Showing papers in "American Literature in 1979"

The American Jeremiad.

Abstract: When Sacvan Bercovitch s \"The American Jeremiad\" first appeared in 1978, it was hailed as a landmark study of dissent and cultural formation in America, from the Puritans writings through the major literary works of the antebellum era. For this long-awaited anniversary edition, Bercovitch has written a deeply thoughtful and challenging new preface that reflects on his classic study of the role of the political sermon, or jeremiad, in America from a contemporary perspective, while assessing developments in the field of American studies and the culture at large.\

The Dialects in Huckleberry Finn

Abstract: In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary "Pike-County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guesswork; but pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.'

Cotton Mather: The Young Life of the Lord's Remembrancer, 1663-1703.

Abstract: Reinterprets the life and thought of the controversial Puritan New England clergyman, examining his religious conversion, his role as an historian and literary figure, and his fanatical attitudes concerning witchcraft.

Thirst and Starvation in Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Abstract: 66 MILY DICKINSON I did like very much and do still," wrote her friend Joseph Lyman to his fiancee in I858. "But she is rather morbid and unnatural."1 Lyman, who lived with the Dickinsons during the winter of I846, had formed a close platonic attachment with Emily at that time and continued to use her as his touchstone of a superior woman throughout his life. In singling out unnatural morbidity as the single defect in an otherwise flawless character, he was referring, I think, not merely to Dickinson's early and lifelong fascination with illness, with death, and with dying. He was suggesting also the absence of inner vitality, the emotional numbness which was the subject of many of her greatest poems and the enabling wound to her artistic bow. Her poetry was an attempt to keep herself alive by memorializing a range of feeling and experience threatened with extinction from without and within. The relationship between the "Death blow" aimed by God, nature, and human beings, and the "funeral" in the brain was one to which Dickinson addressed her sharpest creative intuitions. She explored this relationship with particular subtlety and sophistication through images of thirst and starvation. Dickinson uses thirst and starvation metaphorically to represent a broad spectrum of needs: spiritual, emotional, and intellectual. The characteristic response of her deprived persona is to strive for selfsufficiency, for intellectual mastery, and for esthetic sublimation of the debilitating emotions occasioned by neglect or persecution. To this end, her starving-thirsting "I" cultivates a strategy of renunciation, a "Banquet of Abstemiousness," which is an attempt to deny the needs of the social self. However, the Dickinsonian persona cannot depend on the religious, social, and moral context which made the economy of compensation work for such Puritan poets as Anne Bradstreet and such transcendental philosophers as Emerson and Thoreau. Thus her persona also responds to deprivation imposed by

W.E.B. Du Bois as a Man of Literature

Abstract: W HAT HENRY JAMES wrote of Nathaniel Hawthorne is equally true of W. E. B. Du Bois: "our author," James wrote, "must accept the awkward as well as the graceful side of his fame; for he has the advantage of pointing a valuable moral." Hawthorne's moral was that "the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion."' Du Bois's reputation as a man of literature is surely the "awkward" side of such fame as he possesses, and one meaning of his awkward side is essentially the same as Hawthorne's (as James saw it), with an important difference. The flower of art will bloom only where there is liberty or the memory of liberty. Du Bois understood the need for justice in the growth of the flower of art: "The time has not yet come," he wrote in I9I3, "for the great development of American Negro literature. The economic stress is too great and the racial persecution too bitter to allow the leisure and the poise for which literature calls."2 Or, as James went on in the famous passage about Hawthorne, "American civilization has hitherto had other things to do than to produce flowers... The other, more graceful sides of Du Bois's reputation vary with the attitude of each observer but rest somewhere in his pioneering and persisting works of history and sociology and his decades of crusading journalism against neoslavery in the South and in some respects similar oppression in the North. Trained at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, he produced essays, monographs, and books of history and sociology that gave him by themselves the most prominent place among black American thinkers, so that the NAACP could write with justification in I934 that "he created, what never existed before, a Negro intelligentsia, and many who have not read a word of his writings are his spiritual disciples and descen-

Feminist Sources in The Bostonians

Abstract: ALTHOUGH HENRY JAMES'S KNOWLEDGE of his subject matter in The Bostonians has been impugned or ignored since I885, specific historical events, issues, and personalities of the feminist movement from the Civil War to the early i88o's indicate that James developed the novel from the actualities of that period of the women's movement.1 To add historical sources to the material from which James created the plot and characters of The Bostonians is not to forget that he had literary sources as well. The numerous studies of those literary sources, however, are disproportionate to the paucity of scholarship on real-life sources.2 Curiously, the novel most similar to The Bos-

The Quest for Mythic Vision in Contemporary Native American and Chicano Fiction

Abstract: A MERICAN LITERATURE has traditionally reflected what Annette C Kolodny calls America's "oldest and most cherished fantasy": a dream of the harmony between man and nature, a dream repeatedly betrayed as the land is exploited.1 Seen in a larger context, this pastoral vision forms part of the historical quest by Americans for unity, for wholeness, for a sense of the sacred in a secular existence. Though vision reflects the Romantic impulse in our literature, modern writers have tended to deny the validity of sacred or mythic vision. Therefore they create a literature described by Bellow as "a dark literature, a literature of victimization, of old people sitting in ash cans waiting for the breath of life to depart."2 Yet in speaking of America's betrayal of the dream, one excludes the American people who betrayed neither the land nor the dream: the Native Americans and their brothers, the Chicanos, who have watched others intrude upon their land and their religious beliefs. Emerging in the last fifteen years, the fiction of the Native Americans and Chicanos reveals an intense desire to recapture and restate the sacred vision which physical conquest has not been able completely to destroy. This quest requires initially the rejection of Christianity, the conqueror's religion, and a return to indigenous paganism. In its most complete form it recovers a vision associated with a world view found in all ancient people, a view which offers to modern America a mythic vision that has been lost,3 a vision of the sanctity of all life, a vision of the beauty and everlasting quality of the land, and a sense of the unity of life and time that transcends the lineal, judgmental, and historical view accepted by Western Chris-

Moby-Dick: The Transformation of the Faustian Ethos

Abstract: NE MAJOR DIFFERENCE between Moby-Dick and its five predecessors in the Melville canon consists in its being its author's first exploration of "landlessness." Like Moby-Dick, the earlier novels recount actual or allegorical voyages, three of them even involving, briefly or incidentally, whaling ships. Like Moby-Dick also, those novels express what Merlin Bowen has rightly called Melville's "principal concern" in all his works, "a concern with the problem of selfdiscovery, self-realization." But unlike Moby-Dick, those novels also involve an "otherness" both sufficiently real and sufficiently comprehensible to act as a foil in the process of self-definition. Tommo and Redburn, for instance, learn much about themselves from their confrontations with the "other," whether this be the valley of Typee, or Liverpool, or the complexities of life aboard ship. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the remaining early protagonists. In MobyDick, by contrast, this "other" ceases to function as an aid to selfknowledge because it ceases either to be truly "other" or to be accessible to human understanding, in the former case becoming a mere reflection of the self and in the latter becoming a world emptied of meaning and hence emptied of reality. In Moby-Dick the voyage is, literally and metaphorically, one into "landlessness." The formal implication of this "landlessness" have been noted by Edgar A. Dryden: "Unlike its predecessors, Moby-Dick is almost completely selfcontained and self-referring. . . . it is always moving away from the objective or factual world and persistently calling attention to itself as fiction." Melville's masterpiece brings to full imaginative development a tendency in his thought only implied by such earlier statements as Redburn's "I began to see, that my prospects of seeing the world as a sailor were, after all, but very doubtful; for sailors only go round the world, without going into it."''

Wendell Berry's Husband to the World: A Place on Earth

Abstract: FARMER, PROFESSOR, WENDELL BERRY has also had a prolific literary career since his first book, Nathan Coulter. He works in all forms-poetry, fiction, essays, drama-and with his most recent works of I977, Clearing (poems) and The Unsettling of America (essays), has published twenty-two volumes.1 From his artistic beginnings, he has shown an abiding interest in his Central Kentucky homelands. And like his fellow novelist of the land, Ernest J. Gaines, who sets his tales in the dust and bayous of rural Louisiana, Berry also tills a single native soil. His constant terrain has been the Upper Appalachian South, in the locale of Port William, Kentucky (a poetic imagining of his own Port Royal), spread across the rolling hills and cuts that drain into the Kentucky River. Berry's fictive families, mainly the distantly related Coulter and Feltner clans, are subsistence tobacco farmers and dwell in all three of his novels and much of his other work. Their stories are set mostly in the I940's and I950's, but they range as far back as the antebellum Simon Feltner (I784I858) and span at least seven generations-actively and historicallyin the novels. "The earth is the genius of our life," Berry writes near the end of A Place on Earth, and from that earth and a sense of man's place

From Spears to Leaves: Walt Whitman's Theory of Nature in "Song of Myself"

Abstract: HERE is widespread critical agreement that Walt Whitman was not a consistent philosophical thinker. Although Whitman speaks in "Song of Myself" as though he is presenting an answer to the age-old question of Being, it is generally agreed that he did not do so. Critics have noted traces of various philosophical systems (or approaches), including Platonism, neo-Platonism, trancendentalism, pantheism, mysticism, Hegelianism, Darwinism, vitalism, and phrenology in "Song of Myself," but have not been able to find an underlying logic in Whitman's thought that addresses the basic conflicts in these systems.1 The ideas Whitman expresses in "Song of Myself" have often been praised for vigor, therefore, but never for consistency. What Whitman gives with one line he seems to take away with another. The purpose of this paper is to show that there is in fact an underlying consistency of thought in "Song of Myself" to which all the lines of the poem, not just some of them, can be related. I shall try to show that Whitman is presenting in this poem not an assortment of only vaguely related and often inconsistent ideas as is usually assumed. Rather, he is giving us a "theory of nature" (or a philosophy of Being) which answers to the demands that Emerson made for such a theory in "Nature." An understanding of Whitman's theory of nature in "Song of Myself" is, it seems to me, the key to unlocking other Whitman puzzles, e.g., the structure of the poem, the function of the catalogs, Whitman's use of language, his view of the importance of science and the greater importance of poetry, as well as his philosophical relation to Emerson. In my opinion Whitman's theory of nature is so fundamental to his poetry

Fitzgerald's Josephine Stories: The End of the Romantic Illusion

Abstract: S OMEWHERE between The Great Gatsby, with its hero obsessed by a romantic vision, and Tender Is the Night, with its hero acknowledging that the romantic vision, "the golden bowl," has been shattered irrevocably, F. Scott Fitzgerald changed his world view as the values which sustained it altered. It is not difficult to locate exactly where this metamorphosis occurred-it is in the Josephine stories in which the author worked and reworked the same elements until he arrived at a formulation which was antithetical to the original construct of the "genteel romantic heroine."' The Josephine of the first four stories ("First Blood," "A Nice Quiet Place," "A Woman with a Past," "A Snobbish Story") was animated by the same dream of fulfillment in and through love that drove all Fitzgerald's heroes to pursue the object of their desire-the projection of their romantic dream of perfect and eternal commitment. Ever the fickle adolescent, Josephine realized that the object of her affections might change, but she did not doubt until the very end that "the only thing she cared about in the world was being in love and being with the person she currently loved."2 In the last story, "Emotional Bankruptcy," there is a devastating and cataclysmic reversal; Josephine found herself almost as enervated and demoralized as Fitzgerald's later crack-up would leave the author. Having built her life and her career around the romantic ideal, she suddenly found love an inadequate raison d'etre. It left her with nothing to believe in and no one to blame for her precipitous collapse. "'Oh, what have I done to myself?' she wailed,"3 therein acknowledging that both the illusion and the dis-

Faulkner, Childhood, and the Making of The Sound and the Fury

Abstract: EARLY IN I928, while he was still trying to recover from Horace IL Liveright's rejection of Flags in the Dust, William Faulkner began writing stories about four children named Compson. A few months earlier, his spirits had been high. Confident that he had just finished the best book any publisher would see that year, he had begun designing a dust jacket for his third novel. His first book, The Marble Faun, had sold few copies, and neither of his previous novels, Soldiers' Pay and Mosquitoes, had done very well. But Flags in the Dust had given him a sense of great discovery, and he was counting on it to make his name for him as a writer. Following Liveright's letter, which described the novel as "diffuse and nonintegral," lacking "plot, dimension and projection," Faulkner's mood became not only bitter but morbid. For several weeks he moved back and forth between threats to give up writing and take a job, and efforts to revise his manuscript or even re-write the whole thing. Yet nothing seemed to help-neither the threats, which he probably knew to be empty, nor the efforts, which left him feeling confused and even hopeless. Finally, he decided to re-type his manuscript and send it to Ben Wasson, a friend who had agreed to act as his agent.' The disappointment Faulkner experienced in the aftermath of Liveright's blunt rejection was intensified by the solitude it imposed. He had enjoyed sharing the modest success of his earlier books, particularly with his mother, with old friends like Phil Stone, and with his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham Franklin. But he found it impossible to share failure. "Don't Complain-Don't Explain" was the motto his mother had hung in the family kitchen and

Poe's "The City in the Sea": Source and Interpretation

Abstract: ARLY critical approaches to "The City in the Sea" assumed the city is sunken and were largely confined to identifying Poe's sources. Two articles by T. 0. Mabbott, for instance, took that direction.' Roy P. Basler first noticed that the city is not sunken but on a level with the waters which surround it, and subsequent critics have taken Basler into account.2 But in the Harvard Collected Poe, Mabbott unaccountably ignores Basler and sticks to his contention that "The City in the Sea" is about Gomorrah. Legends, he says, have it that "the ruins of the Cities of the Plain are close to the surface at ordinary times, and in very dry weather the tops of walls and columns may be seen above the water. Everything in the poem fits this interpretation."' But everything does not fit the interpretation. Poe's city cannot be sunken. "There open fanes and gaping graves/Yawn level with the luminous waves."' Clearly the only "very dry weather" which could expose those graves would also evaporate the Dead Sea. Gomorrah is not the only suggested model for Poe's city. Killis Campbell thought it was Babylon, an idea which Mabbott finds unexpectedly inept," since the ruins of Babylon are not near any sea, let alone in one, and since Poe could scarcely have called the walls

Phillis Wheatley in London: An Unpublished Letter to David Wooster

Abstract: PHILLIS WHEATLEY had enough regard for her correspondence to propose thirteen letters for publication in a collection of her works. Unfortunately, only a few of her letters have survived. The best-known are those addressed to her friend and fellow-slave, Obour Tanner, and this group, especially, shows her as a pious young woman and an affectionate friend. But there was another side to Wheatley: she was also an ambitious and worldly-wise woman, acquainted with notables of her time, and capable of unabashedly representing her own interests. Her recently discovered letter to David Wooster, written on her return from her London voyage, is perhaps the most notable item in her extant correspondence. It illuminates this less-known side of the poet and provides much-needed information on the climactic year of her literary career. It describes her London visit, her emancipation, and her financial preoccupations. The events described were fresh in Wheatley's mind. Accompanied by her master's son, Nathaniel, the poet had arrived in London on June I7, I773. Six weeks later, because of the news of the illness of her mistress, she had hurriedly sailed for America, returning to Boston on September I3. On October i8 she addressed the letter, given below, to a "Col. David Worcester in New Haven, Connecticut." At this stage of her acquaintance with the gentleman, she appears to have been unfamiliar with the spelling of his name, for her "Col. David Worcester" is in fact Colonel David Wooster, the soldier and merchant upon whose death in combat in Tryon's raid she was later to write an elegy.' The text of the letter follows:2

Criticism and Autobiography in James's Prefaces

Abstract: Critique et recit a la fois, autobiographie et roman, les prefaces de J. sont a la charniere des fictions et des essais de l'auteur. Elles tendent a annuler la distinction entre les deux et sont une reflexion sur le pouvoir auto-generateur du langage litteraire.

Form as Vision in Herman Melville's Clarel

Abstract: N HIS FOREWORD to Vincent Kenny's book on Clarel, Gay Wilson Allen recommends three "routes" for approaching the poem. The first relates Clarel to Melville's "spiritual quest for the meaning of existence." The second reaches Clarel by way of Melville's actual trip to Palestine. The third explores Melville's anticipation of the pessimism so important to later thought.1 Efforts by such recent critics as Kenny and William H. Shurr, not to mention all whose contributions Kenny summarizes in his fourth chapter, have moved us far enough along these routes that another can be glimpsed.2 Clarel demands a reading in the light of relationships between Melville's poetic technique and modifications which the practice of verse wrought in his view of literature. A reverence for organic unity pervaded Romantic poetics in America;3 Melville's changing interpretation of this doctrine determines the adapting of versification to narrative purpose which gives Clarel its unique shape. Such a study promises a better understanding of how Melville's later verse grew out of the impatient questing of the novels, an explanation of his curious abandonment of tetrameter in the Clarel epilogue, and a more flattering image of his state of mind than has been current. The protean nature of Melville's poetry suggests that the promise of artistic rather than philosophical accomplishment motivated the varied forms of his mature works. Although his themes reflect the depression which adorns his family correspondence, his incessant technical experiments bespeak an undying vitality. Our view of Melville should include the literary interests, both practical and theoretical, which kept him active at his desk in spite of obscurity, money problems, family tragedy, poor health, and civil service. Clarel, with

Pound's "Ideogrammic Method" as Illustrated in Canto XCIX

Abstract: NE OF THE MOST COMMON TERMS applied to Ezra Pound's Cantos 't.J has been taken from the theory about the Chinese character which Pound derived from Ernest Fenollosa. Pound believed that almost all the characters are ideograms, that is, composed of two or more pictures which when put together create a new word; to choose a real ideogram as an example, "sun" and "moon" together mean "bright." He also believed that various elements put together in a canto (or in The Cantos as a whole) create a new concept. Canto XCIX is, like most of the cantos, an ideogram in the sense that it consists largely of passages from The Sacred Edict of K'ang Hsi juxtaposed to create a picture of the Confucian ideal of Chinese society. A good many of the passages themselves use Pound's theory by treating the characters as ideograms and analyzing them in accordance with what Pound believed to be their elements. There is a further use of ideogram in that passages from The Sacred Edict are juxtaposed with references to other sources and other civilizations. This canto is thus a good example for a detailed examination of one use of the ideogrammic method in practice, in both its narrowest and its broader senses, to see what Pound really did with it. Pound's frequent statement that only through particulars can we come to generalizations is nowhere better illustrated than in attempting to see how his theories are applied in The Cantos; by a close examination of his method in one canto one can learn how to read other cantos. It can hardly be expected that everyone will agree with the conclusions drawn from these particulars, but we will try to avoid the irritation and also the adulation, one or the other of which has characterized a good deal of Pound criticism. Certainly we should give ample illustrations of a unique method of composition. Canto XCIX is a continuation of Canto XCVIII, most of which also deals with The Sacred Edict, but since that canto has already been analyzed fairly completely, it will be treated only incidentally

The Cartesian Vortex in Moby-Dick

Abstract: CONTEMPORARY CRITICS of Herman Melville have offered various interpretations of the Cartesian vortex in Moby-Dick without a thorough study of Melville's scientific source, Rene Descartes.' From Herman Gansevoort, Herman Melville acquired in I846 Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, which he kept until I872, when it was passed to Captain Thomas Melville.2 In his article "Melville's Education in Science," Tyrus Hillway includes Chambers's huge two-volume encyclopedia in a list of source books from which Melville derived all his scientific information before I85I (the publication date of Moby-Dick).' Given the specific reference to the Descartian vortices in the Mast-Head scene, it seems certain that Melville read the "CARTESIANISM" and 'VORTEX" entries of Chambers's Cyclopaedia: