Thank You Everyone!

Thank you for your fine comments to this blog. I have enjoyed all of the posts. The blog served as fertile ground for many of the final papers in the course.

Last, I must thank Osei Dixon, whose commitment to the blog kept it alive. In a memorable e-mail to me, Osei wrote, "The blog is a good idea, don't leave it to die on the side of the road. That's what people do to helpless Christmas puppies!" This puppy grew up into a tough old dog.

I hope you have a great summer and that you read the great writers. They are good company.

Matters of Choice (And a Military Metaphor)

We have spent some time in a literary period now, and as we embark on the summer, which for many of us will mean some intellectual independence--no more books selected by instructors!--I do wonder what you might read in this period. Of course, there is no obligation to read further, BUT you do have a "foothold" now or, to borrow a military term, a "beachhead."

Let's imagine for a moment that you are planning to launch a further incursion into the American Romanticism. To quote Admiral David Farrugut's famous Civil War battlecry, pronounced in 1864--incidentally, a few months after Hawthorne's death--"Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"

A. Which of the authors that we read this semester might you pursue further, and what books by these writers would you consider picking up?

B. Which "battlefronts" are now effectively over? In other words, which authors will you leave to other readers, perhaps, those more wise or more foolhardy than you?

C. Which work could you envision yourself reading again twenty or thirty years hence? Why would you choose this work?

D. What work, if any, would you like to know more about?

E. Which of these authors would you be interested in learning more about?

F. Last question, which passages of these texts do you think will stay with you, that you will recall in your everyday life, everywhere, from here to there, until you reach Longfellow's "Ultima Thule."

A Matter of Synthesis: Overview of American Romanticism

Over the course of the semester, we have read book length works from following authors: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Fanny Fern. In addition, we have read short pieces related to the Transcendentalist Movement by Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery Channing, Mary Moody Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, and Orestes Brownson.

With the exception of Longfellow's later works, all of the texts that we read cover a span of roughly thirty years time, from the 1820s through the 1850s. More narrowly, The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Israel Potter (1854 - 1855), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Ruth Hall (1855), and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) were all written within a seven year time. F.O. Matthiessen in his seminal work The American Renaissance identified the writing from the 1850s alone, which the texts above represent merely a briefly sample, as the American Renaissance, the first definitive outpouring of American art.

My question is the following: looking at all of these works, what are some of the definitive characteristics that we find in these works, and do these texts have overarching thematic and stylistic elements that are distinctly "American" or define this period in American society? In answering the question, try to reference specific works.

Ruth Hall and Feminist Agency

Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1855) focuses exclusively on the sufferings and eventual triumph of the eponymous heroine. In what ways does the novel create a feminist hero for the 1850s, and in what ways does the novel fall short of this goal? To answer this question, you might Fanny Fern compare to the other female characters we have seen through this course.

(Just as a side note, Ruth Hall sold 50,000 copies in the first eight months of publication, and by 1856, Fanny Fern was the nation's highest paid author, earning $100 per column for the serialization of her next novel Rose Clark. Although it is difficult to create an equivalence of the purchasing power of one dollar in the 1850s to dollars today, we can estimate that 1$ in the 1850s would equal between 15$ and 25$ today. On the high that would be $2,500 per column. She is an author with an incredibly wide appeal).

Redemption and Justice in Uncle Tom's Cabin: Ideas on an Ending

Building from the comparative discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass,
perhaps, we can turn our attention to the question of Christian redemption and salvation in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). How does Stowe view redemption and salvation both for individual characters and for the nation as a whole?

To answer this, we may also want to consider the question of justice. How does Stowe conceive of justice? Is justice a temporal concept--that is, an idea relating to earthly time and based in views of morality that are non-religious--or does it also have an eternal, divine component that unfolds both in life and the afterlife? Does the novel present us with the realization of justice for its principal protagonists: Cassy, Emmeline, Eliza Harris, George Harris, Eva, and Uncle Tom? What does justice look like for Stowe? Again, think of justice as being both in the "here and now" and in terms of eternity.

Of course, from these questions we can return to Douglass and his views on the same questions. These are the questions of the 1850s, which we see Stowe and Douglass confronting directly.

Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, Part I

At the beginning of Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), the editor, Frederick Douglass himself, states in the "Editor's Preface" that "If the volume now presented to the public were a mere work of ART, the history of its misfortune might written in two very simple words--TOO LATE" (5). Douglass here refers primarily to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Or Life Among the Lowly (1852), published three years earlier. Douglass is clearly conscious of the power of Stowe's work.

For this prompt, please contrast Stowe's representation of slavery in her novel, through the first seven chapters, to Douglass's representation of slavery in his non-fiction autobiography. What are some of the differences in these two representations? Does Stowe's novel afford her opportunities of depiction not available to Douglass? Likewise, what advantages does Douglass's own account enable? Remember that both writers have a strong anti-slavery agenda despite differences in their outlooks, which we will discuss as we move further into the novel.

Frederick Douglass and the Romantic Ideal

In class today, we discussed whether Frederick Douglass presents himself as a romantic hero. Following the thread on Natty Bumppo on this blog, we drew a comparison with James Fenimore Cooper's fictional Natty Bumppo in the Leatherstocking Tales. However, we could have examined other heroes and anti-heroes from the course, including Gabriel Lajeunesse, John Alden, Arthur Gordon Pym, Israel Potter (and Melville's construction of Revolutionary War figures like Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, and Ethan Allan), and Holgrave.

Does Frederick Douglass as an autobiographer present himself as a hero in this same tradition of male American heroism? Does he share characteristics with this type?

Postscript: In class, I drew a very tenuous connection between Cooper and Douglass by way of each man's recognition of Sir Walter Scott. Cooper models his own historical romances on Sir Walter Scott's works. Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey adopts the last name Douglass out of his appreciation for Sir Walter Scott's poem "Lady of the Lake" (1809) and his identification with the character James of Douglass.

One significant difference between Natty Bumppo and Frederick Douglass--among many, many differences, I should add--is that Natty Bumppo believes in racial and ethnic separation, a view hinted at in the Pioneers and expressed directly in the other Leatherstocking novels, particularly Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Prairie (1827). In contrast, Douglass believed in an integrated, multi-racial democracy and full gender equality. He fought literally until the day he died for a society in which men and women, regardless of color, would enjoy all the civil rights and protections of full citizenship. On Feb. 20, 1895, Douglass was present at a meeting for the National Council of Women in Washington; later, that same day, he died in his Cedar Hill home in Anacostia, Washinton, DC.

Frederick Douglass's Visions of Religion and Morality

In an Appendix to his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Douglass includes an eight to nine page account (roughly 1,800 words) of his views on religion. He begins with this statement:

I find, since reading over the foregoing Narrative, that I have, in several instances, spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious views to suppose me an opponent of all religion. To remove the liability of such misapprehension, I deem it proper to append the following brief explanation. What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the _slaveholding religion_ of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference--so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the
other as bad, corrupt, and wicked.

In My Bondage and My Freedom, published ten years later in 1855, Douglass addresses this topic in such a way that he no longer feels the need to include a similar explanatory appendix. We might assume that Douglass's refashioning of his biography gives him a chance to include this discussion directly in the text properHow does Douglass, then, balance Christian theology with his views on morality in general and of the immorality of the South and slavery? There are many ways to address this question. It is complicated question. We might consider Douglass's occasional calls for revolutionary action in My Bondage and My Freedom, like the one below:

The slaveholder, kind or cruel, is a slaveholder still--the every hour violator of the just and inalienable rights of man; and he is, therefore, every hour silently whetting the knife of vengeance for his own throat. He never lisps a syllable in commendation of the fathers of this republic, nor denounces any attempted oppression of himself,
without inviting the knife to his own throat, and asserting the rights of rebellion for his own slaves. (197)

This worldview, at least on the surface, does not appear to be the position of Uncle Lawson, whom Douglass describes as "my chief instructor, in matters of religion" and "my spiritual father" (124).

There are other ways to consider this as well. Discussions of God and Christianity appear throughout My Bondage and My Freedom in nearly every chapter.

James Fenimore Cooper and Natty Bumppo

In The Pioneers (1823), the inaugural novel in the five book Leatherstocking Series, James Fenimore Cooper created Natty Bumppo, also known as Leatherstocking and Hawkeye. In the prolific career that would follow, comprised of twenty-nine years of steady writing until his death in 1851, Cooper would not create any more memorable character than Natty Bumppo.

What is it about Natty Bumppo that makes him such a compelling character? Is he a representative American-type, and if so, what does this type suggest about American society and culture?

Natty Bumppo, interestingly enough, was always a character from the past, not the present--neither ours nor Cooper's. Natty is a protagonist in the historical romance tradition, a man from a bygone era, whose last appearance occurs in the 1827 novel The Prairie, which is set in 1804. Eighty-years has Natty Bumppo at the start of this novel as he manages a life west of the Mississippi River, away from the settlements.

By contrast, in 1804, Cooper himself was a wilfull fifteen-year old, in the midst of an unillustrious career at Yale. About a year or so later, he would be expelled for some ill-concieved pyrotechnics involving a dorm room door. Despite his restless spirit, the fifteen-year old Cooper could not have been any farther from the prairie. Nineteen-years later, with four spent at sea, Cooper would give birth to Natty Bumppo.

The Legacy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882): While beloved in the nineteenth-century for his heartfelt verse in poems like Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847) and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), critics and readers today often look askance at the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Terms like shallow, sentimental, and escapist today cast a long shadow over Longfellow. However, Longfellow keeps good company in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey, London, where Longfellow's bust (and we imagine his spirit) converses with the immortals, the likes of Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. He remains the only American so honored. Having read, so far, long epic poems like Evangeline and The Courtship of Miles Standish, and shorter works like "The Skeleton in Armor," "The Fire of the Driftwood," and "The Wreck of the Hesperus," the questions our class have asked are whether Longfellow remains good company today and where does he stand among the nineteenth-century American Romantics. Is a Longfellow revival long overdue?

American Romanticism In Action

Welcome to our blog! We have created this venue to discuss major U.S. authors in the literary period known as American Romanticism and to put the knowledge generated from our undergraduate academic seminar at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania to work. American Romanticism "in action" depends on a single premise (which is perhaps a romantic one): when we lend our voices to the authors of the past--through reading, thinking about, discussing, and writing about texts--we intervene in history and make the past and present alive. These authors' words live as vividly today for readers as they did for readers in the past.