Showing papers in "American Literature in 1975"

Mark Twain's Response to the Native American

Abstract: ARK TWAIN HAS BEEN called the "champion of the oppressed,"' IVJL but when he wrote of the Native American he was unfailingly hostile. Some Twain scholars, reluctant to accept Maxwell Geismar's conclusion that Twain's writings reflected "hatred of the Indian,"2 have cited instances of Twain's sympathetic response to Indians and concluded that although during his Western years he seemed prejudiced against Indians his attitude eventually changed.3 To be sure, Lewis Leary raised a valid consideration when he expressed concern that sustained focus on Twain's social reform efforts would diminish his image and detract attention from his literary artistry.' However, if Twain's work is worthy of analysis, both as a complex individual's artistic expression and as literature reflecting nineteenth-century American culture and literary taste-for Twain was a popular writer-then his response to the Indian, usually treated as a taboo subject or ignored, demands investigation. To oversimplify Twain's response to the Native American tribes and their struggle to survive as a free people may be to ignore the relationship between Twain's literary insistence on the inferiority of the Indian and the nation's need to mythologize extermination of the natives and seizure of their homelands as an admirable part of the "pioneer struggle." Although the Native American was a frequent subject of Twain's writing, analysis of Twain's portrayal of him is usually limited to Injun Joe's mythic role or Cooper's influence on Twain's portrayal of the Indian.5 Long before Twain, the Indian had been stereotyped

Family Dreams in Death of a Salesman

Abstract: NE CRITIC, perhaps facetiously, has called Death of a Salesman' a "tragedy for extroverts."2 This differentiates Willy Loman from a dramatic tradition of introspective figures who, like Shakespeare's Hamlet or Milton's Samson, confront their situations in a profound social and metaphysical solitude. By contrast, a protagonist who cannot be alone, who cannot summon the intelligence and strength to scrutinize his condition and come to some understanding of it-whatever agony it may cost him-seems disqualified for the tragic stature literature can bestow. With reference to Aristotelian standards, Sheila Huftel has remarked that Loman fell only from "an imagined height."3 Indeed, to an extent his drama represents merely the collapse of a Philistine. Yet if one does not look upon Loman with a scowl of condemnation for his adherence to values he barely understands, for his anti-intellectualismi, his contradictions, his insensitivities and petty cruelties, he does not because the fall from a height only imagined is nevertheless a fall. Loman is not, as critics have too facilely stated, a modern Everyman but an anomaly, a bourgeois romantic, an odd synthesis of Joe and Chris Keller, or of Everyman and Faust. He moves one not with his mediocrity and failure but with the frustrated energies of his outreach beyond mediocrity and failure toward a relationship to society constantly denied him. Loman wants success, but the meaning of that need extends beyond the accumulation of wealth, security, goods, and status. As Arthur Miller said in an interview, "The trouble with Willy Loman is that he has tremendously powerful ideas."' But he yearns toward them

The Limits of Reason: Poe's Deluded Detectives

Abstract: N A CANON OF FICTION preponderantly devoted to terror, madness, disease, death, and revivification, Poe's tales of ratiocination provide a revealing counterpoint in their idealization of reason and sanity. During the productive years I84I-44, Poe explored the theme of rational analysis in various ways: the three adventures of C. Auguste Dupin-"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (I841), "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (I842-43), and "The Purloined Letter" (I844)-established the prototype of the modern detective story by focusing on the investigative methods of a master sleuth. Ratiocination led William Legrand to buried treasure in "The Gold Bug" (I843) and enabled the narrator of "'Thou Art the Man'" (I844) to solve a backwoods murder; analytical operations figured less prominently in "A Descent into the Maelstr6m" (I841) and "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (I844). But publication of "The Purloined Letter" marked the last of Poe's investigative fiction; none of the tales after I844 returned to the subject of ratiocination. Two basic questions to be considered here, then, are why Poe initially became interested in the detective story, and why, after the technical achievement of "The Purloined Letter," he abandoned the genre, reverting to the familiar materials of horror and the grotesque. The significance of Poe's ratiocinative phase can perhaps be best understood in the context of his broader thematic concerns. The search for the figure in Poe's fictional carpet has produced myriad interpretations: Patrick F. Quinn has termed the Doppelganger motif the "most characteristic and persistent" of Poe's fantasies, while Edward H. Davidson states that the "central bifurcation" in Poe lies between "two sides of the self, between emotion and intellect, feeling and the mind." Harry Levin sees the essential Poe hero as an "underground man" embodying "reason in madness," while more recently, Daniel Hoffman has identified "duplicity" or "the doubleness of experience" as Poe's chief theme.! Behind the evident

Pity the monsters : the political vision of Robert Lowell

Abstract: Williamson examines Robert Lowell's poetic expression of his discontent with American civilization.

Marriage and the New Woman in The Portrait of a Lady

Abstract: T HE QUESTIONS OF MARRIAGE, his father's questions, were urgent within the domestic circle in which the novelist Henry James was raised. If The Portrait of a Lady mocks the transcendental innocence in which his father revelled,1 still, the overall pattern of the book, in which Isabel Archer chooses to return to her dismal marriage, reflects ideas about the relationship between husband and wife, akin to those which Henry James, Sr. espoused. The most concise presentation of the father's views appeared first in a series of debates, which began in I852 in the New York Tribune, between himself, Horace Greeley, and the inveterate reformer, Stephen Pearl Andrews; and then appeared again in a series of papers on marriage which were published in the Atlantic Monthly in i870.2 In the second Atlantic article, entitled "Is Marriage Holy?" the elder James posits a hypothetical situation (the reverse occurs in The Portrait) in which a wife has offended her marriage vows. What is the husband to do? His answer comes fast: "Pray tell me then, my reader, what business it is of yours and mine, that any man's wife in the community, or any woman's husband, has either veritably or conjecturally committed adultery, and should be legally convicted or legally absolved of that unrighteousness. What social right has any man or woman to thrust the evidence of a transaction so essentially private, personal, and irremediable up to the light of day?"' Or, as he states the case more dramatically: "Thus, to keep to the case supposed, when the civil magistrate says to me, 'Your wife has violated the conjugal bond, and so exposed herself to

The Jewishness of Bellow's Henderson

Abstract: M UCH OF THE CRITICAL COMMENTARY on Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King begins with the observation that, in Richard Lehan's words, "Henderson, the first of Bellow's explicitly nonJewish characters, is a WASP."1 This observation is quite literally accurate. Henderson's family numbers among its nineteenth-century members such clearly Protestant worthies as a Secretary of State, American ambassadors to England and France, and a friend of Henry Adams and William James.2 Further back, Henderson's ancestors "went on the crusades" (p. 257). In his travels through Africa in search of self-education and a life worth living, Henderson himself takes on aspects of ambassador and crusader, of Henry Adams and William James themselves. Obviously Henderson is intended as the archetypal gentile American, the heir to centuries of Christian and New World culture. He is yet another incarnation of the American as quester for knowledge, perhaps the commonest character type in our literature and myth.3 Thus Bellow, in sympathetically portraying the spiritual death and rebirth of this inheritor of American tradition, would seem to have made an important break from the usual world of his fiction. Alone among Bellow's novels, Henderson would seem devoid of the Jewish. Yet the case is more complicated than it might at first appear. For while Henderson is "explicitly non-Jewish," implicitly he is

Billy Budd and the Haymarket Hangings

Abstract: N THEIR "new and definitive" text of Billy Budd, Sailor, in I962, Hayford and Sealts took away what had seemed to many scholars a "sufficient source" for the work-the Somers mutiny case of I842. Their genetic analysis of the text showed that while the Somers affair served as a "cogent analogue" for the third and final stage of the work, which focused on Captain Vere, it could not have been the original source for the work Melville did on the first two stages of the manuscript in i886 and I887. The editors expressed hope that scholars, freed from a false "sufficient source," would discover new parallels and sources for Melville's last great work. They also hoped that readers would begin to view Billy Budd in the context of the years in which Melville wrote it instead of continuing to place it "in unmediated juxtaposition with the work of [Melville's] young manhood in the I840's and I850's, nearly a half a century earlier."1 At the time when Hayford and Sealts wrote, only Karl Zink and Leon Howard had tried to connect Billy Budd with the time in which it was written. Zink, in I952, had called the novel "a social allegory, the last of Herman Melville's criticisms of social injustice as he saw it in nineteenth century America."2 Howard, in i96i, had found in Billy Budd "the power which an author only manages to get into a book when he succeeds in capturing in his own person the major tensions of his age."3 Neither critic, however, attempted to anchor his intuitive generalization about Billy Budd upon particular social or political developments during the last years of Melville's life. Subsequent scholars have avoided the matter. The purpose here is twofold: to suggest a new "cogent analogue" for Billy Budd and to connect the work with specific historical developments which Melville witnessed while working on the text. Melville's final version of Billy Budd, whatever else it might be, reflects the author's imaginative response to the Haymarket affair.

The Poetics of Ethiopianism: W.E.B. Du Bois and Literary Black Nationalism

Abstract: DU BOIS S POSITION WITH RESPECT to Black Nationalism has been described as ambivalent, reflecting his admitted doubleconsciousness as both a black man and an American, his "two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body."' This often-quoted line registers the doubleconsciousness manifested in the thought of many Afro-Americans, and, indeed, many Western intellectuals who have attempted to be at once culturally nationalistic, and yet loyal to a more broadly conceived "Western Civilization." Du Bois's early work struggles to fuse two complementary but substantially different mythological traditions. The first of these is "Ethiopianism," a literary-religious tradition common to English-speaking Africans, regardless of nationality.2 The other is the European tradition of interpretive mythology, transplanted to America by its European colonizers. The "Ethiopian" tradition sprang organically out of certain shared political and religious experiences of English-speaking Africans during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It found expression in the slave narratives, in the exhortations of conspiratorial slave preachers, and in the songs and folklore of the slaves of the Old and the peasants of the New South.3 On a more

The Composition of Moby-Dick

Abstract: SOME TWENTY YEARS AGO George R. Stewart's "The Two MobyDicks" appeared in American Literature.' Since that time his theory of the composition of Moby-Dick, though often ignored, has not been seriously questioned;2 it is, briefly, that there were two separate narratives written during two distinct periods of time and arranged back to back in the completed work. It is now time to review the theory of "two Moby-Dicks" in order to see whether it accurately describes either the writing of the novel or the manner in which Melville arranged the compositional parts-for undoubtedly Melville spent an unexpected length of time upon his book and probably engaged in a considerable amount of arranging and rearranging before it went through the press.

Knickerbocker's History and the "Enlightened" Men of New York City

Abstract: \ v[ORE THAN JUST THE SATIRE of national politics now assumed, LVJL Knickerbocker's History contains a multitude of satiric shafts aimed at well known New York City individuals and institutions. It is, above all, a book written with the hometown audience in mind. De Witt Clinton probably recognized this. In his An Account of Abimelech Coody and Other Celebrated Writers of New-York, he describes Irving's work: "The History of New-York by Knickerbocker, independently of its broad humour, is really intolerable. The heterogenous and unnatural combination of fiction and history is perfectly disgusting to good taste."' This, with its "intolerable" and "disgusting," is harsh criticism of a book we have come to think of as gently humorous. But Clinton was leader of the city's literati, men of the Enlightenment who were the founders of the New-York Historical Society and the Literary and Philosophical Society, and they were being challenged by a younger group of writers. This group was led by Verplanck, with Irving as editor of the Analectic Magazine: they formed a newer literary school, one that laughed at the excessive erudition and "nit-picking" concerns of the older group. This younger circle was anti-intellectual and pragmatic. Irving's History ridiculed all that the literati held dear-and it mocked the way New York City was governed at a time when Clinton was mayor. This satire of the older men of the Enlightenment wlho ruled the city and dominated society is found throughout Knickerbocker's History, but can conveniently be discussed under four headings: The Picture of New-York, which furnished the original inspiration; the activities of the New-York Historical Society; Irving's picture of an enlightened, philosophic ruler; and the satire of city politics.

Serpent in Eden: H. L. Mencken and the South.

Abstract: The appearance in 1920 of H. L. Mencken's scathing essay about the intellectual and cultural impoverishment of the South, "The Sahara of the Bozart," set off a firestorm of reaction in the region that continued unabated for much of the next decade. In Serpent in Eden, Mencken scholar Fred Hobson examines Mencken's love-hate relationship with the South. He explores not only Mencken's savage criticism of the region but also his efforts to encourage southern writers and the bold "little magazines," such as the Reviewer and the Double Dealer, that started up in the South during the 1920s.Originally published in 1974.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The Insomnia of Julian West

Abstract: A LONG WITH Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Jungle, Edward LI. Bellamy's Looting Backward is remembered as one of the few American novels with indisputable effect upon the practical world of events. Scholars have frequently described the growth of the Nationalist Clubs, Bellamy's involvement in the larger Populist movement, and the public controversy aroused by his book and prolonged by the flood of Utopian and dystopian imitations it excited. Indeed the polemical reputation of Looting Backward has apparently caused readers to neglect the more elemental fact that it is a novel. That is, Bellamy's contemporaries and most later critics have regarded the book as a blueprint for reform, extracting usable ideas and casually dismissing the narrative, characters, setting, and language as irrelevant decoration.' Such an attitude, of course, is justified. At his best, Bellamy was barely a journeyman storyteller, and at his worst, he could perpetrate the unremitting didacticism of Equality.2 Paradoxically, however, critical preoccupation with Bellamy's overt philosophy tends to distort the very ideas it seeks to illuminate. More specifically, abstracting Bellamy's "theory" from the narrative often blinds critics to the regressiveness of Bellamy's thought. While plans to centralize production and distribution or to control individualistic excess by means