American Literature An American Renaissance --Nationalism, Transcendentalism, and Romanticism

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1 American Literature An American Renaissance --Nationalism, Transcendentalism, and Romanticism Part I Terms to Know: Aesthetic: of or concerning the appreciation of beauty or good taste: the aesthetic faculties. Characterized by a heightened sensitivity to beauty. Enlightenment: an 18th-century philosophical movement stressing the importance of reason and the critical reappraisal of existing ideas and social institutions. The movement brought about many humanitarian reforms. Nationalism: Devotion to the interests or culture of one's nation. The belief that nations will benefit from acting independently rather than collectively, emphasizing national rather than international goals. Aspirations for national independence in a country under foreign domination. Realism: Interest in or concern for the actual or real, as distinguished from the abstract, speculative, etc.; the tendency to view or represent things as they really are. In literature, a manner of treating subject matter that presents a careful description of everyday life, usually of the lower and middle classes. A theory of writing in which the ordinary, familiar, or mundane aspects of life are represented in a straightforward or matter-of-fact manner that is presumed to reflect life as it actually is Romanticism: An artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by a heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual's expression of emotion and imagination, departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and conventions. Transcendentalism: A literary and philosophical movement, associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, asserting the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends/rises above the empirical (practical) and scientific and is knowable through intuition. Keep in mind the larger historical context the abolitionist movement; early manifestations of the women s rights struggle in the temperance society; the emerging American economic system; the near extinction of the American 1

2 Indians in the settled Northeast and Midwest; and the various conflicts with Canada, Britain, and Mexico as we study a literature that explores the power of the imagination and struggles with or evades the conflicts at the center of early 19 th century American social and political life. By the 1850s there was definitely some quality about the new literature that was American. Even though many of our early 19 th century writers may have turned inward to the world of romance, Gothic fantasy, dreams, idealized portraits of the West and the American Indians, or to the microcosm of individual perception, or to the single-sex universe of Melville s sea fiction (Moby Dick) even the transcendentalist, Thoreau, in separating himself from society at Walden Pond, tries to give imagery of the waking literal and literary body. Is an American identity the creation of a few early 19 th -century dreamers or does it result from rhythms of dreaming and waking, of separation and engagement, of evasion and confrontation? As the literature of the period shows, writing helps Emerson, Hawthorn, Dickinson, and others discover who they are in what they see and the language they find to express that vision. What we are exploring, in part, as we read American literature is the development of ways of thinking and seeing the world as well as ways of imagining and creating the self. In rejecting the rationality of the Enlightenment, early 19 th -century writers were evolving their own vision. Thoreau, in Walden, exchanges Enlightenment thinking for mystical enlightenment. Can you see this period s writers rejection of rationality as part of a pattern in American literary history? The Puritans were typological [classifying people/things by common characteristics or types); the 18 th century writers exalted reason and logic, but the early 19 th century writers were analogical in their way of seeing. Perhaps the emergence of an American imaginative literature in the early 19 th century may itself be seen as evidence of evolution in epistemology [theory of knowledge]. Once writers became capable of inventing metaphors for their own imagination or for telling stories about either public or private life, they became equally capable of exploring the meaning of their experience and defining it as American. In one sense, Transcendentalism took the separation of early 19 th century writers to its limit, yet Nature and Walden both show us that the transcendentalist theory of language is the basis for another American spiritual movement. In fact, every prior moment of separation in colonial and American literary history may be seen in retrospect (looking back) as a variation on that pattern. When the Puritan reliance on God s word seems in need of strengthening, Edwards rewrites the Bible; when theology fails to solve material problems, Franklin invents a language with which to address the common people and to create himself as a blueprint; when Britain no longer speaks for the colonists. Jefferson writes a document that enacts the very independence it declares; and in the 2

3 early 19 th century, Emerson calls for a literary separation ( We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe ) and for an American poet capable of finding the language for the as yet unsung American experience. The evolution from typology to logic to analogy is progressive, even though the early 19 th century writers were the first to see the pattern. The forms of being change, but American writers become increasingly aware of their powers to name themselves and thus to write themselves into being. From Rip Van Winkle s dream to Adrienne Rich s dream of a common language, the meaning of both American identity and American literary history are intimately tied to the evolution of an American language. By the time we finish with this unit, you will see that while American writers may continue after the Civil War to struggle with language and literary forms that will make it possible for them to write an American literature, from the Revolution on they look to themselves for their literary authority and to their own experience for the emotional and aesthetic power of their work. American writers after the Federal period no longer even have the illusion, as Edward Taylor had written, that Thou {God} will guide my pen to write aright. Nineteenth century authors make creative literature out of the economic and spiritual self-reliance of which Franklin and Emerson wrote. Nevertheless, the prohibitions against writing and speaking that American white women and black and Native American men and women suffered throughout the period in American history would mean that many Americans, then and now, continued to be silenced and that the act of writing for white women and for black writers would reflect acts of heroic rebellion. James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans James Fenimore Cooper was very popular for more than a century as a writer of adventure stories and historical epics of the American past. Later 19 th century writers, however (famously including Mark Twain) saw Fenimore Cooper as part of a ponderous romantic legacy that realism had to push out of the way, just as British realism had to rise up against Sir Walter Scott. His character Hawkeye, as a young superhero in buckskin, did much to shape not only the popular conception of the eastern woods in the French and Indian War and the Revolution but also popular ideas of what Indians were like and how to tell the Noble Savages (mostly Delawares and Mohegans in these tales) from the skulking, villainous Hurons. In his work, Fenimore Cooper was writing an epic of sorts, emulating the classic purposes of Virgil s epic: to lay claim to a heroic heritage; to infuse a landscape 3

4 with an aura of grandeur and elegy; to inspire his contemporaries with paragons of various virtues. But Fenimore Cooper was also writing romance, in emulation of Scott, who had imbued Scotland with magic, legend, and melancholy beauty, making a lot of money in the process. And Fenimore Cooper was also a man of political and social causes: environmentalist ethics burst forth at times in these novels, as do moments of prophecy. Fenimore Cooper created slow-developing sentences, delighted in the carefully composed tableau, and worked in a style that revealed his affinity for and alliance with the dark, emotion-charged, ceremonial canvases of the Hudson River School of painters. Washington Irving: Rip Van Winkle Rip Van Winkle is a good place to open the period. This story is the first American Dream in American literature, and we can talk about the implications of that dream. We can make connections between the confused state of mind the earliest colonists must have experienced and Rip s confusion on waking to discover that he is a citizen of a new country, an event that must have seemed to many to have taken place overnight. In one central passage in the story that recurs almost as a template in later American literature, Rip asks, Does nobody here know Rip Van Winkle? Irving writes, The poor fellow was now completely confounded. He doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself or another man. In the midst of his bewilderment, the man in the cocked hat demanded who he was, and what was his name? Rip s reply echoes with contemporary resonance to overworked Americans today: God knows, exclaimed he, at his wit s end; I m not myself I m somebody else that s me yonder no that s somebody else, got into my shoes I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, and they ve changed my gun and everything s changed, and I m changed, and I can t tell what s my name, or who I am! The story suggests that, like Rip, we may be deeply confused and years behind in accepting or understanding our own history and destiny. The new country begins in uncertainty; the new American sense of identity falters, and then gains confidence, much as the tale itself shows Rip, by the end, invested with new authority and self-assurance. But what is the nature of that authority? For Rip, who becomes reverenced as a storyteller, a chronicler of the old times before the war, is the same person 4

5 who, twenty years earlier, owned the worst conditioned farm in the neighborhood and was ready to attend to any body s business but his own. It is only after history catches up with Rip, in a sense, and he manages to wake up after the Revolution that he finds his vocation. Is the story in some sense Irving s meditation on imaginative literature before and after the American Revolution? What happens to Rip s cultural identity that makes it possible for the townspeople to produce their first storyteller? The story seems to document the transition between the moment in which the new country had a potential chronicler (Rip Van Winkle) but no history to the moment just a dream later when its new identity gave it both a storyteller and a story to tell. There is a moment of transition between pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary thinking for the new American Rip Van Winkle. That the village inn should have changed only the red coat of King George to the blue coat of George Washington on the sign that used to stand over it (and that now advertises the Union Hotel suggests that, in Irving s view, the singularly metamorphosed country may have undergone radical change in some ways, but in other ways it may have changed very little indeed. At the end of the story, Irving turns Rip s confusion into a joke at Dame Van Winkle s expense: But there was one species of despotism under which he had long groaned, and that was petticoat government. Here Irving establishes a theme that would become characteristic of much 19 th century fiction, in which the male character represents simple good nature, artistic sensibility, and free spirit and the female character signifies the forces that inhibit that sensibility. Dame s curtain lectures vie only with Puritan sermons in their severity, and it is her dinning voice, her tongue that was incessantly going, that Irving blames for silencing the budding artist in Rip. ( Rip had but one way of replying to all lectures of the kind. He shrugged his shoulders, shook his head, cast up his eyes, but said nothing. ) American fiction seems to begin, therefore, in the silencing of Dame Van Winkle for Rip s real victory is not the one he wins over the British but the one he wins as a result of Dam s death. You could speculate that for Irving as for Fenimore Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville the real American Dream is of a world in which women are either silent, dead, or in some other way excluded from the sphere of action. William Cullen Bryant: Thanatopsis and To a Waterfowl Celebrating romantic intuition, heartfelt inspiration, and the American wilderness as a great book of unread wisdom, William Cullen Bryant was an important pioneer in the quest to build a uniquely American poetic voice. There is a civility to Bryant, and a simplicity of theme that underlies what might seem (especially in Thanatopsis ) a daunting tide of language. Is Bryant a showoff? Is he merely laying thick romantic sauce over simple observations? 5

6 Some might argue that the British elements in Bryant s poetry contribute greatly to its beauty and power, and that they reflect one valid response to the confusion the new Americans must have felt after the revolution and also serve as a tribute to the enduring cultural and emotional content of the new country s relationship to things British, despite the change in our form of government. The grandeur and opulence in Bryant s poetry is also appearing in the oversized landscape painting being produced at this time by painters such as Thomas Cole and later Albert Bierstadt Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature and Self-Reliance Ralph Waldo Emerson is the lodestone at the center of American writing for his generation and decades after. Nature is regarded by many scholars as the cornerstone of Emerson s thought and the transcendental revolution; it s also quite difficult to get through. There are long forays into abstraction, expositions of reasoning that seem to follow no logic, and a form that seems circular. Try to proceed with patience concentrate on specific passages rather than worrying about getting the whole argument down completely. Emerson s idea of an idea, and his idea of intellectual process, have very little in common with Edwards and systematic Calvinism. For Emerson, nature includes nearly everything about our own condition. He breaks down boundaries between self and body, between our own feeling and the natural world, with the result that he achieves a spiritual vision of unity with nature. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world. How can Emerson say such a thing? Does this concept become clearer and more believable when we combine it with another observation Emerson makes: Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into a stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Emerson often connects with us by this strategy, by reaching, suddenly for mutual common experience, for the everyday perceptions that everyone shares. The following propositions seem to provide the shape and continuity of Emersonian thought: 1. that our observations of the finite ripples on the water leads us to see the ripples that ease out into infinity; 2. that the concentric circles made by the ripples themselves form a series of analogies (comparisons); and, 6

7 3. that in the act of throwing one stone we can manage to touch an infinitely enlarging sphere. These perceptions can help us sort out some related ideas that man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects and that Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments. Emerson is a poet, aesthetician, observer of nature and humanity, philosopher, and theologian. Jefferson provided us with a declaration of political independence; Franklin affirmed our independence from any single dogma or body of systematic thought, exhorting us to make our own preferably on the model of his own. Self-Reliance is Emerson s declaration of complete intellectual freedom. So, does Emerson mean what he says, as Edwards or Winthrop or any of the great Puritan theologians or homilists (sermon writers) meant every sentence they wrote? Emerson seems to reserve the right to mean what he says only today. Nathaniel Hawthorne: Young Goodman Brown, The Birthmark, and Rappaccini s Daughter Reading Nathaniel Hawthorn presents a special challenge you are doing much more than playing a game to find the secret sin or the moral of the story. Do not confuse Hawthorne s Puritan subjects and themes with his personal values. Hawthorne is neither a Puritan nor a grumpy rejecter of transcendental optimism. Allegory figures into an appreciation of Hawthorne and in discerning differences between stories that seem predominantly or essentially allegorical and stories in which allegorical dimensions are part of a larger experience. Though young Goodman Brown, The Birthmark, and Rappaccini s Daughter all invite you to hunt for allegories, each of these stories ultimately frustrates that hunt. Hawthorne, as an author and a modern human being, asks complex questions rather than deals in simple answers. With Rappaccini s Daughter, we can have fun looking for parallels between the Garden of Eden and Rappaccini s garden. But beyond those parallels lies another enigma/mystery: who is the real serpent in this garden, the figure most responsible for Beatrice s death? Rappaccini? The rival scientist Baglioni? The supposedly adoring Giovanni? If the story is ambiguous about all this, what is the quality of that ambiguity? In other words, is this just a game of assigning the guilt or can we identify a broad range of complicity in the destruction of innocence parents who want only the best for their own children; small- 7

8 minded professional competitors who gloat at the fall of the enemies; lovers who, in worshipping illusions, really love only themselves? The Birth-Mark seems to play by all the rules and themes that became evident in Rappaccini s Daughter the foolhardiness and depravity of seeking perfection or superhuman power; the fatality of mistaking infatuation and idolatry for love; the reduction, in one s own mind, of other human beings to objects to be manipulated, overhauled, or otherwise controlled. As for Young Goodman Brown, are we supposed to figure out, or really care, what happened in the forest that night and/or in Brown s past to cause these permanent transformations in his character? What about the theme of selfknowledge. Which of these characters truly comes to know something about human nature and to know himself or herself in the process? Do any of them end up supposing that they know more about life or the human condition than they really do? 8