6.12.2010
MAKING OF NATIONAL LITERATURE 1800-1865
Part 2
Unlucky In death as he had been in life thanks to
· An editor, critic and anthologist, Poe’s literary executor and enemy
Rufus Wilmot Griswold:
· Wrote a long obituary which appeared in The New York Tribune, a memorial article signed by “Ludwig”
· “Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many but few will be gneved by it”
· Wrote a biographical article called “Memoir of the Author” included in an 1850 volume of the collected works
· Depicted Poe as a drunk, drug – addict madman “re-wrote” some of Poe’s letters and probably forged others entirely
Defending Poe
· People came to the defence of Poe’s reputation (N. P. Wills, Mrs. Whitman, George Graham)
· Baudelaire exposed Poe’s cause, translated his writings and wrote memorable essay on him. Poe became a major influence in French literature, particularly upon the symbolist school
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864)
LIFE
· Tied to Salem, Massachusetts
· His relatives were wealthy and influential citizens
· Talented from the childhood, reading a lot and retelling what he read
· Blot of family history and Hawthorne’s sense of guilt – in 1962 Hawthorne’s great grandfather, John Hawthorne a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials had condemned all the 3 women (Goody Cloyse, Goody Cory, Martha Carrier) to be hanged
· Happy marriage to Sophia
· Working as a measurer of coal and salt in the Boston customhouse
· Living in Old Manse in rural Concord. Massachusetts
Knew he wanted to be a writer. This is what he wrote in a letter to his mother from Bowdoin
‘’I do not want to be a doctor and live by men’s diseases, nor a minister to live by their sins, not a lawyer and live by their quarrels. So, I don’t see that there is anything left for me but to be an author”
Sometimes he felt that there was no fate so horrible as that of the mere spectator
He wrote to Longfellow (his Bowdoin classmate;
“I have been carried apart from the main current of life and find it impossible to get back again Since we last meet which, I remember was in Sawtell’s room where you read a farewell poem to the relics of the class- ever since that time I have secluded myself from society: and yet I never meant any such thing, nor dreamed what sort of life I was going to lead. I have made a captive of myself and put me into a dungeon, and now I cannot find the key to let myself out- and if the door were open, I should be almost afraid to come out.”
HIS WRITING
· Inner monologue- ‘’dreaming in words” outlining books in his head, shy men substitute for spoken conversation
· Sense of music sense of rhythm
· Latinized vocabulary and formal sentence structure not always appropriate to the misty emotions he was trying to express
· mirrors –‘’ a kind of window to a spiritual world’’ looking –glasses burnished shield, copper pots, fountains, lake’s pools, anything that could reflect the human form.
· His tales begin with the idea of guilt. Or pride, or intolerance, and he moves from there into complex personal relationships into the secret mysteries of the human heart
· ‘’in all my stones, I think there is one idea running thorough them like an iron rod, to which all other ideas are referred or subordinate’’
· ‘a certain remoteness’ from actuality, placed in the past or in scenes removed from ordinary experience (Hawthorne chooses the setting and creates the circumstances)
· There is sufficient reality, warmth, and humor in his fiction to win sympathetic readers
· ‘a natural territory, somewhere between the real world and he fairyland were the Actual and Imaginary may meet and each imbue itself with the nature of the other”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
· Made a great art of; ambiguity, irresolution, a refusal to close off debate of the search for truth
· Was a moralist; concerned with moral errors of egoism and pride
· Was aware of the complexity of human character and relationships
· Aware of how subtle moral judgments have to be and how we have to understand and feel sympathy before we judge somebody
· His characters seem to be outside of life, set apart by pride, egoism. Innocence, guilt
· Discovering the inner life, torments and tensions, fires hiden within every human being
The Scarlet Letter 1850 a masterpiece of American literature
· Evolving sets of meanings: Adultery Able Angel Art
· Set in Puritan New England
· Tells of passionate, forbidden love affair between a sensitive religious young man, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and sensuous beautiful Hester Prynne
The novel highlights:
· Obsession with morality
· Sexual repression
· Guilt and confession
· Spiritual salvation
· Conflict- life inside and social domain
· Constrictions and repression
· Law and freedom
· Condition of women in a society (separation and subjection)
· Symbols (an object assumes multiple possible significances)
· Hester-love Arthur-spirit Chillingworth-mind
His other works
· Fanshave 1828
· Twice-Told Tales 1837 1842 1851
· Mosses from an Old Manse 1846
· The Snow Image and other Twice Told Tales 1851
· The house of Seven Gables 1851
· The Blithedale Romance 1852
· The Marble Faun 1860
HERMAN MELWILLE 1819- 1891
· Born in New York City
· His father was an importing merchant, goes bankrupt and dies, Herman is 12 at that time
· Junior clerk in a bank, helping on his uncle’s farm worked in his brother’s store, teaching
· Studying surveying and engineering ( to find employment in the state canal system)
· Signed on a merchant ship St. Lawrence as a ‘boy’ and sailed in te summer of1838 for Liverpool
· Signed up for another sailing ship Acushnet- a trip to the south Pacific to hunt whales (from January 1,1841 to October 14, 1844
Melville admired Hawthorne’s work
· He wrote an article “Hawthorne and his Mosses” citing Hawthorne’s power of darkness
· “he says ‘no’ in thunder, but the devil himself cannot make him say ‘yes’. For all men who say ‘yes’ lie.”
· Melville dedicated his greatest book to Nathaniel Hawthorne “in token of my admiration for his genius”
MOBY DICK or The Whale published in 1851
· It begins with a character directly addressing the reader
· “Call me Ishmael” he feels it is high time to go to sea ‘whenever it is a damp drizzly November in his soul’
· With his new- found friend Queequeg. Ishmael signs for a whaling ship voyage on the ship Pequod
· The ship is full of fascinating characters
o The mysterious Fedallah
o The American Indian harpooner Tashtego
o The African Daggoo
o The black cabin boy Pip
o The pacific and noble chief mate Starbuck
· The main character Captain Ahab
o Appears in the 28th chapter
o Has iron (wooden) leg, a token of his last encounter with the legendary white whale Moby Dich
o He is bent on revenge- cost what it may
o With outsized ambitions, dedicated to the cause, determined
o Gloomy, sinister
o “ungodly, god-like man”
o Dominates everything- crew book and reader
o Loses himself “Is Ahab, Ahab?”- lack of control
Universal ideas
o “monkey rope bonds”- Ishmael holding the rope which is tied to him, Queequeg the harpooner is going down- the sense of connectedness
o ‘fast fish’- it is your fish if you caught it (people controlling others)
o ‘loose fish’ a fair game for anyone who cam catch it first (e. g. Poland to Czar)
“The Whiteness of the Whale”
o History suggest that whit colour is the colour of purity, in contrast Melville examines te horror of whiteness, allied with atheism, nihilism, and nothingness
o Whiteness= absence of colour. Moby Dick can never be captured
o The whale –cosmic inscrutability (mystery), the unsearchable infinite. Ahab’s ascription of malevolence (ill-will) to the whale is his interpretation, while Starbruch insists that Moby Dick is merely a “dumb brute”. Melwille depicts Moby Dick as supreme in beauty, strength, peril (serious danger) ans awesome conundrum (mystery, enigma) of the universe.
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