(1836 1876)
16.1. XIX . . . . . .
16.1.1. In its most specific usage, transcendentalism refers to a literary and philosophical movement that developed in the U.S. in the first half of the 19th century. While the movement was, in part, a reaction to certain 18th-century rationalist doctrines, it was strongly influenced by Deism. Transcendentalism also involved a rejection of the strict Puritan religious attitudes that were the heritage of New England, where the movement originated. The basic idea is the belief in a higher reality than that found in sense experience or in a higher kind of knowledge than that achieved by human reason. Nearly all transcendentalist doctrines stem from the division of reality into a realm of spirit and a realm of matter.
More important, the transcendentalists were influenced by romanticism, especially such aspects as self-examination, the celebration of individualism, and the extolling of the beauties of nature and humankind. Consequently, transcendentalist writers expressed semi-religious feelings toward nature, as well as the creative process, and saw a direct connection, or correspondence, between the universe (macrocosm) and the individual soul (microcosm). In this view, divinity permeated all objects, animate or inanimate, and the purpose of human life was union with the so-called Over-Soul. Intuition, rather than reason, was regarded as the highest human faculty. Fulfillment of human potential could be accomplished through mysticism or through an acute awareness of the beauty and truth of the surrounding natural world.
Transcendentalism in the USA began with the formation (1836) of the Transcendental Club in Boston. Among the leaders of the movement were the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, the feminist and social reformer Margaret Fuller, the preacher Theodore Parker, the educator Bronson Alcott, the philosopher William Ellery Channing, and the author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau.
16.1.2. The leader of the philosophical movement of transcendentalism was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American essayist and poet. Influenced by such schools of thought as English Romanticism, Neoplatonism, and Hindu philosophy, Emerson is noted for his skill in presenting his ideas eloquently and in poetic language.
Seven of Emerson's ancestors were ministers, and his father was minister of the First Church (Unitarian) of Boston. Emerson graduated from Harvard University at the age of 18 and for the next three years taught school in Boston. At 26 he became minister of the Second Church (Unitarian) of Boston. Three years later Emerson resigned from his pastoral appointment because of personal doubts about administering the sacrament of the Lord's Supper.
After nearly a year in Europe, Emerson returned to the United States. In 1834 he moved to Concord, Massachusetts, and became active as a lecturer in Boston. His addresses were based on material in his Journals, a collection of observations and notes that he had begun while a student at Harvard. His most detailed statement of belief was reserved for his first published book, Nature (1836), which appeared anonymously but was soon correctly attributed to him. The volume has come to be regarded as Emerson's most original and significant work, offering the essence of his philosophy of transcendentalism. Emerson applied these ideas to cultural and intellectual problems in his lecture The American Scholar, which he delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard a year later. In it he called for American intellectual independence.
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The first volume of Emerson's Essays includes some of his most popular works. It contains History, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Love, Friendship, Prudence, Heroism, The Oversoul, Circles, Intellect, and Art. The second series of Essays includes The Poet, Manners, and Character. In it Emerson tempered the optimism of the first volume of essays, placing less emphasis on the self and acknowledging the limitations of real life. In the interval between the publication of these two volumes, Emerson wrote for The Dial, the journal of New England transcendentalism.
"To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says,he is my creature, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period so ever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth."
Later in life, Emerson again went abroad and lectured in England. While visiting abroad, Emerson also gathered impressions that were later published a study of English society. His Journals give evidence of his growing interest in national issues, and on his return to America he became active in the abolitionist cause, delivering many antislavery speeches. The Conduct of Life was the first of his books to enjoy immediate popularity. After 1867 Emerson did little writing and his mental powers declined, although his reputation as a writer spread.
16.1.3. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) is an American writer, philosopher, and naturalist, whose work demonstrates how the abstract ideals of libertarianism and individualism can be effectively instilled in a person's life. Thoreau was educated at Harvard University. As a young man he taught school and tutored in Concord and New York. For some time Thoreau lived in the home of American essayist and transcendental philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1845 Thoreau moved to a crude hut on the shores of Walden Pond, a small body of water on the outskirts of Concord. He lived there for almost two years. During his residence at Walden Pond and elsewhere in Concord, Thoreau supported himself by doing odd jobs, such as gardening, carpentry, and land surveying. The major portion of his time was devoted to the study of nature, to meditating on philosophical problems, to reading Greek, Latin, French, and English literature, and to long conversations with his neighbors.
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In 1846 Thoreau chose to go to jail rather than to support the Mexican War by paying his poll tax. He clarified his position in perhaps his most famous essay, Civil Disobedience . In this essay Thoreau discussed passive resistance, a method of protest that later was adopted by Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi as a tactic against the British, and by civil rights activists fighting racial segregation in the United States.
Of the numerous volumes that make up the collected works of Thoreau, only two were published during his lifetime: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854). The material for most of the other volumes was edited posthumously by the author's friends from his journals, manuscripts, and letters. In Walden, his most enduring and popular work, Thoreau explains his motives for living apart from society and devoting himself to a simple lifestyle and to the observation of nature. His writing style seems at first plain and direct, but witty similes, etymological puns, and allusions and plays on conventional proverbs dislocate conventional meanings and force the reader into a mode of reconsideration and reevaluation.
16.2. . ( ). - .
16.2.1. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) is an American novelist, whose works are deeply concerned with the ethical problems of sin, punishment, and atonement. Hawthorne's exploration of these themes was related to the sense of guilt he felt about the roles of his ancestors in the 17th-century persecution of Quakers and in the 1692 witchcraft trials of Salem, Massachusetts.
Hawthorne was born there into an old Puritan family. After graduation from university, he returned to his Salem home, living in semi-seclusion and writing. His work received little public recognition, however, and Hawthorne attempted to destroy all copies of his first novel, Fanshawe, which he had published at his own expense. During this period he also contributed articles and short stories to periodicals. Several of the stories were published in Twice-Told Tales, which, although not a financial success, established Hawthorne as a leading writer. These early works are largely historical sketches and symbolic and allegorical tales dealing with moral conflicts and the effects of Puritanism on colonial New England.
Unable to earn a living by literary work, Hawthorne took a job in the Boston, Massachusetts, customhouse. Two years later he returned to writing and produced a series of sketches of New England history for children. He also joined the communal society at Brook Farm near Boston, hoping to be able to live in such comfort that he could marry and still have time to devote to his writing. The demands of the farm were too great, however; Hawthorne was unable to continue his writing while doing farm chores, and after less than a year he withdrew from the community.
To survive, Hawthorne returned to government service as surveyor of the Salem customhouse. By then he had already begun writing The Scarlet Letter (1850), a novel about the adulterous Puritan Hester Prynne, who loyally refuses to reveal the name of her partner. Regarded as his masterpiece and as one of the classics of American literature, The Scarlet Letter reveals both Hawthorne's superb craftsmanship and the powerful psychological insight with which he probed guilt and anxiety in the human soul.
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To Hester's eye, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale exhibited no symptom of positive and vivacious suffering, except that, as little Pearl had remarked, he kept his hand over his heart.
Slowly as the minister walked, he had almost gone by before Hester Prynne could gather voice enough to attract his observation. At length, she succeeded.
"Arthur Dimmesdale!" she said, faintly at first; then louder, but hoarsely. "Arthur Dimmesdale!"
"Who speaks?" answered the minister.
Gathering himself quickly up, he stood more erect, like a man taken by surprise in a mood to which he was reluctant to have witnesses. Throwing his eyes anxiously in the direction of the voice, he indistinctly beheld a form under the trees, clad in garments so sombre, and so little relieved from the gray twilight into which the clouded sky and the heavy foliage had darkened the noontide, that he knew not whether it were a woman or a shadow. It may be that his pathway through life was haunted thus, by a spectre that had stolen out from among his thoughts.
He made a step higher, and discovered the scarlet letter.
"Hester! Hester Prynne!" said he. "Is it thou? Art thou in life?"
"Even so!" she answered. "In such life as has been mine these seven years past! And thou, Arthur Dimmesdaie, dost thou yet live?"
It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual and bodily existence, and even doubled of their own. So strangely did they meet in the dim wood, that it was like the first encounter, in the world beyond the grave, of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering, in mutual dread, as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost!
With modern psychological insight Hawthorne probed the secret motivations in human behavior and the guilt and anxiety that he believed resulted from all sins against humanity, especially those of pride. In his preoccupation with sin he followed the tradition of his Puritan ancestors, but in his concept of the consequences of sin as either punishment due to lack of humility and overwhelming pride, or regeneration by love and atonement he deviated radically from the idea of predestination held by his forebears. Hawthorne characterized most of his books as romances, a category of literature not as strictly bound to realistic detail as novels. This freed him to manipulate the atmospheres of his scenes and the actions of his characters in order to represent symbolically the passions, emotions, and anxieties of his characters and to expose the truth of the human heart that he believed lies hidden beneath mundane daily life.
16.2.2. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) is an American writer and abolitionist, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), a forceful indictment of slavery and one of the most powerful novels of its kind in American literature. The success of the book, however, was unprecedented; 500,000 copies were sold in the United States alone within five years, and it was translated into more than 20 foreign languages. It did much to crystallize militant antislavery sentiment in the North, and therefore was an important factor in precipitating the American Civil War. Uncle Tom's Cabin, like most of Stowe's novels, is rambling in structure, but rich in pathos and dramatic incident. It is one of the best examples of the so-called sentimental fiction that enjoyed popularity in the United States during the 1800s. Sentimental writers focused on domestic scenes, and their work evoked strong emotions. Like Stowe, many of these authors were social reformists, but they were criticized for creating overly idealized characters.
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16.3. ( ). .
Herman Melville (1819-1891) is an American novelist. His works remained in obscurity until the 1920s, when his genius was finally recognized. His life was hard. At 20, he shipped to Liverpool, England, as a cabin boy. When he returned to the United States he taught school and then sailed for the South Seas on the whaler Acushnet. After an 18-month voyage Melville deserted the ship in the Marquesas Islands and with a companion lived for a month among the natives, who were cannibals. He escaped aboard an Australian trader, leaving it at Tahiti, where he was imprisoned temporarily. He worked as a field laborer and then shipped to Hawaii, where he enlisted as a seaman on the U.S. Navy frigate United States. After his discharge Melville began to write novels based on his experiences and to take part in the literary life of Boston and New York City.
Melville's first five novels all achieved quick popularity. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life and Omoo, a Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas were romances of the South Sea islands. Mardi was a complex allegorical fantasy. Redburn, His First Voyage, based on Melville's first trip to sea, and White-Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War, a fictionalization of his experiences in the navy, exposed the abuse of sailors that was prevalent in the U.S. Navy at that time.
In 1850 Melville moved to a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he became an intimate friend of the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom Melville dedicated his masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or The Whale (1851). The central theme of this novel is the conflict between Captain Ahab, master of the whaler Pequod, and Moby-Dick, a great white whale that once tore off one of Ahab's legs at the knee. Ahab is dedicated to revenge; he drives himself and his crew, which includes Ishmael, the narrator of the story, over the seas in a desperate search for his enemy. The body of the book is written in a wholly original, powerful narrative style, which, in certain sections of the work, Melville varied with great success. The most impressive of these sections include the rhetorically magnificent sermon delivered before sailing and the soliloquies of the mates; lengthy flats, passages conveying non-narrative material, usually of a technical nature, such as the chapter about whales; and the more purely ornamental passages. The work is invested with Ishmael's sense of profound wonder at his story, but it nonetheless conveys full awareness that Ahab's quest can have but one end. And so it proves to be: Moby-Dick destroys the Pequod and all its crew except Ishmael.
For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned. "The ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking look-outs on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lancepole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.
But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched; - at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
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Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
16.4. : . . : . - .
16.4.1. One of the most celebrated poets of his time was Henry Longfellow ( 1807-1882 ). After graduating from college in 1825 he traveled in Europe in preparation for a teaching career. He taught modern languages at Harvard University. At 47, he decided to retire and devoted himself exclusively to writing. Two years after his death a bust of Longfellow was placed in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in London; he was the first American to be thus honored.
Longfellow received wide public recognition with his initial volume of verse, Voices of the Night, which contained the poem A Psalm of Life. The poem earned enormous popularity due to its optimism and vigor.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not the goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the worlds broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no future, howeer pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, act in the living present!
Heart within, and Gods oerhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing oer lifes solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
His subsequent poetic works include three notable long narrative poems on American themes: Evangeline, about lovers separated during the French and Indian War; The Song of Hiawatha, addressing Native American themes; and The Courtship of Miles Standish, about a love triangle in colonial New England. Longfellow also made a verse translation of The Divine Comedy by Italian poet Dante Alighieri.
Longfellow's poetic work is characterized by familiar themes, easily grasped ideas, and clear, simple, melodious language. Most modern critics, however, are not in accord with the high opinion that was generally held of the author by his contemporaries, and his works are often criticized as sentimental. Nevertheless, Longfellow remains one of the most popular of American poets, primarily for his simplicity of style and theme and for his technical expertise, but also for his role in the creation of an American mythology. His verse was also instrumental in reestablishing a public audience for poetry in the United States.
16.4.2. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is the American poet, whose work boldly asserts the worth of the individual and the oneness of all humanity. Whitmans defiant break with traditional poetic concerns and style exerted a major influence on American thought and literature.
As a young man, Whitman wrote poems and stories for popular magazines and made political speeches. In 1855 Whitman issued the first of many editions of Leaves of Grass, a volume of poetry in a new kind of versification, far different from his sentimental rhymed verse of the 1840s. Because he immodestly praised the human body and glorified the senses, Whitman was forced to publish the book at his own expense, setting some of the type himself. His name did not appear on the title page, but the engraved frontispiece portrait shows him posed, arms akimbo, in shirt sleeves, hat cocked at a rakish angle. In a long preface he announced a new democratic literature, commensurate with a people, simple and unconquerable, written by a new kind of poet who was affectionate, brawny, and heroic and who would lead by the force of his magnetic personality. Whitman spent the rest of his life striving to become that poet. The 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass contained 12 untitled poems, written in long cadenced lines that resemble the unrhymed verse of the King James Version of the Bible. The longest and generally considered the best, later entitled Song of Myself, was a vision of a symbolic I enraptured by the senses, vicariously embracing all people and places from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans.
Stimulated by a letter of congratulations from the eminent New England essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman hastily put together another edition of Leaves of Grass, with revisions and additions; he would continue to revise the collection throughout his life. The most significant second-edition poem is Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, in which the poet vicariously joins his readers and all past and future ferry passengers. In the third edition, Whitman began to give his poetry a more allegorical structure. In Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, a mockingbird (the voice of nature) teaches a little boy (the future poet) the meaning of death. His poem When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd, the great elegy for President Abraham Lincoln. One of Whitmans most popular poems O Captain! My Captain! is dedicated to Lincoln.
Today, Whitmans poetry has been translated into every major language. It is widely recognized as a formative influence on the work of many American writers. Allen Ginsberg in particular was inspired by Whitmans treatment of sexuality. Many modern scholars have sought to assess Whitmans life and literary career.
16.4.3. O ne of the foremost authors in American literature is Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830-1886), Americas best-known female poet. Dickinsons simply constructed yet intensely felt, acutely intellectual writings take as their subject issues vital to humanity: the agonies and ecstasies of love, sexuality, the unfathomable nature of death, the horrors of war, God and religious belief, the importance of humor, and musings on the significance of literature, music, and art.
She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. With the exception of a trip to Washington, D.C., and a few trips to Boston for eye treatments, Dickinson remained in Amherst, living in the same house on Main Street from 1855 until her death. During her lifetime, she published only about 10 of her nearly 2,000 poems, in newspapers, Civil War journals, and a poetry anthology. The first volume of Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, was published after Dickinsons death.
Dickinsons short poetic lines, condensed by using intense metaphors and by extensive use of ellipsis (the omission of words understood to be there), contrasted sharply with the style of her contemporary Walt Whitman, who used long lines, little rhyme, and irregular rhythm in his poetry.
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me
The simple News that Nature told
With tender Majesty
Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see
For love of Her Sweet countrymen
Judge tenderly of Me
Her language is dazzling: she chooses most common words, there is nothing strange or 'poetic' about most of them, yet the unexpected juxtapositions of these words bring new meanings into the ordinary. She was far ahead of her time in the concentration and spareness of her verse. Like all great poetry hers helps to bridge a gap between the physical and the spiritual.
Curiously, Emily Dickinson, just like many great authors, never knew how to sort out the best of her stuff. Her first letter to the world came to light on April 15, 1862. A professional essayist and lecturer Thomas Higginson received a mere letter from a young woman named Emily Dickinson who enclosed four of her poems. She was writing to inquire whether her verses "breathed". But Higginson's problem was that he was literally unable to classify the poems. He said later that "the impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius" was distinct on his mind.
The poems by Dickinson are usually brief, many of them are based on a single image or symbol. But within her little lyrics she writes about some of the most important things in life: love and a lover, nature and immortality. She writes about success, which she thought she never achieved, and about failure which she considered her constant companion. Dickinson writes so brilliantly that she is indisputably ranked as one of America's greatest poets.
LECTURE 17
THE GUILDED AGE AND AFTER (1876 1916)
17.1. XIX XX . . .
17.1.1. Two movements became increasingly important in American fiction after the Civil War: regionalism and realism. As the country expanded in area and population, regional differences became more apparent and of greater interest, especially to people in the established cultural centers of the East. Increasing urbanization and the expansion of the railroads had made more of the country accessible. Regional literature would do the same. Tales of the West also became a popular form of regional writing and created frontier outlaws and heroes. Foremost among writers who contributed to legends about the West was Bret Harte, especially in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches, a collection of stories about California. The author Kate Chopin built her reputation on regionalist stories of Louisiana. She is, however, best remembered for writing one of the first important feminist novels , The Awakening (1899). The book realistically depicts Creole life in Louisiana as it tells the story of a young woman in a stultifying marriage who discovers a new sense of self when she takes a lover.
Realism emerged as a literary movement in Europe in the 1850s. In reaction to romanticism, it emphasized the everyday and through detailed description re-created specific locations, incidents, and social classes. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain, is sometimes called a regionalist for his vivid portrayals of Southern character and dialect. However, he also ranks among the great American realists, too.
Realism entered American literature after the Civil War, soon followed by naturalism, an extreme form of realism. Jack London is a naturalist. His writings depict the forceoften violentof nature and of human nature, combining realism with idealist views on human betterment. Naturalism had an outlook often bleaker than that of realism, and it added a dimension of predetermined fate that rendered human will ultimately powerless. Stephen Crane is a notable late-19th-century American writer in the realist/naturalist traditions. Despite an early death at the age of 29, Crane published several brilliant although grim stories. His best-known work, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), is an intense examination of the psychology of fear and the state of the human mind during war; it met with immediate success.
American writers also turned to the psychological and physical reality of the laboring classes, whose ranks continued to swell with high rates of immigration. Several American authors who are sometimes known as social realists the Muckrackers looked at working conditions, often for the purpose of social reform. They are Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis.Edward Bellamy wrote a utopian novel of importance.
17.1.2.. Mark Twain's best work is characterized by broad, often irreverent humor or biting social satire. Twain's writing is also known for realism of place and language, memorable characters, and hatred of hypocrisy and oppression. In his youth he was apprenticed to a printer, and soon began setting type for and contributing sketches to his brother Orion's Hannibal Journal. Subsequently he worked as a printer. Later Clemens was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River until the American Civil War brought an end to travel on the river. Clemens served briefly as a volunteer soldier in the Confederate cavalry. Later that year he accompanied his brother to the newly created Nevada Territory, where he tried his hand at silver mining. In was there that he began signing his articles with the pseudonym Mark Twain, a Mississippi River phrase meaning two fathoms deep.
In 1865 Twain reworked a tale he had heard in the California gold fields, and within months the author and the story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, had become national sensations. Much of Twain's best work was written in the 1870s and 1880s. Roughing It recounts his early adventures as a miner and journalist; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) celebrates boyhood in a town on the Mississippi River; The Prince and the Pauper, a children's book, focuses on switched identities in Tudor England; Life on the Mississippi combines an autobiographical account of his experiences as a river pilot with a visit to the Mississippi nearly two decades after he left it; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court satirizes oppression in feudal England.
Next appeared a dark-complexioned, black-eyed, black-haired young lady, who paused an impressive moment, assumed a tragic expression, and began to read in a measured, solemn tone:
"A VISION. Dark and tempestuous was night. Around the throne on high not a single star quivered; but the deep intonations of the heavy thunder constantly vibrated upon the ear; whilst the terrific lightning revelled in angry mood through the cloudy chambers of heaven, seeming to scorn the power exerted over its terror by the illustrious Franklin! Even the boisterous winds unanimously came forth from their mystic homes, and blustered about as if to enhance by their aid the wildness of the scene.
"At such a time, so dark, so dreary, for human sympathy my very spirit sighed; but instead thereof, My dearest friend, my counsellor, my comforter and guide -- My joy in grief, my second bliss in joy,' came to my side. She moved like one of those bright beings pictured in the sunny walks of fancy's Eden by the romantic and young, a queen of beauty unadorned save by her own transcendent loveliness. So soft was her step, it failed to make even a sound, and but for the magical thrill imparted by her genial touch, as other unobtrusive beauties, she would have glided away un-perceived -- unsought. A strange sadness rested upon her features, like icy tears upon the robe of December, as she pointed to the contending elements without, and bade me contemplate the two beings presented."
This nightmare occupied some ten pages of manuscript and wound up with a sermon so destructive of all hope to non-Presbyterians that it took the first prize. This composition was considered to be the very finest effort of the evening. ()
Now the master, mellow almost to the verge of geniality, put his chair aside, turned his back to the audience, and began to draw a map of America on the blackboard, to exercise the geography class upon. But he made a sad business of it with his unsteady hand, and a smothered titter rippled over the house. He knew what the matter was, and set himself to right it. He sponged out lines and remade them; but he only distorted them more than ever, and the tittering was more pronounced. He threw his entire attention upon his work, now, as if determined not to be put down by the mirth. He felt that all eyes were fastened upon him; he imagined he was succeeding, and yet the tittering continued; it even manifestly increased. And well it might. There was a garret above, pierced with a scuttle over his head; and down through this scuttle came a cat, suspended around the haunches by a string; she had a rag tied about her head and jaws to keep her from mewing; as she slowly descended she curved upward and clawed at the string, she swung downward and clawed at the intangible air. The tittering rose higher and higher -- the cat was within six inches of the absorbed teacher's head -- down, down, a little lower, and she grabbed his wig with her desperate claws, clung to it, and was snatched up into the garret in an instant with her trophy still in her possession! And how the light did blaze abroad from the master's bald pate -- for the sign-painter's boy had gilded it!
That broke up the meeting. The boys were avenged. Vacation had come.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the sequel to Tom Sawyer, is considered Twain's masterpiece. The book is the story of the title character, known as Huck, a boy who flees his father by rafting down the Mississippi River with a runaway slave, Jim. The pair's adventures show Huck (and the reader) the cruelty of which men and women are capable. Another theme of the novel is the conflict between Huck's feelings of friendship with Jim, who is one of the few people he can trust, and his knowledge that he is breaking the laws of the time by helping Jim escape. Huckleberry Finn, which is almost entirely narrated from Huck's point of view, is noted for its authentic language and for its deep commitment to freedom. Huck's adventures also provide the reader with a panorama of American life along the Mississippi before the Civil War.
Twain's later work is marked by growing pessimism and bitterness. Twain's later writings include short stories, the best known of which are The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg . Twain's work was inspired by the unconventional West, and the popularity of his work marked the end of the domination of American Literature by New England writers and the end of American reverence for British and European culture. Successive generations of writers recognized the role that he played in creating a truly American literature. He portrayed uniquely American subjects in a humorous and colloquial, yet poetic, language.
17.2. . : . .
17.2.1. Jack London ( 1876-1916) is an American writer, whose work combined powerful realism and humanitarian sentiment. He was deeply influenced by Darwins ideas of constant struggle in nature and the survival of the fittest. Not surprisingly, the main characters of some of Londons best stories are animals.
London was born John Griffith London in San Francisco. From age 10, London worked at various odd jobs, later trying such occupations as a seal hunter, an oyster pirate, an explorer, a war correspondent, a gold miner, and a rich farmer. He participated in the Alaska gold rush. Upon his return to the San Francisco area, he began to write about his experiences. A collection of his short stories, The Son of the Wolf, was published in 1900. London's colorful life, during which he wrote more than 50 books and which included enormous popular successes as an author, experience as a war correspondent, and two stormy marriages, ended at the age of 40.
Many of his stories, including his masterpiece The Call of the Wild, deal with the reversion of a civilized creature to the primitive state. London's stylebrutal, vivid, and excitingmade him enormously popular outside the United States; his works were translated into many languages. London's important works include People of the Abyss and The Iron Heel, in which he showed himself as a Marxian socialist. Martin Eden (1909) is an autobiographical novel about a writer's life.
There was a brief pause in the conversation they were trying to get started. Then she asked tentatively about the scar on his cheek. Even as she asked, he realized that she was making an effort to talk his talk, and he resolved to get away from it and talk hers.
"It was just an accident," he said, putting his hand to his cheek. "One night, in a calm, with a heavy sea running, the main-boom-lift carried away, an' next the tackle. The lift was wire, an' it was threshin' around like a snake. The whole watch was tryin' to grab it, an' I rushed in an' got swatted."
"Oh," she said, this time with an accent of comprehension, though secretly his speech had been so much Greek to her and she was wondering what a lift was and what swatted meant.
"This man Swineburne," he began, attempting to put his plan into execution and pronouncing the I long.
"Who?"
"Swineburne," he repeated, with the same mispronunciation. "The poet."
"Swinburne," she corrected.
"Yes, that's the chap," he stammered, his cheeks hot again. "How long since he died?"
"Why, I haven't heard that he was dead." She looked at him curiously. "Where did you make his acquaintance?"
"I never clapped eyes on him," was the reply. "But I read some of his poetry out of that book there on the table just before you come in. How do you like his poetry?"
And thereat she began to talk quickly and easily upon the subject he had suggested. He felt better, and settled back slightly from the edge of the chair, holding tightly to its arms with his hands, as if it might get away from him and buck him to the floor. He had succeeded in making her talk her talk, and while she rattled on, he strove to follow her, marvelling at all the knowledge that was stowed away in that pretty head of hers, and drinking in the pale beauty of her face. Follow her he did, though bothered by unfamiliar words that fell glibly from her lips and by critical phrases and thought-processes that were foreign to his mind, but that nevertheless stimulated his mind and set it tingling. Here was intellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty, warm and wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be. He forgot himself and stared at her with hungry eyes. Here was something to live for, to win to, to fight for - ay, and die for. The books were true. There were such women in the world. She was one of them. ()
17.2.2. O. Henry is thepseudonym of William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), American writer of short stories, best known for his ironic plot twists and surprise endings. Born and raised in North Carolina, O. Henry attended school only until age 15, when he dropped out to work in his uncles drugstore. During his 20s he moved to Texas, where he worked for more than ten years as a clerk and a bank teller. O. Henry did not write professionally until he reached his mid-30s, when he sold several pieces to the Detroit Free Press.
In 1896 O. Henry was charged with embezzling funds from the bank where he had worked previously. The amount of money was small and might have been an accounting error; however, he chose to flee to Honduras rather than stand trial. Learning that his wife was dying, he returned to Texas and, after her death, turned himself in to authorities. He served three years of a five-year sentence at the federal penitentiary where he first began to write short stories and use the pseudonym O. Henry. Released from prison, O. Henry moved to New York City in 1901 and began writing full time. In his stories he made substantial use of his knowledge of Texas, Central America, and life in prison. He also became fascinated by New York street life, which provided a setting for many of his later stories. During the last ten years of his life, O. Henry became one of the most popular writers in America, publishing over 500 short stories in dozens of widely read periodicals. O. Henrys most famous stories, such as The Gift of the Magi, The Furnished Room, and The Ransom of Red Chief, make simple yet effective use of paradoxical coincidences to produce ironic endings.
Writing at the rate of more than one story per week, O. Henry published ten collections of stories during a career that barely spanned a decade. They are Cabbages and Kings, The Four Million, Heart of the West, The Trimmed Lamp, The Gentle Grafter, The Voice of the City, Options, Roads of Destiny, Whirligigs, and Strictly Business.
If you do not know Bogle's Chop House and Family Restaurant it is your loss. For if you are one of the fortunate ones who dine expensively you should be interested to know how the other half consumes provisions. And if you belong to the half to whom waiters' checks are things of moment, you should know Bogle's, for there you get your money's worth in quantity, at least.
Bogle's is situated in that highway of bourgeoisie, that boulevard of Brown-Jones-and-Robinson, Eighth Avenue. There are two rows of tables in the room, six in each row. On each table is a caster-stand, containing cruets of condiments and seasons. From the pepper cruet you may shake a cloud of something tasteless and melancholy, like volcanic dust. From the salt cruet you may expect nothing. Though a man should extract a sanguinary stream from the pallid turnip, yet with his prowess be balked when he comes to wrest salt from Bogle's cruets. Also upon each table stands the counterfeit of that benign sauce made "from the recipe of a nobleman in India."
At the cashier's desk sits Bogle, cold, sordid, slow, smouldering, and takes your money. Behind a mountain of toothpicks he makes your change, files your check, and ejects at you, like a toad, a word about the weather. Beyond a corroboration of his meteorological statement you would better not venture. You are not Bogle's friend; you are a fed, transient customer, and you and he may not meet again until the blowing of Gabriel's dinner horn. So take your change and go to the devil if you like. There you have Bogle's sentiments.
The needs of Bogle's customers were supplied by two waitresses and a Voice. One of the waitresses was named Aileen. She was tall, beautiful, lively, gracious and learned in persiflage. Her other name? There was no more necessity for another name at Bogle's than there was for finger-bowls.
The name of the other waitress was Tildy. Why do you suggest Matilda? Please listen this time Tildy Tildy. Tildy was dumpy, plain-faced, and too anxious to please to please. Repeat the last clause to yourself once or twice, and make the acquaintance of the duplicate infinite.
The Voice at Bogle's was invisible. It came from the kitchen, and did not shine in the way of originality. It was a heathen Voice, and contented itself with vain repetitions of exclamations emitted by the waitresses concerning food.
Will it tire you to be told again that Aileen was beautiful? Had she donned a few hundred dollars' worth of clothes and joined the Easter parade, and had you seen her, you would have hastened to say so yourself.
The customers at Bogle's were her slaves. Six tables full she could wait upon at once. They who were in a hurry restrained their impatience for the joy of merely gazing upon her swiftly moving, graceful figure. They who had finished eating ate more that they might continue in the light of her smiles. Every man there and they were mostly men tried to make his impression upon her.
17.3. . C. : .
17.3.1. Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) is an American writer and social and economic reformer. Sinclair is the most famous of the Muckrakers, a group of writers who were relentless critics of the nations political, social and economic evils early in the 20th century (1900 1914). The author of 90 books, Sinclair became well known after the publication of his novel The Jungle (1906), which exposed the unsanitary and miserable working conditions in the stockyards of Chicago, Illinois, and led to an investigation by the federal government and the subsequent passage of pure food laws. The novel tells a story of an immigrant family, the Redcuses, who come to America with dreams of a better life. But they only experience a series of horrors and tragedies. Jack London described the novel as the Uncle Toms Cabin of wage-slavery. Sinclair wrote other social and political novels and studies advocating prohibition and criticizing the newspaper industry. His novels were always a form of propaganda. As works of literature, they seem to be lesser achievements.
17.3.2. Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) is an American essayist and journalist. In 1888 Bellamy published his most important work, Looking Backward, 2000-1887, a depiction of an ideal socialistic society in the year 2000. This best-selling novel inspired the formation of many socialistic clubs. The most famous American utopian novel, the book has a purpose of criticizing capitalist America of the 1880s. A man goes to sleep and wakes up in the year 2000. He finds an entirely new society which is much better than his own. Today, the book seems a little bit too optimistic. Bellamy was sure that societys problems could be solved on by a higher level of industrialization. Today, many people are not so sure.
Living as we do in the closing year of the twentieth century, enjoying the blessings of a social order at once so simple and logical that it seems but the triumph of common sense, it is no doubt difficult for those whose studies have not been largely historical to realize that the present organization of society is, in its completeness, less than a century old. No historical fact is, however, better established than that till nearly the end of the nineteenth century it was the general belief that the ancient industrial system, with all its shocking social consequences, was destined to last, with possibly a little patching, to the end of time. How strange and well-nigh incredible does it seem that so prodigious a moral and material transformation as has taken place since then could have been accomplished in so brief an interval! The readiness with which men accustom themselves, as matters of course, to improvements in their condition, which, when anticipated, seemed to leave nothing more to be desired, could not be more strikingly illustrated. What reflection could be better calculated to moderate the enthusiasm of reformers who count for their reward on the lively gratitude of future ages!
18.4. . .
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) is an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. Although some critics regarded his style as clumsy and plodding, Dreiser was generally recognized as an American literary pioneer.
As a young man Dreiser was a reporter, dramatic editor and traveling correspondent. His career as a novelist began in 1900 with Sister Carrie, which he wrote in the intervals between work for various magazines. The novel tells the story of a small-town girl who moves to Chicago and eventually becomes a Broadway star in New York City. It also traces the decline and eventual suicide of her lover. As a result of public outcry against the novel for its depiction of unrepentant and unpunished characters and for its frank treatment of sexual issues, the publisher withdrew the book from public sale.
By the time Dreiser's second novel, Jenny Gerhardt, was published in 1911, his work had found influential supporters, including the British novelist H. G. Wells, and he was able to devote himself entirely to literature. Dreiser's writings continued to excite controversy. In The Financier and The Titan, he drew harsh portraits of a type of ruthless businessman. Real fame, however, did not come to Dreiser until 1925, when his An American Tragedy had great popular success. The novel, based on an actual murder case and concerned with the efforts of a weak young man to rise from pious poverty into glamorous society, was dramatized and made into a motion picture.
Dreiser believed in representing life honestly in his fiction. He accomplished this through accurate detail, especially in his descriptions of the urban settings in which many of his stories take place. In his naturalistic portrayals Dreiser saw his characters as victims of social and economic forces, and of fate, all of which conspire against them. The American writer Sinclair Lewis hailed Sister Carrie as the first book free of English literary influence. Toward the end of his career, Dreiser, a member of the United States Communist Party, worked to promote his political views. Earlier he had visited the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and, in Dreiser Looks at Russia, had offered a sympathetic portrait of the country.
LECTURE 18
LITERATURE BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS (1916 1956)
18.1. . ( ). . (, !). : , -, , .
18.1.1. A period of disillusion and cynicism that followed World War I found expression in the writings of a group of Americans living in Paris who became known as the Lost Generation. Although the group never formed a cohesive literary movement, those associated with it shared bitterness about the war, a sense of rootlessness, and dissatisfaction with American society. The most influential American writers of this generation include novelists Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and dramatist Thornton Wilder. The term lost generation was first used by writer Gertrude Stein in her preface to Hemingways novel The Sun Also Rises to characterize Hemingway and his circle of expatriate friends in Paris.
18.1.2. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is an American writer, whose novels and short stories chronicled changing social attitudes during the 1920s, a period dubbed The Jazz Age by the author. He is best known for his novels The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender is the Night, both of which depict disillusion with the American dream of self-betterment, wealth, and success through hard work and perseverance.
Fitzgerald left Princeton because of academic difficulties and joined the United States Army, which was then entering World War I. While in basic training near Montgomery, Alabama, he met high-spirited, 18-year-old Zelda Sayre. They married in 1920 and she became the model for many of the female characters in his fiction. Fitzgeralds first novel, This Side of Paradise, captured a mood of spiritual desolation in the aftermath of World War I and a growing, devil-may-care pursuit of pleasure among the American upper classes. The book met with both commercial and critical success. Thereafter, Fitzgerald regularly contributed short stories to diverse periodicals. Financial success as well as celebrity enabled the Fitzgeralds to become integral figures in the Jazz Age culture that he portrayed in his writing. Fitzgeralds partly autobiographical second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, is the story of a wealthy young couple whose lives are destroyed by their extravagant lifestyle.
In 1925 Fitzgerald reached the peak of his powers with what many critics think is his finest work, The Great Gatsby. Written in crisp, concise prose and told by Nick Carraway, a satiric yet sympathetic narrator, it is the story of Jay Gatsby, a young American neer-do-well from the Midwest. Gatsby becomes a bootlegger (seller of illegal liquor) in order to attain the wealth and lavish way of life he feels are necessary to win the love of Daisy Buchanan, a married, upper-class woman who had once rejected him. The story ends tragically with Gatsbys destruction. Although the narrator ultimately denounces Daisy and others who confuse the American dream with the pursuit of wealth and power, he sympathizes with those like Gatsby who pursue the dream for a redeeming end such as love.
The Fitzgeralds made their home on the French Riviera, where they became increasingly enmeshed in a culture of alcohol, drugs, and perpetual parties. Fitzgerald began a battle with alcoholism that went on for the rest of his life, and Zelda experienced a series of mental breakdowns that eventually led to her institutionalization. Tender is the Night is generally regarded as Fitzgeralds dramatization of Zeldas slide into insanity. It tells of a young doctor who marries one of his psychiatric patients. The novel met with a cool reception. Poor reviews alienated Fitzgerald from the literary scene and Zeldas disintegration left him personally distraught. He moved to Los Angeles, California, where he worked as a scriptwriter. While there, he began The Last Tycoon, a novel set amid corruption and vulgarity in the Hollywood motion-picture industry. At the age of 44 Fitzgerald died of a heart attack.
He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was...
... One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees - he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lip parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
18.1.3. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is anAmerican novelist and short-story writer, whose style is characterized by crispness, laconic dialogue, and emotional understatement. Hemingway's writings and his personal life exerted a profound influence on American writers of his time. Many of his works are regarded as classics of American literature, and some have been made into motion pictures.
After graduating from high school, he became a reporter, but he left his job within a few months to serve as a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy during World War I. He later transferred to the Italian infantry and was severely wounded. After the war he served as a correspondent and then settled in Paris. After 1927 Hemingway spent long periods of time in Key West, Florida, and in Spain and Africa. During the Spanish Civil War, he returned to Spain as a newspaper correspondent. In World War II he again was a correspondent and later was a reporter for the United States First Army; although he was not a soldier, he participated in several battles. Hemingway drew heavily on his experiences as an avid fisherman, hunter, and bullfight enthusiast in his writing. His adventurous life brought him close to death several times: in the Spanish Civil War when shells burst inside his hotel room; in World War II when he was struck by a taxi during a blackout; and after the war when his airplane crashed in Africa.
One of the foremost authors of the era between the two world wars, Hemingway in his early works depicted the lives of two typ
