Showing papers in "American Literature in 1972"

The Indian Captivity Narrative as Ritual

Abstract: ALL CIVILIZED PEOPLES have recognized the value of tempering their joys with a play or story chronicling the misfortunes and tragedies of others. Because the earliest Americans countenanced neither play-acting nor the unhealthy influences of the novel, they wrote and read true tales of tragedy and horror in the form of disasters, plagues, and shipwrecks-and of Indian massacres and captivities. As the frontier pushed westward under continuing conflict the tales of Indian captivity accompanied it, gradually becoming our first literature of catharsis in an era when native American fiction scarcely existed. The immense popularity of the Indian captivity narratives in their time is unquestionable. First editions are rare today because they were quite literally read to pieces, and most narratives went through a remarkable number of editions: there are over thirty known editions of the Mary Rowlandson narrative; John Dickenson's account went to twenty-one, including translations into Dutch and German; there are twenty-nine editions of the Mary Jemison captivity, and the popularity of Peter Williamson's narrative carried it through forty-one editions.' Over twenty-five years ago, Phillips Carleton made the point that the vast body of Indian captivity narratives was known mostly to historians, anthropologists, and collectors of Americana.2 Regrettably, that observation is as true today as then. And in the rare instances where informed scholarship has turned its attention to the narratives, emphasis has been upon the historical and cul-

Romantic Imagery in Kate Chopin's The Awakening

Abstract: A LTHOUGH KATE CHOPIN'S The Awakening has in recent years elicited considerable commentary, critics have tended to construe her theme much too narrowly. As George Arms points out in his discussion of the book, it is too often seen in terms of the question of sexual freedom,' and in at least one analysis, it is read as a strongly feminist novel.2 To be suire, some critics, like Per Seyersted, recognize that the book has broader implications than these, but even he stresses unduly the theme of "female self-assertion" which he sees as underlying all of Chopin's works.3 No one would want to deny, of course, that this theme is indeed present in both The Awakening and many of her short pieces. The awakening of Edna Pontellier must surely be seen in part as her sexual arousal by Robert Lebrun during the summer on Grand Isle, one that resembles in some ways the arousal of Athenaise or the awakening of Caline in their respective stories in A Night in Acadie. The latter character, in particular, is specifically "awakened" from sleep by the sudden stopping of a railroad train from which steps the young artist whom she later seeks in the city.4 But too much emphasis on this aspect of The Awakening will distort both Chopin's meaning and her accomplishment. For Kate Chopin reserves neither the word nor the experience for women alone, nor is it always seen in her works in a sexual context. In "A Rude Awakening," a story in Bayou Folk, Sylveste Bordon is shocked into assuming responsibility for his family by

A Calendar of Transcendental Club Meetings

Abstract: 7 HE TRANSCENDENTAL CLUB and the Dial were the two focal points of American Transcendentalism, places where the members of the "New School" of literature, philosophy, and religion could meet and discuss their views among friend.s. Yet even though two full-length studies of the Dial have been done,' the hisitory and the activities of the Transcendental Club have suffered from either neglect or distortion. The only published articles on the Transcendental Chlb are a report of one of Bronson Alcott's Conversations and his own published memories of the Club.2 Other menitions of the Transcendental Club in books and articles rely upon Alcott or are dependent upon information obtained through F. B. Sanborn. As Theodore Parker's literary executor and as a good friend of Alcott's, Sanborn had free access to the manruscript journals of both men. Unfortunately he often transcribed their writing incorrecdy, left ou-t much material, and invented names in his use of their journals for his own writings. The result is that until now virtually all referen;ces to the Transcendental Club are based upon Alcott's reminiscences or upon Sanborn's often inaccurate statements.3 The present study, then, is the first to list all the known meetings of the Transcendental Club as based upon primary documents. The Transcendental Club had its beginnings in June, I836, when Frederic Henry Hedge, a minister at Bangor, Maine, invited Ralph Waldo Emerson and a few other Unitarian ministers to form a

Faulkner's Pantaloon: The Negro Anomaly at the Heart of Go Down, Moses

Abstract: THE "SENSE OF HOW NEGROES live and how they have so long endured," wrote James Baldwin in i95i, was "hidden" from white Americans. The barriers, he felt, were formidable; foremost was "the nature of the [white] American psychology." For whites to accept the qualities of Negro life, that psychology "must undergo a metamorphosis so profound as to be literally unthinkable."' The statement summed up years of Negro frustration at the fumbling efforts of white writers to portray Negro character. It remains a significant expression of a widely shared attitude; and yet, obviously, some "sense of how Negroes live" is indispensable for the white artist. For if the Negro is not, as Richard Wright has asserted, "America's metaphor,"2 he is obviously one very important metaphor; and our classic writers have generally acknowledged this by attacking the issue. No white writer of stature has committed himself to this problem more strongly than Faulkner; "The Negro," Robert Penn Warren concludes, "is the central figure in Faulkner's work." Warren, like other Southerners of moderate and liberal persuasion, 'has found much to satisfy him in Faulkner's efforts. Because of his open-eyed rendering of Negroes, Warren contends, Faulkner was able to accomplish "a more difficult thing" than Joyce's Dedalus: "To forge the conscience of his [white Southern] race, he stayed in his native spot and, in his soul, in images of vice and of virtue, reenacted the history of that race."' Few writers receive such praise. But Faulkner's formidable efforts have left Negroes far from satisfied. Precisely because he is "the greatest artist the South has produced,"

The Mark of Cain and the Redemption of Art: A Study in Theme and Structure of Jean Toomer's Cane

Abstract: JpUBLISHED IN I923 by Boni and Liveright, Jean Toomer's Cane was an instant failure. Although praised by the literary avantgarde of the twenties (Sherwood Anderson, Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, Waldo Frank, Gorham Munson, to name a few), the novel sold only 500 copies in the first year. From one point of view, it is strange the novel fared so badly, for it was experimental in the manner of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, whose influence is quite noticeable in Cane,' and it antedates by two years the publication (also by Boni and Liveright) of Hemingway's In Our Time, whose form it most distinctly resembles. Also, given the emergence of "exotic Harlem" and an interest in things Negro, the public seemed ready for a novel like Cane, or at least so felt Horace Liveright.2 Still, the novel failed, and Toomer began a slow retreat into obscurity. With the revival of interest in black literature, its reputa-

Zoroastrianism and the Fire Symbolism in Moby-Dick

Abstract: COMMENTING UPON THE Zoroastrians, in I836, Hawthorne's American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge concludes with a judgment of their prime symbol: "There is, in truth, nothing that can be seen or felt, which combines so many symbolic attributes of splendor, terror, and beneficence, as fire."' Whether the "germinous seeds" planted by Hawthorne during his Pittsfield companionship with Melville included any thoughts on the literary promise of these Orientals who "worshipped with no unnatural idolatry,"2 we still do not know, but there is adequate evidence that through a variety of generally well known sources Melville acquired a fair knowledge of their religion and used it with skill to strengthen the metaphysical argument of Moby-Dick. Aware of fire as an ancient and complex symbol associated with both creation and destruction, Melville not only takes advantage of traditional Occidental fire symbolism but also relates the fire symbols to the Zoroastrian religion. The Parsees, or Indian Zoroastrians, were known for their extraordinary religious orthodoxy. Melville intended his Parsee harpooner to be the orthodox follower of an orthodox faith, who in his unreasoning orthodoxy ironically reduces religion to ritual. In this matter of faith, Fedallah is both a foil to the rationalistic rebel Ahab and a reminder that orthodoxy, though on the "lee shore" of faith, is not without its dangers. The depth and logic of the fire symbolism is especially evident in the carefully designed relationship between the Parsee and Ahab, both questers and fanatics, both hunting the

"Guinea" of White-Jacket and Chief Justice Shaw

Abstract: TN CHAPTER 90 OF White-Jacket, "The Manning of Navies," MelI ville introduced a minor character of some interest, the slave "Guinea." This slave, the personal servant of the purser, was the occasion for one of Melville's few comments on the institution of slavery, provoked a bitter comparison between the easy life of "Guinea" and the "slavery" of the ordinary seaman, and figured in a quite important law case in which Melville must have been very much interested. Melville introduced "Guinea" as follows:

Richard Wright: The Expatriate as Native Son

Abstract: (Q UCH AMERICAN NOVELISTS as Henry James, Hemingway, and 3Henry Miller did not discover how to cope as artists with their experience until their sense of American life had been placed in a European perspective. With Richard Wright the opposite was true. When he left for Paris in I946, where he was to make his home until his death in i96o, his best fiction had been written and exile was only to dilute his capacity for dealing with American life in those works of fiction, principally The Outsider and The Long Dream, which he wrote abroad. Critics of Wright's work seem fully agreed that as a result of leaving America he lost touch with the source of his strength as a writer, namely, his being a Negro, a man immersed in the American Negro experience, and a spokesman for black causes. There are two fundamental conditions, however, which should qualify this prevalent view of the relation of Wright to his American experience and the part which his activities as an expatriate played in affecting his thinking and writing. One condition is that in a very real sense Wright may be said to have gone into exile from that moment in early childhood when he began his long migration from the shack near Natchez, Mississippi, where he was born; so that all of his fiction written from, and at times about, the "alien" lands of Chicago and New York bore the mark of an outsider not responding to felt, personal experience, but consciously shaping an intellectual criticism of specific aspects of American life. A second condition is that only after he had left the United States was Wright able to acknowledge-in Africa, in Indonesia, and in Spain-the manifold ways in which, beneath the shifting facade of formal institutions, a people sustained its folk identity, the kind of

The World as Emblem: Language and Vision in the Poetry of Edward Taylor

Abstract: TN THE PAST THIRTY YEARS, a good deal of critical attention has been concentrated on the paradoxes posed by Edward Taylor's role as an "American Metaphysical."' From his life and teachings Taylor emerges as a strong, even reactionary exponent of the "New England Way" in theology and church polity;2 yet his poetry suggests a theology more like that of the Anglo-Catholics Donne and Herbert, "supernaturalist and incarnational," admitting of "miracles and transcensions of common sense," of ecstasy and ingenuity in the world of the poem as in the world of human experience.3 The

The House of Mirth: Social Futility and Faith

Abstract: A LMOST INEVITABLY, critics of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth focus their comments onthe "moral" vitality of its social criticism. Clearly, the novel's scenic art and the author's pointed intrusions into her narrative justify this critical emphasis. Iit is true, as Irving Howe asserts, that "the meanings of the book emerge through a series of contrasts between a fixed scale of social place and an evolving measure of moral value."' In one of the most original essays on the novel that I have encountered, Diana Trilling endds up by seeing the heroine's fate in socio-moral terms: "Like the old Bolshevik who confesses to uncommitted crimes in attestation of the superior moral authority of the state, Lily affirms the absolute power of society over the life of the individual by her demonstration that she is finally incapable of effective action on her own behalf."2 Though he dwells primarily on the "naturalistic" aspects of the novel, Blake Nevius describes its theme as "the victimizing effect of a particular environment on one of its more helplessly characteristic products."3 Even Richard Poirier, whose brilliant analysis of The House of Mirth is almost a last word, finally traces Lily's doom to the absence in her society of "an ordering principle for her good impulses."4 I believe that in the curiously didactic last chapters of the novel, Mrs. Wharton reached beyond her immediate social concerns toward a larger, perhaps ultimately philosophical vision. She permits her two sympathetic characters, Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden, to come inito triumphant possession of a secret that reconciles Lily to death and Selden to life. This secret, contained in a "word" never divulged by the author, endows the seeming absurdity of existence

Louis Zukofsky: Objectivist Poetics and the Quest for Form

Abstract: A DMIRED BY CHARLES OLSON, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and generation of avant-garde writers who esteem Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky remains an enigmatic and generally misunderstood figure. Even the members of the socalled Objectivist group that gathered around him in the thirties often found his work impenetrable and today the situation has been compounded by the appearance of his five-hundred page "metaphysics of cognition," Bottom: On Shakespeare, and his still unfinished masterpiece, "A," a quasi-autobiographical poem written over a lifetime.' Just as the theories he presented a-s guest editori:of the Objectivist is-sue of Poetry in I93I were met with silence or confusion, so he has rarely been discussed outside the little magazines. But Zukofsky is more than a coterie poet or a man who owes his place in literary history chiefly to his association with Ezra Pound. To the contrary, he is, for all his eccentricity, both a germinal part of the whole nominalist trend of twentieth-century poetry and a craftsman -of extreme subtlety. I have limited myself in this study to a consideration of Zukofsky's "objectivist" theories of poetry a-nd what I understand to be the conceptual basis of his early poems. As one might expect, Zukofsky is impatient with labels; he accepts the term "objectivist," but (William Carlos Williams notwithstanding) he denies that there is or ever was any thing called "Objectivism." Still, his poetic values do spring from a coherent philosophic context; they embrace not only technical devices but a particular mode of perception and expression. Finally, many of the poems, implicitly or explicitly, record the efforts to achieve ideal "objectivist" perception and to discover the form that will turn sensations and impressions into poetry.

The Brand Metaphor in "Ethan Brand"

Abstract: T HE PRINCIPAL IDEOLOGICAL reference in Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand: A Chapter from an Abortive Romance" is to the "unpardonable sin" of the title-character; the principal event of the story is his suicide by leaping into a furnace. Hawthorne seems to connect the two, the sin and the suicide, in a peculiar way through the name Brand. Just before killing himself Brand feels that he has nothing further to seek; no more to achieve. "'My task is done, and well done!"' he thinks. What he has done is probably stated in his soliloquy of farewell:

"The Whole is a Prose Poem": An Early Review of The Scarlet Letter

Abstract: I N HER INFLUENTIAL ANALYSIS of "Hawthorne as Poet," Q. D. Leavis suggests that "sentimental and moralistic misreadings" of The Scarlet Letter overlook a sulbtle "poetic procede and technique"; the opening chapter, "The Prison-Door," "is a prose poem.... ." It may surprise some admirers of Hawthorne's artistry to learn that a hitherto unnoticed anonymous review in the Boston Post of March 2I, I850 (just five days after the pulblication of the novel),2 discusses the book in terms that anticipate Mrs. Leavis: "The whole [says the reviewer] is a prose poem, and must be regarded as such, and judged by poetical standards only." Equally striking is the reviewer's anticipation of a famouLs pronouncement of Melville on Hawthorne. In April of i85i, Melville informed 'the authoir of The House of the Seven Gables that "there is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He slays NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes."3 A year earlier, the Post reviewer said of the author of The Scarlet Letter that "his pen is above all cant and creed, and his characters are of the real stuff, either God-born or devilborn, and not the offspring of man's ceremonials." Also noteworthy is 'the new evidence 'here provided of the instant, widespread popularity of The Scarlet Letter. Just five days after the first appearance of the book, the reviewer feels constrained, in his opening sentence, 'to take into account the fact that "hundreds of our readers must already be conversant with this book" and to explain the tardiness of his notice. His concluding comment on Twice-Told Tales and omission of any reference to Mosses from an 1 "Hawthorne as Poet-Part II," Sewanee Review, LIX (Summer, I95I), 426-43I. 2The New York Literary World advertised in three successive numbers that "On SATURDAY, March i6th, Will be published, . .. .THE SCARLET LETTER: A ROMANCE. BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. . . ." See the Literary World, VI (March 2, 9, i6, I850), 2II, 239, 288. 'Letter dated April? i6?, I851, The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven, Conn., I960), p. I25.

Hawthorne's Editorial Pose

Abstract: N "THE CuSTOM-HousE" Hawthorne announces that he wishes to place himself in his "true position as editor, or very little more" for the story of The Scarlet Letter.' He claims to have discovered a manuscript in the Custom House which gives the outline of the tale which is to follow. By so placing The Scarlet Letter in the tradition of the Gothic romance, which often used a discovered manuscript as basis, he begs for his reader's acceptance of the tale as authentic and for latitude to develop the outline of Surveyor Pue's manuscript. While his role as historian has received attention in recent criticism of The Scarlet Letter,2 Hawthorne's determined pose as editor has, not been taken seriously, perhaps because it is so obviously an imposture.3 The pervasiveness, m;oreover, of a similar