhaps the simplest form of irony is rhetorical
irony, when, for effect, a speaker says the direct opposite of what she means.
Thus, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, when Mark Antony refers in his funeral
oration to Brutus and his fellow assassins as honorable men he is really
saying that they are totally dishonorable and not to be trusted. Dramatic
irony occurs in a play when the audience knows facts of which the characters
in the play are ignorant. The most sustained example of dramatic irony is
undoubtedly Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus searches to find the
murderer of the former king of Thebes, only to discover that it is himself, a
fact the audience has known all along.
Synecdoche: Figure of speech that uses either the part to represent the whole
('There were some new faces at the meeting', rather than new people), or the
whole to stand for the part ('The West Indies beat England at cricket', rather
than naming the national
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The author did not know the exact date of his birth just as most
slaves, children and adults alike, ignored theirs in his time.
Regarding his fathers identity, the author only knew that he was a white man and
heard rumors that he was his own master.
The author was separated form his mother when he was an infant following a
custom that often resulted in severing family ties.
For the author the pathway from slavery to freedom was the acquisition of
literacy.
The sight of the ships on Chesapeake Bay made the author feel sad ad frightened
at first, but later increasingly hopeful.
The Chesapeake Bay monologue does not express his fear of the risks involved in
any attempt to escape.
Mr. Coveys attempt to tie the author with a rope was unexpected because
Frederick was working diligently.
When the author seized Mr. Covey by his throat, the master was startled and
confused.
While Hughes was trying to tie the authors right hand, Frederick gave Hughes a
strong kick.
When Mr. Covey called Bill for help, Bill refused to intervene.
In the six months following the hand-to-hand fight, Mr. Covey would sometimes
threaten Frederick, but never tried to whip him again.
The struggle with Mr. Covey infused him with self-assurance, and he resolved to
fight for his freedom at all costs.
The author felt happy with his first job because her was glad to keep his just
reward, instead of having to share his wages with a slaveholder.
The author was unable to find a job as a caulker because white caulkers objected to
having a black co-worker.
When the author first spoke at an antislavery convention held at Nantucket, he
began by feeling intimidated by his white audience, but soon felt comfortable
enough to express everything he wanted to say.
Douglass addressed northern readers as innocent people who needed to be
enlightened about the evils of slavery because they lacked direct knowledge of how
slaves were being treated in the South.
Ishmael Reed observed that the slave who was the first to read was the first to
run away. Antiliteracy state laws were often justified on the grounds that slaves
would misunderstand or misuse the power given to them by the ability to read
and write.
Monologue is a long speech given by a single person who is alone. This literary
device is generally used to reveal the private thoughts and emotions of an
individual character.
There is a clear reference to the dehumanizing effects of slavery in the phrase
By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of
theirs.
Douglass often elaborated n the negative effects of slavery upon slaveholders who
were led to moral degradation because they were continually tempted to exercise
harshness and cruelty.
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seek the immediate overthrow of that execrable system,--without trembling for the
fate of this country in the hands of a righteous God, who is ever on the side of the
oppressed, and whose arm is not shortened that it cannot save,--must have a flinty
heart, and be qualified to act the part of a trafficker "in slaves and the souls of
men." I am confident that it is essentially true in all its statements; that nothing
has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing drawn from the
imagination; that it comes short of the reality, rather than over- states a single fact
in regard to SLAVERY AS IT IS. The experience of FREDERICK DOUGLASS, as a
slave, was not a peculiar one; his lot was not especially a hard one; his case may
be regarded as a very fair specimen of the treatment of slaves in Maryland, in
which State it is conceded that they are better fed and less cruelly treated than in
Georgia, Alabama, or Louisiana. Many have suffered incomparably more, while very
few on the plantations have suffered less, than himself. Yet how deplorable was his
situation! what terrible chastisements were inflicted upon his person! what still
more shocking outrages were perpetrated upon his mind! with all his noble powers
and sublime aspirations, how like a brute was he treated, even by those professing
to have the same mind in them that was in Christ Jesus! to what dreadful liabilities
was he continually subjected! how destitute of friendly counsel and aid, even in his
greatest extremities! how heavy was the midnight of woe which shrouded in
blackness the last ray of hope, and filled the future with terror and gloom! what
longings after freedom took possession of his breast, and how his misery
augmented, in proportion as he grew reflective and intelligent,--thus demonstrating
that a happy slave is an extinct man! how he thought, reasoned, felt, under the
lash of the driver, with the chains upon his limbs! what perils he en- countered in
his endeavors to escape from his horrible doom! and how signal have been his
deliverance and preservation in the midst of a nation of pitiless enemies!
This Narrative contains many affecting incidents, many passages of great eloquence
and power; but I think the most thrilling one of them all is the description
DOUGLASS gives of his feelings, as he stood soliloquizing respecting his fate, and
the chances of his one day being a freeman, on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay-viewing the receding vessels as they flew with their white wings before the breeze,
and apostrophizing them as animated by the living spirit of freedom. Who can read
that passage, and be in- sensible to its pathos and sublimity? Compressed into it
is a whole Alexandrian library of thought, feeling, and sentiment--all that can, all
that need be urged, in the form of expostulation, entreaty, rebuke, against that
crime of crimes,--making man the prop- erty of his fellow-man! O, how accursed
is that system, which entombs the godlike mind of man, defaces the divine image,
reduces those who by creation were crowned with glory and honor to a level with
four-footed beasts, and exalts the dealer in human flesh above all that is called
God! Why should its existence be prolonged one hour? Is it not evil, only evil, and
that continually? What does its presence imply but the absence of all fear of God,
all regard for man, on the part of the people of the United States? Heaven speed its
eternal overthrow!
So profoundly ignorant of the nature of slavery are many persons, that they are
stubbornly incredulous whenever they read or listen to any recital of the cruelties
which are daily inflicted on its victims. They do not deny that the slaves are held
as property; but that terrible fact seems to convey to their minds no idea of
injustice, exposure to outrage, or savage barbarity. Tell them of cruel scourgings,
of mutilations and brandings, of scenes of pollution and blood, of the banishment of
all light and knowledge, and they affect to be greatly indignant at such enormous
exaggerations, such wholesale misstatements, such abominable libels on the
character of the southern planters! As if all these direful outrages were not the
natural results of slavery! As if it were less cruel to reduce a human being to the
condition of a thing, than to give him a severe flagellation, or to deprive him of
necessary food and clothing! As if whips, chains, thumbscrews, paddles, blood-
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hounds, overseers, drivers, patrols, were not all in- dispensable to keep the slaves
down, and to give protection to their ruthless oppressors! As if, when the marriage
institution is abolished, concubinage, adultery, and incest, must not necessarily
abound; when all the rights of humanity are annihilated, any barrier remains to
protect the victim from the fury of the spoiler; when absolute power is assumed
over life and liberty, it will not be wielded with destructive sway! Skeptics of this
character abound in society. In some few instances, their incredulity arises from a
want of reflection; but, generally, it indicates a hatred of the light, a desire to shield
slavery from the assaults of its foes, a contempt of the colored race, whether bond
or free. Such will try to discredit the shocking tales of slaveholding cruelty which
are recorded in this truthful Narrative; but they will labor in vain. Mr. DOUGLASS
has frankly disclosed the place of his birth, the names of those who claimed
ownership in his body and soul, and the names also of those who committed the
crimes which he has alleged against them. His statements, there- fore, may easily
be disproved, if they are untrue.
In the course of his Narrative, he relates two in- stances of murderous cruelty,-in one of which a planter deliberately shot a slave belonging to a neigh- boring
plantation, who had unintentionally gotten within his lordly domain in quest of
fish; and in the other, an overseer blew out the brains of a slave who had fled
to a stream of water to escape a bloody scourging. Mr. DOUGLASS states that in
neither of these instances was any thing done by way of legal arrest or judicial
investigation. The Baltimore American, of March 17, 1845, relates a similar case of
atrocity, perpetrated with similar impunity--as fol- lows:--""Shooting a slave."--We
learn, upon the authority of a letter from Charles county, Maryland, received by a
gentleman of this city, that a young man, named Matthews, a nephew of General
Matthews, and whose father, it is believed, holds an of- fice at Washington, killed
one of the slaves upon his father's farm by shooting him. The letter states that
young Matthews had been left in charge of the farm; that he gave an order to the
servant, which was disobeyed, when he proceeded to the house, "obtained a gun,
and, returning, shot the servant." He immediately, the letter continues, fled to his
father's residence, where he still remains unmolested."--Let it never be forgotten,
that no slaveholder or overseer can be convicted of any outrage perpetrated on
the person of a slave, however diabolical it may be, on the testimony of colored
witnesses, whether bond or free. By the slave code, they are adjudged to be as
incompetent to testify against a white man, as though they were indeed a part of
the brute creation. Hence, there is no legal protection in fact, whatever there may
be in form, for the slave population; and any amount of cruelty may be inflicted
on them with impunity. Is it possible for the human mind to conceive of a more
horrible state of society?
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Of course, it was impossible to get any white man to volunteer his testimony in my
behalf, and against the white young men. Even those who may have sympathized
with me were not prepared to do this. It required a degree of courage unknown to
them to do so; for just at that time, the slightest manifestation of humanity toward
a colored person was denounced as abolitionism, and that name subjected its
bearer to frightful liabilities. The watch words of the bloody-minded in that region,
and in those days, were, "Damn the abolitionists!" and "Damn the niggers!" There
was nothing done, and probably nothing would have been done if I had been killed.
Such was, and such remains, the state of things in the Christian city of Baltimore.
I conclude these remarks by copying the following portrait of the religion of
the south, (which is, by communion and fellowship, the religion of the north,)
which I soberly affirm is "true to the life," and without caricature or the slightest
exaggeration. It is said to have been drawn, several years before the present antislavery agitation began, by a northern Methodist preacher, who, while residing at
the south, had an opportunity to see slave holding morals, manners, and piety,
with his own eyes. "Shall I not visit for these things? saith the Lord. Shall not my
soul be avenged on such a nation as this?"
A PARODY
"Come, saints and sinners, hear me tell
How pious priests whip Jack and Nell,
And women buy and children sell,
And preach all sinners down to hell,
And sing of heavenly union.
"They'll bleat and baa, dona like goats,
Gorge down black sheep, and strain at motes,
Array their backs in fine black coats,
Then seize their negroes by their throats,
And choke, for heavenly union.
"They'll church you if you sip a dram,
And damn you if you steal a lamb;
Yet rob old Tony, Doll, and Sam,
Of human rights, and bread and ham;
Kidnapper's heavenly union.
"They'll loudly talk of Christ's reward,
And bind his image with a cord,
And scold, and swing the lash abhorred,
And sell their brother in the Lord
To handcuffed heavenly union.
"They'll read and sing a sacred song,
And make a prayer both loud and long,
And teach the right and do the wrong,
Hailing the brother, sister throng,
With words of heavenly union.
"We wonder how such saints can sing,
Or praise the Lord upon the wing,
Who roar, and scold, and whip, and sting,
And to their slaves and mammon cling,
In guilty conscience union.
"They'll raise tobacco, corn, and rye,
And drive, and thieve, and cheat, and lie,
And lay up treasures in the sky,
By making switch and cowskin fly,
In hope of heavenly union.
"They'll crack old Tony on the skull,
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Douglass slave narrative of 1845 shares some features with Equianos one
(1789). Both authors place a great deal of importance on individual achievement
and the work ethic as a means of success, they locate their quest for freedom
within a Christian context, and they stress the value of freedom for personal and
spiritual development. The two writers had to counter the notions that blacks were
only fit to be slaves and that ex-slaves were incompetent to deal with the
responsibilities of freedom. Both ex-slaves had to refute claims that blacks were
intrinsically inferior, exposing how they had been degraded by slavery, but could be
morally rehabilitated and elevated from their inferior condition. In the 18 th Century,
Equiano had criticized the brutality of slave-owners, not the institution of slavery
itself, whereas Douglass wanted to reveal the evils of Americas peculiar institution
to his mid-nineteenth-century audience.
Also Douglass can be contrasted with Franklin as auto biographers equally
willing to share the secret of their success stories for the benefit of their audiences.
Note that both authors stress their talents when they proudly present themselves
as archetypal self-made men worthy of admiration. Douglasss autobiography,
however, lacks the self-critical and self-questioning dimension that makes Franklin
admit his mistakes and confess his errata.
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UNIT 18
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1811 1896)
The novel soon proved to be a highly effective tool for social reform.. When
the author met President A. Lincoln in the White House, he greeted her with the
words So your are the little lady who started this great war! The early loss of her
mother together with her inability to establish a satisfactory relationship with her
stepmother, who entered the household the following year and bore three more
children, deeply affected the perception of motherhood that would so prominent
in her writings. She had an orthodox Calvinist upbringing, which explains why
the Puritan background would always be present in her work. The author has
been considered an excellent writer of dialogue because she had an ear for idiom,
delighted in rendering different styles and made an effort to transcribe black
vernacular accurately.
Hailed as a book that inflamed the North and shook the conscience of the South.
Emerson called it the book that encircled the globe. Among the main characters
of the novel, the protagonist has become the most controversial of al, partly
because he was the origin of the pejorative term Uncle Tom, which refers to a
thoroughly subservient black zealously intent on pleasing whites.
Uncle Toms Cabin has drawn criticism for its alleged racism was published at a
time when almost no one in America wrote about slavery in secular terms.
Romantic realism: added strength to the belief that slavery constituted the
oppression of one of the best races of the human family. Abolitionists contended
that one of the worst evils of slavery was that it led to the degradation of
a naturally virtuous people.
She did not endorse racist claims of black inferiority. In a Key to Uncle Toms
Cabin, she made a typical statement or romantic racialist thinking The Negro race
is confessedly more simple, docile, child-like and affectionate, than other races.
To understand the principal theme of the novel is the problem of evil, including its
theological, moral, economic and political dimensions. The author refers to the
slaves as human property in order to emphasize the idea that they are human
beings who are treated like commodities. She uses an omniscient narrator who
speaks directly to the reader, not only explaining facts and discussing moral and
political issues and establishing an intimacy that allows her to exhort, rebuke,
implore etcShe uses biblical sources in chapter 30 of her novel.
The original subtitle of Uncle Toms Cabin The Man Who was a Thing pointed out
the dehumanization and objectification to which slaves were subjected as if they
were mere objects rather than human beings. Another way to dehumanize slaves
was to treat them as if they were animals. Susan and Emmeline are presented as
paradigms of true womanhood (piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity).
Slave women, being property of their master, had no legal right to resist their
sexual advances and they are vulnerable to all kinds of sexual abuse. According to
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the author, slavery should be eradicated from any true Christian society because
its maintenance s a sin committed not only by slaveholders but also by those who
did not own slaves themselves, but were guilty of perpetuating the system.
The book was published over nine months in forty-one installments. Serialization
is a mode of literary production which implies the writing of a story in sections
that appear over a period of time with interruptions both for the author and for the
reader. In a series, the beginning of each chapter should help the readers to recall
preceding chapters, and the ending secion should arouse their interest so that they
look forward to the next issue.
Sentimental novel: concentrated on the distress of the virtuous and illustrated
the alliance of acute sensibility with true virtue. The term sentimentality became
pejoratively associated with the practice of overemphasizing emotions and with any
attempts on the part o the author to arouse an outpouring of intense feelings in a
sympathetic audience.
Realism sought to portray ordinary life with fidelity, avoiding idealization and any
rendering of fantastic or improbable events.
Plantation novel defended and idealized slavery in the context of a glorified
South, effacing the violence which played such a central role in maintaining
the peculiar institution.
Both slave narrative and antislavery works of fiction are best understood when
considered within their historical context.
UNCLE TOMS CABIN
1811-96, American novelist and humanitarian, b. Litchfield, Conn. With her novel
Uncle Tom's Cabin, she stirred the conscience of Americans concerning slavery
and thereby influenced the course of American history. The daughter of Lyman
Beecher , pastor of the Congregational Church in Litchfield, and the sister of Henry
Ward Beecher , Harriet grew up in an atmosphere of New England Congregational
piety and, like all the Beechers, early developed an interest in theology and in
schemes for improving humanity. In 1824 she went to Hartford, at first to study,
later to teach in her sister Catherine's school. When her father became head of
Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, she moved to that city with him and
there began teaching again and writing. In 1836 she married Professor Calvin Ellis
Stowe.
Cincinnati, a border city, was at the time torn with abolitionist conflicts.
Harriet's brothers were violently opposed to slavery, and she had seen its effects
in Kentucky and had aided a runaway slave. However, it was not until the passage
of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) that she was moved to write on the subject. Uncle
Tom's Cabin, first published serially (1851-52) in an abolitionist paper, the National
Era, was not intended as abolitionist propaganda, nor was it directed against the
South, although slaveholders condemned the book as unfair; indeed, it presented
some of the favorable aspects of slavery, but it also crystallized the sentiments of
the North. In one year over 300,000 copies were sold, and its dramatization by G.
L. Aiken had a long run. The book was translated into many foreign languages, and
when Mrs. Stowe visited Europe in 1853 numerous honors were bestowed on her.
At her best, Stowe combined literary realism with evangelical fervor. A prolific
writer whose works fill 16 volumes, she was chiefly popular because she so aptly
expressed the sentiments of the 19th-century middle class. Her works reflect the
great issues and events of her century: slavery, women's position in society, the
decline of Calvinism, the rise of industry and consumerism, and the birth of a great
national literature.
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US suffragist, abolitionist, and author. Her antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was
first published serially 1851-52. The inspiration came to her in a vision 1848, and
the book brought immediate success.
Section: The Antislavery Movement
Related: United States History
The Tappan brothers and William Lloyd Garrison , who began publishing an
abolitionist journal, The Liberator, in 1831, were the principal organizers in Dec.,
1833, at Philadelphia, of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The primary concern
of the society was the denunciation of slavery as a moral evil; its members called
for immediate action to free the slaves. In 1835 the society launched a massive
propaganda campaign. It flooded the slave states with abolitionist literature, sent
agents throughout the North to organize state and local antislavery societies, and
poured petitions into Congress demanding the abolition of slavery in the District of
Columbia.
The abolitionists were at first widely denounced and abused. Mobs attacked them in
the North; Southerners burned antislavery pamphlets and in some areas excluded
them from the mails; and Congress imposed the gag rule to avoid considering their
petitions. These actions, and the murder of abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy
in 1837, led many to fear for their constitutional rights. Abolitionists shrewdly
exploited these fears and antislavery sentiment spread rapidly in the North. By
1838, more than 1,350 antislavery societies existed with almost 250,000 members,
including many women.
Although abolitionists united in denouncing the African venture of the American
Colonization Society , they disagreed among themselves as to how their goal might
be best reached. Garrison believed in moral suasion as the only weapon; he and
his followers also argued that women be allowed to participate fully in antislavery
societies, thus disturbing more conservative members. When the Garrisonians
passed such a resolution at the society's 1840 convention, a large group led by
the Tappan brothers withdrew and formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery
Society. The abolitionists were never again united as a single movement.
Advocates of direct political action founded (1840) the Liberty party; James G.
Birney was its presidential candidate in 1840 and 1844. Writers such as John
Greenleaf Whittier and orators such as Wendell Phillips gave their services to the
cause, while Frederick Douglass and other freed or escaped slaves also took to the
lecture platform.
An antislavery lobby was organized in 1842, and its influence grew under Weld's
able direction. Abolitionists hoped to convert the South through the churches, until
the withdrawal of Southern Methodists (1844) and Baptists (1845) from association
with their Northern brethren. After the demise of the Liberty party, the political
abolitionists supported the Free-Soil party in 1848 and 1852, and in 1856 they
voted with the Republican party.
The passage of more stringent fugitive slave laws in 1850 increased abolitionist
activity on the Underground Railroad . Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher
Stowe , became an effective piece of abolitionist propaganda, and the Kansas
question further aroused both North and South. The culminating act of extreme
abolitionism occurred in the raid of John Brown on Harpers Ferry. After the opening
of the Civil War insistent abolitionist demands for immediate freeing of the slaves,
supported by radical Republicans in Congress, pushed President Lincoln in his
decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation .
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Douglass intention in his Narrative. While using different methods, they were
joined in a common cause. Not surprisingly, the southern critics response was
overwhelmingly hostile. Accused of ignorance and inaccuracy, she realized that her
novel could not stand alone and felt obliged to justify what she had written by
producing documentary evidence.
She replied to objectors with A Key to Uncle Toms Cabin: Presenting the
Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded (1853)
Stowes novel bears the direct influence of the slave narrative tradition, for
she drew on material form African American autobiographies of the 1840s. Among
the main characters of the novel, the protagonist has become the most
controversial of all, partly because he was the origin of the pejorative term Uncle
Tom, which refers to a thoroughly subservient black zealously intent on pleasing
whites. This Uncle Tom stereotype, with all its negative associations, does not
correspond to Stowes characterization, but to the distorted image which arose
from the influential stage versions loosely based on the best-selling book.
Uncle Tom is intelligent, sensible, peaceful, forgiving, stoic and generous in
his response to the human needs that require his assistance, of blacks and whites
alike. There is no servility or passivity in Toms attitude, but what we would now
call non-violent resistance. In Stowes religious mind, it was the sacrificial offering
of the innocent, cast in the role of the perfect Christian, the martyr. She
deliberately presented Tom as a Christ-like figure by emphasizing parallelisms as
her novel progressed and, consequently, no other ending would have fit her plans
and her readers expectations. From her perspective, Tom was the true hero of the
story, although our contemporary readers are more inclined to see the hero in the
intrepid George Harris, who breaks the law like Frederick Douglass in real life in
order to free himself.
Her stated purpose of showing the evils of slavery in order to make
Americans react against it required a particularly careful handling of her subject
matter. There is ample proof that, while writing her novel, Stowe wished to take
into account the slaves own perspectives.
During her lifetime and until the first decades of the twentieth century,
Stowe was honoured among African Americans. Later in the century, however, she
began to be accused of portraying the slaves of her novel condescendingly.
Obviously, 20th Century African Americans, who had never been slaves, were keen
to distance themselves from everything that Uncle Tom had come to represent.
Turning away from the universalism of the Enlightenment, 19 th Century
intellectuals embraced a kind of racialist thinking which held the notion that, apart
from distinctive physical features, each racial group had special innate gifts or
particular inbred qualities. Romantic racialism was common in abolitionist circles,
and even added strength to their belief that slavery constituted the oppression
of one of the best races of the human family. Stowe subscribed to the romantic
racialism of her time, not to be confused with modern racism, for she did not
endorse racist claims of black inferiority.
The concept of evangelical Protestantism is essential in order to understand
that the principal theme of the novel is the problem of evil, which Stowe treats on
different levels, including its theological, moral, economic and political dimensions.
She combines notions that we nowadays tend to place in separate spheres and
mixes various modes of discourse that we generally separate. For instance, she
blends theological with political discourse in the jeremiad tradition that runs
through American literature. She denounces the civil laws regulating slavery,
because she thinks that they are in conflict with the higher religious laws that
forbid the system absolutely.
Stowe used the analogy of the nation as a family under threat; she was
establishing a connection between the domestic and the political spheres. If slavery
destroyed the family, that is, the institution upon which human society rests,
slavery was endangering society itself. As she felt that the American domestic
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values of her time were complicit in the patriarchal institution of slavery, she
proposed to alter such values so that American society would be reformed in a
genuinely progressive sense. Although Stowes ideas about sacredness of the home
and the sanctity of the family may seem old-fashioned today, her work was
informed by the most advanced cultural feminist ideology of her own time, which
was struggling over the issue of maternal power. Indeed, motherhood plays a
fundamental role in Uncle Toms Cabin.
Stowe uses an omniscient narrator who speaks directly to the reader, not
only explaining facts and discussing moral and political issues, but establishing an
intimacy that allows her to exhort, rebuke, implore, persuade, admonish or
otherwise instruct someone very much like herself, although less knowledgeable
about the multiple evils of slavery. Thus, she develops a sense of immediacy,
proximity and empathy that creates or encourages a sense of personal
responsibility in each individual reader. The original subtitle of the novel was The
Man Who Was a Thing, pointed out the dehumanization and objectification to
which slaves were subjected.
Slave women, being the property of their masters, had no legal right to
resist their sexual advances. Black women in bondage gave birth to mixed-blood
babies fathered by their white masters. These children added to the wealth of their
owners by remaining as part of their estate or by being sold away. According to
Stowes worldview, slavery should be eradicated from any true Christian society
because its maintenance was a sin committed not only by slaveholders but also by
those who did not own slaves themselves, but who were guilty of perpetuating the
system.
The novel was originally published over nine months in forty-one
instalments. Serialization is a mode of literary production which implies the writing
of a story in sections that appear over a period of time with interruptions both for
the author and for the reader. The narrative organization of a serialized story
differs from the linearity of a novel published as a whole text in a single book. In a
series, the beginning of each chapter should help the readers to recall preceding
chapters, and the ending section should arouse their interest so that they look
forward to the next issue. The plot must be developed with a clear system of crossreferences to past events and to characters already well-known to the audience.
Minor characters must be introduced in a striking manner, so that they may leave a
lasting impression on readers.
Uncle Toms Cabin must be placed within the literary traditions of
sentimentalism and realism. The sentimental novel is concentrated on the distress
of the virtuous and illustrated the alliance of acute sensibility with true virtue.
Sentimentality became pejoratively associated with the practice of overemphasizing
emotions with any attempts on the part of the author to arouse an outpouring of
intense feelings in a sympathetic audience. Rejecting Romanticism, nineteenth
century realism sought to portray ordinary life with fidelity, avoiding idealization
and any rendering of fantastic or improbable events.
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UNIT 19
WALT WHITMAN (1819 1892)
LEAVES OF GRASS
Whitman likened it to a carefully constructed cathedral; critics hail his work as the
cornerstone of modern American poetry.
Whitman broke away from the standard metre and rhyme schemes of English
poetry and explored the possibilities of free verse instead
Free verse: called vers libre in French, has no regular metre and no equal
line length. It has an irregular rhythm does not mean that it has no rhythmic
arrangement. The overall effect has a melodic character because the variable
patterns of sound used by the poet are created by means of alliteration and
assonance, and by the repetition of words and phrases. Verse lines have different
lengths and are fluid because they are structured according to the cadence of
natural speech.
The author saw himself as a bard for his whole nation, speaking with a voice dram
from Americas vernacular, a popular language, made by the masses, people
nearest the concrete, having most to do with actual land and sea. He called for a
literature for the masses, but the great contradiction was that Whitman was never
read by the mass readership of his day.
The first three lines of the first section or canto indicate that the speaker
celebrates in himself the qualities that he has in common with his reader, his own
individuality and that of other people and the feeling of community with other
people.
In line 5, a spear of summer grass stands for a symbol of the individual, a symbol
of the natural world, a symbol of democracy.
In section 6, lines 14-16 is an example of anaphora. Anaphora: the repetition of a
word or a group of words in successive clauses
The handkerchief mentioned in section 6 stands as a symbol of the purity embodied
by the whiteness, a reminder of divinity and a symbol of the new life embodied by
the greenness.
Section 15 presents a lengthy catalogue that emphasizes human diversity, end
by merging human diversity into a harmonious union and presents both individual
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portraits and group scenes in rather long lines. The portrayal of people treat
them with dignity and respect, emphasize the importance of the working class
and presents them in a variety of settings, both in the county and in the city. The
people described are identified by their occupations, relationship to other members
of their family and ethnicity.
Section 52 I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world suggests that
the speaker of the poem joyously joins with the hawk mentioned 2 lines above,
rather than merely observe the bird.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow form the grass I love suggests that the
speaker perceives existence as a continuum and believes in a kind of rebirth in the
regenerative natural world.
Unlike most nature writers Whitman did not focus on the adversarial relationship
between human beings and the natural world, which in his time were and still
are often treated as irreconcilable entities. He saw humans and their creations,
including their cities as inextricable components of a harmonious natural world.
His grasp of the detail of an event, but not of its ethical quality, is shown in his
description of a sea-fight [pp. 62-63]. Somehow he never shows us the soul of
anything. We may ask even, "Does he believe there is any such thing as a soul?"
American he is, of the ruder and more barbaric type, a prairie cow boy in a buffalo
robe, with a voice of the east wind, shouting prophecies and incantations about
what he thinks he sees and knows. But from civilized speech or melody he seems
strangely remote. Egotism, if a virtue, is certainly an unfragrant one, and Walt
Whitman's egotism, grotesque as it is, is perhaps less grotesque than gigantic. He
describes himself well enough in the lines,
I am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
Milton defines poetry as "thoughts that voluntary move harmonious numbers";
and Chatfield says, "Poetry is the music of thought, conveyed to us in the music
of language." Joubert happily puts it, "Nothing which does not transport is
poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument." Let us see, then how a few lines from
Whitman's "Song of Myself" come up to the requirements of these authorities:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume
you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer
grass.
1.
2.
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The Only Kangaroo among the Beauty: Emily Dickinson and America [1979]
): "They both work against the distinction between the work and the person who
produced it. They both hold writing not as a freestanding achievement but as some
kind of medium in which a unique personality heroically exposes itself. They both
appear to have held that a poem derives its credentials from its place in a special,
lived experience. They both appear to have felt that the poet's effort is successful
when it ruptures the collective voice; and thus we have the incompleteness, the
fragmentary quality in both, the tendency in both toward antigenres. All of this,
in both, leads to the celebration of the quality of one's consciousness as the final
standard." "The usual artificial distinctions between them can be largely accepted
and largely ignored: Whitman's prophet versus Emily Dickinson's recluse; his
certainty versus her doubt; his homosexuality versus her physical denial; and so
on. We understand little as soon as we have made the one poet New English and
the other American, the one intellectual and analytical and the other imaginative
and synthetic, the one intensive and concentrating and the other expansive and
liberating, the one a hothouse-plant and the other wild- luxuriant-natural, the one
contemplative and passionate and the other prophetic and compassionate, or the
one personal and abstract and the other universal and concrete. . . . There is no
use making Emily Dickinson's poetry the epitome of home verse and Whitman's the
epitome of the fringe. We can know we have an incomplete idea if Whitman is given
the circumference and Emily Dickinson the center."
M.L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall (The Modern Poetic Sequence [1983]): "Emily
Dickinson professed a reluctance to publish, and certainly she felt no public call in
Whitman's sense. . . . What she did share with Whitman, apart from exquisite
lyrical gifts and sensuous alertness, was the passion that drives their work and the
need to be discreet. The need was hopeless in both cases, because their most
intense work gives the game away. Misunderstood, Whitman's self-exposure
seemed unmanly and suspect to many readers. Dickinson's would have been
thought unbecoming in a lady had she been published and understood. But
Whitman's discretion was a practical expedient, a minimal self-protection in a
hostile environment. Dickinson's was a matter of her essential idiom of style and
personality. As we shall see, much of her greatest writing evokes boldly clear
states of awareness within an indeterminate context. It is both reticent and
revealing: 'pure' as Whitman's 'touch' poems are pure. The principle at work in
Dickinson, the pressure to get an extreme emotional complex into focus while
repressing its private source, may account for the unevenness of her work, given
her prolificacy and the absence of reaction from peers. . . ." "A certain affinity with
Whitman is seriously present no matter what their differences were. Emily
Dickinson might well have seen the 1855 and 1860 editions of Leaves of Grass,
despite her humorously suspect, prim denial. . . . Yet the two poets are kindred
sensibilities, a fact that becomes more visible when their reciprocities are seen in
the magnifying lenses of their sequences. Whitman, to be sure, was more direct
and explicit about sex, but no more sensitized to it if we read Dickinson aright. He
plunged more ardently, with strongly sexual overtones, into his intoxicating
commerce with nature, and was relatively untroubled by any sense of division
between himself and nature or deity. In general, he provides external detail and
circumstance plentifully, addresses himself to the reader, and relatively seldom
keeps his literal subject hidden from us. Dickinson, more complex and starkly
conscious of the betrayal of manifold hopes, finds many more shadings and levels
and degrees of half-alienated relationship among self and nature and God, just as
she does in her relations with other persons and her sense of herself. She pushes
further, with more psychological precision, than Whitman does into the subjective
realm of self-doubt and of confusions and agonies of spirit."
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collection of Leaves of Grass, thus giving the Civil War a central position in his
work. It is commonly believed that the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln
at the end of the war affected Whitman much more deeply than any event in the
war itself.
Whitmans explicit celebration of sexual freedom often shocked and
offended his first audience. Although he thought of himself a moral poet trying to
cleanse an immoral society, many of his contemporaries saw him not merely
vulgar, bur as corrupt for his alleged obscenity. Curiously enough, in his lifetime it
was his allusions to heterosexuality that became subjects of controversy, whereas
his handling of homosexuality was largely unnoticed. 20 th Century scholarship has
paid a great deal of attention to the Calamus poems. As these pieces celebrated
the beautiful and sane affection of man for man according to its author, they were
initially taken as innocent poems of male comradeship and brotherly love. Recently,
however, the Calamus cluster has come to be interpreted as a group of overtly
homoerotic lyrics. Since Whitman thought that sex was part of human experience,
he was no reason why it should be excluded from his all embracing poetry, whose
material was drawn from the common everyday lives of all kind of people. His
poetry stressed the importance of the physical self, yet did not focus exclusively on
it. In fact, democracy was his most distinctive and central theme, to which many
other were related. He thought that America was the great democracy where each
individual could evolve to spiritual perfection.
On the frontispiece of Leaves of Grass was the portrait of a young man, who
remained unidentified, as no authors name was given on the title page. His
unconventional appearance, however, seemed to link him to the poet who boldly
addressed readers by celebrating himself and his whole nation with him.
The grass, which is the most commonplace plant on earth, appears as a
formal structuring device throughout Song to Myself, starting with the close
attention devoted to a single spear or leaf of grass in line 5 of the first section.
Whitman was fascinated with the power inscribed in visual images and often
thought of his work in relation to painting. With the dexterity of a realist painter he
created extraordinary and exceptional democratic images in the historical context
of antidemocratic feeling that characterized the antebellum period. Indeed, the
visual arts produced in America during the years immediately preceding the Civil
War were associated with and elite tradition rather than with popular values.
American painting at that time did not focus on representations of common people
in scenes of everyday life that were prevalent in France after the French
Revolution, particularly in the works of Millet, with whom Whitman felt an affinity
that led him to observe: the Leaves are really only Miller in another form. After
the Civil War the realist painters Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, among other,
created visual counterparts to the literary representations of the democratic ideals
that Whitman had already expressed before the war.
Whitman aesthetic relies heavily on reversals of preceding forms of poetry.
According to him, as poems should be spontaneous and organic rather than present
and regular, they must be divided into sections of varying rhythm and size, rather
than constrictive rhyming stanzas. Everything in poetry verse, form, subject
matter and vernacular language- must be drawn from life and be true to it.
Reduction, simplification and closure (the effect of finality and completeness) must
be avoided.
Song to Myself places great demands on its readers partly because of the
freedom Whitman takes with word order, his frequent use of ellipsis and his
anaphoric frame of reference.
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UNIT 20
EMILY DICKINSON (1830 1886)
She is often compared with Walt Whitman and placed with him in the first rank of
the 19th Century radically experimental poets whose original and innovative style
anticipated in some respects the modernist movement of the following century.
There is no certainty about the reasons why she only spent one year at
Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, ten miles from her house. Homesickness, ill
health and her refusal to become a professing Christian may all have played an
important role in her departure from that prestigious institution. Except for that
year at the Seminary and some visits to Boston and to Washington, Dickinson
spent her life within the grounds of the Homestead, the family mansion where she
had been born. She never married and tried to avoid domestic duties in order to
devote all her energy to reading and writing.
When in 1860 Dickinson ceased to visit other peoples houses,
correspondence remained her preferred means of communicating with her friends.
Though the Homestead was only one lawn away from the Evergreens (where her
best friend, Susan, lived), she addressed Susan primarily in writing, and she did so
with such an extraordinary intensity and passion that their life-long emotional bond
has become a matter of conjecture. What is known for sure is that the poet
regularly shared drafts and invited feedback from that friend, her sister-in-law, in
whom she found her true soul mate and with whom she felt free to voice her most
intimate thoughts.
Since Dickinson did not keep a diary, her letters are her only prose available
to the public. They are interesting both in themselves and because they provide the
best context for interpreting her poetry. Many of them can be read as poems, just
as many of her poems can be read as letters, for she challenged traditional notions
of boundaries between genres, and in some of her letters she even switched from
prose to verse in the middle of the sentence.
Higginsons words in the introduction to the first volume of her Poems (1890)
defined Dickinson as a recluse by temperament and habit contributing to the
propagation of the mythic portrait of the eccentric woman always dressed in white.
Rather than clarify matters about her enigmatic figure, her poetry makes it still
more complex because she constantly manipulated her appearance and position
through frequent metamorphoses.
She chose a method of publishing which consisted in circulating her
manuscripts among her trusting friends. Much has been written about how the
conventions of print violated the characteristics of her poetry and about her wish to
preserve her privacy rather than exhibit her feelings to strangers. Another reason
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that may have discouraged her from having her poetry printed is that she valued
her autonomy and was reluctant to have her work edited. All of the ten poems
printed in her lifetime, chiefly in newspapers, had been altered in various ways and
given titles without her consent.
Her most creative year was 1863, when she wrote more than three
hundred. She copied selections of her poems in ink onto sheets of letter paper that
she bound with string, but did not sign or put her name on these hand-sewn
albums which would come to be known as fascicles nor did she label, number, or
give them any titles. It is not until the year 1955 that an accurate collection of
Dickinsons poems appear.
The fact that Dickinsons work has been edited by a variety of people
accounts for different editorial practices. As her first editors wanted her poems to
be accepted by their contemporaries, they felt the need to make them conform to
19th Century standards of verse decorum, and thus adopted policies that tended to
delete the authors radical experimentation. In contrast, recent editors are
concerned with rendering her manuscript poems as faithfully as possible into print.
Rather than being anxious to assert her authority as a poet, she questioned
authority itself. Trapped between doubt and certainty, she was willing to admit that
there are no final answers to the great traditional questions that continue to
exercise poets. Therefore, instead of favouring straightforwardness, she preferred
indirection.
Much has been written about her scepticism, which seems to be obvious.
Many of her poems, however, indicate that she was deeply concerned with divinity
and often explored notions of God.
Dickinsons poems are short and compact in accordance with the brevity and
conciseness of her style, characterized by a extraordinary sharpness. In contrast
with the wordiness or verbosity of most of her contemporaries, her passion for
economy in language giver all her utterances and epigrammatic character.
Nevertheless, her aphoristic verses are far from being simple, because the frequent
grammatical elisions that are the root of her elliptical style often result in obscurity.
Neither were her main themes nature, death and immortality- new, nor were the
formal features alliteration, assonance, consonance, simile, metaphor and analogyunusual. Her originality stemmed from her power and skill in expressing her
multifaceted sensibility in beautiful and suggestive language.
THIS IS MY LETTER TO THE WORLD
The message comes from Nature. Concerning form, this poem clearly exemplifies
how Dickinson adapted to her purpose the Congregational hymns she often sang.
She used the traditional hymn metre which consisted in quatrains of alternating
iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter lines, stanzas of four lines in alternate lines
of eight syllables (four metrical feet) and six syllables (three metrical feet), but she
interrupted this regularity by occasional changes in metre (as in line5, which only
has seven syllables) and rhyme (as lines 5 and 7).
SAFE IN THEIR ALABASTER CHAMBERS
At present there are five manuscripts of the poem, and one or two more have been
lost.
Apart for the changes in capitalization, the most important remodelling in the first
stanza took place when the author replaced the first word of the fourth line sleep,
by lie, thus transferring the focus from the notion of slumber into that of stasis.
The substitution was consistent with the contents of each of the two versions of
the second stanza. Indeed, the earlier version focuses on the marked contrast
between the somnolence of the dead and the vitality of the birds and bees. On the
other hand, the later version emphasizes how the universe remains in never ending
motion while the dead are motionless in their graves.
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The opening unvoiced S sound is the key note of the first stanza, the S of silence
that strikes again in sleep, satin and stone Some readers have understood it as
the expression of the authors belief in the Resurrection, whereas others insist that
it transgresses conventional pieties and gives no consolations or hope because its
conclusion implies that it is the physical world rather than its spiritual counterpart
that continues to exist.
I TASTE A LIQUOR NEVER BREWED
It was first published anonymously under the title of The May-Wine with editorial
changes intended to please a conventional audience. Two lines were altered
to get and exact rhyme, and one line was transformed for the sake of a more
understandable metaphor.
For quite long readers understood this poem as an innocent nature poem about
the intoxicating joy that the author experiences when she is overwhelmed by the
beauty of the spring scenery. The air is compared to liquor, and the speaker like
a bird drinking nectar- surpasses butterflies and bees in her capacity to luxuriate
in sensuous pleasure. Nature as a source of delight is indeed a theme that recurs
in many of Dickinsons poems. What is unique here is the subversive aspect that
is revealed when its last stanza is compared with the lines that inspired it. In The
Day of the Doom the divine Michael Wigglesworth had depicted the terrifying
scene of the second coming of Christ, when the passed over rush and to their
windows run,/Viewing this light, which shines more bright than doth the Noon-day
Sun. In Dickinsons poem it is also the saints who to windows run, though not
to contemplate the glory of God, but to see the little Tippler/Leaning against the
Sun.
Dickinson seems to evoke some kinds of transcendental experience similar to the
ones described by Emerson, whose general influence on her thought is undeniable.
But, again, what is original in Dickinsons poem, and rather unexpected from
someone with her upbringing, is how wittily she plays with the language of alcohol
and inebriation to create an extended metaphor suffused with humour.
This piece is written in quatrains, alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter, with
rhymes of various styles between the second and fourth line of each stanza.
I FELT A FUNERAL, IN MY BRAIN
It was first published in Poems (1896) without the last stanza. The removal of
the terrifying stanza has a significant effect on the meaning of the poem, which
not only becomes less frightening, but may be interpreted as a discourse on
death rather than as the description of a psychic breakdown. The poem is not
about actual death in a biological sense, but about the death of consciousness
which is linked to the experience of depression. It is the feeling of a funeral that
occurs in the speakers brain while experiencing a disturbed mental state. The
ritual described in the first four stanzas is familiar. But then, in the fifth stanza,
something unexpected happens. The plank suddenly breaks and the coffin, instead
of being lowered on ropes into the ground, drops down bumping against the sides
of the deep grave until it comes to a halt in the darkness at the bottom.
The extended metaphor of the funeral illustrates a mental process that is
characterized by monotony and repetitiveness. Although the world of sound
predominates, the spatial setting of the poem which is suggested by the
claustrophobic environment of the funeral-, is also important. In this gloomy
atmosphere, the mind becomes numb. The last line of the fourth stanza, Wrecked,
solitary, here, draws the readers attention to a different setting: that of an alien
land where a shipwrecked mariner endures a solitude compares to that of the
corpse in the coffin. But instead of expanding on this new metaphor, the poet
returns to the funeral and suddenly introduces the final element of surprise.
Both seeing ones funeral and the fantasy of being buried alive are common
motifs that have often been treated in literature. Dickinson uses and at the same
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time, subverts this convention in an original manner and with dramatically effective
results.
I HEARD A FLY BUZZ-WHEN I DIED
It focuses n the experience of death by capturing the last thoughts of the speaker,
surrounded by mourners, but much more attentive to the presence of a buzzing fly
that blocks out the light.
The imagery emphasizes the connection of the senses of hearing and sight by
linking sound and colour. The final ebb of consciousness is depicted as a loss of
sight, which marks the ending of the poem. It concludes when vision fails, the
unequivocal sign that the speaker has just died.
MY LIFE HAD STOOD-A LOADED GUN
It exemplifies her technique of the omitted centre, a device by which the author
alludes to what seems specific, but in fact does not identify the people involved
or locate the events evoked. Instead, she omits information that is crucial to the
understanding of the poem.
This poem has attracted many feminist critics and within these interpretations they
emphasize how female creation is perceived as a form of aggression. The fact that
the speaker sees herself as a loaded gun, a lethal weapon, is understood as the
poets rejection of conventional femininity because she would be presenting herself
as everything that a woman is not supposed to be.
Feminist critics have been particularly interested in the volcanic image of line
11, because they associate it with that of the female writers, whose linguistic
expression erupts out of silence, disrupting the social structures of the male
organization. According to this elucidation, Dickinson would have characterized the
Vesuvian power of her art by comparing her smile to the aftermath of a volcanic
eruption.
There is a great deal of violence in it, though it is difficult to point out concrete
equivalences.
One of the most exciting interpretations is the one that identifies the speaker with
Death that has the power to kill but not the power to die.
In perfect or exact rhyme the vowel sounds are the same, whereas in imperfect or
slant rhyme, also called half-rhyme, partial rhyme or para-rhyme, the vowel sounds
are close but not identical. In both versions of Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,
lines 3 and 5 in the second stanza rhyme exactly (ear, here in the 1859 version;
row, snow in that of 1861), whereas the rhyme of lines 3 and 5 in the first stanza is
imperfect or slant.
Dickinsons style creates an illusion of simplicity while conveying complex meaning.
Kamilla Denman has argued that Dickinsons punctuation is neither a transcendent,
purely extra-semantic effect nor a careless transgression of grammatical rules,
but an integral part of her exploration of language, used deliberately to disrupt
conventional grammatical patterns and create new relationships between words; to
resist stasis in linguistic expression []; to create musical and rhythmical effects;
and to affirm the silent and the nonverbal, the spaces between words that lend
resonance and emphasis to poetry.
Dickinsons elliptical style leaves ample room for endless speculation about
meanings and intentions.
Critics have been fascinated by the contrast between Dickinson, a private poet
writing intimate lyrics for a selected audience, and Whitman, a public poet loudly
addressing his nation and the world at large. The difference between them is
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illustrated, for instance, by the striking contrast between Dickinsons hesitant tone
in This is my letter to the World and the confident tone of the first section of
Whitmans Song to Myself.
UNIT 21
MARK TWAIN (Samuel L. Clemens)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, two classics
novels of boyhood adventure. The fact that many people have read both of them
in their school days has contributed to spreading his fame as an author of childrens
books, while it has somehow challenged his stance as a serious literary artist.
He was a master of satire, a term which can be defined as the art of exposing folly
or wickedness by mocking them. He did not poke fun at trivialities, but resorted
to humour in the name of important values and for crucial purposes, in order to
correct, censure and ridicule the vices of societe by making them the target of
derision.
Realism: as a typical realist, he aimed at accurately portraying the daily life of
common people, one of his main concerns was to record precisely the way he heard
ordinary people both children and adults- talk. He avoided bookish effect that
often marred previous attempts to transpose local idiom into literature. He did not
simply use slang and dialect words, but strove to reproduce in print the sounds as
they were pronounced in order to suggest authentic regional accents.
His accomplishments in the field not only attracted an audience sympathetic to the
promotion of democratic and nationalistic ideals in his own time, but also paved the
way for the acceptance of vernacular speech in modern American literature.
The adventures of Tom Sawyer was rooted in the authors own childhood memories
of frontier life in the river town of Hannibal. Such a provocative specimen of the
modern bad boy literature that clearly satirized the older good boy or model
boy genre, with its picaresque and witty satire established Twain as an extremely
popular writer of fiction. Its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Fin, much richer
than its antecedent on all accounts.
Mark Twains famous work Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been very
controversial from the time of its appearance to the present. Some of its first
readers considered it vulgar, irreverent trashy and vicious. Nowadays it is still
one of the most challenged books in America and a s a result, various schools
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across the US have alternatively banned and restore it to their curricula. Mark
Twain was absolutely against slavery and wanted to demonstrate the harm that the
institution had caused o his country, but he did not completely overcome certain
racial prejudices about non-white people. He would be judged as racist by todays
standards of political correctness were applied to a thorough analysis of all his
writings.
Although HF expresses antislavery feelings, it is not an antislavery novel in the
sense of Uncle Toms Cabin had been, basically because Twain published it after
slavery had been abolished in the United States. He wrote it after the Civil War
and Emancipation, in a period of Reconstruction that was failing to establish ht
necessary conditions so that former slaves who were legally emancipated would be
truly free.
Mark Twain began HF as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and over a
period of seven years, he set aside his manuscript several times and every time
he resumed his work he altered his former plans. Out of the forty-three chapters
that comprise the novel, the first eleven deal with adventures on land, and the next
twenty chapters detail those that take place either on the raft that floats down the
Mississippi River or on its banks. The river dominates the geography of the novel
and provides a symbolic contrast with the land, where a decadent and perverted
culture prevails. Dominant notions of morality are progressively questioned and
subverted in the subtle ways to make the audience sympathize with the authors
ideological position.
Although HF has disturbed and offended many people since its first reception, it is
widely recognized as a major text of American realism. Hailed as a masterpiece
by some of the most prestigious critics of the period, there is a consensus to
celebrate this work as the archetypal American novel. When Hemingway made
the famous statement, all American writing comes from that. There was nothing
before. There has been nothing as good since, he had probably in mind the
vernacular language of the novel, which remains a crucial feature of its literary
quality. Twain put into literature the spoken language of the Southern lower and
middle-class society, he devoted particular attention to the speech of illiterate
children and slaves. He also breaks grammatical rules, he makes errors of subjverb agreement, he frequently uses double negatives, get the past form of irregular
verbs wrong, uses the non-standard aint for isnt and occasionally misspells
certain words.
Hucks colloquial speech as a first person narrator, he directly addresses the
readers in a friendly manner so as to engage their sympathies. Mark Twain uses
a typical innocent eye perspective that help readers to see beyond the surface
of reality. Indeed the man effect of this literary device is to emphasize the
narrators imperfect or nave perception in order to encourage a superior and more
enlightened readers awareness.
Twain often satirized Christian customs and the hypocritical spiritual guidance
of certain religious instructors. The author not only poked fun at the Widows
saying grace before meals and mocked Miss Watsons conventional conceptions of
heaven and hell, but also took the liberty pf making iconoclastic allusions to biblical
personages such as Moses. Huck plays the role of an unruly boy who wants to
remove himself from the female world of conformity and rejects the conventional
standard of behaviour and values that both women represent.
Superstition is a theme that permeates the novel, appearing whenever Huck and
Jim express their fear of the unknown.
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Although some of this humour arises form its distinctly American idiom and
depends on fashions that may no longer be prevalent, most of it is universal
enough to still be enjoyed by readers all over the world. The author creates
humorous effects by irony, paradox, hyperbole, slang expressions and funny
situations.
HF presents some typical features of the picaresque novel, a genre which originated
in 16th century Spain, the earliest example being Lazarillo de Tormes.
He continued to lecture with great success both at home and (in 1872-73) in
England. In 1876 he published Tom Sawyer, a narrative of youthful escapades.
It was followed in 1880 by A Tramp Abroad, in 1881 by The Prince and The
Pauper, and in 1883 by the autobiographical Life on the Mississippi. His next
novel, Huckleberry Finn (1884), is generally considered his finest and one of the
masterpieces of American fiction. In 1889 he published A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur's Court, in which a commonsensical Yankee is transported back in time
to medieval Britain.
EXPLANATORY
IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect;
the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike
County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been
done in a hap- hazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the
trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of
speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would
suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
Twain is unsurpassed in American literature. His novel The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, a masterpiece of humor, characterization, and realism, has been
called the first (and sometimes the best) modern American novel.
Twain's literary reputation rests most particularly on The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn. In its hero, a resourceful, unconventional boy with an innate sense of human
values, Twain created one of the most memorable characters in fiction. The
narrative device of a raft carrying Huck and a runaway slave down the Mississippi
enabled Twain to achieve a realistic portrait of American life in the 19th cent.
Through his use of authentic vernacular speech he revolutionized the language
of American fiction and exerted a great influence on many subsequent American
writers. In 1990 a handwritten manuscript of the first half of the novel was
discovered that includes a number of minor changes and an episode that was left
out of the original published version; these passages were included in an edition
published in 1996
Like William Dean Howells, Clara Clemens may have honestly thought that
the "real" Mark Twain was a genial humorist who was led to omit certain American
colloquialisms from the printed page -- for example, from "Huckleberry Finn." The
savagery of certain elements in that great novel -- Colonel Sherburn's assassination
of Boggs and his contemptuous quelling of the mob that wants to lynch him come
to mind -- cannot be made to vanish by a conjuring trick; and the space age is far
more moved by the sardonic and disillusioned Mark Twain than it is by Twain the
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UNIT 22
HENRY JAMES
His models were Dickens, Balzac, and Hawthorne.
Characteristic for James novels are understanding and sensitively drawn lady
portraits. His main themes were the innocence of the New World in conflict with
corruption and wisdom of the Old. Among his masterpieces is DAISY MILLER
(1879), where the young and innocent American Daisy finds her values in
conflict with European sophistication. In THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1881) again
a young American woman becomes a victim of her provincialism during her
travels in Europe. THE BOSTONIANS (1886) was based on Alphonse Daudet's
novel L'vangliste and set in the era of the rising feminist movement. WHAT
MAISIE KNEW (1897) depicted a preadolescent young girl, who must chose
between her parents and a motherly old governess. In THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
(1902) a heritage destroys the love of a young couple. James considered THE
AMBASSADORS (1903) his most 'perfect' work of art. The novel depicts Lambert
Strether's attempts to persuade Mrs Newsome' son Chad to return from Paris back
to the United States. Strether's possibility to marry Mrs Newsome is dropped and
he remains content in his role as a widower and observer. James's most famous
short stories include 'The Turn of the Screw', a ghost story in which the question of
childhood corruption obsesses a governess.
Although James is best-known for his novels, his essays are now attracting
audience outside scholarly connoisseurs. In his early critics James considered
British and American novels dull and formless and French fiction 'intolerably
unclean'. "M. Zola is magnificent, but he strikes an English reader as ignorant; he
has an air of working in the dark; if he had as much light as energy, his results
would be of the highest value." (from The Art of Fiction) In PARTIAL PORTRAITS
(1888) James paid tribute to his elders, and Emerson, George Eliot, Turgenev.
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His advice to aspiring writers avoided all theorizing: 'Oh, do something from your
point of view'. H.G. Wells used James as the model for George Boon in his Boon
(1915). When the protagonist argued that novels should be used for propaganda,
not art, James wrote to Wells: "It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes
importance, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of
its process. If I were Boon I should say that any pretense of such a substitute is
helpless and hopeless humbug; but I wouldn't be Boon for the world, and am only
yours faithfully, Henry James."
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UNIT 23
KATE CHOPIN (1850 1904)
Her literary fame rest on The Awakening, the novel that marked her fall into a long
period of obscurity.
In her own time, she was praised for her aesthetic achievement, she was
immediately condemned on moral grounds for writing a story about the artistic and
sexual awakening of a young woman dissatisfied with her conventional role as wife
and mother. The sympathetic way of treating the theme was harmful for her at her
time and good afterwards.
She has almost been forgotten after the publication of The Awakening in 1899 until
1969, when the Norwegian Per Seyersted edited her complete works and the 1 st
critical biography. The only thing that had survived her meanwhile where a few
short stories often anthologised as illustrative examples of regionalist or local colour
fiction, a genre that became successful after the Civil War because it satisfied
the curiosity among Americans to learn about the different regions of the united
nation; that had the negative effect of confining her to a narrow designation local
colourist, often used derogatorily.
Nowadays her whole work is placed in the more prestigious literary movements
of realism and naturalism; the short stories mentioned before have been recently
reinterpreted as subversive pieces that use the conventions of the genre in order
to undermine and dismantle the conservative ideology it helped to support.
She described everyday life of ordinary people of Louisiana, she adopted many
of the typical features of the regionalist writing that was popular among her
contemporaries and then went beyond the surface representations of folkways and
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speech patterns in order to examine the values of southern society and explore
fundamental issues n regard to humanity at large. Unlike most regionalists, she
expressed no nostalgia for the past, for she did not present an idealized picture of
Old South (gender and race relations in particular).
LIFE: Both bilingual and bicultural, is now recognized as the 1 st major writer in
American literature, formed outside the Protestant Anglo-Saxon mainstream.
Born Katherine OFlaherty to a wealthy family of Irish and French descent, her
father was an Irish immigrant who had succeeded in various business and become
a prosperous merchant before he took as his second wife, Eliza Faris, a member
of the prominent old French community of the city. When Kate was 5, her father
was killed in a railway accident and she was raised by 3 women (mother, maternal
grandmother and great-grandmother, who taught her French).
Her personality was shaped while growing up in a matriarchal household ruled by
strong independent women who controlled their own lives. She was educated at
the Sacred Heart Academy in St. Louis, from which she graduated in 1868, 2 years
later, at 20, she married Oscar Chopin, born in Louisiana and who had spent the
years of the Civil War in France, the son of Creole mother and a French father who
was a cotton plantation owner in Louisiana; -Oscar had a cosmopolitan background
that suited Kates taste and possessed all the qualities to anticipate a happy
marriage.
3 months of honeymoon in Europe, then went to live in New Orleans (Louisiana),
where a French atmosphere still prevailed. Oscar worked as a cotton factor, that is,
between the cotton traders and the growers, a gentlemanly middle man; when his
factoring business failed in 1879, they moved with their children to Cloutierville, to
take care of his family plantation in Natchitoches Parish in northwestern Louisiana,
where they spent 4 years. He died suddenly from malaria in 1882, she ran their
general store and plantation for more than a year and she proved that she was
able to take charge of her own life. At the prompting of her mother in St. Louis,
however, in 1884 she returned with her 6 children to her native city, where she
spent the rest of her life.
Within 5 years after moving back to St. Louis, she began her relatively successful
literary career, partly to supplement her income and support her children. Although
she did not live only on writing, she did not consider herself an amateur, but a
dedicated professional writer and a serious artist as well. She look for literary
distinction and, being a very practical woman, she also managed her literary career
just as she was managing her familys property. She started with a poem, If It
Might Be, and tried Missouri local colour with some short stories set in St. Louis.
But she soon realised that what would really sell was farther south, in Louisiana,
whose foreignness compared to the rest of the United States hardly needed to
be emphasized. At 18 she had spent 3 weeks in New Orleans, which she liked
immensely, and had been particularly impressed by the sensuous life-style of its
bourgeois Creole population. During the 14 years she spent in the area after her
marriage, she became fascinated by the sophisticated and refined Creole culture
of Louisiana; she observed the exclusive milieu of this artistically sensitive elite as
an outsider, for it was quite different from her own St.Louis French background. At
that time, the upper class of Louisiana was made up of the proud descendants of
the early French and Spanish settlers, Catholics and who spoke a provincial form of
standard French. While in Louisiana, he knew another group of French heritage, the
descendants of the French-speaking Protestant settlers whom the British had driven
out of the captures French colony of Acadia (now Nova Scotia, Canada), back in
1755, and who created the Cajun culture. Most of the characters in Chopins
Louisiana stories belong to one of these 2 groups, largely unknown to the rest of
America.
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But she was concerned with psychological realism and tried to show how these
people dealt with universal issues according to the specific values prevalent in their
environment, not in entertaining America.
HER WORK
The critical praised her during her lifetime from her Louisiana short stories, only 1
part of her production, in 1 decade she wrote more than a hundred short stories,
sketches, poems, essays, reviews, a one-act play and 3 novels. The 1 st one, At
Fault (1890), was set in the isolated Cane River region of Louisiana. Reviewers
praised the authors style, but objected to her portrayal of an alcoholic wife and to
her treatment of the theme of divorce. She wrote a 2 nd novel, Young Dr. Gosse and
Theo, but destroyed the manuscript in 1896, after having had it rejected by several
publishers. Before the appearance of her last and best novel, The Awakening
(1899), her reputation as a writer rested basically on the short narratives that she
began to publish in regional newspapers, and which after improving her marketing
abilities, she also placed in important eastern magazines. Over 200 reviews and
press notices attest to the nationwide acclaim she won with Bayou Folk (1894), a
collection of 23 stories and sketches of rural life in Louisiana, most of them set in
Natchitoches Parish. A Night in Acadie (1897), her 2 nd collection, with 21 stories,
received much less attention.
Her correspondence reveals that several editors asked her to rewrite the stories
they considered too indelicate or immoral for an audience of true ladies, she
reacted to censure: sometimes she altered what she had submitted for publication,
and developed an ability to hide enconded meanings that can only be uncovered
by a close reading of her polished texts; on other occasions she resisted pressure
and suffered the consequences of dealing with subject matter that was deemed
provocative, especially when treated by a female writer who was expected to
conform to the prevailing mores. For instance, she never attempted to find a
publisher for her most explicitly erotic story, The Storm, the joyful sexual fantasy
of an unpunished happy adultery she wrote in 1898. The Story of an Hour,
about the sense of freedom enjoyed by a woman during the hour she thinks she
is a widow until she discovers her husband is still alive; it was refused by the
editor of The Century, 1 reason was that her heroines were gradually becoming
less submissive and more independent; she began to get into trouble when
she imagined discontented women rebelling against oppressive attachments to
unattractive men and openly exposing the oppressive nature of their marriage
contracts; she also wrote about sexuality in the lives of men and women with a
frankness rarely seen in the work of 19th century female writers. As her initially soft
dissenting voice became clearer, the chances to be accepted diminished.
The Awakening (1899), is a complex narrative about Edna Pontelliers growth from
being her husbands possession to achieving self-ownership; she is a discontented
wife and mother who experiences an awakening or process of self-discovery that
makes her yearn for sexual freedom and artistic fulfilment. Chopins audaciously
sympathetic treatment of her female protagonist elicited many hostile critical
reactions. Calling the novel the American Madame Bovary may be interpreted as
a compliment today, but not then. Many reviewers allowed for the aesthetic merit
of the book and praised its skilful technique, but most of them disapproved of
Chopins handling of the theme of adultery and deplored her choice of an improper
and essentially vulgar subject matter. In this adverse atmosphere, the publishers
cancelled her contract for a 3rd collection, A Vocation and a Voice was posthumously
published in 1991. Of the 22 stories planned for the volume, only 4 were set in
Louisiana, and most of them dealt explicitly with issues of love, sex, marriage,
paying little attention to specific settings.
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The reception of The Awakening (both critical and personal response on her
personal and professional life) had not that bad results on her as it has been
said:
Not all the reviews were unanimously unfavourable, some were commendatory
and others were mixed
Not all readers felt outraged, some women wrote her warm letters of
appreciation.
Although the book could have surprised some people, no the ones close to her
and the ones who attended her artistic and literary salon, that she started by the
early 1890s in her St. Louis house, notable for its liberal thinking.
The invitations she received prove she was not totally ostracized in her city
The book was never banned or withdrawn from libraries
Contrary to the idea that she sank into a severe emotional depression, her
correspondence does not suggest that she was disheartened by the controversy it
caused.
The legend that The Awakening killed her has recently been amended. The
publication of a novel that so clearly denounced the subordinate role of women
and proclaimed their right to independence certainly damaged Chopins literary
reputation, but the main reason why she wrote few stories afterwards was that her
physical health was gradually failing.
She died from a cerebral haemorrhage after a strenuous full days outing at the ST.
Louis World Fair of 1904.
More than half a century after her death, her work has been reassessed from
different approaches:
The apparently clear and direct style of her brilliantly compressed prose has
been thoroughly revised in search of subtle ironies that may be missed by careless
readers
Her meticulously chosen symbolism is now considered more than decorative, an
essential artistic component of her technique.
She has been called a psychological symbolist because she used symbols to
project the psyche of her characters.
Her concentration on the mind of each individual character has been linked to the
psychological realism of the French writer Guy de Maupassant, whom she really
admired. She translated 8 of his short stories into English, though only could sell
his 3 more conventional. In her essay How I Stumbled upon Maupassant, she
explained the nature of her attraction to his work in words that could also have
been applied to her own literary production: here was a man who had escaped
from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life
through his own being and with his own eyes; and who, in a direct and simple way,
told us what he saw
Other strong influences were Zola and Flaubert, nevertheless, she transcended her
sources when she created a body of work that spoke in her own voice.
Her attitude towards slavery and her portrayal of black people is influenced by
the fact that she had been brought up in a Missouri slaveowning family that had
supported the Confederacy during the Civil War, though is not reason enough
to say she approved of the institution; as she set most of her narratives in the
postbellum period (slavery was already abolished), they embodied a vision of a
society deeply concerned not with slavery itself but with its legacy. The few stories
she set before the American Civil War, such as Desirees Baby (1893), had tragic
endings that subverted the idyllic images offered by the plantation novel that
Chopin evoke din the deliberately deceptive beginnings of her narratives.
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Desirees Baby was an immediate success, it was included in the collection entitled
Bayou Folk and it remained continuously in print while most of her work fell into
oblivion.
Her main themes: marriage and motherhood are explored here through a
submissive female protagonist who is far from being like the emancipated heroines
that people Chopins later fiction. This is maybe the reason why it survived.
Additionally, it deals with miscegenation, a theme that most local colourists
were reluctant to treat but that Chopin managed to get through by encoding her
profound meanings beneath the surface of her text.
The story is told in the standard English of her audience, but includes glimpses of
French, the language that was spoken in the historical context where the plot takes
place.
UNIT 24
STEPHEN CRANE (1871 1900)
In a brief career ended by death at 28, he produced an extensive work that has
been collected in 12 volumes. In only 8 extremely productive years characterized
by financial struggle and exciting adventure, he brought out 2 volumes of poetry, 5
novels and over 300 short stories, sketches and articles.
He was a prolific journalist, thats why its said that he wrote fiction basically
drawing on the events he witnessed and reported for the newspapers; 1 of his
biographers, however, said he often anticipated in his writings the circumstances
in which he himself would later be involved,(he sketched a novel about NY slum
before having any direct knowledge of the metropolis and published brilliant
descriptions of battlefields before he had any real acquaintance with actual war).
The enormous imaginative appeal that disasters at sea and scenes of drowning
had for him inspired some of his literary and journalistic practice before it finally
materialized in his own shipwreck off the coast of Florida.
His obsessive search for intense experience was both the result of his artistic
concerns and the stimulus for his creative achievements.
In his lifetime, his personal exploits became legendary, public interest often
focused on his bohemian lifestyle and daring acts as a war correspondent. He was
the preachers unruly son who rejected Christianity and lived in scandal with his
common-law wife, Cora Taylor, the ex-owner of a brothel in Florida.
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This colourful life of excess resembled that of Edgar Allan Poe, its treatment by
an inaccurate 1st biographer had a deep impact on his literary reputation; later
biographies clarified the magnitude of the inventions that had found credence for
decades; therefore, many of the clues that were used to interpret the authors
existence are now considered unsubstantial.
His biographical background has been properly researched and what emerges is a
nonconformist and mysterious figure, such was his own descriptions: I cannot help
vanishing and disappearing and dissolving, it is my foremost trait.
Much in his best writings is as original and remains as unexplained as his
personality. Many of his works elude simple definition or classification, for they
reflect the various artistic trends of the end of the 19th century, especially
naturalism, impressionism and symbolism. Furthermore, some critics have seen
Crane as a forerunner of the 20th-century movements of expressionism and
existentialism.
LIFE
Born in Newark, New Jersey, 14th son of a revivalist Methodist minister and a pious
mother who wrote for religious journals and was herself descended from a long line
of Methodist clergy.
Brought up in an austere home, he soon rebelled against the interdictions and
strict discipline; at school he enjoyed history and literature, but he spent more time
gambling and playing sports than studying, therefore academically not successful.
He attended Syracuse University but left after 6 months to become a writer, went
to N.Y. and supported himself as a freelance newspaperman and completed his 1st
novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893).
He had sketched out a draft of Maggie while still a student at Syracuse, before
having any experience of the wicked city; his literary inspiration was stirred by
listening to Hamin Garland lecture on realism in fiction. His real-life models,
as he was obsessed with learning about the actual existence of the people he
wrote about, he decided to study urban vice in one of the worst slums of NY, the
Bowery. The idea of danger bordering the genteel neighbourhoods had a peculiar
attraction for him, and his journalistic activities allowed him to observe at close
hand the shabby tenement districts and the citys police court. Maggie 1 of the
earliest examples of literary determinism in American fiction for it tries to show
that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives.
Its protagonist is an innocent and abused slum girl who is seduced driven to
prostitution and eventually commits suicide. After being rejected by a number
of publishers, the novel was privately printed under a pseudonym (because of
his family), although the author was encouraged by the praise he received form
William Dena Howells and Hamlin Garland, (influential novelist and critics), he was
disappointed with the general reception of Maggie. The novel was a commercial
failure because the American public did not welcome this grim exponent of social
realism that so authentically recreated sordid slum life.
His 1st book of poetry The Black Riders, (1895), also had little popular success, it
contained 68 short poems in free verse in which he expressed his bleak worldview
and which foreshadowed innovative techniques that would be developed in the 20th
century. Those experimental poems did not win wide acceptance, because they
were too cryptic in content, too unconventional in form and too sombre in tone.
His 2nd collection of poetry, War is Kind (1899), reiterated the attitudes set forth
in his previous volume and included more explicit social poems. Its title poem is
a bitterly satirical antiwar piece composed of 3 stanzas addressing successively
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a maiden, a child and a mother who have lost loved ones in battle, each stanza
ending with the admonition: Do no weep, war is kind. These 2 collections have
earned the author a position as a minor poet in the canon of American literature,
where he stands mainly as a fiction writer.
The publication of The Red Badge of Courage (1895) brought Crane the
international literary fame he had been seeking. The novel was particularly well
received in England, the novelist Joseph Conrad, later 1 of his best friends, hailed
it as masterpiece. Years after Cranes death, Conrad recalled his reading of The
Red Badge.. as one of the most enduring memories of his literary life, and praised
the marvellous accord of the vivid impressionistic description of action on that
woodland battlefield, and the imaged style of the analysis of the emotions in the
inward moral struggle going on in the breast of one individual, the Young Soldier
of the book, the protagonist of the monodrama presented to us in an effortless
succession of graphic and coloured phrases.
Such comment pointed out for the 1st time the impressionism that most critics
would consider characteristic of Cranes fiction, and also emphasized the main
theme of the book, defined as a psychological portrayal of fear, by its own author.
Indeed, The Red Badge is primarily an initiation story concerned with the changing
emotional states of a young soldier, Henry Fleming, who overcomes his fear and
discovers courage.
Innovative features of this work
The presentation of the protagonists personal identity in a complex and ambiguous
manner through the development of techniques which are consistent with Cranes
devotion to psychological verisimilitude.
It parodies historical novels about the American Civil War (1861-5), and the
conventional narrative forms previously used to interpret that conflict. Unlike most
works of fiction based on the American Civil War, his uncommon contribution to the
genre does not even mention the name of a campaign or a battle, though it could
be guessed that it was the Battle of Chancellorsville (1863)
When the novel 1st appeared , there was speculation about how could he write so
convincingly about a war he had never seen, (he was born 6 years after the end of
the War), he relied on eyewitness accounts in order to present battle scenes in a
realistic mode, but transcended realism when he combined it with impressionism,
and thus achieved remarkably original results. He had a reputation as a war writer
and had the desire to witness real combat, the Bacheller Syndicat (press agency)
set hi to the American West, Mexico and Cuba.
In spite of the official neutrality of USA, the Cuban revolutionaries who fought
against the Spanish rule of the island, received the support of filibustering
expeditions that sailed from American seaports and were widely publicized by
the American press. Crane, who was obsessed with participating in a war, was
commissioned by the Bacheler to cover the Cuban Revolution, in December 1896 he
sailed out of Jacksonville (Florida) aboard the Commodore, an old steamer bound
for Cienfuegos with a large party of insurrectionists and 10000 dollars in arms and
ammunition for the Cuban rebels. The steamer foundered and sank several miles
off the Florid coast near Daytona Beach, then he and other 3 men remained at sea
for 27 hours n a dinghy because the rough surf did not allow them to go ashore
until next morning. He 1st published a newspaper report of it and then a short
story based on it: Flanagan and His Short Filibustering adventure, this adventure
also became the framework for one of his best and most often discussed pieces of
fiction: The Open Boat.
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After a week rest he was ready for going to Cuba, but could not find the way to
do it, after many unsuccessful attempts to reach Cuba, he accepted a job offer to
cover the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 as a correspondent for Hearsts NY Journal,
whose owner wanted to exploit the writers name and personality. This experience
provided the background for Active Service (1899), a novel hurriedly written in
England, where he arrived soon after the end of the war.
In February 1898, he heard the Maine had been blown up in Havana Harbour, he
returned immediately to USA intending to volunteer for the Spanish-American war,
but was rejected for health reasons, so he went to Cuba as a reporter, instead than
as a soldier, reporter for Joseph Pulitzers NY World.
American correspondents played a very unusual role in this war, they fought in it,
instead of merely reporting what was going on, Cranes daring behaviour won him
the 1st place among his fellow journalists. His reports were exciting, provocative
and full or irony. He felt encouraged to transcribe reality with as few words as
possible so as to evoke with swiftness and precision the picture he was aiming for.
Apart form 25 dispatches, he used the materials he had gathered in Cuba to write
11 short stories posthumously collected in a volume entitled Wounds in the Rain
(1900), where fact and fiction were skilfully combined to produce an integrated
whole of mixed feeling about warfare. The sketches were based on his experience
of actual combat, which confirmed the intuitions about the futility of violence he
had expressed throughout The Red Badge of Courage, also taught him about the
multiple facets of a complex human activity he analysed from various perspectives,
often with humour, sometimes satirically and always perceptively.
He avoided both cheap sentimentalism and the idealized views of death in battle
which pervaded the writings of many of his contemporaries, prone to justify
imperialist expeditions as noble missions on behalf of humanitarianism, and to
encourage aggressive nationalism with appeals to the martial spirit so prevalent at
that time.
He was loyal to his own country, but tried to understand other positions, like the
Spanish enemies and the Cuban allies and show a king of respect toward them,
unlike his fellow American journalists.
During the Spanish-American War, he suffered from fever and exhaustion, his
health deteriorated and had to be evacuated after he collapsed and became
delirious; had some rest in Virginia, after was contracted again by Hearst to cover
the Puerto Rican campaign for the NY Journal. He went to Cuba and remained
in Havana for some time when he returned to England he war suffering form
tuberculoses and probably malaria. In the last months of his life, his situation
became desperate, he was seriously ill and heavily in debt, but still tried to
concentrate on his writing and meet deadlines for publication. In an attempt to
regain his health, in May 1900 he was taken to a sanatorium in Germany with the
assistance of Henry James and other friends, but he died at Badenweiler on June 5.
WORK: Harold Bloom said his main contribution to American literature is The Open
Boat, which exemplifies the maturity of the writer; when Crane wrote it, he had
already published newspaper report of shipwrecks whose imagery clearly prefigures
that of his famous short story. In his earlier fiction, (long before the Commodore),
he had also articulated some of the themes developed in The Open Boat. His main
source was his own experience of being adrift in the ocean, although readers
should not expect to find a literal transcription of what happened. It is impossible
to determine how much is fact and how much is imagination; after the sinking
of the steamer, Crane (correspondent), Edward Murphy (the captain), Charles
Montgomery (steward) and William Higgins (oiler) certainly remained at sea for 27
hours, all night Higgins and Crane took turns rowing and just before they landed
in the morning, the oiler was drowned in the surf; our of 19 survivors, they 3 were
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