Exploring American Literature: Colonial America & the Covenant of Grace, Apuntes de Literatura

¡Descarga Exploring American Literature: Colonial America & the Covenant of Grace y más Apuntes en PDF de Literatura solo en Docsity! CHAPTER O. NATIVE AMERICAN TRIBES AND EXPLORERs A) NATIVE AMERICAN TRIBES: the oral tradition American literature begins with the orally transmitted myths, legends, tales, and lyrics (always songs) of Indian cultures. There was no written literature among the more than 500 different Indian languages and tribal cultures that existed in North America before the first Europeans arrived. As a result, Native American oral literature is quite diverse. Narratives from quasi-nomadic hunting cultures like the Navaho are different from stories of settled agricultural tribes such as the pueblo dwelling Acoma; the stories of northern lakeside dwellers such as the Ojibwa often differ radically from stories of desert tribes like the Hopi. Tribes maintained their own religions — worshipping gods, animals, plants, or sacred persons. Systems of government ranged from democracies to councils of elders to theocracies. These tribal variations enter into the oral literature as well. A few generalizations: Indian stories glow with reverence for nature as a spiritual as well as physical mother. Nature is alive and endowed with spiritual forces; main characters may be animals or plants, often totems associated with a tribe, group, or individual. The closest to the Indian sense of holiness in later American literature is Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendental “Over-Soul”. Examples of almost every oral genre can be found in American Indian literature: lyrics, chants, myths, fairy tales, humorous anecdotes, incantations, riddles, proverbs, epics, and legendary histories. Accounts of migrations and ancestors abound, as do vision or healing songs and tricksters' tales. Vision songs are another distinctive form. Appearing in dreams or visions, sometimes with no warning, they may be healing, hunting, or love songs. Indian oral tradition and its relation to American literature as a whole is one of the richest and least explored topics in American studies. The Indian contribution to America is greater than is often believed. The hundreds of Indian words in everyday American English include canoe, tobacco, potato, moccasin, raccoon, tomahawk and —totem. B) LITERATURE OF EXPLORATION If history had taken a different turn, the United States easily could have been a part of the great Spanish or French overseas empires. Its present inhabitants might speak Spanish and form one nation with Mexico, or speak French and be joined with Canadian Francophone Quebec and Montreal. 1. CRISTOPHER COLUMBUS (1451-1506) + The first known and sustained contact between the Americas and the rest of the world began with the famous voyage of CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS funded by the Spanish Crown: Isabel and Fernando (Reyes Católicos). + Columbus's journal in his “Epistola” (written in Spanish) printed in 1493, recounts the trip's drama — the terror of the men, who feared monsters and thought they might fall off the edge of the world; the near mutiny; and the first sighting of land as they arrived in America. Columbus” psychology, as expresses in his letters. e Piety: In the 1493 letter he expresses “la gran Victoria que Nuestro Señor me ha dado en mi viaje” (Note the number of times that “Nuestro Señor” appears in the selected fragments). e Aspiration: In the 1493 letter he states: “y de ellas todas he tomado posesión por Sus Altezas” e Self-righteousness: In the 1503 letter “Las Indias, que son parte del mundo, tan ricas, te las dio por tuyas; tú las repartiste adonde te plugo, y te dio poder para ello.” e Pride: In the 1493 letter Espanola is a marvel. He describes it to be beautiful, singing, and variety. “Del cual cabo vi otra isla ...a la cual luego puse nombre la Española y fui allí... En ella hay muchos puertos... y hartos ríos y buenos y grandes, que es maravilla. Las tierras de ella son altas, y en ella muy muchas sierras y montañas altísimas... que los ví tan verdes y tan hermosos como son por mayo en España, y de ellos estaban floridos” 2. Naufragios, by Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1488-1559) The expedition (1528) of 250 to 300 men, including Cabeza de Vaca, was led by Panfilo de Narvaez (Narvaez died in one of those disasters). After surviving a hurricane near Cuba, the expedition landed on the west coast of Florida in April 1528, claiming the land for Spain. But there was a shipwreck...Only 15 men survived. + After serving as a Mexican territorial governor, Cabeza de Vaca returned to Spain (in 1537) and published an account of his travels, noting the appalling treatment of Indians by the Spanish. e Naufragios is a central text in colonial studies. e The Shipwrecks are not the exalted relation of a victorious feat; they are, instead, the history of a failure whose negative sign it seeks to erase with the writing. e The unfulfilled purpose of the expedition - to conquer and rule - is positively replaced by another, which is a rhetorical feat: to inform and convince e The journey (the very center of the story) is not only a physical or geographical transfer; it constitutes a "transfer from one goal to another, transfer from one culture to another, transfer at last from oneself to another self" (Molloy, 1987: 437) 3. The West: Myth of the Frontier: almost limitless expansion of a cultural, social, religious, political ideal to the West through a vast Virgin land. This is the powerful MYTH OF THE WEST (read Frederick JaksonTurner): it implies the ever-renewed possibility of starting afresh, of always finding a new space in which to leave mistakes behind and have a second chance. THE MYTH OF THE FRONTIER. "As used in Europe, (The FRONTIER) means the boundary between two nations and it is represented on the map by a thin line. That line is one to approach with caution, equipped with passports and permits. It is a place to stop at or pass at national peril "The sharp edge of sovereignty". In America, the word frontier is hardly used to indicate the nation's limits. No American would refer to the line separating the US from Canada or Mexico as a "frontier". The American concept holds that the frontier lies within, and not at the edge of the country -not a line to stop at, but an area inviting entrance. In Europe the frontier is stationary and permanent, in America it was transient and temporal (Walter Prescott Webb: The Great Frontier) READING: The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893 > Boundless progress > Beacon and guide for the salvation of humanity FRONTIER THESIS. Frederick Jackson Turner's She Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893). TURNER'S MAIN IDEAS: e A narrative of heroic rebirth in an ever-retreating wilderness. e The essential American creation myth. e The dynamic West rather than distant Europe was the seedbed of American culture. e The intense pressure of the frontier continually shattered European customs and forged a new American culture e The "ever-retreating frontier" forged an exuberant, restless, materialistic, pragmatic people e It also gave birth to American democracy, nationalism, and individualism. 3 main aspects of America as a Myth: > Boundless progress > Beacon and guide for the salvation of humanity > The American Dream THE AMERICAN DREAM "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position." (James T. Adams, The Epic of America, 1931) 3 MAJOR IMAGE CLUSTERS: e the MYTHIC IMAGES of America as a land of milk and honey and a new “earthly paradise” ; a “Brave new world”. e the RELIGIOUS IMAGES of America (Puritans as God's chosen people called upon to found “a new Heaven and a new Earth..., and a new Commonwealth together” , To erect a “New Jerusalem”.) e the POLITICAL IMAGES of America: where natural rights and natural laws would become reality, and where a DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE resulted in a political system envied by Europeans THE AMERICAN DREAM/ THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE (of broken promises and frustrated hopes) Elements: Belief in progress General attainability of success; American exceptionalism and its MANIFEST DESTINY: Continual challenge of respective frontiers; The belief in the American form of government of the people, by the people and for the people as the sole guarantor of liberty and equality The MELTING POT (mixture)* and its historical mutations from cultural pluralism through multiethnicity to multiculturalism. (*Now: “SALAD BOWL” every ingredient can be perceived individually) CHARACTERISTICS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. THEMES. O Technology vs. Virgin land WEST (Frontier Myth) Innocence, Virgin land, Child/negro, Primal beginning EAST (Urban: New York, Chicago, Detroit...) Corruption Technology Adult authority Future progress O Old World vs. New World O Individual vs. Society O Liberal vs. Conservative LANGUAGE AND STYLE O American sense of Romance (a tendency to allegory, abstraction, fabulation, symbolism...) O Tendency to allegory, not novels of manners. EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: Postcolonial features. Remember, America was a colony under the British empire. Literature independence comes with political independence. GB is the mother country that America was to become socially economically politically independent. e The changes which eventually differentiated Am Lit from British Lit did not happen all of a sudden, but slowly. It was a gradual process of transformation. e This process can be studied in terms of the process suffered by all postcolonial Literatures, and runs parallel to the process of national differentiation: the emergence of a distinctive lit is parallel to the emergence of a national identity (literary independence only comes with political independence). e The process is similar to that of independence of teenagers from their parents (GB as the mother country). 3 stages: 1. Absolute dependence 2. Beginnings of differentiation 3. Differentiation 1. Absolute dependence: the British empire is seen as necessary (Literary Imperialism) Puritan literature is imported. In the poem claims for the necessity to be more American The Gift Outright (1961). Robert Frost The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England's, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living, And forthwith found salvation in surrender. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become. 2. Beginning of differentiation: , realization from americans of having different needs, so puritan settelers start demanding more freedom to deal with that different situation and start demanding independence. Gret Britain is still considered better, need to establish differences from the colonizers. Excerpt from emerson and Whitman.whitman> price to pay is the independence war From the POV of literature, the literary production is still produced "under imperial license", and the literary assumptions are still those of the British canon. It is still an off-shoot of the parent tree (where older is better, the authority). Ralph Waldo Emerson. Essays: Second Series [1844]. The Poet (diapositiva 16). WALT WHITMAN. Letter to W.R. Emerson (1856). The lists of ready-made literature which America inherits by the mighty inheritance of the English language—all the rich repertoire of traditions, poems, historics, e Church is a democratic and autonomous organization + 1620. Plymouth Colony. The Mayflower (with William Bradford) e The Mayflower Compact: all members of the group would "covenant and combine themselves into a civil body politic" 2) The Puritans. LEADER: John Winthrop (1588-1649) e 1629: Massachusetts Bay Colony (Boston). The Arabella e They were strongly in favor of a state church, but one more in line with their Calvinistic principles of simplicity of service and semi-autonomous organization. e The Puritans felt that the Pilgrims/Brownists were irresponsible enthusiasts, and were only bringing discredit on the reform movement. e In Boston, Winthrop established a Theocracy: The clergy had a great political influence, and the status of freeman was limited to male church members. Biblical typology. - — Typological hermeneutics involved explicating signs in the Old Testament as foreshadowing events and people in the New. Eg: O 4OT Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel) »-4 NT Apostles (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John). O 12 OTTribes >» 12 NT Apostles. - — Typology (more liberally) enabled an interpreter to discover biblical forecasts of current events. Puritan Mythico-historiography (Typological Beliefs) - — Israelites' escape from Egypt > Puritans' escape from European Protestantism - New Israel »- America = (“City upon a Hill”) - — Biblical Exodus (red Sea) »- The Puritan's journey across the Atlantic towards a Christian Israel. - The New World, like biblical Canaan, belonged wholly to the history of salvation - Thestory of America was enclosed in the Scriptures; its future was antedated by prophecy The Puritans and the Native-Americans. - TRIBES: Wampanoags, Pokanokets, Capawicks, Mohegans, Nipmucks, Pequots, Patuxets, Narragansets. - 1616: epidemic Smallpox (viruela): killed 75 to 90 % of the native population along the coast - 1620-1622: Indian Squanto and his treaty with William Bradford (Myth of friendship) e - Most Puritans viewed the Indians as hopeless pagans and even as Satan's envoys - — Winthrop interpreted the Smallpox plague as God's generous land clearing, to prepare it for His Saints - 1636: the first major "Indian War", with the Pequots. - 1670: “King Philip's war” (Chief Metacomet) with the Narragansets. MAIN PURITAN IDEAS. PREDESTINATION (Calvinist idea) O Justification: The person "justified" (filled with Grace) would then fight to achieve a perfect Christian life: his sanctification O Sanctification (Puritans: “The Saints”) O if one had the virtue of faith and did not act accordingly, one was breaching the COVENANT contracted with God, and hence could call his wrath upon him. COVENANT OF GRACE (AGREEMENT): term for describing the innermost personal relationship between the Christian and God (an effort to formulate the connection between the finite man and the absolute God; the relationship of the Creator with his created Universe). O After Adam in Paradise had breached the Covenant of Works (by breaking the rules and acting bad), God had entered into a SECOND COVENANT with man. Reading: Thomas Shepard's The Covenant of Grace. e The Covenant of Grace: God had had voluntarily accepted to treat man as an equal, and had entered into an agreement whereby his plans and actions (otherwise beyond the understanding of finite human reason) could be comprehended within the operations of history (our daily lives constantly give us proofs of our Grace) e The Covenant Theory served 2 purposes: - 1) It asserted the absolute and immesurable power of God - 2 It asserted also the divine gift of God: he permits man to inhabit a rational universe, that allows him to understand God (Puritans could rationally affirm the destiny of the CITY UPON A HILL) e Function of the Covenant: to calm and mitigate fears Eg: the acquisition of wealth and money was one of God's signs to indicate his preference: (diapositiva 15) Covenant vs. Job's Principle JOB'S PRINCIPLE: e Majestic incomprehensibility of God's actions e Defends that those who try to understand God's designs are blasphemous (since they try to subjugate God's will to mortal reason): the decrees of God are inscrutable (FRAGMENTO DIAPOSITIVA 16) Contradictions of Puritan thought CONCLUSION: AMERICAN CONSCIOUSNESS is therefore based on 2 ideas: 1) FEAR: uncertainty of the future and the lack of sense of life. You can have two reactions to this fear: a. Youtry to mitigate it or soften it (By means of the Covenant of Grace) b. You accept it and live with it (Job's Principle) 2) DREAM: The idea of being able to achieve everything. REQUIRED READING |: e “The Covenant of Grace” by Thomas Shepard, 1651 (sermón) THOMAS SHEPARD (1605-1649) e Born in England, he came to Am in 1635, and became one of the most powerful preachers in the first generation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony e His Sermon "THE COVENANT OF GRACE" is the most succinct statement of the Covenant Theory. As we have said, this theory declared that God had entered into an agreement with men whereby his plans and actions, otherwise utterly beyond the grasp of humane reason, could be perceived and understood within the events of history. It was not easy; but it was not an impossible task. REQUIRED READING Il Reading: “a Model of Christian Charity” (JOHN WINTHROP): His most famous sermon, written and delivered on board the Arbella, 1630 WHAT WAS THE PURITAN MISSION, ACCORDING TO WINTHROP? e As we have seen, Puritans believed they had freely entered a powerful binding compromise with God, the breach of which would imply God's wrath and damnation. (See in Text,p. 8). By the terms of this compromise, their MISSION was to establish in the New Land the community of God's will. e It was their responsibility to bring God's city onto earth, “The city upon a hill" (p. 9) - Look back in Thomas Shepard the same metaphor); the lighthouse in the storm of their evil times of chaos, corruption, fear, disorder: that is, to institute a model of Christianity in the American wilderness. (Thus, American belief of being a redeeming nation: a manifest destiny). “A City upon a Hill” (Matthew 5, 13-16) (fragmentos) A Model of Christian Charity. WINTHROP'S MAIN IDEAS: e According to Winthrop's Puritan view, Politics and Religion are closely linked: the Puritans wanted to establish a theocratical society based on politics closest to God's will. e That is to say: Government was imposed by divine decree after the Fall of Adam in order to restrain what would otherwise be the anarchic ravagings of depravity. GENRES: Prose: O Historical records (Historiography) O Diaries, personal narratives, conversion narratives, journals, autobiographies O Sermons, Apocalyptic pronouncements, Jeremiads. Poetry: O Meditational /Devotional poem LANGUAGE AND STYLE: Emphasis on communication Simplicity, clarity “Plain Style” (avoidance of conceit and distracting devices) vs. the “Ornate Style” (“God's altar needs not our polishing!”) Energetically moving, vehement, shattering. Biblical Typology: Biblical Allusions/ Comparisons (“New” Canaan) AUDIENCE: Intelligent, religious, highly-literate “Saints”. SUBJECT: man's relation to God. Main Puritan Historians: William Bradford, John Winthrop, Cotton Mather and Thomas Shepard Questions of history: e Arecord of concrete historical facts. e A meditation on the unique nature of the present historical moment WHY HISTORIOGRAPHY?: 1) Because every earthly event was part of God's timeless plan: scrupulously reported - Everything could emblemize something: (FRAGMENT DIAPO 6) Because of the role they had been chosen to play in the universal drama was exceptional (AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM). - The greatest of all Puritan historians: COTTON MATHER and in his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) e "Saints' lives": as examples of the progress of the individual Christian soul and an allegory of the potential American hero. Because written history was finally an important mode of instruction. The historian was delivering a lesson. SO: Centuries after the dissolution of Plymouth, Americans still talk about a sort of Manifest Destiny: that of being the moral and practical leaders of the world. COMPULSORY READING. WILLIAM BRADFORD'S Of Plymouth Plantation (fragments) William Bradford was among the first Pilgrims to arrive in Plymouth on the Mayflower. He helped write and also signed the Mayflower Compact when the ship arrived in Cape Cod. Bradford was the designated governor of Plymouth from 1621 to 1656 Written between 1630 and 1647, Of Plymouth Plantation describes the story of the Pilgrims from 1608, when they settled in the Netherlands through the 1620 Mayflower voyage, until the year 1647. BOOK I: Written in the manner of the Book of Exodus BACKGROUND INFO FOR READING PLYMOUTH PLANTATION Bradford's OF Plymouth Plantation and the Bible Libro del Éxodo Autor: Moisés fue el autor del Libro de Éxodo (Éxodo 17:14; 24:4-7; 34:27). Fecha de su Escritura: El Libro de Éxodo fue escrito entre el 1440 y 1400 a.C. Propósito de la Escritura: La palabra “éxodo” significa salida. En el tiempo de Dios, el éxodo de los israelitas de Egipto, marcó el final de un período de opresión para los descendientes de Abraham (Génesis 15:13), y el principio del cumplimiento del pacto de la promesa hecha a Abraham, de que sus descendientes no solo habitarían en la Tierra Prometida, sino también se multiplicarían y llegarían a ser una gran nación (Génesis 12:1- 3, 7). El propósito del libro puede ser expresado como un seguimiento desde el rápido crecimiento de los descendientes de Jacob en Egipto, hasta el establecimiento de la nación teocrática en su Tierra Prometida. WILLIAM BRAFOED'S OF PLYMOUTH PLANTATION. Story of the founding, development and decline of the Colony from 1620 to 1650. Written in the third person (although it is an Autobiography of sorts) O Book! (1608 to 1620): escaping England, Holland years and arrival in Cape CodM O Book!! (1620 to 1646): Mayflower Compact, organization, relations with Indians and other colonies, and themes of everyday life Epic theme, cast in a Virgilian mood: exiles in a “Howling wilderness” who struggled against all adversity to bring into being the city of God on earth.... “Manifest Destiny” REASON For the Pilgrims” decision to move to the New World: “propagating and advancing the gospel of the Kingdom of Christ in the remote parts of the world” (Chapter 4; Book I) Basic Pattern: Constantly showing the presence of God's mercy and His providence Differences in Tone between Books | (triumphant) and Il (sad, dark in tone) We see the testing of the ideal with the actual (real); of the utopian idea with the real experience Narrates the struggle against: O The external forces of Nature O The corruption and worldliness within the Community (BOOK II) BIVLOCAL REFERENCES IN PLYMOUTH P. (DIAPOSITIVA 11Y 12) MAYFLOWER COMPACT. - Thefirst colonial agreement that formed a government by the consent of the governed. The Mayflower Compact was signed in 1620 by Pilgrims, English people hoping to establish a settlement in North America. The agreement was completed on the ship Mayflower, which was anchored off the coast of Massachusetts. - The compact gave the settlers the power to frame and enact laws for the general good of the planned settlement. - Each male adult signed the document. - Thesigners agreed to follow all "just and equal" laws that the settlers enacted and to be ruled by the will of the majority. THE ORIGIN OF THANKSIVING. (FRAGMENT) - Plymouth offered an excellent harbor and plenty of resources. - — But their happiness was short-lived. IIl-equipped to face the winter on this estranged place they were ravaged thoroughly. - Somehow they were saved by a group of local Native Americans who befriended them and helped them with food. Soon the natives taught the settlers the technique to cultivate corns and grow native vegetables, and store them for hard days. - By the next winter they had raised enough crops to keep them alive. The winter came and passed by without much harm. The settlers knew they had beaten the odds and it was time to celebrate. - They celebrated it with a grand community feast wherein the friendly native Americans were also invited. It was kind of a harvest feast. The recipes entail Indian corn, barley, pumpkins and peas, "fowl" and yes, of course the wild turkey. - Today: celebrated on the 4th Thursday of every November CHAPTER 2.2: PURITAN LITERATURE 2: PERSONAL NARRATIVES. - — Conversion narratives - Diaries and journals - Biographies - — Captivity narratives O The spiritual journey of a single soul as paradigm for the state of the Congregation O Imagery of sickness and death permeates Puritan Literature. O Nature: appears as a third channel for communication with God, besides the Bible and direct revelation (an angry God may send violent storms, earthquakes, etc) Magnalia Christi Americana (“The grand deeds of Christ in America”) 800 pages in two volumes: prose epic of the History of New England until 1700 BOOK 1: Lives of the Early settlers BOOK 2: Lives of the lives of its Governors (Biographies) LATER BOOKS: History of Harvard College and its Graduates, history of the Congregational Church. A treasury of information about 17th c New England (FRAGMENT OF INTRODUCITON) Aim of the author: Clearly didactic How is the history of new England treated? O We find ecclesiastical history (in tone) and political history (in events) O Biblical typology: particular events are a repetition of what was said in the bible, but transplanted geographically (EJ: Satan are the Indians and the English) O Tendency to allegory, fable, moral abstraction: Puritan history is a Biblical chapter How are characters presented? O They are also reflection of the Biblical types and characters translated to America. O HAGYOGRAPHIES: They are idealizations: exemplary, modelic, typified according to Biblical characters O The Book ends as a catalogue of exemplary. The history of the community becomes BIOGRAPHY; the chapters of the lives of individuals represent the life of the community (Bradford=Moses) Basic themes? Biblical themes transposed to New England O Journey to New England = Exodus of Jews O Conquest and foundation of settlement = Advent of Christ in America O New Plantation = Community of Biblic Jews O Satan = Anything that threatens: Indians, ethnic mix, dissenters... O Somewhat more ornamental and heavily rhetorical than favored by most Puritans O Direct, confessional, evangelic, full of mythical allusions and literary conventions, and quotes in Latin and Greek to give a sense of authority and cultivation (Harvard) Is History realistic?: Not really (allegorical, epic): O Idealization of Characters O Typification O temporal distortion O Apocalyptic sermons (READ EXCERPTS) CONCLUSION: THE PURITAN ORIGIN OF THE AMERICAN HERO. The tendency to typification continued in American letters way after Cotton Mather and the Puritans. However, inthe 19th c. the theory of TYPES became literary Symbolism. What remained of the TYPE concept in Am Lit is that its characters are not created as freshly conceived individuals, but as based on fixed models, of which the most important are ADAM and CHRIST. This is inherited from the Calvinistic tendency to typification. CHRIST FIGURE: : not related with the Powerful and wrathful God of the Old Testament, but with the gentle, merciful, humane character of the New Testament: humanization of Christ. a. CHRIST figures appear abundantly in relation to men suffering: Christ becomes the type of the ideal suffering man, the ideal of the unheroic hero ABOUT THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA (Hemingway) (FRAGMENT) ADAM FIGURE: Adam is the American hero par excellence (cf. Lewis: The American Adam). But again, not the Adam of the Old testament brought down by his sin, but the INNOCENT ADAM who feels free of the burden of history and faces the future. a. The American as the man who started anew in a New World given to him, and who can pursue his happiness. b. So, unlike the Greek hero, the modern American hero built on the type of a non- Calvinistic Adam is wholly innocent -he is a character without human weakness and faults. And he will have to face the conflicts that the world brings him. c. But later on, these New Adams will also encounter tragedy and the dream become nightmare: Melville, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, James etc depict innocent, ordinary Americans who encounter inexplicable adversities given along with life itself. CHAPTER 2.3: PURITAN LITERATURE: SERMONS AND JEREMIADS. HISTORICAL SITUATION IN NEW ENGLAND: After 1660 immigration to New England accelerated, and many of the new comers were less pious immigrants who only sought financial opportunities. ... Religious favor was beginning to wane The newcomers were often denied church membership and thus land, unless they testified publicly about their conversion experience in public. Frustration and dismay spread throughout the 1670s and 1680s. This shared perception of moral deterioration (internal and external tensions) inspired many of the colony's most interesting literary texts, the trope of decay or decline became central to later Puritan expressions and sermons. PURITAN SERMONS Adopt a Manichean strategy: sets of opposites or contraries (This logic tended to foster polarization and extremism: a person is either saved or damned, saint or sinner, virtuous or sinful; there is no purgatory between heaven and hell.) PURITAN JEREMIADS: Taking their texts from Jeremiah, in which the Prophet chastised the Hebrews for their loss of religious zeal. These sermons followed a rhetorical formula that included: Remember courage and devotion of founders (idealism and success) Lament recent ills (disillusionment, loss, disappointment). Pleas for the congregation to repent and pray for forgiveness Cry out for a return to original conduct and zeal and a restoration of harmony Pop FORMULA: FAILURE >BLAME> REFORM> PROJECTIONS OF A BETTER FUTURE THE ELECTION SERMON: was a typical case for the Jeremiad O The minister gave a summary of the larger historical picture O Stock of the past and present O Articulation of a prophecy for the future ORGANIZATION OF SERMONS: O ABiblical text, followed by an "Explication". O The "Doctrine" = "Propositions" = "Reasons". = "Application": how the Doctrine and the Proposition applied to NE O Prophecy of what might follow THEMES OF JEREMIADS: TERRIBLE EVENTS: Because the Puritans believed that the Bible and nature/history should both be closely studied for signs of God's intentions, they were alarmed by some tragic events that occurred in the 16070's and 1680's (earthquakes, plagues, storms, fires in towns, suicides..... Until the most devastating event: King Philip's war against the Wampanoag People) - Gloomier themes: anxiety over recent apostasy, danger that God would abandon his saints, God's anger, etc. - Many of the ministers favoured imagery of sickness to characterize the corrosive and dangerous condition of apostasy. INFLUENCE OF JEREMIADS: - Even TODAY on every 4th of JULY, speakers across the country hail the founding fathers, criticize present failures, and urge audiences to revive original ideals so that America can fulfill its manifest destiny. - Fromthe presidential addresses to works of literature, the Jeremiad appears as a fundamental structure in American expression. Moby Dick, Frederick Douglass, Walden, the Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath... have been called Jeremiads because they call for a return to a former innocence and a moral strength that has been lost. The Tenth Muse (1650) is the first published book of poetry by an American writer. Although Bradstreet was not much read in the two succeeding centuries, her poetry was rediscovered in the 1960s as part of the new focus on women's writing. The breadth of Bradstreet's scholarship, the depth of her humor, the mastery of her poetic lines, and the intensity of her passion for her husband and children have kept alive the interest in her work and have led scholars to re-evaluate Puritanism and women's role init. Her poetry is a frequent tension between a passion for the material world -natural beauty, books, home, and family- and the opposite Puritan dictum that the world is corrupt and vile and incomparable to the love of Christ. Although she follows the convention of Puritan Poetry by making a religious, even doctrinal point, the tone of wonder and the vivid natural images suggest competition between the love of this world and the doctrine of divine sovereignty. MAIN POETRY: Bradstreet completed Four Quaternions in the 1640s: “The Four Elements” (1641-1643), “The Four Humours” (1641-1643), “The Four Ages of Man” (1643), “The Four Seasons” (1643). “The Four Humours” ¡s set up as an argument among four sisters about which humor (choler, blood, bile, or phlegm) is most important. The argument is often comic and demonstrates Bradstreet's understanding of both physiology and female psychology. "Dialogue between Old England and New", presents a dialogue between Mother England and Daughter NE, on the subject of the English political turmoil and the Civil War. In her later years, Bradstreet also wrote poems on her own ¡llnesses, on the many deaths in her family, including her father and mother, her daughter-in-law, and her grandchildren. READING AND ANALYSIS OF : Prologue To my Dear and Lovely Husband Upon the Burning of our House The author to her book The Flesh and the Spirit PROLOGUE CONTRADICTIONS: Bradstreet's positions on the issue of women's status in society are ambiguous. At times, her work expresses acceptance of women's subordination, as in : To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings, Of cities founded, commonwealths begun, For my mean pen are too superior things: or how they all or each their dates have run, Let poets and historians set these forth; My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth At the same time, the poet expresses a feeling of wrath in Stanza 5: Lam obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits A poet's pen all scorn | should thus wrong For such despite they cast on female wits; If what | do prove well, it won't advance, They'I! say it's stolen,or else it was by chance TO MY DEAR AND LOVELY HUSBAND: A love poem of 12 lines, in a Shakesperean manner, which considers love from several points of view, and finally subsumes the whole argument in a couplet: the union of the lovers in eternity is the outcome of their earthly love. UPON THE BURNING OF OUR HOUSE: Is a conventional Puritan exercise in finding the hand of God behind every apparent disaster Yet the poem moves back and forth from the human levels to the divine, and sometimes the human level -the fear of fire, the sense of loss- is what moves the poet, while her submission to the will of God is a forced acknowledgement of an arrangement that is not really satisfactory: And when | could no longer look, | blest His name that gave and took, That laid my goods now in the dust. Yea, so it was, and so 'twas just. It was his own, it was not mine, Far be it that | should repine; He might of all justly bereft But yet sufficient for us left. Her "double voice”, after "blessing his Name that gave and took", cannot help thinking of the things that she had loved. THE AUTHOR TO HER BOOK: the speaker is a poet-mother whose children are her books and her poems. The poem expresses doubt and disappointment about her work from start to finish. This is achieved through an extended metaphor that characterizes the book as the "ill- form'd offspring" of the author's "feeble brain." THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT: a debate between two sisters: Flesh questions Spirit's belief in the unseen. Flesh is not a figure of dissipation, but of hard work and the innocent pleasures that come from it. Spirit says that heaven's pleasures are better than earth's, but that she has to fight the temptations of Flesh. Spirit is again a female voice, speaking intensely to her counterpart: Be still thou unregenerate part, Disturb no more my setled heart, For | have vow'd (and so will doe) Thee as a foe, still to pursue. (“te perseguiré como a un enemigo”) EDWARD TAYLOR (1642-1727) BIOGRAPHICAL DATA: Born in England, he arrived in Boston in 1668 (at 26), he studied at Harvard U. In 1671 he was invited to serve as Church Minister at the frontier settlement of Westfield, Massachusetts, where he served for over 50 years. In 1674, Taylor married Elizabeth Fitch and they had eight children. Three years after Elizabeth died in 1689, Taylor married Ruth Wyllys, with whom he had six more children. “Upon Wedlock, 8: Death of Children” expresses his love for family but also his ability to accept losses in a spirit of Christian resignation (like Bradstreet). He was totally convinced that the form of Congregational Puritanism practiced in Massachusetts in the 1630s and 40s was the only true religion. So, his poetry is distinguished by a strain of mysticism that infused his spiritual vision and led him to a more complex understanding of metaphor. He wrote primarily as a form of meditation as he prepared himself to preach (Preparatory Meditations, 1682- 1725). Known as the best poet of the Puritan times, Taylor's works were not published until 1939. Taylor's poetry captures the attitudes of the second generation Puritans in its emphasis on selfexamination, particularly in an individual's relations to God. His poetry is said to have been influenced by John Donne and other Metaphysical Poets His fame is the result of two works, the Preparatory Meditations and Gods Determinations touching his Elect. But he also wrote many other poems during his long life, and he was an indefatigable preacher (he also wrote many sermons and Jeremiads) THEMES: His poems always depict the conflict between human will, desire and love on the one hand, and Puritan doctrine, especially of Divine sovereignty and retribution. His poetry may be seen as a personal Diary which has its typology; a diary full of extravagances and metaphors bringing heaven down to New England huswifery (“economía doméstica”); a diary of a selfconscious and meditative, lonely poet in the wilderness, whose poetry is the fruit of isolation. A dominant theme in his poems is Taylor's poems: he is obsessed with writing about the process of writing. Just as he deprecates himself as a fallen creature, se he depreciates his poems as products (like Bradstreet) Sometimes he presents a masochistic and self-destructive process of meditation. THE PATTERN is constantly repeated: the speaker creates a metaphor for understanding God's purposes then exposes the metaphor as inadequate to his difficult task; then, as he approaches the point of despair, he struggles to find a new way to rationalize the divine purpose, He ends in submitting in faith to God's will. He seems, then, to understand that human struggle is a permanent process. HIS LANGUAGE is full of linguistic games (borrowings, neologisms, arcaic words), which makes his poetry obscure and more remote than any other colonial writer. Instead of speaking “New Englandly”, Taylor wrote in a personal idiom that was somehow incommunicative. In his choice of baroque metaphors, in his biblical typology, in his erratic punctuation, rhyme and syntax, in his boring repetitiveness.... Taylor was free to write of his soul and his God in the language that he wanted. O In suggesting that we are not born with a set of innate ideas of good or evil and that mind is rather like a blank slate upon which experiences are inscribed (tabula rasa), Locke qualified traditional belief. O Interest in the progress of ordinary men = Man and his society are perfectible = Future progress is possible = America offers the best setting for the realization of man's happiness in an ideal society. = Puritan " city of God" » "city of man". - So, as the 18th century wore on, and New England's Theocracy receded, the strict Calvinist doctrine of predestination came to seem intolerably harsh. Intellectuals sought a more reasonable and kindly version of Christianity: Unitarianism (a branch of Deism). POLITICS: George Washington (1* President) Federalists: believed in a strong central Government (Hamilton). Republican-Democratic (Jefferson): defense of government nonintervention The religious liberalism of the “founding fathers” has 3 main characteristics: 1. A belief in God, but not necessarily the God of orthodox Christianity. ... the concept of God ranged from the God of Nature of Thomas Paine, through the impersonal Providence of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, to the Biblical God of John Adams. 2. An unqualified affirmation of the separation of church and state (Anti- theocratic) 3. Afundamental belief in religious liberty and religious tolerance. According to the founding fathers, America should be a country where peoples of all faiths, including those who profess no religious belief, can live in peace and mutual benefit. Full religious liberty means not only freedom of religion, but freedom from religion. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. l had been religiously educated as a Presbyterian; and tho' some of the dogmas of that persuasion, such as the eternal decrees of God, election, reprobation, etc., appeared to me unintelligible, others doubtful, and | early absented myself from the public assemblies of the sect, Sunday being my studying day, | never was without some religious principles. | never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that He made the world, and governed it by His providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter. These | esteemed the essentials of every religion; and, being to be found in all the religions we had in our country, | respected them all, tho' with different degrees of respect, as | found them more or less mixed with other articles, which, without any tendency to inspire, promote, or confirm morality, served principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another. THE MOVE TOWARDS INDEPENDENCE - 1764: Stamp Act (against taxation without representation in the English Parliament) - 1770: Boston Mob - 1773: "Tea Party" 1776: Richard Lee: "These united colonies are and ought to be, free and independent states". July 4, 1776: Declaration of Independence. War of Independence: 1775 (Lexington)-1783 Thomas Paine's Common Sense (January, 1776) LITERATURE IN THE AGE OF REASON Social instrument: communicate new reasonable social values Logical digressions, methodical analysis No need for poets, but for diplomats and thinkers (analysts) THEMES: Outer circumstances: O American landscape - American life O The issue of race O The uunjust situation of the American Indian O The curse of Negro slavery DICTION: precision, clarity, purity, logic. XVIII: RATIONALISM XIX: ROMANTICISM Social Individual Social didacticism Personal self-exploration Objective Subjective Logical Irrational, imaginative, emotional Didactic Non-didactic Communicative Expressive Intelligible Inspired LITERARY GENRES. 1. NON-FICTION: Essay: : (sing the virtues of the New Republic), propagandistic, non-literary. Benjamin Franklin: Poor Richard's Almanac (1732-57), The Way to Wealth (1757), Autobiography (1771-1790) Thomas Paine (1737-1809): “Common Sense” (1776), “The Age of Reason” (1793- 1795) Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826): “The Declaration of Independence” (1776), “Notes on the State of Virginia” (1785) Travel Writing (Westward exploration, discovery, adventure): William Byrd, William Bartram, Zebulon Pike Newspapers. 2. POETRY (sing the virtues of new landscape, in a sort of versified prose) Neoclassical Poetry: “The Connecticut Wits”: Timothy Dwight, John Trumbull, Joel Barlow Pre-Romantic Poetry: Philip Freneau, William Cullent Bryant, Charles Brockden Brown 3. FICTION. NOVEL: "The fictional attempt to give the effect of realism, by representing complex characters with mixed motives who are rooted in social class, operate in a highly developed social structure, interact with many other characters, and undergo plausible and everyday modes of experience". (M H. Abrams). However, early Am Novels do not look anything like the conception we have of the novel. Their characters are abstractions, hardly ever realized in any complex psychological way, their plots are mechanical, often clumsy. No "cultural voice" (J. Rubin-Dorsky): - “Voice” is the sound that results when fear is overcome and truth can be asserted. It is the cry of unsuppressed rage, the release of unmitigated anger, the expression of unmediated passion or desire” 1. No authentic American language 2. No interest the development of arts and letters 3. Lack of international copyright 4. Literature's purpose should be that of moral improvement MAIN NARRATIVE GENRES. 1) The Sentimental Novel: - William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789) - — Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797) - Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1794) 2) The Picaresque - Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792) 3) The Gothic - Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland, 1798 Ormond, 1799 Arthur Mervin, 1799 Edgar Huntly, 1799 4) Nostalgic Fiction - James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy (1821) CHAPTER 3.1: THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743-1826) - — 3rd PRESIDENT of the US (after Washington and John Adams), Minister to France, Governor of Virginia, Congressman. As Delegate to the first Continental Congress he drafted the Declaration of Independence (1776). O Conclusion: Therefore, the American people have the right and duty to create “new Guards for their Future Security.” The third part (“Bill of particulars”) has three effects: 1. Enumerate the causes that lead to seeking emancipation from Great Britain (the King as “Tyrant”) 2. Reflections on Absolute despotism 3. Justification for change and independence CHAPTER 3.2: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-1790) BIOGRAPHICAL DATA: American success story par excellence (rise from “rags to riches”) Born in Boston in 1706, the 10th child in a family of 15 children At 17, he ran away to Philadelphia, and at 18 he went to London. His “ERRATA” (F. avoided the Word “sin”) His instinct for success. Taught himself French, Spanish, Italian and Latin. At 24: owner of a successful printing shop in Philadelphia. Sells Poor Richard's Almanac In 1730 he married Deborah Read and had two children (after two illegitimate ones - William is taken into the household). At 42: founded a library, invented a stove, a lightning rod and gifocals, established a fire company, created an Academy, secretary to the American Philosophical Society. His observations on electricity were published in London in 1751 His diplomatic life: London, paris and Philadelphia. He was a born diplomat. 1757: went to England to represent the colonies (five years) 1775: Committee to draft the Declaration of Independence 1776: appointed Minister to France and signed the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary war. FRANLIN'”S IDEAS: Franklin believed that man was naturally innocent, that all the mysteries that charmed the religious mind could be explained through science, that people were not inherently evil and that Education could transform mans life and set man free from tyranny of church and monarchy. For Franklin, the act of worship was carried out most sincerely when it was directed toward the betterment of man in his practical, everyday human relationships. Accordingly, Franklin borrowed from Puritan teachings his famous Thirteen Virtues (temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquitlity, chastity, and humility) and exhorted others to practice them, not for their Calvinistic value of "justifying the ways of God to man" but rather for their practical usefulness in the fundamental motive of existence -the desire to Get On. - — Whereas the Calvinist regarded prosperity as a mark of God's favor and a sign of heavenly reward, Franklin looked upon it as a means of establishing the earthly happiness of mankind. FRANKLIN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY - Translated into dozens of languages and reprinted in hundreds of editions, it continues to be one of the most successful books of all time - Stylistically: Unfinished (incomplete, disjointed, inaccurate, mangled manuscript) - Written in 4 sittings (1771, 1784, 1788, 1790): 4 separate explorations in self-discovery and self-advertisement. - — Thestory of his conversion (humanistic and secular): secularized version of Spiritual Autobiography (St Augustine's Confessions) O From poverty and darkness to richness and celebrity O From Puritanism to Deism O From Imperialist to Revolutionary - — Unlike Puritans: Not concerned with sins or God's salvation (“errata”): Autobiography as the story of the growth and development of a self. No crises, no conversions and de- conversions - — INTENTION: didactic, doctrinary, exemplary (moral guide to show young people how to succeed) - — Originality: Self-creation enacted as the playing of calculated roles. O First section: The cultivated elderly man, gazing backwards and examining the provisional roles. O Second section: The young man of whom everyone speaks. >» The maturing person devoted to project of moral perfection. O Third section: The Industrious civic leader. The Benjamin Franklin as American patriot. ANALYTIC READING OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY (FRAGMENTS) FRANKLIN'S AUTHOBIOGRAPHY AND AMERICA. - — Promotion Moral tract: America is the possibility of progress (vs. Europe): democratic presumption that anyone can rise. Taught in all American schools. - — Historians: study of the American middle-class (WASPs) - Revolutionary Document: assertion of proletarian dignity - Success Story: Franklin presents himself as a representative figure (metaphor of his own life: shows himself as American prototype): allegory of American National experience - — Franklin and the AMERICAN DREAM: in the American colonies anyone could fashion his own economic and social status through his personal merits. O Franklin preached that the possibilities were limitless through personal merits (not class structure) for those practicing frugality, honesty, industry, etc. FRANKLIN'S PLAN FOR MORAL PERFECTION: 1. TEMPERANCE - Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation. 2. SILENCE. - Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. 3. ORDER. - Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time. 4. RESOLUTION. - Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. 5. FRUGALITY. - Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; ¡. e., waste nothing. 6. INDUSTRY. - Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions. 7. SINCERITY. - Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly. 8. JUSTICE. - Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty. 9. MODERATION. - Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve. 10. CLEANLINESS. - Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation. 11. TRANQUILLITY. - Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable. 12. CHASTITY. 13. HUMILITY. - Imitate Jesus and Socrates. LANGUAGE AND STYLE: - His questionable worldview put aside, Franklin's list impresses on a purely literary level. His explanatory maxims are models of well-constructed phrases: pointed, concise, clear, and memorable as balanced aphorisms. - — Ifthe list suggests why Franklin is no longer consulted as a philosopher, it also illustrates why he is still admired as a prose stylist. CONCLUSIONS: The "American myth" will reach its maximum expression with the Autobiography of Benjamim Franklin, and his indications of how to become prosperous and respectable. That Franklin secularized the Puritan spiritual autobiography is as generally accepted by critics as that of considering Rousseau the secularizer of the Confessions of St. Augustine. Franklin's "faith" is not in Providence, but in himself and in his country. THE AUTOBOIGRAPHY AS “CONVERSION NARRATIVE” Franklin's Autobiography is the proud account of the American "self-made man", with a clear exemplary and didactic intention. To St. Augustine he owes the structure around an experience of "conversion"; butif the Confessions presented a conversion from sin to the salvation of the soul, Franklin presents the conversion of a poor nobody, to a prosperous and famous character. Franklin's greatest business accomplishment came from the publication of Poor Richard's Almanack. Despite the superior British naval force, they are too far away to succesfuly fight the colonies. Paine concludes by calling for a Declaration of independence (SIX months later, the Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson) CONCLUSION: Paine's arguments against British rule lt was absurd for an island to rule a continent. America was nota "British nation"; it was composed of influences and peoples from all of Europe. Even if Britain were the "mother country" of America, that made her actions all the more horrendous, for no mother would harm her children so brutally. Being a part of Britain would drag America into unnecessary European wars, and keep it from the international commerce at which America excelled. The distance between the two nations made governing the colonies from England unwieldy. If some wrong were to be petitioned to Parliament, it would take a year before the colonies received a response. The New World was discovered shortly before the Reformation. The Puritans believed that God wanted to give them a safe haven from the persecution of British rule. Britain ruled the colonies for its own benefit, and did not consider the best interests of the colonists in governing them. CHAPTER 3.4: HECTOR ST. JOHN DE CREVECOEUR (1735- 1813) BIOGRAPHIC DATA. Born in 1735 to a family of minor nobility in Normandy, France. He was educated in England and came to America in 1759, first serving in the British colonial militia and then observing firsthand the American Revolution. In 1969 he bought land in New York county and, newly married, settled into the life of an American farmer. He was a successful diplomat Best known for his Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Crévecoeur also wrote travel essays and a variety of sketches about his adopted homeland. His Letters are a minor classic of American literature, and they fed the eager European imagination about the wonders of the New World. LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN FARMER Written in the voice of the fictional James the Farmer, requested by an Englishman, "Mr. F. B.," to satisfy his curiosity about America. Crévecoeur wrote in a tradition of eyewitness literature about the New World He offered the insider observations of a resident, instead of the bland comments of a tourist. His Letters dictate terms to Europe about how America will repair the ills of the Old World. They also offer an American literary voice: the American primitive, who is insightful and ironic, and wiser than his "civilized" counterparts. The Letters are divided into inquiries about three regions in America and their activities: O the South (Charlestown, VA) and its slavery O New England (Nantucket) and its whaling O the Middle-Atlantic states and their farms (his own farm). Extremes of the west: raw wilderness (the frontier) Rural setting: a dark forest transformed into a garden: America (in its most representative form) Extremes of Europe (crowded cities, castles, manufacturers...) Composed during his residence in New York (1759-1768), when he farmed at his estate, Pine Hill Its publication followed close enough to the American Revolution (1775-1783) to satisfy an insatiable demand for things American, and confirmed a vision of a new land, rich and promising. Crévecoeur articulated the excitement and wonder of the new, the sense of freedom from European corruption and constraint, a vision of harmonious relationship between the natural and the civilized. He particularly admired the independence of the frontier mentality, and how the absence of traditional held out the promise of equality for all. He particularly commended the American democratic ideal, rejoicing in its racial pluralism, ¡ts capacity to assimilate all races an cultures to produce a "new race of men". In contrast to Puritan America, Crévecoeur represented a secular, Enlightenment view. His new man was the settled farmer and artisan, Jeffersonian man, rather than one of the Puritan "elect". For Crevecoéur, America seemed to promise the opportunity for man to become anything he wants. So, concentrating on future possibility rather than present actuality, Crevecoeur articulated a simple optimism, a faith in man's perfectibility, and the progress that epitomized the American Dream. But the later chapters of the Letters are less cheerful: Crévecoeur writes about the disruptions to his agrarian reverie, brought on by the incipient American Revolution, with clear distaste. Eventually, Crévecoeur's experience of the American Revolution shook his faith in the revolutionaries and their ideals. He sought to avoid party lines, but he was suspected of espionage by both sides during the conflict and sailed back to Europe to sell his Letters to a publisher. He praises the American democratic ideal of EQUALITY: "The visitor to America views not the hostile castle, and the haughty mansion, contrasted with the clay- built hut and miserable cabin, where cattle and men help to keep each other warm, and dwell in meanness, smoke and indigence” (pg. 2) The central idea is that in America the European underwent a "great metamorphosis," a sort of "resurrection". He became a "new man.“ "The American is a New Man, who acts upon new principles; he must entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependance, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence -This is an American” (pg. 4) However, there is a total CHANGE OF MOOD as the letters progress: from total ASSIMILATION to METAMORPHOSIS - TRANSMUTATION - TRANSITION to Nature American Adam, (R. W. B. Lewis: The American Adam (1955): - A radically new personality, the hero of a new adventure: an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources... The world and history lay all before him. And he was the type of creator, the poet par excellence, creating language itself by naming the elements of the scene about him. Philip Freneau "The Rising Glory of America": Paradise Anew Shall flourish, by no second Adam lost No dangerous tree with deadly fruit shall grow No tempting serpent to allure the soul from native innocence. The “American Adam” in Literarture: INCARNATED IN: The figure of Natty Bumpo (JF Cooper) and in Emerson and Thoreau. In Whitman (who presents himself as "Adam, early in the morning") In Twain's Huck, struggling to preserve his integrity in a corrupt world. In Henry James, who indicates the Adamic innocence of his Americans by calling them Christopher Newman and Adam Verver. In the 20th c., the “American Adam” is: O Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby) O Saul Bellow's Augie Marsh (The adventures of A M), O Salinger's Holden Caulfield (Catcher in the Rye) O Hemingway's Nick Adams (In Our Time) LETTER 1 Totally cheerful (assimilation) 1. Whatis an American?: New Man - New Adam: Metamorphosis (pg. 3, 12) of the European in the New World. Resurrection (11) CHARACTERS: realistic, an Individual The American character: a large and grounded in a social and moral order, a luminous generality. He assumes a network of relations (people, past, mythic dimension. (Natty Bumppo, environment, God...) Hester Prynne, Capt. Ahab, Huck Finn...). AMERICAN THEMES. 1. THE FRONTIER: Frontier life offered a return to primal nature, an escape from civilization and a recovery of the lost Eden. It promoted the virtues of individualism, the sense of freedom and self-sufficiency. It bred a new American. hero. The Frontiersman: Leatherstocking, Daniel Boone, Buffalo Bill. And it generated its own distinctive literature: O guides and manuals for frontier living, Indian narratives, O stories of the legendary exploits of frontier heroes, O thetall tale, "local color" fiction. The myth of the frontier survives in the American response to contemporary life: Modern versions of the old narratives of excursion into the wilderness territory would be the Westerns, stories of the flight into space (Star Treck) and into the inner space of hallucinogenic experience. Since the Frontier has always been associated with lawlessness as well as freedom, hardship as well as opportunity, danger as well as democracy, it has always aroused ambivalent feelings: Ambivalent feelings about the Frontier: MW. Bradford's Puritan wilderness was a place of bestial evil, chaos and night. «e Cooper and Thoreau: the source of renewal (Eg: Walden) Cooper's Natty Bumpo combines innocence and experience, always fleeing the civilization The frontiersman is Whitman's hero Huck Finn: "light out of the territory" away from the Widow Douglass's efforts to civilize him. Hester Prynne lives in the "neutral territory" between the town and the forest Some 20th c. works: The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Hemingways' heroes... THE NOVEL AND AMERICA (From Love And Death In The American Novel (Leslie Fiedler, 1965) “Where is our Madame Bovary, our Anna Karenina, our Pride and Prejudice or Vanity Fair. Henry James apart, the best attempt at dealing with love in 19th cent. USA is The Scarlet Letter, in which the physical consummation of adultery has occurred and all passion burned before the novel proper begins. For the rest, there are Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn, The Last of the Mohicans, and The red Badge of Courage, the stories of Poe -books that turn from society to nature or nightmare out of a desperate need to avoid seduction, marriage and child-bearing”. The figure of Rip Van Winkle presides over the birth of the American Imagination - — Ever since the typical male protagonist of American fiction has been a solitary man, a man on the run (to avoid "civilization")....... The American Wanderer - Horror is essential to American literature. - Through GOTHIC images are projected OBSESSIVE CONCERNS of American national life. - BUT: The final horrors are neither gods nor demons, but intimate aspects of our own minds (Poe) - The American writer lives on the "frontier": the margin where the theory of original goodness and the fact of original sin come face to face. - — American fiction is nonrealistic, even anti-realistic: American SYMBOLISM. “Indeed, the moment at which Flaubert was dreaming Madame Bovary was the moment when Melville was finding Moby Dick, which is not precisely a realistic novel. American Lit is not only escaping from the physical data of the actual world, in search of an Ideal: it is bewilderingly and embarrassingly (from Twain to Faulkner or Eudora Welty to Paul Bowles) a GOTHIC FICTION, nonrealistic and negative -a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation. Moreover, our classic lit. is a lit. of horror for boys. We do not possess truly obscene authors. Our novels of terror (Moby Dick, Scarlet letter, Huck Finn, the tales of Poe) are placed on the approved book list of Parents' Committees”. SUMMARY : “For better or for worse, the American novel is different from its European prototypes, and one ofits differences arises from its careful treatment of woman and sex”. To talk, then, about the American novel is to talk about the fate of certain European genres in a world of alien experience. - — Itisa world where courtship and marriage have suffered a profound change, - — aworld losing the traditional distinctions of class; - —aworld without a significant history or a substantial past; - aworld which has left behind the terrors of Europe not for the innocence it dreamed of, but for new and special gilts associated with the rape of nature and the exploitation of dark-skinned people; - aworld doomed to play out the imaginary childhood of Europe. 2. Nature: The Nature-mystics, Dickinson 3. Religion: Transcendentalism: refers to modes of thought which emphasize the intuitive and the mystical powers of the mind, and the possibility of some higher world or realm of existence beyond the world of the senses. 4. Immigration and xenophobia 5. Politics and war: national sins. (Frederick Douglass) 6. Sex and sexism THE ARRIVAL OF ROMANTICISM - — Itisimportant to understand the meaning in that moment in the mid-18th century which gave birth to BOTH Jeffersonian democracy and sentimentality alike. - The novel an America did not come into existence at the same time by accident. They are the 2 great inventions of the bourgeois, Protestant mind at the moment when it stood between Rationalism and Sentimentalism on the one hand, and between the drive for economic power and the need for cultural autonomy. - — Theseries of events which includes the American (1776) and the French (1789) Revolutions, the invention of the novel in GB, the rise of modern psychology, and the triumph of the lyric poetry adds up to a new revolution as well as a social one. - This revolution has traditionally been called "ROMANTICISM", what Fielder calls the "Break-Through“, thus emphasizing the dramatic entry of a new voice into the dialogue of Western man with his various selves. “The Break-Through” (ROMANTICISM) - The Break Through: a new concept of inwardness, the invention of a new kind of self, a new level of mind. O Diderot who expressed a first real awareness that man is "double", the prey of conflicting psyches. O So, the new novellas show the emergence of the underground emotions O Profoundly anti-Christian: Don Juan is transformed from villain to hero; and the legendary rebels and outcasts, Prometheus and Cain, Judas and the Wandering Jew, Faust and Lucifer himself are redeemed. O The child is glorified over the man, the peasant over the courtier, the dark man over the white; the rude ballad over the polished sonnet; the weeper over the thinker, colony over mother country; the commoner over the king... nature over culture. - So, America is not exclusively the product of Reason. - Behind its neo-classical facade, it is a nation sustained by a sentimental and Romantic dream, the dream of an escape from culture and a renewal of youth. - In Sentimentalism, the Age of Reason or Enlightenment dissolves into tears; sensibility, seduction and suicide haunt its art even before ghosts and graveyards take over. - — Thefinal horrors are neither gods nor demons, but intimate aspects of our own minds. CHAPTER 4.1: JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1789-1851) BIOGRAPHICAL DATA: - A prominent early American novelist because of his characterization of the frontiersman as an American type. - — Born in New Jersey, the on of a wealthy Federalist land developer of Quaker origins. - The twelfth of fifteen children, Cooper attended Yale College University but was dismissed for misconduct. Then went to sea and served in the navy. - Cooper suffered through his family's economic collapse and, in desperation, turned to writing fiction in an effort to find some means of support for his wife and children. O Tone of farce: caricature, exaggeration, burlesque. O Influenced by the British tradition of satire: Pope, Adison, Steele, Fielding... O “Salmagundi” = chopped salad with veal and chicken. - 2. A History of New York from the beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809): mock-heroic. O An elaborate hoax O Aparody of history and of the pomposities and pedantries of historians, told by “Diedrich Kickerbocker” O “Kinickerbocker School”: authors who wrote about “little New York” in the years before the civil war. - 3. The Sketch Book (1819): Collection of short stories O Exploits the interests of the past (Influence of Romantics) O Exploits the American ambivalences towards England O Protagonist: Geoffrey Crayon (observer and narrator of random 44 sketches). Crayon is a projection of Irving: a middle-aged bachelor of no fixed address and no certain occupation. O Thesuccess of The Sketch book was immediate, and Irving became one of the most admired authors in England. “ = Rip Van Wrinkle” = “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” O Thetechnical developments in “Rip Van Wrinkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” earned Irving a place in the history of American fiction. - 4. Bracebridge Hall (1822): sketches of the English country life centered on Christmas “looking at things poetically, rather than politically” - 5. Tales of a Traveller (1824): Gothic tales. - 6. SPAIN (six years from 1828): The Conquest of Granada (1829); Tales of the Alhambra (1832). - 7. Life of George Washington (1859) in 5 volumes. - — Thefirst theoretitian in Literature: (emphasis of national literature on “literature”, not on “national”). in a letter dated September 4, 1824, Irving made it clear that his plots were merely vulgar vehicles for what he considered a respectable rhetorical purpose: *"L wish, in everything | do, to write in such a manner that my productions may have something more than the mere interest of narrative to recommend them, which is very evanescent; something, if | dare use the phrase, of classical merit, 8:c., which gives a production some chance of duration beyond the mere whim and fashion of the day." The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. - Genre: the literary sketch - Influences (“Der Wilde Jáger”) - — Intention - Title and epigraph - — Irving's contribution to American Culture - Structure (see Freytag's pyramid) - Setting - Characters (Ichabod Crane, Brom Bones, Katrina) - — Thematic aspects (Love, Nature, Change in American Life) - Literary style O Irving's idea of Fiction O “Embedded story”: The role of the narrator O Sources of Humour - Fd STORY LEGEND Heard by a man Tells Knockerbocker He becomes the narrator “embedded story” Freytag's Pyramid Freytag's Pyramid - a diagram of the structure of a five-act tragedy, given by Gustav Freytag, now widely accepted (and sometimes adapted) as a means of getting at the structure of many kinds of realist fiction in addition to drama. (powerpoint) - Exposition: the introductory material, which often creates the tone. Gives the setting, introduces the characters, and supplies other facts necessary for understanding - Rising Action: the part of the dramatic action that has to do with the complication of the action. Begins with the inciting moment, gains interest with various inner and outer conflicts, and proceeds to the climax. It can also be called the complication. - — Climax: the turning point in the action, often coincides with an epiphany or revelation. - — Falling Action: the second half of the dramatic plot. It follows the climax and often exhibits the winding down of the climax. Also called Denouément - Resolution: the end of the falling action and the solution of the conflict. The resolution is not always a happy ending. Involves not only the resolution of the conflict but an explanation of all the secrets and misunderstandings connected with the plot; the tying up of loose ends, exposure of a villain, clearing up a mistaken identity, reuniting characters, etc. (imagen diapositiva) Possible allegorical interpretations: 1. Imagination (Ichabod) rivals practicality (Bones), and imagination is not enough to occupy, subdue and organize a Continent (Katrina) 2. Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones are meant to be more than just two characters with a rivalry—they are actually representations of the young American nation (Bones) and the old Europe (Ichabod): it is an allegory for the goals, the problems, and the livelihood of an adolescent America (the Frontiersman) vs. Europe (culture, tradition) 3. Crane is the childish, adolescent, greedy America whereas Brom Bones, represents the strength of America's motherland, Great Britain (she can be a bully to America, like Bones is to Ichabod): The list of grievances against Ichabod is reminiscent of the list of grievances claimed in the Declaration of Independence RIP VAN WINKLE SUCCESS and INFLUENCE: O 5plays, 3 operas O Cooper's Leatherstocking O Melville's Ishmael O Twain's Huck Finn O Rip: a folk figure. THEMES: O Time (escape from time and victimization by time) Sleep and Waking (sleep as frontier between two distinct temporal realities) Youth and Age (and attitudes toward growth) History Misoginy (lack of sex: cf. Leslie Fielder): wife as oppressor Bipolarities: man-woman; past-present; village-forest; mountain-valley America: rapid change; mutability; need to adapt (The townspeople represent American society at large and how it changed with the realization of becoming an independent country). STRUCTURE: O Four clear parts (Presentation, voyage, awakening and return, New Life) O 3narrative stages: = Thestory-teller, Rip Van Winkle = Diedrick Knickerbocker (who gathers it as a document) = Geoffrey Crayon (who writes it as literary work) SOURCES: “Peter Klaus” (German Tale) O Christian Legend of the 7 Ephesian Sleepers (the story of a group of youths who hid inside a cave outside the city of Ephesus around 250 AD. to escape a religious persecution and emerged some 300 years late.) O Kings: Arthur, Charlemagne... O Sleeping Beauty o Crucifixion and Resurrection PLACE: The Kaatskill mountains (Up Hudson river) TIME: George lll and George Washington (1765-1789): from Colony to independent Nation CHARACTERS - O Rip as counter-hero, as anti-Franklinian (made a success of failure) 000000o O Man-on- the- run e Imagination e Intuition e Idealism e Inspiration e Individuality 1 IMAGINATION: To the Romantics, imagination, individual feelings, and wild nature were of greater value than reason, rationalism, and logic. Each person's imagination is the critical authority over all matters. The Romantics believed that the imagination was able to discover truths that the rational mind could not reach. INTUITION: Feelings and instincts are now considered superior to rationality or reason as the mode of perceiving and experiencing reality. Intuition leads one to truth. British Romantic writer William Wordsworth described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” IDEALISM: the belief that we should always strive for our highest ideals. This can be achieved through the human spirit and the mind. A person's thoughts or ideas have a crucial role in making the world the way it is. INSPIRATION: The Romantics found inspiration through the natural world. Estranged from traditional religious beliefs, the romantics looked upon nature as the dwelling place of God God and the natural universe were considered to be one and the same. They perceived nature as a metaphor for the sublime power and mystery of forces that inspire solace and self-discovery. INDIVIDUALITY: Romantics strongly believed in personal freedom, democratic ideals, and the importance of the rights of each individual. Romantic literature celebrated and explored the inward experiences of the individual. GOTHIC FICTION: MAIN CHARACTERISTICS Fundamentally, a dialogical/unstable/mysterious narrative form reflecting a changing/unstable/abstracting socio-historical milieu. 1 Improbable plots - mysterious letters/informants, magical happenings, great coincidences. Far-off locations - often involving distant locations, cultures/nations considered exotic, very different, barbaric. Repressive Institutions - perceived as horrid, irrational, arbitrary and draconian. Catholic inquisition, monasteries and monks, the family (usually with a tyrannical father), monarchic or aristocratic power, etc. Magic, the supernatural, ghosts, demons, satanic pacts Secret histories, shame, guilt - often revolves around dark family secret, the guilt/evil of ancestors; very often has an element of taboo (often sexual) - a rape, incest, illegitimacy etc. Character types: the tyrannical father (the "senex iratus" or angry old man), the beautiful virgin (the "jeune fille,” or young innocent girl), the anti-hero ( "Byronic hero") etc. Breaking of taboos, - dark defiance of societal/metaphysical laws/gods, a guilt or dark desire which drives the anti-hero on to his desperate acts. Frankenstein, Jekyll. 8. Narrative of breaks, discontinuities, conflicts: prevalence of fragments, incomplete narratives (often because of the interruption of death, chaos, loss), lack of knowledges and feeble narrators EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849) - — Controversy around Poe's figure: O Stephane Mallarmé : “Le Tombeau d'Edgar Allan Poe” O Charles Baudelaire (his translator) O Emerson: “the jingle man”. O Henry James: “An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection" - Poe's legend O Biography by Rev. Rufus Griswold BIOGRAPGY - Parents: David Poe and Elizabeth Arnold. - Brother: William Henry, Sister: Rosalie. Foster parents: Mr. and Mrs. Allan - Boston: the army - Marriage: Virginia Clemm (14 years old) - Mental illness? - — DEATH (40 years old): found on the streets of Baltimore Poe as critic: - Poe contributed with rigorous criteria to the task of literary interpretation - Poe proclaimed that the aim of poetry was pleasure and was against poetry of ideas and informational poetry - — Against the “heresy of didacticism”: The Poetic Principle. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque - aristocratic madmen, self-tormented murderers, neurasthenic necrophiliacs, and other deviant types - Effect: "The ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful colored into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and the mystical“* Poe's Goticism: Poe's fellow American Romantics were nourished by the contemplation of nature or of the world of the frontier. Poe, however, only wrote one tale of the American wilderness. - In Poe's stories, the use of the past is darker, more ominous, more Gothic, and lies on his heroes and heroines with a heavier weight than it does in other Romantic writers. - Poe also dramatizes what has been called the demonic side of the nineteenth century. His tales are filled with assassination and nonescape, with violence and death. - Many of his characters are obsessed with a fear of death. Some of them strive to come back from the tomb; others are terrified of being buried alive or in fact are buried alive. The two obsessions are part of a general fear of retaining consciousness in a world that is dead. - Poe was preoccupied with the disintegration of culture, with decadence. He gives us a vision of “dehumanized man”. Settings: Grandly gloomy interiors provide the appropriate habitat for his heroes, so often morbidly melancholy or actually mad, the proper setting for the return from the tomb. Death /Diseases of heroines: "experience has demonstrated how in the highest expressions of beauty, the tone is that of sadness” ....Any type of beauty in its supreme manifestation invariably provokes tears in the sensitive soul" The way to beauty necessarily goes through death : "the death... of a beautiful woman" as it "is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover." (cf. The philosophy of composition). - Poe's typical heroines: (“The Raven”, “Ligea”, “Annabel Lee”) O the body of the dead woman is elevated to a macabre position of platonic apotheosis O sinister combination of woman, death and eroticism - — Typical heroes: They live only in their heads - all a matter of intellect and imagination. POE'”S SHORT FICTION - Poeis the first American author who formalized the technique of the short story, in pursuit of the totality of effect through compression, immediacy, verisimilitude, and finality. - He also invented the story of detection - He developed a new fiction of psychological analysis (Poe actually predicted the development of psychoanalysis) POE'S POETRY: - embodies his conviction that the function of poetry is not to summarize and interpret earthly experience, but to create a mood in which the soul soars toward supernal beauty - Art does not lie in its message; poetry does not have to inculcate a moral; it has only to be. DETAILED READING OF SHORT STORIES 1. THE MASK OF RED DEATH THEME: Omnia mors aequat (Death equals all) 7 ROOMS=7 STAGES OF MEN SEVEN DEADLY SINS: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, sloth. 7 virtues: humility, charity, chastity, gratitude, temperance, patience, diligence. 8. The Transcendentalists were convinced of possessing "absolute truths" about morals, politics, religion etc; they find themselves superior to the finite world and the common place. So, Thoreau could say about the world that he would have none of its "dirty institutions". TRANSCENDENTALIST FLAWS: How did Transcendentalists react to 19th c society? a) They were against the materialism and the new economic and industrial order, BUT they did not object to wealth. b) They did not fight for the rights of the poor. Emerson said. "do not tell me of my obligation to put all men in good situations. Are they my poor?". - In his essay "The Transcendentalist", Emerson applied the label only to those among the idealists who responded to the conformity, injustice, placidity and materialism of American society by simply dropping out and withdrawing into silence. These were the "self- displaced": “their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw them from the conversation, but from the labors of the world; they are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens; they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public religious rites, in the abolition of the slave trade, or in the temperance society.” c) With his intuition the Transcendentalist was concerned to protect his standards of justice, intellect, taste, morality, as well as himself and his way of life, against the degradation of a majority rule -the “democracy of the masses”: "Masses! The calamity is the masses!: let me draw individuals out of them" d) INTELECTUAL ELITISM: He favours a democracy of real "individuals" (a democracy populated by philosopher-voters, with good manners): "To draw individuals out of masses" -that was what Emerson took to be his mission e) SO: Transcendentalism was a philosophy of naked individualism, aimed at the creation of the New American, the self-reliant man, complete and independent: the "Imperial self" DEFINITIONS - William Henry Chamning(1810-1844) - "Transcendentalism was a pilgrimage from the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the temple of the Living God in the soul. .. Amidst materialists, zealots, and skeptics, the Transcendentalist believed in perpetual inspiration, the miraculous power of will, and a birthright to universal good. He sought to hold communion face to face with the unnameable Spirit of his spirit, and gave himself up to the embrace of nature's perfect joy, as a babe seeks the breast of a mother.” - — Charles Mayo Ellis, An Essay on Transcendentalism (1842) - "Transcendentalism maintains that man has ideas, that come not through the five senses or the powers of reasoning; but are either the result of direct revelation from God, his immediate inspiration, or his immanent presence in the spiritual world. ... - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836) - "Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. | become a transparent eye- ball. | am nothing. | see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; | am part or parcel of God" (pg 2). SUMMARY: BASIC TENETS OF AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM (CHECKLIST) 1. Transcendentalism, essentially, is a form of idealism. 2. The transcendentalist "transcends" or rises above the lower animalistic impulses of life (animal drives) and moves from the rational to a spiritual realm. 3. The human soul is part of the Oversoul or universal spirit 4. Therefore, every individual is to be respected because everyone has a portion of that Oversoul (God).This Oversoul or Life Force or God can be found everywhere. 5. God can be found in both nature and human nature (Nature, Emerson stated, has spiritual manifestations). 6. "Miracle is monster." The miracles of the Bible are not to be regarded as important. Miracles are all about us - the whole world is a miracle and the smallest creature is one. "A mouse is a miracle enough to stagger quintillions of infidels." - (Whitman) 7. More important than a concern about the afterlife, should be a concern for this life - "the one thing in the world of value is the active soul." - Emerson 8. Death is never to be feared, for at death the soul merely passes to the oversoul. 9. Emphasis should be placed on the here and now. "Give me one world at a time." - Thoreau. 10. Evil is a negative - merely an absence of good. Light is more powerful than darkness because one ray of light penetrates the dark. 11. Power is to be obtained by defying fate or predestination. Emphasis on self-reliance. 12. The transcendentalists see the necessity of examples of great leaders, writers, philosophers, and others, to show what an individual can become through thinking and action. 13. The unity of life and universe must be realized. There is a relationship between all things. 14. One must have faith in intuition, for no church or creed can communicate truth. 15. Reform must not be emphasized - true reform comes from within. RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882) Poor origins. Studied at Harvard. Was a schoolmaster. Pastor of Boston's second Church at 21. Resigned at 29 after death of his first wife. Europe and second marriage Concord: “l am a poet... that is my nature and vocation. My singing is for the most part in prose. Still, lam a poet in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover of harmonies that are in the soul” NATURE (1836): “A look on Nature with the spiritual eye” - Central precept: that man should enjoy an original relation to the universe - Suspension of active will and thought while he submits to nature's supernatural power. - TRANSCENDING the life of the body and the senses, he ascends towards a mystical union with the Spirit, God, the One, the Over-Soul - Belief in the essential divinity of man: wonderfully optimistic cultural program. - REASON as man's creative power Puritanism and Transcendentalism (Perry Miller) Mysticism: the nature of reality or of the divine essence may be known and perceived by an immediate insight. Pantheism: the universe itself is God, God is the combined forces and laws manifested in the existing universe. Emerson and his group took the inherent mysticism of Jonathan Edwards, mixed it with Platonism and declared that man need not creep in the dust or torment with his unworthiness. Abandoned the idea of man's innate depravity. Turned away from the doctrines of sin and predestination, and sought with renewed fervor for the presence of the Holy Ghost in their own hearts and in nature. They could give themselves to becoming “eye balls” EMERSON'S IDEAS ABOUT TRANSCENDENTALISM (EARLY ESSAYS, 1841) 1 Transcendentalism posits a distinction between "Understanding," or the normal means of apprehending truth through the senses, and "Reason," a higher, more intuitive form of perception. According to Emerson, reason is "the highest faculty of the soul-- what we mean by the soul itself; it never reasons, never proves, it simply perceives; itis vision.” By contrast, "The Understanding toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues, near sighed but strong- sighted, dwelling in the present the expedient the customary” (Letters 1:412-413). Microcosm and macrocosm: each part of nature contains all within it. "Nature is a sea of forms radically alike....” ". related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is faithfully renders the likeness of the world." Principle of analogy, of perceiving correspondences: "Man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects." Emblematic Nature: "Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.“. Intimate connection of human beings with Nature Universal soul ("Oversoul"): "Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related." Reliance on the Self: Transcendentalism proposes that the essential nature of human beings is good and that, left in a state of nature, human beings would seek the good. Society is to blame for the corruption that mankind: "A man is a god in ruins." Perfectionism and optimism: Americans can build their own world. He and Thoreau belonged to “THE PARTY OF HOPE” READING OF NATURE (1836) One of the most important documents in the history of Am. letters. MAN = New Adam / USA = New Eden He first reflects on man's fallen condition: he is "a god in ruins". Man is divided from himself, and from everything which is not himself, what Emerson calls "Nature". The reason is not his inner depravity, but "Ophtalmia" -a deficiency in human vision (Letter to M. Fuller) : pg. 2. Man had been seduced by the "sensational" theory of John Locke's Empiricism (that we learn and perceive things through sensations). Emerson rejects it. O Hawthorne also opposed his own tragic vision and his sense of ambiguity and contradiction in human experience, against Emerson's confidence in human nature. O If Emerson led the "party of hope“, the representatives of the so-called "Party of despair" (Melville and Hawthorne) emphasized in their fiction the demonic potential of the individual. O Whitman wrote his poetry inspired by Emerson's dictums. O 20thc writers such as Dreiser, R. Frost, W. Sevens, Ralph Waldo Ellison have also felt his influence. HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862) BIOGRAPHICAL DATA Walden bears evidence of Thoreau's close association with Transcendentalist thinking. Of the men and women who made Concord the center of Transcendentalism, only Thoreau was born there and lived there all his life, except for his University years at Harvard. He never married, and his most complex personal relationship was with his older neighbor, Emerson. In 1841 he went to live with the Emersons, working for them as a handyman and editor of the trans journal The Dial (1841-43). It was on Emerson's land that he built his hut by Walden Pond in 1845. He became one of the most outspoken abolitionists He died at 44, with the only national fame of being an eccentric Emersonian social experimenter. WALDEN, or LIFE IN THE WOODS (1854) Walden is an account of the narrator's own pioneering adventures, both physical and spiritual, which he offers as an example to his readers. Walden is not only about retiring from society and returning to nature; but it is about a journey of self-discovery in which there can never be a final destination, only the endless process of the quest. This quest is for the transcendental, the divine spirit in the common world of nature. Although he is chasing the impossible, the book has a fundamentally optimistic tone. Walden is the artistic depiction of HOW a man moved from the state of being a “god in ruins” and moved toward a god-like state of fulfillment. Common points between Emerson and Thoreau: Both affirm the limitless possibilities and worth of the self Both seek communion with the soul or spirit that circulates through nature and all creation Both urge recognition of the mythological and fabulous character of the world, and recommend the adoption of an innocent childlike view of things. Both believe in man!'s ability to realize his divine potential Differences between Emerson and Thoreau: - — Thoreau is much more firmly grounded in the sensuous world. - His writing is less abstract and more appreciative of the intense and varied experience of all the senses. - Walden, in fact, represents a kind of applied Emersonianism in which Thoreau not only translates Emerson's ideas into the practical life of the Frontiersman, but evolves a new, Transcendental language to enact the kind of experience which Emerson tends to treat in a more intellectual and theoretical fashion. - Thoreau wants a kind of writing that is substantial, physical, muscular, urgent, rooted in the earth, giving us the experience of TRANSCENDENCE. THE TONE: - Of great confidence and joy; the pages are the narrator's optimistic proclamation of the richness and fullness of his life at Walden Pond. - — Thoreau “brags lustily” (pg. 24) that he has successfully created a way of living that has enabled him to find a "new day" in his life. - — Itisa new world and a new self that he has discovered through his thought and activity at his woodland retreat. - Hefeels as though he has been reborn into a fresh and new, more satisfying life - Hecelebrates the feeling of having left behind his old self, for the sake of a new and ecstatic spiritual life. - One of the most distinctive characteristics of Walden is that the narrator consistently tries to alert his readers to their potential for spiritual growth. - — Thoreau believed that he had proved to the world the tenet of Emersonian idealism that the divine may be experienced through the medium of nature. WALDEN 1.Economy 2.Where | Lived, and What | Lived For 3.Reading 4.Sounds 5.Solitude 6.Visitors 7.The Bean-Field 8.The Village 9.The Ponds 10.Baker Farm 11.Higher Laws 12.Brute Neighbors 13.House-Warming 14.Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors 15.Winter Animals 16.The Pond in Winter 17.Spring 18.Conclusion MAIN IDEAS AND MAIN CHAPTER PARTS Walden is not just a loose series of anecdotes and meditations, but a coherent 18- chapter narrative in which The "I" is a fictional construct, Thoreau's ideal self/alter- ego. Chapter 1 (“ECONOMY”) A warning to his fellow citizens of Concord (i.e. America): men are living “Lives of quiet desperation”(pg. 4), and confusing means with ends - — Thestyle in this chapter is staccato, bombastic, a language of dogmatic pronouncement and criticism of the people of Concord. The narrator is the angry young man embittered with a society which has not fully appreciated its possibilities. (Compare with CHpts 4 nd 9) - his ideas on work and leisure were not held by a majority of Americans --who had been busy killing indians, felling the forests, sailing ships, farming, shopkeeping, and running for political office - For Thoreau genuine integrity requires leisure. - — Commonalities between Thoreau's “lists” (of expenses, needs, etc) and Franklin's “Virtues”? - A How-to Book? CHAPTER 4: Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, | sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, | was reminded of the lapse of time. | grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. | realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, | minded not how the hours went. ... (PG. 32) CHAPTER 9: In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh;—a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun's hazy brush,—this the light dust-cloth, —which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still----- (PG. 32) Chapter 2 (“WHERE ! LIVED...”): The narrator's development is related to natural processes, to ideas of rebirth, baptism, renewal, building, purifying, metamorphosis.. - — Thoreau's experience at Walden Pond becomes a record of his way of seeing the world - The process of learning for Thoreau involves making analogies he discovers as a result of going to the woods (on an hourly, daily and seasonal basis). - — Frequent references to Eastern religious experience (“Bathing” in pg. 26) - Walden Pond becomes the “eye” of the “1” Chapter 3 (“READING”): a description of what the narrator has gained from reading. ( “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!”). Against “easy reading” Chapter 4 (“SOUNDS”): style more poetic, quiet and serene. The narrator merges with the processes of Nature Chapter 5 (“SOLITUDE”): He finds that “society is commonly too cheap”. His spiritual nourishment is not to be found in Concord, but in the “perennial source of life”, Nature “1 find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time” Chapter 9, (“The Ponds”): "The Ponds" can best be described as a cluster of metaphors which is designed to illuminate Thoreau's concept of the ideal self, or soul. He pushes O Twice-Told Tales (1837) - 1842: Marries Sophia and works at Salem's custom House. They lived in Concord. THEMES: - the consequences of pride, selfishness, guilt, solitude, - — the burden of the past (esp. Puritan past), - the futility of social reforms - the impossibility of eradicating sin from the human heart. - the exploration of men's recesses WORKS: - Moses from an Old Manse (1846) O "Young Goodman Brown“ O “Rappaccini's Daughter” - “The Custom House” (Introduction to TSL) - TheScarlet Letter (1850) - The House of the Seven Gables (1851) - The Snow Image - — TheBlithedale Romance. - The Marble Faun (after a visit to Italy) THE SCARLET LETTER CHARACTER MAP (DIAPOSITIVA) - Nota historical novel but has historical Figures and data: O Puritan Massachusetts for his masterpiece (Boston) O The novel opens in 1642 O NAMES: Gov. Bellingham, Rev. Mr. Wilson, Isaac Johnson, Anne Hutchinson, John Eliot, Increase Mather O Puritan methods of punishment O Election Day (Cpt. 21-22) - — HOWEVER: Not a Realistic Novel; it's a Romance; Hawthorne was a SYMBOLIST - — TRIPLE INFLUENCE: O A) Transcendentalism (rejection of Puritanism, use of Nature as symbol, Views on Religion) O B) ROMANTICISM (Rejection of Society, Individualism, Subjectivism, the Supernatural, Alienation, the Outcast/outsider) O C) CALVINISM: The Sin, Guilt and expiation, Salvation and its external signs) O A Most coherent plot: = 3scenes on the scaffold (Chpts 2/3, 12, 23) = 3 climactic moments coinciding with 3 meanings of A The significance of the three scaffold scenes. - — Humiliation, anxiety and strength as each character develops. - Instrument of torture $ punishment for one's sin 1st scaffold scene: (Ch 2) - — Hester Prynne is accused of being an Adulteress. - — Arevealed to mankind (It represents punishment for committing a sin) 2nd scaffold scene: (Chp 12) - — Dimmesdale sits upon the scaffold during the night. The sin of not standing on the scaffold seven years ago when Hester was accused. - — Itrepresents public sin. 3rd scaffold scene: (Chp. 23) - — Dimmesdale calls for Hester and Pearl. He then reveals his sin and dies. - Thefinal scaffold scene represents revealing sin and repenting. STRUCTURE: 5 clearly marked parts: EXPOSITION / PRESENTATION: (Chs 1-4) COMPLICATION (Chs 5 to 12) COMPLICATION AND CLIMAX (Chs. 13 to 18) RESOLUTION (Chs. 19-21) CONCLUSION (Chs. 22-24) CHAPT. 23 "Shall we not meet again?" whispered she, bending her face down close to his. "Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely, surely, we have ransome done another, with all this woe! Thou lookest far into eternity, with those bright dying eyes! Then tell me what thou seest?" "Hush, Hester, hush!" said he, with tremulous solemnity. "The law we broke!--the sin here so awfully revealed!--let these alone be in thy thoughts! | fear! | fear! It may be, that, when we forgot our God,--when we violated our reverence each for the other's soul,--it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion. God knows; and He is merciful! He hath proved his mercy, most of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this burning torture to bear upon my breast! By sending yonder dark and terrible old man, to keep the torture always at red-heat! By bringing me hither, to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people! Had either of these agonies been wanting, | had been lost for ever! Praised be his name! His will be done! Farewell!“ Chapt. 24 Hester comforted and counselled them, as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. (204) CHARACTERIZATION: HESTER (biblical name of prophetess: 201) (“Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined Prophetess”), pg. 204 CAP. 2: The door of the jail being flung open from within, there appeared, in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim and grisly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side and his staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, ... Stretching forth the official staff in his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, whom he thus drew forward until, on the threshold of the prison-door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity and force of character, and stepped into the open air, as if by her own free-will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the too vivid light of day... (58) On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore... (59) The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam; and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was ladylike, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterised by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace which is now recognised as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more ladylike, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. (59) Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true that, to a sensitive observer, there was some thing exquisitely painful in it [....]. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer—so that both men and women who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time—was that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself. (60) Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne. (62) She was self-ordained a Sister of Mercy; or, we may rather say, the world's heavy hand had so ordained her, when neither the world nor she looked forward to this result. The letter was the symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her,—so much power to do, and power to sympathize, —that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength. (196) Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind, with reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting, even to the happiest among them? As concerned her own individual existence, she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the point as settled. Atendency to speculation, though ¡it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position (201)........ The scarlet letter had not done its office. (201) HESTER: