Showing papers in "American Literature in 1973"

Gertrude Stein and Picasso: The Language of Surfaces

Abstract: GERTRUDE STEIN saw Pablo Picasso's development in terms of a struggle. This was the struggle with the problem of what is seen, the struggle "not to express the things he did not see, that is to say the things everybody is certain of seeing but which they do not really see."1 Picasso, Stein points out, is not like other painters in his use of technique. She sets him off from Courbet, the foremost exponent of photographic realism in painting, and even from Matisse, who is probably the co-founder, with Picasso, of modern art:

Poe's Sense of an Ending

Abstract: I N The Golden Bowl PRINCE AMERIGO recalls the wonder and the mystery of the ending of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, "a thing to show, by the way, what imagination Americans could have."' For all the native power of the final image of Poe's longest tale, however, Henry James himself was unsparing in his criticism of its artistic failure: "the climax fails-fails because it stops short, and stops short for want of connexions. There are no connexions; not only, I mean, in the sense of further statement, but of our own further relation to the elements, which hang in the void: whereby we see the effect lost, the imaginative effort wasted."2 In this pair of observations James displays the characteristic set of responses which the conclusion of Pym invariably elicits: it is at once arresting and arrested, strikinig but unsatisfactory, somehow incomplete in the rendering.3 Even Poe himself, in the person of the "editor" of the tale, would seem to concede the justice of such criticisms in his insistence on the incompleteness of Pym's published narrative. This insistence, however, is deliberately misleading, for the design of the tale is complete and fully executed. The charges that Poe's invention was flagging or that his intentions were shamelessly opportunistic sterm, in fact, from a failure to recognize in this instance the familiar concluding strategies of his major fictions. Taking as a point of reference a passage from the "Marginalia," I want to examine these strategies, showing how they work in the angelic colloquies, the mesmerist pieces, and certain representative tales, with a view toward a deeper understanding of Poe's sense of an ending.

By Dens of Lions: Notes on Stylization in Early Puritan Captivity Narratives

Abstract: Tl['HE "INDIAN CAPTIVITIES" of the New England Puritans were, during the first several years of their existence, deeply devout. Born as they were, however, in the late seventeenth century, in what was for the Puritan way an era of fundamental transformation, the captivity narratives soon changed drastically. First, they became instruments of propaganda against Indian "devils" and French "Papists."' Later, after need for inspiring hatred of the French had subsided, the narratives played an important role in encouraging government protection of frontier settlements. Still later they became pulp thrillers, always gory and sensational, frequently plagiaristic and preposterous.2 Popular in each of these three different modes, as religious tale, as propagandistic tract, and as sensational thriller, Indian captivity narratives spread well beyond the borders of New England and lasted well into the nineteenth century. About I875, when people stopped reading them, scholars began studying them. Moses Coit Tyler (1878) viewed them as records of Indian "conflict" and as pictures of Indian "cruelty."3 In an effort to generalize the significance of the narratives, Phillips Carleton interpreted them as accounts of the frontier experience and as expressions of the frontier mind.4 Later, in a far more searching essay, "The Significances of the Captivity Narrative" (I947), Roy Harvey Pearce reoriented study of the form.

The Portrait of Isabel Archer

Abstract: In order to see the ghost of Gardencourt, Ralph Touchett tells his cousin Isabel at the beginning of The Portrait of a Lady, “You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge.”1 Isabel, who as “a young, happy, innocent person” evidently does not qualify, nevertheless remains eager to see the ghost; and by the end of the novel, on the night of Ralph’s death, “she apparently had fulfilled the necessary condition; for … in the cold, faint dawn, she knew that a spirit was standing by her bed” (II, 418).2 It is as though a quest has been achieved: she has sought her suffering and her miserable knowledge, and found them. Dorothy Van Ghent has seen Isabel’s quest as being for happiness,3 and so it is. But Isabel is deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, like a true American, she is ardently engaged in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; but on the other she is morbidly attracted by their opposites, and devotes herself to death, and immobility, and suffering. She is enamoured of the ghost of Gardencourt. It is this side of Isabel that I want to explore.

Mark Twain's Masks of Satan: The Final Phase

Abstract: PERHAPS THERE IS NO MORE intriguing-or perplexing-phase in Mark Twain's life and art than the final one, the I890's and early I900's. During these years, according to Bernard DeVoto, Twain threshed out his "symbols of despair" from a wide variety of material much of which was left incomplete, though virtually all of it saturated with a bitter or "black" satiric mood.' And DeVoto's hypothesis that Twain sought to free himself from an intolerable burden of guilt through the dream-philosophy of Philip Traum, the mysterious stranger, remains one that still must be considered fruitful, though it has set off some impressive countertheories.2 Yet there is no easily perceived, clearly defined artistic direction in this phase of Mark Twain's work as a whole. What we do see is that Twain's mind and art were coiled around a number of stakes driven into the heart of a dominant symbolic and thematic complex: fallen man with all his attendant personal, social and political evils; an "absurd" universe grotesquely deterministic and dream-like at the same time; the problem of personal (psychic) identity; and a Satan-figure, who, ironically, very likely developed out of a persistent Mark Twain character-type, the sometimes "innocent," sometimes devious stranger striving either to "con" or to "reform" the people and society around him. The Satan-figure has received serious critical attention, since it is he who is at the center of the "Mysterious Stranger" manuscripts-the uncompleted "last testament" of Mark Twain.3 But there were several Satans for

"Two Tramps in Mud Time" and the Critics

Abstract: T HE IDEOLOGICAL CRITICS of Robert Frost have focused on "Two Tramps in Mud Time" as a central document in their case for or against Frost. For the disparagers of Frost the poem illustrates his lack of Christian charity, his social irresponsibility, his callous indifference to human suffering. For Frost's defenders the poem shows his sturdy self-reliance, his dedication to individual liberty, his Thoreauvian resistance to conventional societal pressures. The critics on both sides have misread the poem. Indeed, nearly everyone has who has commented on its conclusion. The common misconception is that the speaker finally keeps the task of woodchopping for himself. The poem's clear implication is that he yields it to the tramps.'

Walt Whitman's Catalogues: Rhetorical Means for Two Journeys in "Song of Myself"

Abstract: VV YALT WHITMAN'S DEVOTED CRITICS in the nineteenth century, such as Edward Dowden, defended the poet's use of catalogues on the grounds that the catalogues were outgrowths of the poet's democratic spirit. Dowden wrote, "No single person is the subject of Whitman's song, or can be; the individual suggests a group, and the group a multitude, each unit of which is as interesting as every other unit, and possesses equal claims to recognition. Hence the recurring tendency of his poems to become catalogues of persons and things."' Although Dowden's position was defensive rather than critical, his comments point to the important relationship between the catalogues and Whitman's "unity through diversity," a relationship pursued more precisely by critics in this century. Modern examinations of the catalogues have helped to explain why Whitman used the catalogues, but these examinations have eschewed the issue of how the catalogues work.2 As modern critics have suggested, Whitman's catalogues express his transcendentalism. The catalogues also control the reader's involvement in the poet's movement from the singular to the cosmic. An examination of the catalogues in "Song of Myself" will show that the catalogues are written in such ways as to manipulate reader involvement. "Song of Myself" is a history of the poet's movement from loafing individual to active spirit. But the poet's movement is paralleled by the reader's movement from "assuming" to 'cresum-

William Bradford's Vision of History

Abstract: fHOUGH OFTEN PRAISED, Of Plymouth Plantation has rarely been taken whole. Bradford's history begins magnificently, diminishes into a tedious account of unsorted administrative details, and ends, uncompleted, in silence.' Though many critics have noted the nobility of its author and the eloquence of individual passages, few have attempted to examine its movement or to explain why so obviously public a document was never completed and published.2 We can understand the structure and dynamics of Bradford's history-its movement from a beginning selective in detail, coherent in structure, and confident in tone, through a large central welter of detail in which all coherence and confidence seem gone, to a truncated ending, again selective in detail but elegiac in tone-by examining the vision of history that informs Bradford's account and forces him, finally, to leave it unfinished -and unpublished. Though the two critics who consider that Bradford's narrative is informed by a coherent vision of history label that vision Augustinian, Bradford's account never mentions Augustine.3 Instead, through four allusions that he lobligingly identifies with footnotes, Bradford places himself within a historiographical tradition that Augustine had attempted, unsuccessfully, to alter and that Reformation historians had resurrected from the writings of Eusebius Pamphili, Bishop of Caesarea. That tradition begins with the Book of Deuteronomy, which Bradford quotes in his; explanation of the lesson that subsequent generations could draw from his account of the Pilgrims' safe passage to Plymouth.4 God has

Stephen Crane in transition : centenary essays

Abstract: An appraisal of Crane's writing style and achievements that explores his personality, ethics, and literary reputation.

Black-White Literary Relations in the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract: URING THE I920'S there was a resurgence of American literature L)-written by both whites and blacks, the latter now regularly known as the Harlem Renaissance. With a white renaissance and a black renaissance both underway at the same time, then, it is natural to ask: what did ;the black and the white writers have to do with each other? Did they know each other at all? If there were contacts between them, were they continuing and fruitful, or casual and negligible? I want to pursue these questions from the black side in this article: what white writers did notable black writers of the Harlem Renaissance know, and so far as it can be determined, what effect did their relations have -on the blacks? Without rehearsing the history of the Harlem Renaissance, I suppose the story of its black-white literary relations could be said to begin back with the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in I9IO and the emergence of a great new Negro leader in the person of W. E. Burghardt DuBois. The NAACP was middle class and integrationist and through much of its early life white-dominated, but DuBois quickly became its most powerful spokesman, especially as editor of the organization's journal, Crisis.! His closest friend in this enterprise was the white writer and literary scholar Joel E. Spingarn, a founder and board member of the NAACP, author of A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (i899), The New Criticism (igii), and other works. DuBois, himself a scholar and man of letters, whose works included sociology such as The Souls of Black Folk (I903) and novels such as The Quest of the Silver Fleece (I9II), probably did his most important work for the Harlem Renaissance in bringing the large white philanthropic piower of the NAACP to

The Nude and the Madonna in The Damnation of Theron Ware

Abstract: THERON WARE was extremely interested in the mechanism of his own brain, and followed its workings with a lively curiosity," the narrator remarks in The Damnation of Theron Ware.' Despite this clue to latent motive in the novel, critics have neglected Harold Frederic's emphasis on psychology, a stress which suggests that Theron's "damnation" involves a ruinous misconception of the workings of his mind-particularly its unconscious motives.2 These motives and misconceptions are represented by two contrasting emblems which define his ideas on lust and love. As Theron examines the nude statues and a portrait of a madonna in Celia's room, "the incongruity between the unashamed statues and this serene incarnation of holy womanhood jarred upon him for the instant" (p. I99). Theron's sense of incongruity between the nude and the madonna, between sensual woman and maternal woman, distorts and undermines his relations with the three women in his life: his wife Alice, Celia Madden, and Sister Soulsby. His behavior with each discloses an unresolved Oedipal obsession which leaves Theron torn between covert, guilty attraction to the nude and overt, childish attachment to the madonna.

The Battle of Boston: A Revaluation of Poe's Lyceum Appearance

Abstract: N THE EVENING of October i6, I845, Edgar Allan Poe returned to Boston, the place of his birth and the most powerful literary city of the nation, to read before the Lyceum. Offered this rare chance to address a prestigious Northern audience, Poe recited the long, obscure "Al Aaraaf." The reading, which also included "The Raven," was a "fiasco" according to some of Poe's reviewers; a "hoax" according to Poe; and, according to important Poe scholars, an example of perversity or "sad evidence of his inability to cope adequately with the affairs of this world."' I am not concerned here with what constitutes a "fiasco" or with just how many auditors walked out on Poe that night. Rather, I would like to suggest that just as Poe's enemies trivialized the occurrence, so did Poe in a much more important way; that instead of'being a perverse choice, the reading of "Al Aaraaf" was probably a deliberate attempt to impress-to deal from strength-rather than to hoax; and that the negative reactions, which must have sharply disappointed Poe, prompted a strange defense. The tensions behind the appearance, the appearance itself, and the damaging repercussions to Poe have been discussed enough to require only brief summary here.2 It will be remembered that Poe, in waging "war to the knife"3 against New England and her "city

Ormond: Seduction in a New Key

Abstract: O F BROCKDEN BROWN'S four major novels, completed within a twoyear outburst, and often rather facilely lumped together as exploitive of gothic sensation, Ormond would seem the least gothicized, and, being somewhat heavy on rhetoric, the least dazzling as well. For the effects of terror, critics have mainly contented themselves with allusions to the realistic depiction of the plague, and Ormond's clairvoyance as "secret witness."2 While Ormond himself is frequently enough cited as Brown's "most complex," and most fully developed Godwinian villain,3 one does not find the endingwhich brings his villainy to its orbital climax-investigated either as a basis of the potency of his character, or as related to literary phenomena of the time. Rather, the ending has been criticized as melodramatic, and as elicitinig contradictions in Ormond's character and an unsatisfactory physical (in lieu of a moral and intellectual) resolution to his conflict with iConstantia. Donald Ringe, who makes this point, has indeed specifically attributed what he construes to be the "artistic failure" of the book to its "denouement."4 I would

The Origins of Emerson's Early Poetics: His Reading in the Scottish Common Sense Critics

Abstract: ID Y I836 EMERSON HAD ARRIVED at a theory of poetry consistent AL)with his transcendental philosophy. The principles of composition that he had learned at Harvard a decade and a half before, however, are very different from these later speculations on poetry, just as his earlier imitative poems are very different from his mature work of the mid-i83o's. In this essay I intend to exami-ne Emerson's reading in the poetics of the Common Sense school during the period beginning with his years at college and ending in the midI820'S, almost a decade before the full flowering of his transcendental view of poetry.1 Emerson's later views developed only after his serious study of Coleridge, Carlyle, and the German romantics. During Emerson's college years and for some time thereafter Coleridge remained a rather minor influence on American letters. As William B. Cairns notes, Coleridge "was known of course, but he is seldom quoted, and there seems to be little to show that he was recognized as one of the strong minds of the -age."2 It was not until James Marsh's publication of Aids to Reflection in 1829 "that Coleridge and Kantian philosophy became influential in the beginnings of New England transcendentalism."3 German literature suffered from a similar lack of interest,at the time. As James Marsh expl.ained to Coleridge, this indifference was due to the influence of Scottish philosophers like Dugald Stewart: "The same views are generally entertained in this country as in Great Britain, respecting German literature; and Stewart's History of Philosophy has had an extensive influence to