See these post from the New York Public Library here and here.

To a large extent, these issues came to the forefront as a consequence of the Protestant Reformation, beginning in the early 16th Century. Once Martin Luther and his followers theorized the “priesthood of all believers,” then the way was opened for the transition to a system of beliefs and ideas grounded in the individual, as opposed to the institutional.

See Benjamin Franklin on Religion and Moral Behavior in Autobiography and “A Witch Trial at Mount Holly” and Thomas Jefferson on race in Notes on the State of Virginia and on religion.

The question as we go forward is now what? If the institutions that provided the controlling narratives of people’s lives are no longer operable, then what are the alternatives? If my life is not going to be controlled by the monarchy or by a priest, then who is going to tell me what to believe – well, I am going to decide for myself.

See Renee Descartes, p. 380; Kant, p.. 391; Neruda, p. 1552

Chapter 13 and 14: Compare and contrast the characters of the Governor and of Cacambo.

Chapter 15: Why does Candide kill Cunegonde’s brother?

Chapter 16: Why do the Oreillons not eat Cacambo and Candide?

Chapter 17 and 18: Describe El Dorado. Consider religion, governance, science. Why do they not stay, and what do they take with them?

Chapter 19: What has happened to the slave and why? How does Candide meet up with Martin?

Chapter 20: Describe the conversation between Martin and Candide. On whose side would you fall? In the next chapter Candide asks why the world was formed and Martin answers, “To make us mad.” What do you think? And how do you know?

Chapter 25: Why is the noble Venetian, who has everything, not happy?

Chapter 30: What is the dervish’s response to Pangloss’ questions? Analyze Candide’s final utterance of the novella.

1. Rationalism: John Locke, The Second Treatise on Government, (1690) and this painting “Liberty Leading the People” (1830) by Eugene Delacroix.

2. Romanticism: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself, Section 6″ (1855) and Caspar David Friedrich “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” (1818)

3. Modernism: T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) and Pablo Picasso, “Guernica” (1937)

4. Postmodernism: Rae Armantrout, “Apartment,” Dean Young, “Undertow” and Serrano Andres “Untitled” (1987) and Mead Magazine.

Please post four paragraphs in which you write about what you observe to be the relationships between the artwork and the poems. The connections are not necessarily thematic but rather in terms of their style and tone.

Read Whitman’s Song of Myself, Sections 1-6, 11-12, 24, and 48-52. (Beginning on page 1240.)

Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is found in his book Leaves of Grass, which he revised and expanded throughout his life, adding and deleting poems as his sense and style evolved. The 52-section free-verse “Song of Myself” is an American epic. Its topic, as you can tell from the title, is the “self,” and yet he does not mean this in any kind of “selfish” way. Rather, the speaker of the poem views his “self” as co-existing with all of the people and experiences around himself. He is in the universe and the universe is in him, so that the study of the self becomes not a narcissistic exercise, but rather an exercise in exploring everything and everyone. Take Section 6 for instance. (p. 1244-45).  This Section begins simply enough with the question, “What is the grass?”, but in the course of answering the question, the grass becomes many things (in order of their appearance): a symbol of the Creator’s power; a symbol of equality; the “hair of graves”; the sprouting hair of men in the graves; the hair of old people and of babies; the lap where the mother sits, mourning the death of her child; and the tongue. In fact there is no answer to the original question; there is only a catalog of metaphors and translations, all pointing to the idea that nothing ever completely ends (or dies). In the particular, the material – the grass – Whitman has discovered the universal. He takes the material world, including his body, very seriously and sees in it the spiritual or soulful. In fact, the spirit or the soul transcends the physical world, which is only a mask for the power behind it. This is the philosophy of American Transcendentalism, of which Whitman was an adherent. (It’s also Platonic. Allegory of the Cave, anybody? Though Whitman and other Transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, also saw the physical world as immensely satisfying and redolent – a sense they did not share with Plato.)

Whitman’s sense of American Exceptionalism encompassed Democracy, Equality, Opportunity, and Brotherhood. His vision was not specifically Christian, though he used Christian imagery in his poetry. Winthrop would have found him a vile heretic. His sense of spirituality was more what we would call today “New Age.” His vision was not specifically male, either, or White. He wrote freely and highly empathetically about the experience of females, Blacks, Native Americans, and homosexuals. He believed America, at its finest, encompassed all of these perspectives. Like Thoreau in Walden, Whitman wished to “suck out the marrow of life.” Whitman did not specifically refer to the Transcendental “Oversoul” in “Song of Myself,” referring instead to the “always procreant urge of the world” and the “barbaric yawp,” but Thoreau and Whitman had in mind the same idea – a unifying, infinite, spiritual energy of which ALL things in the universe are a part.

As you read these Sections of “Song of Myself,” keep in mind a few things:
1. If you find what seems to be overt sexual imagery, you’re not wrong. This is a very sensual poem, and the eroticism – both heterosexual and homosexual – is deliberate. Whitman embraced sexuality as a necessary and joyful adjunct of life.

2. While it may not appear to be “poetry” in the traditional sense – there is no rhyme, no single meter, and there are what may appear to be random line breaks – the sounds of the poem are at times breathtaking. When I read this aloud to students, I usually find it quite tiring and difficult because there is so much sound in his lines. Try it. Read a page aloud and you’ll see what I mean. If you actually enunciate the words, you’ll here all kinds of sonic elements.

3. The imagery can also be astounding. The contrasts of images in Sections and between Sections, the originality of the descriptions, the level of detail, are all extraordinary. What appears “simple” is really not.

Contrast Whitman with Emily Dickinson and you’ll have opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of style, though I think the same passion, which is ironic since Whitman was an active self-promoter, while Dickinson was famously reclusive and primarily shared her work through letters to friends. She never published a book while she was alive.

Dickinson’s poems are identified by number (she didn’t title them) based on which edition of her poems is being cited. Read the introductory notes about her (pgs. 1314-1317), and then beginning on page 1318, read poem 84, 241, 249, 258, 280, 324, 328, 341, and 435.

It’s almost a requirement that her works be read in relation to each other and not in isolation. Certainly, each poem succeeds in its own way, but the symbols or motifs that she introduces – such as birds, flies, and butterflies, or the various permutations of “Light” – speak to each other across the poems and enlarge their sense. As you interpret these poems, here are a couple of guidelines:

First, remember that the poems are lyrical; they are not meant to be read as narratives but more as collages of images and sounds that arrive at a certain feeling and tone; some are more literal than others, but in general, they are meant to infer, provoke, and emote, not define, subdue and rationalize; second, make punctuation your friend; use the dashes and the often inverted syntax to wring out multiple interpretations of each poem; if a phrase or line doesn’t “make sense,” don’t skip it, but view it in relation to the lines before and after and forget some of what you think of as “proper” grammar. Third, if you can’t “get” one poem, then read another; the poems speak to each other.

For instance, let’s look at poem 328, “A Bird came down the Walk.” The first stanza is actually fairly narrative; it describes the speaker’s observation. Notice, however, the irregular rhyme scheme and the capitalization. The second stanza is also narrative, though it gets a little more complicated with the lines, “a convenient Grass – And then hopped sidewise to the Wall/To let a Beetle pass.” Does she mean this literally? Whereas the first stanza was observational, this stanza begins to personify the bird as a human being. How would the speaker know that the bird does something because it is “convenient,” or that a bird would feel the need to let the bug “pass,” as if they were walking down a crowded street on the way to the store? Perhaps the speaker is using the bird as a metaphor for a person that she is watching. In the third stanza, you have the added detail of the bird’s “fear,” another anthropomorphic quality. In the fourth stanza, notice that the speaker is the “one in danger,” further suggesting that the poem is, at some level, about the speaker’s interaction with another person. The “bird,” however, refuses the speaker’s offer of a “Crumb,” which now can be understood as some overture on the speaker’s part toward this mystery person.

The imagery of the last six lines is pretty intense: flying, rowing, swimming, splashing, fish and butterflies are all invoked. The ocean is compared to the atmosphere in terms of its immensity and turbidity, and the “plashless” leaps of butterflies are compared to a rowboat moving across “silver” waters. The imagination and metaphoric dexterity here are astounding. The “bird” flies away so quietly and so speedily that no sign is left of the exchange. Even a butterfly “swimming” in the noon-time sunlight makes more commotion than this fleeting bird.

So what has happened? There is no one answer, and that’s okay. I think the poem is “about” someone the speaker knows, someone she has seen doing something he/she was nervous about. When the speaker confronts the person, the person refuses to interact with the speaker and “disappears”; but this is all conjecture. These poems are not math equations or even philosophical proofs. They are tones, moods, effects, and they are meant to provoke the reader. A paraphrase of these poems, such as I just provided, would never capture their real sense, which can only be rendered in poetry. Doesn’t music operate in a similar way. It has to be experienced. You can learn to talk about the craft elements, and you can learn to interpret it, but the experience of the original poem is key. As you read these, let them wash over you first, then try to figure them out second. They are actually extremely intelligent, and each element in each poem serves some purpose, however small.

There is a connection between the Whitman and the Dickinson, even though they sound extremely different from each other. I would argue that both are poets of the ecstatic moment. Both poets “feel” the world intensely and attempt to communicate that feeling through details and metaphors that push the reader to experience the world in a new way. They may approach ecstasy from opposite ends of the spectrum – Whitman through the urge to meld with everything (the procreant urge) and Dickinson through the awareness of Death and and disintegration – but Dickinson feels all the more strongly the more fully she contemplates Death. Both poets, in the end, arrive at a similar experience.

Optional:

Ginsberg, Allen: “A Supermarket in California” (p. 1312-13)

Both writers, but particularly Melville, usher in the period of “Modern” American literature: Faulkner would cite Melville as a particular influence. Flannery O’Connor would cite Hawthorne. All of these writers challenge American Exceptionalism in that they challenge the idea that any one, single perception is ever correct. American Exceptionalism provides a ready-made narrative of individual and cultural superiority that has at its core a Christian, millenialist (end-of-the-world) outlook. Melville challenges this outlook in Bartleby, arguing that one person or idea is never exactly what it seems.

Written long after Moby-Dick had been published and failed, quite miserably, as a commercial success (it had been accused of blasphemy on the one hand and incoherence on the other), “Bartleby” displays the author’s genius in a stripped-down form. Its action is very small: a lawyer’s office; a few copyists; a symbolic setting; one employee who refuses to do what he is told; that’s really it. Nevertheless, many themes arise: isolation and fragmentation; persecution and oppression; the efficacy (or failure) of communication and language; capitalism and property; ethical behavior (or lack thereof); the Christian Gospels and the Old Testament story of Job. Melville was fascinated with the idea of the persecuted individual. How does one act when one realizes that one is alone in the world? And moreover, how does one act when one realizes that death is inevitable, despite whatever “good” deeds one has done, and especially when one doubts the existence of God?

Read “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” p.1076-1101

Here are a few things to note as you read:

1. The story is told from the first-person point of view of the Narrator, which means that it is finally about him and his transformation, not Bartleby. Remember that he is a property or real estate lawyer.

2. The physical layout of the office emphasizes the fragmentation, isolation, and loneliness of the characters.

3. Bartleby is routinely described in terms of being already dead.

4. The fact that the narrator tolerates the less-than-stellar work performances of Turkey and Nippers tells us something about the narrator’s temperament, as well as why he will tolerate Bartleby for so long.

5. There are references to the number “three” throughout, including as the narrator denies that he knows Bartleby three times to the men who have taken over his old office. This places the narrator in the position of Peter, Christ’s disciple in the Christian Bible, who denies that he knows Jesus three times after Jesus is led away to crucifixion.

6. The reference to the book of Job at the end of the story (“kings and counselors”) is significant given the story of Job. Melville was very interested by this Bible story, in which God agrees to let Satan torture Job in order to test Job’s faith.  Melville interpreted this as an analog to his own experience of and witnessing to madness, deprivation, and despair. Melville’s characters often wonder how evil and cruelty could possibly make any theological sense.

7. The act of “copying” is a mechanical, meaningless exercise.

When you’re done with Bartleby, read “The Paradise of Bachelors,” and “The Tartarus of Maids” (pgs. 1101-1118). These are meant to be read as a contrasting pair. Relative to “Bartleby,” they are fairly straightforward. In “Bachelors,” you have these young men who relax in their lap of luxury and enjoy their female trysts, while in “Tartarus” you have these young women who have been tossed aside by the men who have used them; women who have either had children out-of-wedlock or who for one reason or another have no hope of marriage and whose only way to support themselves is through working in the paper mill – a type of sweat shop.

In the “Paradise” section, notice the author’s tone, which is openly sarcastic. In the “Tartarus” section, note the overtly sexual imagery that Melville uses to describe the factory and the metaphors that he concocts. Notice the way in which he describes the machines and how he plays on the idea of “whiteness,” which in another context might be used as a metaphor for “purity.”

These last two stories are more overtly political than most of the author’s works, but they do give you a sense of how the Industrial Revolution was forcing a reconsideration of traditional gender roles. In fact, it is Industrialization and the rise of the Capitalist class that connects Bartleby and these stories. Insofar as one of the main themes of Bartleby is the de-humanizing effects of Wall-street and “modern” capitalist society, then the “maids” who operate the mills share a similar fate to Bartleby. In fact, both the maids and Bartleby are the same color – deathly pale white. They have been “killed” by the forces of modernization, which tend to rip apart (or at least challenge) traditional human connections.

This also brings us to Henry David Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and Walden. Transcendentalism was a mid-Nineteenth Century American philosophy, most closely associated with the writer and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalists believed that God, which they called the Oversoul, was immanent within Nature (trees, animals, bugs, individual human beings) as well as transcendent without. In other words, taking all of the individual immanent examples of the Oversoul together, one had a sense of the Divine. The Oversoul is in me and you and your dog, and taking us all together, you would have a pretty good sense of the Oversoul. There are elements of Quakerism (Quakers believed that the “Christ” light is within every individual); Unitarianism, which favors a “unitary” conception of God, as opposed to the traditional Christian “trinity”; as well as Hinduism and Buddhism (texts from India and China were beginning to be widely available and read at this time).

On a practical level, this meant that Transcendentalists, who included Margaret Fuller, whose work you read in the lecture on “Women”; Emerson; Walt Whitman, whose poetry you will read next week; and Thoreau, all recognized the inherent worth of each individual (after all, if everyone has the spark of the Divine within themselves, then all are inherently equal). Consequently, Transcendentalists supported the Anti-Slavery movement, the Women’s Right movement, and were generally skeptical of the development of industrial capitalism, factories, and technologies that removed people from their essential relationship with Nature.

The Transcendental movement was centered in New England, and in particular around Boston, and Transcendentalism does share with Puritanism the sense of God as living and present. To both Puritans and Transcendentalists, God (or the Oversoul) was right here right now. Beyond this, however, they differ wildly. For example, whereas the Puritans would believe in a God of Judgment who delivers punishment to those who disobey his laws, the Transcendentalists believed in no such “personality.” They argued that moral perfection did not arise out of obedience or fear but out of personal reflection, simple living, individual courage, and sympathy for all life.  In this sense, they were Rationalists like Jefferson and Franklin, who believed that God existed and that he set the world in motion, but that moral behavior was a matter of personal improvement (remember Franklin’s “Virtues”), not a matter of miracles or mystery.

Melville and Hawthorne were not Transcendentalists, even though they were familiar and even friendly with many of them. (As a Massachusetts man, Hawthorne knew Fuller, Emerson, and Thoreau quite well.) Transcendentalism was far too optimistic for Hawthorne and Melville. These two authors were not at all convinced that cruelty and evil weren’t as immanent in people as was love and sympathy. Whereas Transcendentalists optimistically argued that we were moving toward moral perfection, Hawthorne and Melville did not believe that such an idea as moral perfection even existed.

The connection here between the Melville stories you’ve read and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden has to do with their skepticism about the value of American “progress,” as progress was defined by more money, more technology, more “things.” The problem with such progress, they argue, is that it typically oppresses those who are on the low end of the economic ladder – women, Blacks, immigrants, the poor and homeless. Not incidentally, this was also the same period when Karl Marx was writing the Communist Manifesto. The working class around the world was feeling increasingly “used and abused” by the upper classes.

Thoreau’s Walden is a book about his experience of solitary living in the woods. Highly skeptical of Industrialism and its technologies (the telegraph, the railroad), Thoreau argued that real “freedom” meant self-reliance: growing your own food, building your own house. This also meant that one’s needs also had to be kept very simple. In fact, he argued that the more “things” you had, the more enslaved you were because then you spent all of your time maintaining your “things.”

Read the short overview of Walden on page 809, and then read the section “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” on pgs 815-825.

Thoreau’s arguments are also apparent in the movie The Matrix, in which the protagonist Neo discovers that he has been living in a “fake” world of technology and computers. As he chooses to come to consciousness about his true self, he realizes that he has been made a slave.

watch?v=arcJksDgCOU

Bartleby Questions:

1. What kind of man is the Narrator? What is his job? What is his attitude toward his employees?

2. Describe the physical layout of the office? What might this layout physically represent in terms of the story’s themes?

3. Describe each of the three workers? How are they different? How are they complementary?

4. Describe Bartleby’s physical appearance? Find references to words such as “ghost,” “cadaver,” and “motionless.”

5. Why does the Narrator NOT fire Bartleby? What does he hope to gain?

6. Find instances of the “wall.” What does the wall seem to represent?

7. The employees begin to use Bartleby’s phrase. What does this suggest about Bartleby’s symbolism?

8. Find evidence that suggests Bartleby is a “Christ” figure. Find evidence that suggest the Narrator is Peter, who denied Christ three times?

9.  How does Bartleby die? Why does the Dead Letter Office help explain Bartleby’s actions to the Narrator?

10. Why the reference to Job (again) at the end of the story?

These two clips from The Matrix illustrate the degree to which the question of being “awake” is still timely.

Mark Doty: “A Display of Mackerel“

Read “Young Goodman Brown,” p. 987, “The Wives of the Dead” p. 968, and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” which can be read online here.

Hawthorne’s work, like Herman Melville’s, tends to resist the myth of American Exceptionalism precisely because it is so hard to pin him down to any one theme or point of view. By contrast, James Fenimore Cooper, another 19th Century American author, publishing a couple of decades earlier than Hawthorne, creates a fairly static character – Natty Bumppo – around whom the world transforms. (These novels include The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers, and The Prairie.) Bumppo argues in favor of personal freedom and honesty over and against the corruptible and corrupting values of the “settlements”; he argues in favor of respect for the “red-man’s gifts,” even when his Christian values – his “white-man’s gifts” – lead him to reject practices such as scalping and holding multiple wives; and he consistently approaches his role as a hunter and a “warrior” with humility, thrift, and respect. Meanwhile, as he dearly holds these points of view, America is changing. The Indians are pushed off their land, killed, or die of sickness, and the white-man continually pushes westward, introducing his technology and his laws into a “virgin” land. In other words, Bumppo epitomizes the “exceptional” American. He is a hero.

In Hawthorne’s fiction, however, these tropes are reversed. Hawthorne’s characters are revealed as inherently flawed, and once they realize this flaw, they are transformed, even as the world around them remains relatively static. In fact, the “world” is often charged with the heavy weight of history, usually either Puritan or Italian. And in relation to this history, his characters experience some moment of awakening, realization, or initiation, after which they are left to manage the aftermath. This is certainly the case with “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (Italian) and “Young Goodman Brown” (Puritan), though the issue here is not simply history, but rather the entire allegorized or symbolic world. As these characters become aware of complexity, of relativism, of nuance, they are forced to consider a new perception, a new way of looking at the world, or else they die (literally or figuratively).

“The Wives of the Dead” is a good story to start with because it introduces many of the themes that he works with. Notice, for instance, his imagery related to shadows – cast by the fire, the lamp, or the moon. The “shadow,” for Hawthorne, represents the spiritual or emotional, as opposed to the material and the intellectual. Always, the characters in his fiction who are too rational or too scientific are doomed to destroy themselves and those around them. Dreaming often plays a major role in his works, since the dream-state is located between the waking and sleeping, the rational and the spiritual. “The Wives of the Dead” also introduces us to Hawthorne’s unique complexity and his psychological themes. Are either of the wives dreaming? If one is and one isn’t, how will that change their relationship in the morning? Or maybe the two wives, married to two brothers (one a landsman and one a seaman) represent two halves of one woman’s psyche, a psyche that is split between fantasy and reality.

To understand the literature that Hawthorne was working against, it’s very useful to consider the Englishman John Bunyan’s late 17th Century work Pilgrim’s Progress. This was standard reading fair for any child of New-England during Hawthorne’s time. In the section that you will find here, (scroll down to the 4th Section, “Vanity Fair”) the characters Christian and Faithful enter Vanity-Fair, where instead of purchasing the baubles and goods of this world, they seek to purchase “truth,” which lands them before a court on charges of disturbing the peace and spreading dangerous opinions. After they are tried, Faithful is put to death, though he is then speedily taken to the celestial city, or heaven, by the agents of God. The point here, as we are discussing Hawthorne, is that these “characters” are not really characters at all, but rather symbols, representations of ideas.

For Hawthorne, however, none of these symbols will entirely suffice. He does tend toward allegory, but he usually finds that these allegorical tropes are too empty to carry the weight of human experience. In Hawthorne’s fiction, every character that appears to be absolutely bad or evil is also rendered as containing what is good or divine, and vice versa. What appears to be simply symbolic is transformed into a metaphor. In “Young Goodman Brown,” then, Brown’s “baptism” into hell is also synonymous with his coming to consciousness, his awareness of uncertainty and complexity in the world. For Hawthorne, “sin” is something very similar to inhumanity – the inability to recognize the human in the other; the inability to sympathize or empathize – which is why the sins that devil the enumerates are all sins of “selfishness.” Brown’s ultimate sin is his misanthropy, and ironically, this is brought about because he can’t understand or accept the complexity of human experience. His misanthropy is selfish.

In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Giovanni suffers a similar fate. He is a young man out to explore the world. He finds Beatrice, whom he idealizes, and when it turns out that to love her is to embroil himself in death and loss, he is furious. He wishes to keep the ideal while rejecting the actual. She actually offers him a life outside of the decay of the city and the pride of human longing – a kind of new Eden – but he is unable to embrace this flawed yet passionate love. Moreover, each character is rendered in at least two ways, so that they are not simply allegorical but are transformed into more real representations of human beings. This is evidenced for example, in the way in which Rappaccini is rendered as both God (the creator of the garden) and Satan (the poisoner of the garden). The fact that Rappaccini is both, and that he professes love for his daughter, completely problematizes any simple reading. This story is probably Hawthorne’s most overtly sexual work. The purple-gemed plant at the middle of the garden, set in the middle of the wet fountain, clearly symbolizes the vulva, which not incidentally is also the source of the most poisonous substance in the garden. However, before one simply assumes that Hawthorne’s characters are misogynistic or out-of-touch with their own femininity, it is also important to note that Hawthorne’s female characters, including Beatrice, are almost always braver and smarter than Hawthorne’s male characters. Indeed, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” in some ways reverses the tropes of the sentimental novel and stereotypical gender roles.

Optional:

These poems demonstrate what I’m talking about when I argue that Hawthorne challenges American Exceptionalism by demonstrating that no one point of view is ever entirely correct or authoritative. In these poems, the speakers must consider the world from multiple perspectives, and each is incomplete. Perhaps by considering all of these perspectives, however, some semblance of what is “real” or “true” becomes possible.

Hoagland, Tony. “America.”

Doty, Mark. “A Display of Mackerel.“

Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Facing It.”

In the 17th Century, however, colonial women had not yet actively voiced their dissatisfaction with their political and economic positions. Such a voice would not be widely developed until the 19th Century, concurrent with the development of a fervent anti-slavery movement.

Perhaps ironically, the first book of poems published by an English colonist was written by the Puritan Anne Bradstreet, though it was first published anonymously and evidently without her knowledge by her brother-in-law in London. It is a highly literary and accomplished body of work, but contemporary readers may find its themes – which are typically Puritan – less than satisfying. Read Bradstreet’s poems “The Author To Her Book” (p. 181) and “Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning of Our House” (p. 184). What is the extended metaphor Bradstreet uses in the first poem? What is her attitude toward her own work? In the second poem, what is the source of her succor? How does she rationalize the loss of all her worldly possessions?

The first American “best-seller” was written by another Puritan woman, Mary Rowlandson, and published in1682. Her “captivity narrative” – The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson – follows the events of her capture, captivity, and eventual return by a band of Indians during King Philip’s War in 1676 (King Philip being the name given to the Indian Chief Metacomet, the son of Massasoit, whom William Bradford writes about in his settlers’ chronicle Plymouth Plantation.) Read from the bottom of p. 196, “On the tenth of February …” through the Second Remove on p. 200, as well as the Fifth Remove, p. 204-05 and the Twentieth Remove, from the bottom of 222-the middle of 225 (numbers 1-5) The account is quite bloody and explicit. Note how biblical references are scattered throughout. This is a reflection of biblical typology, or a manner of rendering current events in terms of their relationship to biblical prophecies or associations. The Puritans saw everything in the world around them as a kind of sign from God, from the way a flower bloomed to how someone died. In the Twentieth Remove in particular, note how Rowlandson explains the inability of the English army to rescue her in terms of biblical types. God does not WANT her to be rescued, so he prevents the English army from advancing.

Rowlandson’s devastating account chronicles the extreme dangers and hardships faced by a woman on the colonial frontier, and some critics argue that it was influential in developing what would become a trope of American literature, i.e. the woman in mortal danger at the hands of the blood-thirsty heathens; the woman who must be rescued by the masculine hero – typically a cowboy/maverick figure. Author Susan Faludi argues that this gender dynamic has informed America’s response to 9/11. Her book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America argues that early American captivity narratives were essential in forming the tenor of American “maleness” and reinforcing the stereotype of the innocent, pure, physically fragile American woman. Read her editorial on the topic here. What do you think of her arguments?

The 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans is a horrid affront to James Fenimore Cooper’s novel of the same name. Nevertheless, I think Hollywood has illustrated Faludi’s point. View the trailer here. The film is even more sexist than the original novel, since the film wholly focuses upon Hawk-eye’s need to “save” his European girlfriend from the bloodthirsty “savages.” Cooper’s novel is actually more subtle by comparison.

Faludi refers to the 1956 John Wayne film The Searchers. View the trailer here. In the film, a young woman is captured by Indians and raised by them. The John Wayne character goes in search of her, and when he eventually finds her, he threatens to kill her since she has “gone native.”

Stephen Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds is interesting in this context, since so much of the film focuses on the protagonist’s attempts to save his vulnerable daughter from the blood-thirsty aliens, or as his daughter calls them, “the terrorists.” What Faludi has done is to connect the dots from Rowlandson’s account of terror at the hands of “savages” through to contemporary ideas of Middle Eastern “terrorists.”

It was not until the mid-19th Century when, concurrent with the abolitionist movement, women began to challenge the patriarchal system under which they lived.  Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in particular, became prominent voices in favor of women’s suffrage and civil rights. Stanton’s draft of the “Declaration of Sentiments,” signed by 100 attendees of the Seneca Falls Woman’s Convention in 1848 (include Frederick Douglass), cleverly utilizes the language and structure of the Declaration of Independence to build a rational argument for women’s rights. Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century attempts to reply to men’s well-worn objections to women’s rights by pointing out the contradictions inherent in the male argument. Read Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments, p. 629-32, and Fuller’s “Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” p.727-33. What arguments do each of these women make to prove their thesis that women should have the same rights and opportunities as men?

Also read Fanny Fern: “The Tear of a Wife,” 1064; and “The ‘Coming’ Woman,” p.1071-72. Fanny Fern was a very popular New York journalist who often wrote about social issues. If Fuller appealed to a highly educated audience, then Fern appeared to the popular imagination.

Optional: These two poems, from poets writing mainly in the 1960s and 70s, illustrate how modern American poetry by women has continued to address these issues raised by Fuller and Stanton.

Rich, Adrienne. “Diving Into the Wreck.”

Sexton, Anne. “The Room of My Life.”

Further Readings:

Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.”

Dickens, Charles. From American Notes on Blackwell Island.

We don’t have the time to consider all of this history, and nor is this the place, but we are going to read and examine some key associated texts and pieces of literature.

Barack Obama’s 2008 speech on race, delivered in Philadelphia during the campaign, is a fitting place to start in that it places this issue in a contemporary context. Please view the speech. Some of you may remember this, but the speech was delivered during his presidential campaign, and the pastor he refers to is Jeremiah Wright, a Black church pastor who had delivered sermons critical of the United States and its treatment of Black Americans. If you prefer, to read it instead or in addition to viewing the speech, you may do so here.

Obama specifically refers to the founding of United States and the divisive roll that race has played during that time. Do you think he’s correct to say that race issues are still important in America? How could this be true in a country that prides itself on “all men are created equal?” Read the draft of the Declaration of Independence that begins in your text on page 447 and note what was deleted from the final version. Note in particular the section having to do with the slave trade. Why do you think it was deleted and what was the effect of leaving it out?

Jefferson was the main author of the Declaration, and yet he was a slave holder himself. He held between 150 and 200 slaves s on his plantation at Monticello, in the mountains of Virginia, and it is very likely that he had children with his slave Sally Hemings (To read an account of the controversy by the Monticello Foundation, click here.) At his death, most of his slaves were sold to pay off his debts.

He wrote about slavery as an evil practice, and yet he could not fathom a way during his lifetime to bring about the end of the practice. As a highly educated thinker and an Enlightenment-era Rationalist, he tried to think through problems in a logical, fact-based (empirical) way. I point this out because the next piece I want you to read, a section of his book Notes on the State of Virginia (which is something of a survey of different facets of life in Virginia), attempts to “rationally” understand how blacks are “different” from whites. This section of Notes may be read here and is not in our text. Today, of course, we would argue that Jefferson is an ignorant racist. Clearly, his “logic” was not sound. What “facts” does he use to argue that Blacks are inferior to Whites? What does he propose to do with Blacks once they are freed from slavery and why?

Also read Frederick Douglass, From Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which begins on page p.865. Please read the first 10 pages. Douglass’ account is the canonical (most traditional) narrative of slavery in the American South. When it was first published in 1845, he traveled to England in part to escape the possibility of being re-captured and returned to the South as a slave. When friends bought his freedom, he returned to the United States. His narrative, along with others, were important to the cause of Northern abolitionists because they described life under slavery for a Northern audience. Douglass’ narrative is also extremely smart and well written, so it broke the stereotype of the “ignorant, child-like” Black man. What does he argue is the Biblical support for the institution of slavery? And how does he argue that this Biblical rationale is incorrect? How would you describe the “relationship” he has with his mother, and how does it effect him?

Also by Douglass: “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.”

Compare the language of this Douglass speech to the language of Jeremiah Wright.

Also, read the first 10 pages of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which begins on p.769. Jacobs’ account of her bondage is written of course from a female point of view. What particular hardships does she face that are different from those faced by Douglass?

Following Jacobs’ piece, read the poem by Frances Harper, “The Slave Mother.” (p.1231)

Also read Sojourner Truth’s “Speech To A Women’s Rights Convention” on p.638. The text in the anthology is taken from the first published account in 1851, which differs substantially from the 1863 text read by Alice Walker in this video clip. The speech read by Walker, however, is the more popular version:

Truth’s speech exemplifies how the concerns of the Women’s Rights movement and the Abolititionist (anti-slavery) movement came together in the mid-18th Century. Douglass, for instance, became a strong supporter of equal rights for women. After all, if Douglass was going to argue that it was wrong to oppress another because of the color of his skin, then it was obvious to him that one’s gender should not be a cause for oppression, either.

Finally, view this clip of the contemporary poet Saul Williams performing his piece “Coded Language.” A link to the text may be found here:

Optional:

Stowe, Harriett Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Link here to Chap. 40, The Martyr

Stowe’s novel was hugely successful, becoming the most widely selling novel of the 19th Century. It is indeed a moving account and includes some fascinating characterizations. However, it is somewhat disparaged today as a sentimental protest novel at best and an act of appropriation and a source of black stereotypes at worst. In particular, the author James Baldwin argues in his essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” that Uncle Tom has been “robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex.” Stowe, he argues, has rendered her argument in biblical terms, rather than human terms. Tom is really no human being at all. He is Christ.

Lucille Clifton. Poems.
Clifton, who died in 2010, was one of my favorite poets. Her poems often concern issues of race and women, and she has a very direct, disarming, and thought-provoking style.

The cover of Hobbes’ Leviathan. Note how the king is composed of and encompasses his subjects:

In Hobbes’ vision, men are born equal, but this state results in chaos and bloodshed unless men submit themselves to a higher authority – the monarch in Hobbes’ opinion – who establishes safety and security and exerts an iron control over all aspects of men’s conscience. He argues in favor of a patriarchal, hierarchical society, and while his argument is rendered in secular terms, one can see how the Puritans favored such a view. For despite the fact that they left England, in part, to escape a “corrupt” church, with a monarch at its head, Winthrop and other leaders in Massachusetts Bay owed their lives and allegiance to God, who in their conception had established a hierarchical, ecclesiastical system on earth with the divine Elect at its head. The God of the Puritans had established moral law, to which all Christians had to submit. In effect, Hobbes and the Puritans had the same idea, though for Hobbes the monarch was in control, while for the Puritans God – through a select group of agents – was in control.

Puritans, such as John Winthrop, Jonathan Edwards, and Cotton Mather saw God as the essential “intelligence” behind everything, from the growth of crops in the field, to personal illnesses, to economic success. Every act and event was a reflection of a great contest between God’s will and the will of the Devil, who tried to manipulate people to act against God.

Read about Edwards, p. 276-278, and read From Images or shadows of Divine Things, p. 304-305.

Recently, after the horrendous earthquake in Haiti that has left up to 250,000 dead, TV evangelist Pat Robertson blamed the earthquake on an 18th-Century pact the Hatian people made with the devil.

While Robertson’s remarks blaming the quake on the Hatians for their lack of Christian values may seem extreme, it is not so far different from President Obama’s remarks that “but for the grace of God” we in the United States could have suffered a terrible earthquake like the one in Haiti.

Mather provides a powerful reminder of what can happen when those in positions of authority presume to speak for or about God. His 1693 account of the Salem Witch Trials explains what happened in the courtroom as dozens of people, mostly women, were accused of being in league with the Devil. Twenty people were eventually executed. Read the account of the trial of Martha Carrier here.

There is a strong counterstrain to the Puritan argument, however. Locke, the English philosopher, believed men were equal and possessed of the faculty of reason by which they could determine their own fates. His concept of the individual rights of man was grounded in the idea of property. One owned what one invested one’s labor in, transforming what had been dull or wasted into something needed and useful. According to Locke, God had given the Earth to men to cultivate and to develop. As the indigenous peoples of the “New World” had not “developed” the land where they lived, then it was “free” for the taking, since the English would cultivate it, build upon it, and make it profitable. Governments, then, were formed by men of property who came together in order to ensure the security of each other’s fortunes.

The cover of Locke’s Two Treatises:

Aspects of both approaches may be readily scene in American history/literature and contemporary American culture. Locke’s conception of laissez-faire capitalism lies at the heart of the American economic system, while Hobbes’ conception of an authoritarian state, requiring the allegiance of its citizens, continues to be an enduring paradigm as well. Consider the  issue of police searches of private property or gay marriage, in which the value of individual liberty is weighed against the perceived “interests” of the state, or consider the recent New York Times Magazine article on Christianity and American Exeptionalism, in which the values of absolutism (in this case, Protestant Christian fundamentalism) are at odds with the values of rationalism and pluralism (in this case, represented by scientists and history professors who argue in favor of a secularized public school system).

In the aforementioned article, the Texas State Board of Education’s argument is fundamentally flawed because while it assumes that Winthrop and other English colonizers such as William Bradford wished to establish a “city on a hill,” the argument ignores the fact that Bradford and Winthrop were also Hobbesian absolutists, both in terms of the way they exercised their authority and, more importantly, in terms of their conception of God. Winthrop, for instance, has a particular disdain for democracy, since it is counter to the theology of the Elect. In other words, if God is doing the “electing,” then is this really a democracy in any rational sense of the word?

The fundamentalist Puritan view did not hold sway for forever. Hector Crevecoeur, a Frenchman and an American colonist, in his “Letters From an American Farmer” neatly summarizes the idea of the American Dream and the melting pot, whereby one can come to America from anywhere in the world, work hard, and become successful. His view is largely secular and not Puritanical at all. Read p. 429-433.

And other Americans, such as Benjamin Franklin, viewed religion in general and Puritanism in particular as essentially irrational and dangerous. Franklin was especially important in terms of describing the American character as self-reliant. His up-from-the-bootstraps story is among the most famous in American literature. Read excerpts from his Autobiography: 348-354 and 364-366. In the first section, he describes his self-education, which among other things suggests that “class” is a mutable as opposed to a fixed category in American life; and in the second section he explains how and why one may lead an ethical life without relying upon a supernatural deity to tell you right from wrong.

See also Franklin’s “Way to Wealth”, a summary of his aphorisms in Poor Richard’s Almanac, and his “Witch Trial at Mount Holly,” a spoof on the Puritans. See Cotton Mather’s “Wonders of the Invisible World” to see what Franklin was satirizing.