Prelims Iii.2 -- No Errors

Front 1

1.a.
1. The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles 1624
2. A Description of New England 1616
3. New England Trials 1620. 1622
John Smith
Themes 1, 2, 3

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THEMES: 1. God is his “patron.” the earthly council sent men ill-prepared, but “the fault of our going was our own.” Brawls among individuals bodes poorly for democracy; Indians see the world as a circle; Pocahontas eliminates fear
2. Wealth is the key to a Common-Wealth; pleasure in Virginia is cheap compared to England; idleness and sport abound - - chasing delights (propaganda)
3. Massacre due to poor natives who wanted guns and commodities, and the Dutch who promised alliance, not to Christianity; an economic, not religious war.

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1.b.
"A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia"
(1588)
Thomas Harriot
Themes, Key Quote, genre, audience
THM

Back 2

THEMES: ironic tension between “"We sought by all means possible to win them by gentleness" and “shooting invisible bullets into them.”
KEY QUOTE: “"There is good hope they may be brought through discreet dealing and government to the embracing of the truth, and consequently to honor, obey, fear, and love us"
GENRE: advertising brochure & scrupulous reporting
AUDIENCE: gentle readers, “adventurers, favorers, and well-wishers of the enterprise for inhabiting and planting in Virginia.”
THM: the land is inherently fertile and cultivatable so the report is a mixture of science and advertising; nature = market (commodities out of context)

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2.
Prologue: The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America
Anne Bradstreet
Contents, and its THM, 6 fast points
work of the preface
Stanza 5 analysis
“To My Dear and Loving Husband”
“The Burning of our House”

Back 3

THM: Essentially English, propaganda for the Puritans—hey, we’re not savages
1. This is a hierarchical/traditional culture; women expected to be wives, subject to fathers, husbands, etc.
2. Women restricted to home, homebound
3. Women have a lot to do in the rural society, vital for clothing, feeding, etc.
4. Women must learn to read just like men; less literate but not illiterate.
5. Women teach the little children to read. Dame schools.
6. Upper class like Bradstreet acquire helpmeet skills to shine in the culture.
WORK OF THE PREFACE: announces that it’s a publishable work; ironic: poor me/bad poetry (how serious is she?); apologies were common but is this conventional?
#5: if I do something good, it won’t help anyway
Husband: she loves this guy & she’s forthright about sexuality (If ever two were one, then surely we”). Astronomical imagery means she knows science. Doesn’t suppress or repress the pleasures of married sexuality. Colonial imagery (“Or all the riches that the East doth hold”)
House: terrifying and ecstatic rapture (Fire! And Fire!); individual as part of a heavenly community (The world no longer let me love,/My hope and treasure lie above); elegy for lost things v. where the real things lie.

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2.
Prologue: The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America
Anne Bradstreet
Opening stanza, stanza #5

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To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings,
Of cities founded, commonwealths begun,
For my mean pen are too superior things:
Or how they all, or each their dates have run
Let poets and historians set these forth
My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth.

#5
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on female wits:
If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,
They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.

Front 5

3.1
Seventeenth Century Puritan RELIGIOUS Values

Back 5

GOD: fundamentally hidden, unknowable, & unpredictable - - always a loophole (PM 94); conceived of as first power, second and third rational and benevolent (112)
GRACE: “a reinvigoration of slumbering capacities” (79); God supplies grace as part of the covenant but you never know when he offers it; God offers grace at “secret times” but he “generally dispense[s] grace through … the church” (91).
FAITH: education, revelation of understanding the rational world; quickens but does not add to knowledge.
ORIGINAL SIN: like ancestral nobleman or gentleman who has lost the family estate through an act of treason
SIN: debt to God, repayable
CONDITIONAL COVENANT: it’s the human who is arbitrary about fulfilling the covenant (a shift from strict Calvinism in which God seems capricious)
MORALITY: is first the covenant and second what is good and just
REASON & NATURE: to be used but never fully trusted

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3.2
Seventeenth Century Puritan SOCIAL Values

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COMMUNITY: never solitary, the Puritans move in groups and towns
GOVERNMENT: the church = the state = leadership, discipline, and coercion; the more dictatorial the government the better; anti-Jeffersonian; government “save[s] depraved men from their own depravity” (144)
PURPOSE: nothing laissez faire or ad hoc
ORGANIC PARTICULARITY: feudal hierarchy where everyone has a part and all the parts connect
ANTI-TOLERANCE: the Puritans DID NOT come over to preach tolerance; if they had their way, all non-Puritans would be banished or hanged.

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3.3
5 Puritan qualities

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1. a religious sensibility/temperament/experience
2. Shaped by reform protestant theology
3. Strong desire to effect social reform through the ministers, magistrates, and laiety (to create a Godly society, through the means are somewhat irrelevant)
4. It is not the theology itself
5. It is not a specific set of ceremonies (though they observe the 2 sacraments)

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3.4
Halfway Covenant & Conversion problems

Back 8

1662
Yes you get baptized because your parents are one-half the descendents of the original elect.
Radicals like Stoddard wanted to open the Lord’s Supper up to everyone thinking the excitement of it all would cause conversions.
We can never be entirely certain that we have attained salvation.

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3.0.
Thomas Hooker
Personality

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PERSONALITY: removed to Connecticut (“the Valley”); rival with John Cotton; essentially English; abstract & logical; reputation for being more democratic than Cotton; wanted to lower the election standards but didn’t; thinks all church membership is voluntary; advocate of preparationism, holding (notably against Cotton, who stressed the absoluteness of God's indwelling grace) that the soul can prepare itself for conversion

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3.a.
“The Paterne of Perfection”
Thomas Hooker
Themes, THM

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THEMES: ADAM AS OBEDIENCE: Adams soule was like a well-tuned instrument, all the strings (the affections) being rightly tuned, make a sweet harmony. In a well governed common-wealth, the Councel directs, the King enacts lawes, and the subjects obey: so there was wisdom in Adams understanding, and that counseled; there was holinesse in the will, and that commanded; and all affections were like loyall subjects, imbracing what reason and holy will commanded. In this common-wealth there were no traitors; no, in Adams heart there were no tumultuous disorders, as now we finde; but what the reason said, and the will chused, that the affections embraced.”
[see Bradstreet] "It is lawfull for a man to love the world; but no more than reason and holinesse allowes: if God should say, I will take away these things from thee, love and joy should willingly part with them"
[see Cotton] "Nothing can trouble a gravious heart, unlesse hee trouble himselfe. It is not the blowing of the winde that shakes the earth; but from within: so, when there is envieand malice within, thesse breed hatred without, and these shake our holds... "
THM :[the spirit of his ministry lay in practical religion] “preparation for, implementation in, and salvation by, the glorious Lord Jesus Christ”; limited public censures; aversion to strife; “disposition to listen to the other side” (PM 28)

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3.b.
“The Way of Life”
(1641)
John Cotton
Themes, Personality, THM

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THEMES: COMMODITIES: Were the comfort of this life never so precious and glorious, yet forget them all, let them all be as a dead commodity for a living Christ;
MECHANICS: Christ gave us our life, and he preserves it, wee cannot better explaine it then thus; A wind-mill moves not onely by the wind, but in the wind; so a water-mill hath its motion, not onely from the water, but in the water;
LAW: Licitus perimus omnes, we most of us perish by lawfull things
LABOR: Labour to be loose to the World, and live like those that have a living fountain to run unto, for supply of what ever you stand in need of, that so all the rest of our time may not be a life of our owne lusts, but of Christ in us;
PERSONALITY: stays in Boston (“the Bay”); essentially English; thinks people should be punished not for their wrong opinions but for persistent beliefs in wrong opinions (PM 146)THM: solid piety

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3.c.
(1630)
John Winthrop

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THM: moves b/w discussing differences b/w people (class, etc.) > diversity of Creation > we must be charitable to one another > extended body metaphor > all parts work together to maintain the health and balance of the whole ("one body in Christ"):
“God disposed mankind in a hierarchy of social classes” (PM 5) - - not a trip for material improvement, rather to suppress heresy; a community that is to be “knit together in this work as one man” - - social solidarity ; almost a tyrant w/ regard to the laws of hospitality (circa Hutchinson affair - - PM 42); definite mission; full belief in the covenant; an essential scene in a vast Christian drama; mission, not flight; a Calvinist international
TH quote: “For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us.” - mission requires an audience; essentially public;
STYLE: Essentially English

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3.d.
“A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness”
(1670)
Samuel Danforth
Themes, Bercovitch’s analysis, TH quote

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THEMES: stresses “errand” more than “wilderness”; jeremiad is a result of having broken Winthrop’s solidarity; declension (decline) & apostasy (abandonment of one’s faith); specifically New England (rather than English)
BERCOVITCH’S ANALYSIS: persistence in founder’s dream
TH quote: What went ye out into the wilderness to se? A reed shaken with the wind? / But what went ye out to se? A man clothed in soft raiment? Beholde, they that weare soft clothing, are in Kings houses. / But what went ye out to se? A Proohet? Yea, I say unto you, and more then a Prophet. (Matthew 11:7-9)
"Pride, Contention, Worldliness, Covetousness, Luxury, Drunkenness and Uncleanliness break in like a flood upon us, and good men grow cold in their love to God and to one another"

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3.d.2.
“A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians” (a.k.a) Increase Mather's 12 Jeremiah complaints

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1. Decay of Godliness
2. Manifestations of pride
3. Heretics-- Quakers, etc.
4. Increase in swearing and sleeping in sermons
5. the Sabbath was wantonly violated
6. family governments had decayed (fathers letting daughters prowl at night)
7. people were full of contentions rather than knit together (marked by lawsuits)
8. sex and alcohol
9. telling lies, especially when selling something
10. land speculation raised prices considerably
11. no disposition to reform
12. destitute of civic spirit.

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4.
OF PLYMOUTH PLANTATION
William Bradford
Plot, key Quote, THM, Plain Prose

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PLOT: reluctant voyagers (PM 3); also a big mess with a lost trajectory
KEY QUOTE: “For summer being ended, all things stood in appearance with a weather-beaten face”; “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men” (America is utterly savage, virtually uninhabitable, and inhospitable).
THM: everything is allegorical & typological; declension - - we were all so great and no look what’s come of us. Text tries to control the record of declension. Europe positioned as other for the first time. Erasing the native inhabitants from the landscape (rather than conquering them with Smith). Cooking the books?
PLAIN PROSE: sober style asserts an authority; gap between the signified and signifier; question of how we narrate reality because he unblinkingly describes horrific slaughter of Pequods replete with smells (stinking, frying flesh)

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5.
Edward Taylor
Preoccupations

Back 16

from the early focus on creation to the later renunciation of earthly vanities
from his earliest attempt to map the soul's conflicts with Satan to his later celebration of Church fellowship, the Lord's Supper, and Christ as the divine host
from his domestic espousal to his spiritual union with Christ as the eternal Bridegroom
from his questioning of poetic status to his desire to be another David or Solomon, singing hymns for all eternity
from his entrance into the minister's life to his death--the end of a long preparation recorded in a virtual poetic autobiography

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5.a.
“God’s Determinations touching his Elect”
(1680s)
Edward Taylor
Themes, literary devices

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Which All from Nothing fet, from Nothing, All:
Hath All on Nothing set, lets Nothing fall.
Gave All to nothing Man indeed, whereby
Through nothing man all might him Glorify.
In Nothing then imbosst the brightest Gem
More pretious than all pretiousness in them.
But Nothing man did throw down all by Sin:And darkened that lightsome Gem in him.
That now his Brightest Diamond is grown/ Darker by far than any Coalpit Stone.
THEMES: Against the Half-Way Covenant; Lost Children; Redemptive Mercy Incidental Happiness; God is scary but really full of love; defending the old ways (FN)- series of poems dramatizing God's method of saving the saints; although man's sinswarrant eternal damnation, God's justice has been satisfied by Christ's mercy in dyingfor his chosen saints
LITERARY DEVICES: Conceits: Wasp, Weaving, Royal Coach Military Register Personified Values (Justice, Mercy, Grace) Dialog; poetry is like a mouth full of marbles to help demonstrate the inability of conversation to capture the sacred, mystical metaphors

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5.b.
“Preparatory Meditations”
(1680s)
Edward Taylor
Form

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T's best poems, served as private reexaminations of his own conversion experienceand as preparations for the bimonthly celebration of the Lord's Supper in the Westfieldchurch
generally paralleled the sermons Taylor delivered on these occasions
belong to an ancient Christian tradition of disciplined meditation and probably owemuch of their inspiration to Richard Baxter's popular Puritan treatise on meditation, TheSaints Everlasting Rest, published in London in 1650
the Puritan habit of allegorizing incidental happenings displays itself in thesepoems, as does a constant effort to open himself to God's message & discipline himselfto the divine will
poems of a man who felt himself to have been saved, not of a religious searcher
Form: unchanging, six-line, iambic pentameter, ababcc stanza; “poetry as ritualistic praise, as a rational framework within which to explore (and contain) irrational impulses of the rebellious soul, as a stimulus to imaginative imagistic variations, and as a habitual exercise of spiritual preparation.”
(http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/heath/syllabuild/iguide/taylor.html)

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5.c.
"Upon a Spider Catching a Fly"
from Occasional Poems
Edward Taylor
Form

Back 19

rhyme scheme- ababb
questions "why?"
"Thou sorrow, venom Elfe'! Is this thy play,! To spin a web out ofthyselfe/ To Catch a Fly?/ For Why?"
metaphorically connects a wasp in a web w/ Satan's attempt to ensnare human souls
"This Frey seems thus to us.
Hells Spider gets
His intrails spun to whip Cords thus
And wove to nets
And sets.

To tangle Adams race
In's stratigems
To their Destructions, spoil'd, made base
By venom things/
Damn'd Sins.

Front 20

6.
A NARRATIVE OF THE CAPTIVITY AND RESTORATION OF MRS. MARY ROWLANDSON
Mary Rowlandson

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Economic and propagandistic in addition to being religious. Yet her voice is also appropriated. Human as a commodity - - market, empire, frontier. Written at the time of a spiritual crisis of faith. Captivity as a spiritual trial. The difference between ideology and propaganda. A narrative of returning to the fold. An Odyssey. Yoking of different worlds. She dislikes the praying Indians. “Nux” as a representative moment of middle ground. The end (survival) justifies the means.
last line: "I have learned to look beyond present and smaller troubles, and to be quieted under them. As Moses said, 'Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord' (Exodus 14.13)"

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7.a.
A NARRATIVE OF THE LORD'S WONDERFUL DEALINGS WITH JOHN
(1785)
John Marrant
Theory, TH quote, problems

Back 21

THEORY: According to Joanna Brooks, Marrant represents what Paul Gilroy calls the “counter culture of modernity” but she rejects that he represents hybridity. Rather, she argues that his actions hearken back to African trickster tales - - an escape from impossible circumstances from which there is no rational means of escape, i.e., his execution in a Cherokee camp was cancelled when the executioner was miraculously converted; he gains fluency in Cherokee, etc.
TH quote: His daughter took the book out of my hand a second time; she opened it, and kissed it again; her father bid her give it to me, which she did; but said, with much sorrow, the book would not speak to her. The executioner then fell upon his knees, and begged the king to let me go to prayer
PROBLEMS: his family doesn’t recognize him but the Cherokee king does, from afar, six-year later. Text narrated to William Aldridge, amanuensis.

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7.b.
THE REDEEMED CAPTIVE RETURNING TO ZION
John Williams
Facts, plot

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FACTS: Queen Anne’s War (2 of 4 French and Indian Wars), 8 weeks with the Abenakis and 2.5 years in French Catholic communities near Montreal.
PLOT: the battle and march through snow; the death of his wife; the cruelties and kindnesses of the Indians; attempts to obtain news about his children; efforts to serve members of his congregation; purchase by the French, Jesuit efforts to convert him; letters to his son Samuel; and return home, with all but Eunice (10).
The captivity narrative is unusual because it’s mostly among the French, not Indians. Yet Catholicism poses a threat equal to Indian “savagery.” Samuel briefly converts to Catholicism; Eunice can no longer speak English. Seven years later, he returned to her village and met with her, but “she is obstinately resolved to live and dye here, and will not so much as give me one pleasant look.”

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The narrative is a jeremiad. It warns New Englanders that they have fallen away from their covenant with God, and it demonstrates “the anger of God” toward his “professing people” and the patience of Christians who are suffering “the will of God in very trying public calamities!” Williams renders his painful plight meaningful thus ascribing personal and collective meaning to the violent cultural, religious, economic, and political power struggles among the French, British, and Indians that roiled New England during the eighteenth century.

Back 23

captivity narrative / propganda

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8.a.
MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA
(1702)
Cotton Mather
General themes, THM

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GENERAL THEMES: An encyclopedic account of New England’s history and a gallery of its eminent lives, this text attempts to preserve a sense of the colony’s sacred mission. To that end, most of Mather’s biographies are quite similar, for each New England hero is made to fit a common, saintly pattern from early conversion experience to oracular deathbed scene, and each is highly eulogized. (Heath Anthology)
to make explicit the connection between saint and society
“the epitome of 17 century Jeremiad” (SB 87)

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B quote: {the renunciation of Europe, the effort at a new beginning, and the “great works" providentially attained through "affliction" and "temptation." But [he] proceeds to translate all this into legend. The American Puritans, he writes, have created another" GOLDEN Age.... there are golden candlesticks (morethan twice times seven!) in the midst of this' outer darkness.'" The phrase, which looks back to- paradise and early Christianity and forward to the millennium.}
THM: “The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those which were once the devil’s territories” (FOM 282-3); neurotic exaggerations; lamentation over the prodigal children of the pilgrims

Back 25

history / jeremiad

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10.
SOME ACCOUNTS ON THE FORE-PART OF THE LIFE OF ELIZABETH ASHBRIDGE
(1746)
Elizabeth Ashbridge
Characters, themes, literary devices, & genre(s)

Back 26

CHARACTERS: Quakers, Sullivan
THEMES: Independence versus Dour Tone Proto-Feminist Rebellion versus Failed Marriage Heroism versus Perversion Family versus Community Reviling, abusive husband Solitude and Despair Alcoholism Cuban Refusal to Fight
LITERARY DEVICES: dialog
GENRE(S): Spiritual Autobiography; Personal Narrative; Social History; 18th century rationalism; Confessional Fiction?

Front 27

11.0
“Essay Concerning Human Understanding”
John Locke
(1690)
THM

Back 27

THM: rejection of Descartes’ notion of “innate ideas” and instead believed in the Tabula Rasa, i.e., sensation precedes reflection

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11.1
Jonathan Edwards
THM

Back 28

THM: uniting the 16th century’s hard grasp of fact and deep sense of mysticism (FOM); he felt that rationalism and ethics “stifled the doctrine of God’s sovereignty” (PM 98), a feeling that led him to disregard the covenant scheme, “repudiate[…] the conception of transmission of sin by judicial imputation,” declare God unfettered, made Grace irresistible, and “annihilated the natural ability of man” (98). New England’s first authentic Calvinist (Cohen disagrees). He liberated the jeremiad “from the confines of theocracy, he harnessed the Puritan vision to the conditions of a new age” (SB 106)“western” and remote as compared to Boston; the manipulation of human emotion “is not a violation of human freedom” (JF 240) - - compare to Weiland.
ROLES: preacher, philosopher, revivalist, theologian, biblical exegete, missionary,

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11.0.
JONATHAN EDWARDS v. Emerson

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Edwards vs. Emerson- "The real difference between Edwards & Emerson... lies not in the fact that Edwards was a Calvinist while Emerson rejected all systematic theologies, but in the quite other fact that Edwards went to nature, in all passionate love, convinced that man could receive from it impressions which he must then try to interpret, whereas Emerson went to Nature, no less in love with it, convinced that in man there is a spontaneous correlation with the received impressions" [Perry Miller]

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11.a.
"Personal Narrative"
JONATHAN EDWARDS
Genre, Literary Devices, themes

Back 30

GENRE: conversion narrative/ spiritual autobiography filling the role of the public relation of God’s manner of working on the soul.
LITERARY DEVICES: part 1 & 2 are chronological accounts of important events in his spiritual life; part 3 is composed of doctrinal and pietistic loci. He knew his letter would be semi-public (Minkema 51) thus we can read the narrative as didactic.
THEMES: part 1: obtaining an awakening, a new sense, building a booth in a swamp for personal prayer; he yearned to be “wrapt up to God in Heaven” and “swallowed up in Him” - - a rapturous loss of self (Minkema 49). Thunder inverts from terror to joy; weeping and singing; rushing out to meet the storms.
KEY EVENT: summer 1721, “I seemed to see them both is sweet conjunction: majesty and meekness joined together: it was a sweet and gentle, and holy majesty; and also a majestic meekness; an awful sweetness; a high, and a great, and holy gentleness.” THEMES: part 2: switch from the episode to a summary; split between :the Holiness of God” and his “perfectly ineffable” wickedness (“infinite upon infinite!”)

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11.b.
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"
(1741)
JONATHAN EDWARDS
Deuteronomy

Back 31

Deuteronomy: "Their foot shall slide in due time"
"The observation from the words that 1 would now insist upon is this, 'There is nothing that keeps wicked men at anyone moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.' By the mere pleasure of God, I mean His sovereign pleasure"

Front 32

11.c.
"A Divine and Supernatural Light"
JONATHAN EDWARDS
E's explanation of the sermon's structure
revelation/spiritual knowledge
what the "spiritual and divine light" is
"rational" vs. "sense.. .in the heart"

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"That there is such a thing as a spiritual and divine light, immediately imparted to thesoul by God, of a different nature from any that is obtained by natural means. And onthis subject I would, 1. Show what this divine light is; II. How it is given immediately by God, and not obtained by natural means; III. Show the truth of the doctrine. And then conclude with a brief improvement [literally, turning something to profit-here used in the sense of the lesson to be learned]"
"revelation"-begins w/Peter recognizing Christ as God's son, while others didn't
"spiritual knowledge" can only come from God, never "flesh and blood;" "revealed"
spiritual/divine light: "a true sense of the divine and superlative excellency of the things of religion; a real sense of the excellency of God and Jesus Christ, and of the work of redemption, and the ways and works of God revealed in the gospel"
rational v. sense in heart: "he does not merely rationally believe that God is glorious, but he has a sense of the gloriousness of God in his heart"

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11.d.
"Images or Shadows of Divine Things"
JONATHAN EDWARDS
THM, roses, hills & mountains, and trees

Back 33

THM: from a notebook of some 212 entries-in these notes, E continues the medieval tradition of typology, a method of reading the Bible by which Old Testament figures ("types") are fulfilled by Christ in the New Testament ("the anti-type" being that which is foreshadowed by a type). E here extends the idea of typology and suggests that the physical world may be read as a sign or type, revealing ultimate spiritual truth.
"Roses grow upon briers, which is to signify that all temporal sweets are mixed withbitter. But what seems more especially to be meant by it, is that true happiness, thecrown of glory, is to be come at in no other way than by bearing Christ's cross by alife of mortification, self-denial and labor, and bearing all things for Christ. Therose, the chief of all flowers, is the last thing that comes out. The briery prickly bushgrows before, but the end and crown of all is the beautiful and fragrant rose"
"Hills and mountains are types of heaven, and often made us of as such in Scripture.These are with difficulty ascended...This is a representation of the difficulty, laborand self-denial of the way to heaven... '"
"What is observable in trees is also a lively emblem of many spiritual things, asparticularly of the dispensations of providence since the coming of Christ. Christ is asit were the trunk of the tree, and all the church are his branches... "

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12.a.
A HISTORY OF THE DIVIDING LINE
(1733)
William Byrd

Back 34

History of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island produced through the need for “elbow room.” Humorous, e.g., “Another limb lopped off from Virginia….” Weyanoke creek - - a marker for a dividing line disappears. “private interest got the better of public spirit; and I wish that were the only place in the world where such politics are fashionable.” Surveying (mathematics) mixed with Baptizing (religion). “And we have reason to say, by our own happy experience, that no man need to despair of his daily bread in the woods, whose faith is but half so large as his stomach.”
Nature commodified; line starts on a receding sandbar; straight line v. the swamps; (straight story v. digressions); lazy inhabitants on the east, fascinating animals on the west; making a virtue of necessity; Indian myths; great fertility of the land seen as providential; anti-wife (Matrimony creek, etc.); allegorical? (the fire hunting).
Compare to Poe’s “The Gold Bug”
Obsessive record keeping
Medical: ipecacuanha, snakeroot & wine, ginseng (his favorite medicines)

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12.b.
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE DIVIDING LINE
William Byrd

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restoration comedy of manner, lascivious

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13.
JOURNAL
(1756-1772)
John Woolman
Characters, themes, & literary devices

Back 36

CHARACTERS: John Churchman
THEMES: refusal to pay war taxes, turning hospitality into economy, personal revelation, racial equality, economic justice, morally lawful universe, Indians/wilderness
LITERARY DEVICES: trope of dyeing clothes (please eye/hide the dirt), dreams & remembrances, scenes of hospitality and exchange, argumentation, letters and petitions

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14.00
The Enlightenment

Back 37

practical, pragmatic
this-world orientation with a benevolent RATIONAL god
concept of the human being as universal (“Hey, I’m Human, too”) is the shared humanity of the Enlightenment
Human is like God, rational and benevolent
skepticism and a distrusting of authority (part of scientific thinking)
progress in individual and the world
education key
belief in print and book (instruments to disagree, print turns responsibility back to the reader).
All told: watershed event in history, there’s no real going back, the old mindset cannot pretend that nothing’s changed and this all does some funky yet functional things to literature.

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14.a.1.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Benjamin Franklin
1. Life
2. Composition, publication, influence of Autobiography
3. Cultural/Historical contexts
4. The Enlightenment part

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1. most famous teenage runaway ever, urban apprentice, takes over The Pennsylvania Gazette at 23, writes Poor Richard’s Almanac at 27, retires at 42. Civic improvements: paving, lighting, UPenn, bifocal, Franklin Stove, lightning = electricity, lightning rod, delegate to the 2nd Continental Congress, toned down the Decl. of Ind., in France during Rev., delegate to Constitution Assembly, first postmaster general, second most famous American when he died.
2. 3 parts (but unfinished), Fit to be Imitated; part II inserts a letter from a friend, now book is for son and for millions, how a man and a nation might succeed; whole book not published until 1818 and the impact then is tremendous: rags to riches story; “representative American”; Part III increasing involvement in local and national politics; text is a moving target because the purpose keeps changing; An Anglo-American Equiano (a rise from poverty to prosperity).3. constant opposition to the Royal Governors; population increase and many more non-Calvinists; urban growth; colonies abut one another; diversity of protestant religions; rise in the standard of living and secular thought, decline in religious fervor;
4.1 Looking at fire as a cause and effect; “not for Christ’s sake, but for your sake”; doubting and inventing a means to test Mr. Whitefield’s vocal abilities to compare with ancient orators.

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14.a.2.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Benjamin Franklin
5. Franklin’s style: urbane, humorous, self-aware
6. The importance of self-presentation

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5. humorous, winking, smile-inducing; cosmopolitan humor; never loses temper; always pleasant; you cannot separate Franklin from his style; self-presentation: channels the young Ben through the Old Ben to gain sympathy
6. Not just frugal, people must see the frugality; there’s no point in being virtuous if nobody knows you’re virtuous; wheelbarrow moment is a performance
If we are going to be the first nation that governs itself then we must, as individuals, govern ourselves. Thus Franklin is profoundly socially oriented (not going to Walden Pond). Everyone’s got to cooperate.

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14.d.
"Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One"
(1773)
Benjamin Franklin

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heavily ironic counterpart to the Declaration of Independence
both list 20 grievances, but Franklin turns them into "encouragements" for England inits seeming desire to lose the colonies by contempt and corruption
in the imperative tense
some "suggestions":
“II. take special care the provinces are never incorporated with the mother country; that they do not enjoy the same common rights, the same privileges in commerce andthat they are governed by severer laws, all of your enacting, without allowing themany share in the choice of the legislators"
"VI. whenever the injured come to the capital with complaints of maladministration,oppression, or injustice, punish such suitors with long delay, enormous expense,and a final judgment in favor of the oppressor"
"XI. To make your taxes more odious, and more likely to procure resistance, send from the capital a board of officers to superintend the collection, composed of the mostindiscreet, ill-bred, and insolent you can find"
"your main purpose, of making them weary of your government"

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14.e.
"Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America"
(1784)
Benjamin Franklin

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"Savages we call them, b/c their manners differ from ours, which we think theperfection of civility; they think the same of theirs"
seeing Americans from the Indians' perspective; showing how "civilized" Americansare sometimes less "civil" than "savage" Indians
pointing out white hypocrisy- in terms of politeness & civility
3 parts: 1) white vs. Indian conceptions of education, 2) Indian politeness in conversation, 3) Indian politeness to strangers vs. white rudeness to Indians
3 lengthy quotes from Indians explaining the differences b/w themselves & whites towhites: 1) diffs. in education, 2) creation story, 3) white treatment of Indian visitors

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14.f.
"Information for Those Who Would Remove to America"
(1782)
Benjamin Franklin

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Written while in Europe, a few years after signing the Treaty of Paris, which brought the Revolutionary War to an end
clears up misunderstandings about America and presents "some clearer and truer notions"
false: that Americans are rich, ignorant of the sciences, respect strangers of "birth" and give them free land
true: Americans "mediocre" in fortune; versed in the latest knowledge (w/9 colleges/univs.); work valued over birth ("... America, where people do not inquire concerning a stranger, what is he? but, what can he do?); usefulness valued; space & cheap land; healthy climate & abundance of food; state constitutions & Articles of Confederation; no poor people; apprenticeships; religious tolerance
"America is the land of labor"

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15.
THE INTERESTING LIFE OF OLAUDAH EQUIANO, OR GUSTAVUS VASSA, THE AFRICAN, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF
(1789)
Olaudah Equiano
Ideas

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Believed in and embraced the Enlightenment. What does it mean to be human? Who is, who isn’t human? Equiano uses the Enlightenment to argue that he is human but unlike Paine and Franklin, Equiano is also religious, a Methodist. Representative African and representative European. Thinks white people are going to eat him (inverts standards)
Mayflower (we wanted to come); Middle Passage (we didn’t want to come); Indians (we’ve always been here)
Trope of the Talking Book - -contrasting an earlier self with the narrator’s persona through the trope of the book signifying literacy; an African-American Franklin (a rise from property to prosperity)
Invented his African origin (and concerns over authenticity)

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16.
POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL
(1773)
Phyllis Wheatley

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THM: Second book of woman’s poetry. Every poem is understood to be written by a (19 year old) African.
Style: 18th century neoclassical references to Greece; Latin diction, heroic couplet (aa, bb); circumlocution (finding a fancy way of saying something, i.e., not plain Tom Paine) e.g., “sons of vegetation” for trees, “vast machine” for solar system (also pointing out her Enlightened character). Love still over reason.
THEMES: The natural right of blacksDual allegiance to "Africans" and "Americans" within the Christian crusade.How have women have gained access to the public sphere? How have they been "authenticated"? How have they claimed authority? How they have negotiated through identity categories (e.g., blackness and whiteness)? How they have demanded their "natural rights" to reshape concepts of American womanhood, intelligence, and virtue? (from GGC 467)

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17.
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN FARMER
(1782)
St. Jean de Crevecoeur

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NARRATOR: “I feel the necessity, the sweet pleasure of acting my part.” & “you'll receive my letters as conceived, not according to scientific rules to which I am a perfect stranger, but agreeable to the spontaneous impressions which each subject may inspire”
“What should we American farmers be without the distinct possession of that soil?” (- influence of environment upon people's beliefs, values)
A "melting pot," full of "variety;" an "asylum for the world"; ”Every person's country"
Society vs. the indiv.- see Bradford, Cooper, Sedgwick, Hawthorne
”Freedom"- contrasts with the evils of slavery in the middle & southern states
The Revolution- de C "convulsed" by despair and bitterness in his final letter
"What then is life?"- lamenting precarious position as Tory sympathizer inRevolutionary America
Questions the "moral operations of the world" that allow slavery; asks about God'sparticipation in human affairs-why He lets certain things happen
Narrator wants to move family from Revolutionary fighting to an Indian village
Amer. vs. Europe- America- freedom and opportunity; opportunity for self-determination; Europe- classes, laden w/history- religious indifference in America b/c of the variety of backgrounds

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18.0
Thomas Paine
THM, Style

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THM: the theorist of American Independence, to validate and justify independence because US at the forefront of progress and would be a nation founded on Enlightenment ideals; hates established authority because it stands in the way of reason.
STYLE: founder of the modern style: plain, punchy, telling it like it is. Look at his titles, how straightforward. Expository basis is in logic, start with a premise and the argument follows.

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18.a.
COMMON SENSE
Thomas Paine
Kay Quotes, Literary Devices, themes

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Key Quotes: “In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense.” (plain tom Paine)
“Hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name of husband, father, friend or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.This is not inflaming or exaggerating matters…”
LITERARY DEVICES: figures of biblical precedents - - landmarks of early New England christianography, i.e., {a fallen Old World (harboring Romish Antichrist), an Egyptian England (in bondage to a “hardened, sullen-tempered pharaoh”), and a New Canaan charged “by the design of Heaven” with “the cause of all mankind.”} (SB 121).
Themes: parent country but not acting like a parent; “nopt from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster” (mother to monster; not logical but powerful)

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18.b.
THE CRISIS #1
(Dec 23, 1776)
Thomas Paine
audience, quotes and literary devices within them

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Audience: the Tories rather than the English
“THESE are the times that try men's souls. [off rhyme, alliteration] The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman” (very compressed metaphors)
Panics “are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light”;
“Every Tory is a coward; for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave”;
wanting peace in our time is the same as wishing war to your children;
“if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to ‘bind me in all cases whatsoever’ to his absolute will, am I to suffer it?”;
“There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one”;
“I dwell not upon the vapors of imagination; I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as A, B, C, hold up truth to your eyes”

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18.c.
THE FEDERALIST PAPERS #1
(1787)
Hamilton

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The introduction reflecting on the time of crisis, the test of stabilizing a revolution.
What’s at stake: “Whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
Style of honesty: “Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question.”
The problem: “the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust.”
How the problem manifests: “a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.”

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18.d.
THE FEDERALIST PAPERS #10
(Nov 23, 1787)
James Madison

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The problem: “Our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”
Faction: “A number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Factions cannot be abolished because to do so would abolish liberty. We cannot make everyone agree on everything so we have to learn how to control factions.
#1 cause of factions: the “unequal distribution of property.”
How to control factions (because “neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on”): create a republic rather than a democracy.
THM: go big; “A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.”

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19.a.
"Declaration of Independence"
THOMAS JEFFERSON

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emphasizes, like Franklin, Warren, & Paine, the "long train of abuses & usurpations" &(untill776) America's lengthy patience- "In every stage ofthese oppressions we havepetitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injuries"

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19.b.
NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA
(1781-2)
Thomas Jefferson

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logic of the state as the unit for measuring & cataloguing ecosystems using logic and global information to assess Indian stories “Nature has hidden from us her modus agendi. Our only appeal on such questions is to experience.”; “not to produce a conclusion […] but to justify a suspension of opinion until we are better informed”partially in French long running comparison between Europe & N. America
FN = the sense that the natives didn’t use the landNarrative anxiety: military and Indian threat
preservation and improvement of the races and animals (by extirpating wolves, crows, blackbirds, etc. and quarantining vessels)

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20.0.
Philip Freneau
THM

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Interested in exploring man's nature, w/out the Puritan bias toward theories of depravity, & discovered that man was neither good nor bad by nature but capable of being either.
From his travels- considered the effect of landscape & climate on character, & his political writings show concern for the brutalizing moral effect of aristocratic institutions.
Explored theme of "transiency"

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20.1.
"The Beauties of Santa Cruz"
(1779)
Philip Freneau
THM

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Dwells upon the verdant, fecund island as "haven" from war (American Rev.)
Refrain: "Sweet orange grove, the fairest of the isle,
In thy soft shade luxuriously reclined,
Where, round my fragrant bed, the flowrets smile,
In sweet delusions I deceive my mind.
But Melancholy's glooms assail my breast,
For potent nature reigns despotic there;-A
nation ruined, and a world oppressed,
Might rob the boldest Stoic of a tear"
Tension blw patriotic responsibility & life amidst "potent Nature;" but also criticizes slavery on Santa Cruz

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20.2.
"George the Third's Soliloquy"
(1779)
Philip Freneau
THM

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“Written in the neoclassical mock-epic tradition; presents the king agonizing privately over his military humiliations; a burlesque quality of degradation counterpoints the mock-heroism, as the royal troops turn out to be British felons wishing themselves safe home in jail" (Intro.)
Self-deception- "What mean these dreams, and hideous forms that rise
Night after night, tormenting to my eyes
No real foes these horrid shapes can be,
But thrice as much they vex and torture me"
Worries over France & Spain's support of the Rev.; the actions of the Continental Congress; etc.

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20.3.
"A Picture of the Times, with occasional reflections"
(1782)
Philip Freneau
THM

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Denouncing the concept of monarchy-
"Cursed be the day, how bright soe'er it shined,
That first made kings the masters of mankind;
And cursed the wretch who first with regal pride
Their equal rights to equal men denied;
But cursed, 0'er all, who first to slavery broke,
Submissive bowed, and owned a monarch's yoke:
Hence wrath, and blood, and feuds, and wars began,
And man turned monster to his fellow man"
Imagining an ideal time before monarchy
Pointing to ambition as the cause of monarchy & war: "0 dire ambition!' ..swayed by the madness of the present hour / Lays worlds in ruin for extent of power"

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21.0.
THE CONTRAST
(1787)
Royall Tyler
Basic Characters

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Colonel Manly- fought in the Revolution; Charlotte's brother; falls in love with Maria; patriotic & "sentimental"
Dimple
engaged to Maria, planning to marry Letitia for her money, and keep Charlotte as his mistress; has received "the polish of Europe"
Charlotte- Manly's sister; loves Dimple; friends with Letitia
Letitia- ward of Manly's uncle; also loves Dimple
Jessamy- Dimple's servant; tricks Jonathan the "Yankee" & laughs at his New England manners & speech
Jonathan- the "Yankee;" Colonel Manly's servant
Van Rough- Maria's father

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21.1.
THE CONTRAST
(1787)
Royall Tyler
In Depth: Manly, Dimple, Maria, Charlotte

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Col. Manly, gentleman who claims that America should learn from ancient Greece's mistakes: "the common good was lost in the pursuit of private interest; and that people, who, by uniting, might have stood against the world in arms, by dividing, crumbled into ruin;-- ...what they once were, is all we have left to admire. Oh! that America! Oh! that my country, would in this her day, learn the things which belong to her peace!" (III, 2)
Persona of America Mr. Billy Dimple, good looking and wealthy; micro-manages relationships with Charlotte, Letitia, and Maria at once: Dimple: "Indeed, I cannot see the satisfaction of an intrigue, if one can't have the pleasure of communicating it to our friends" (IV, 1)
Maria: Maria, complaining about having to marry Dimple to Charlotte: "Oh! how sweet it is, when the heart is borne down w/misfortune, to recline & repose on the bosom of friendship! "(IV, 1)
Charlotte: Charlotte arranging her wardrobe around what certain people say is "fashionable" (Manly laments: "in America, the cry is, what is the fashion? and we follow it, indiscriminately, because it is so" (II, 2))

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21.2.
THE CONTRAST
(1787)
Royall Tyler
In Depth: Letitia

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Letitia, possesses monetary wealth but is looking for friendship; Letitia explains how books influenced Maria's disgust w/Dirnple while he was touring Europe: "she read Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa Harlowe, Shenstone, & the Sentimental Journey; and b/w whiles... Billy's letters. But as her taste improved, her love declined. The contrast was so striking betwixt the good sense of her books, and the flimsiness of her love letters,that she discovered she had unthinkingly engaged her hand without her heart; and thenthe whole transaction managed by the old folks, now appeared so unsentimental, and looked so like bargaining for a bale of goods, that she found she ought to have rejected, according to every rule of romance, even the man of her choice, if imposed upon her in that manner"(I, 1)

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21.2.
THE CONTRAST
(1787)
Royall Tyler
Themes and literary devices

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THEMES Economics ("mind the main chance") versus Sentiment Old/New Fashioned Early Republic Propaganda Private versus Public City versus Country Security (national) versus security (goods) Everyone is acting; knowledge/ignorance of fashion, scandal, diction, manners, etc.; the "American gentleman" vs. the man with the "polish of Europe"; patriotism; reading novels/sentimentalism/seduction & seduction narratives; friendship; communication/gossip/scandal
LITERARY DEVICES Restoration Comedy techniques (e.g., listening in the closet) Surprise ending Publicly edifying morals

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22.a.1.
THE ADULATEUR
(1773)
Mercy Otis Warren
Characters, themes, literary devices

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CHARACTERS: Rapatio (Thomas Hutchinson, leader of Tories for a repressive government)- - “I from a scribbling, superficial dabbler, / A vain pretender to each learned science”; Hazelrod (Tory); Brutus (James Otis, leader of a group of patriots)
THEMES: tension; Tory guilt that goes unassuaged and trumped by the chance for fame and fortune; nature; basically: the force of selfish men who locate power in individuals versus selfless men who locate power in sacrifice- - but not print as Michael Warner might argue; passions of the soul v. rapacious desires
LITERARY DEVICES: allegorical - - “Upper Servia” = Boston; nature is a chorus, a barometer of change; a patriotic “burst of joy,” a “warm effusion of an heart that feels / In virtue’s cause. Gods! What a throb of pleasure! / To look around this vast, this crowded hall / And hail them freemen - - what tho’ some have bled, / Unhappy victims- - what tho’ I have wept, / And struggled hard to rescue thee, my country, / This glorious harvest richly compensates / For dangers past- - nature looks gay around me, / And all creation seems to join my joy.” (III.3)

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22.a.2.
THE ADULATEUR
(1773)
Mercy Otis Warren
Questions

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QUESTIONS: How have women have gained access to the public sphere? How have they been "authenticated"? How have they claimed authority? How they have negotiated through identity categories (e.g., blackness and whiteness)? How they have demanded their "natural rights" to reshape concepts of American womanhood, intelligence, and virtue? (from GGC 467)

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22.b.
THE GROUP
(1775)
Mercy Otis Warren
Characters, themes, literary devices

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CHARACTERS: General Sylla (Gen. Thomas Gage); Sylvia (Simple Saplings’s wife); Kate (Hateall’s wife)
THEMES: {political and military hostilities and strife will end when men stop being concerned over their egos and start paying attention to women’s thoughts and feeling.}; venal and spineless government men; choosing self over family; moral corruption; urban values over rural values; corruption over morality; tyranny over godliness; oppression over freedom; England over America; women enslaved to their husbands; in the course of confidential chats among themselves, the Tory leaders reveal the base motives, cowardly fears, & petty rivalries imputed to them by Patriots
LITERARY DEVICES: nature used as a metaphor for political violation, dramatic satire, restoration comedy techniques of naming; traitors are "selling their country"; ends with a "Lady" foreseeing the Patriot victory
QUESTIONS: How have women have gained access to the public sphere? How have they been "authenticated"? How have they claimed authority? How they have negotiated through identity categories (e.g., blackness and whiteness)? How they have demanded their "natural rights" to reshape concepts of American womanhood, intelligence, and virtue? (from GGC 467)

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23.
WIELAND: THE TRANSFORMATION
(1798)
Charles Brockden Brown
Characters, themes, literary devices

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CHARACTERS (from JT 40): {Theodore Weiland, religious man who hears voices and becomes morbidly introspective & has a vision from God to kill his wife and children (which he does) and then breaks out of jail to kill his sister Clara, kills himself; Clara Weiland, who hears voices threatening rape and violence; Catharine Pleyel, married to Weiland; Henry Pleyel, a rationalist, hears voices that his fiancée is dead (she’s alive) and that Clara (whom he love) has betrayed him to another man (she has not); Francis Carwin, a ventriloquist who saves Clara from Theodore and whose biloquism causes Theodore to doubt he heard God’s voice}; Carwin is ultra-cosmopolitan/transnational
THEMES: “an illustration of some important branches of the moral constitution of man”; profanation of “Locke’s principle of the inner voice and Rousseau’s of the inner hand” (JF 238); Carwin tests the age of reason’s faith in reason (JF 238); dissolution of character as proof; “the dark flip side of Franklin’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY” (JF 240) and Jonathan Edwards; anti-Jeffersonian proof that men need to be governed. His writing “destabilizes the epistemological certainties of republican culture” (CHAL 645).
LIT. DEVICES: set a decade before the revolution to position the “transformation” as the historical backdrop preceding the republic (JF 240); to turn the “mechanical horrors of the Gothic novel into something really felt” (FOM 201).

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24.1.
EDGAR HUNTLY
Charles Brockden Brown
Characters, themes, literary devices

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CHARACTERS: Edgar Huntly (who decides his mission in life is to save Clithero & who begins to walk in his sleep & hide Waldegrave’s letters after Weymouth takes his $); Clithero Edny; Mrs. Lorimer (attractive widow benefactress who supports Clithero); Clarice (Lorimer’s niece); Lorimer’s evil twin (her double; she thinks she’ll die when he does; Clithero kills him); Saresfield (Lorimer’s lover whom Huntly encounters after escaping from the forest); Mary Waldegrave (whose brothers grave Huntly visits when he encounter Clithero); Waldegrave (who has secret letters w/ Huntly); Weymouth (who claims that Waldegrave’s $ that he left to Mary is his)
THEMES: “the boundaries and nature of the self are constantly in question” (CHAL 651); identification with one’s demented double to “duplicate the Irishman’s rise from rural poverty” as seen in the three houses he visits - Queen Mab’s hut, a modest farmhouse, and a prosperous abode (CHAL 652). Irrational empathy b/w Huntly & Clithero. As Brown again explores the passions that lie beneath the surface of enlightened reason, he shows how Huntly's fear of the Indians and his latent desire for vengeance are transformed into acts of violent aggression. Randomness throws the characters into tailspins.
LITERARY DEVICES: to turn the “mechanical horrors of the Gothic novel into something really felt” (FOM 201)

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24.2.
EDGAR HUNTLY
Charles Brockden Brown
Ending/THM

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The pompous tone of Saresfield's letter to Huntly that ends the book certainlystresses the social chasm separating Huntly and Saresfield: "You acted in direct opposition to my counsel and to the plainest dictates of propriety. Be more circumspect and more obsequious for the future.... May this be the last arrow in the quiver of adversity! Farewell"When Huntly claims that he has acted by the impulse of "powerful benevolence," he is aping the rhetoric of the emerging benevolent empire in America, which Brown saw replacing the ideal of social equality with a system of charitable organizations to keep the poor indebted and confined. Brown's novel. suggests that without being aware of his own deeper motives, Huntly sides with Clithero against the privileged Saresfields.Just as he has taken his revenge upon the Indians for depriving him of his parents, he joins with Clithero in bitter resentment over their economic deprivation.

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25.
THE SKETCH BOOK
(1819)
Washington Irving
Main themes

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anxiety over "genius," his own artistic creativity
change/mutability
memory/immortality
America vs. England

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26.
THE COQUETTE
Hannah Foster
Characters, themes, literary devices

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Eliza Wharton- main character; seduced by Sanford, dies after giving birth to a stillborn
Major Sanford- seduces Eliza while he is married; marries for money; a "rake"
Rev. Boyer- asks Eliza to marry, but rejects her after imagining that she loves Sanford
Lucy Freeman Sumner- Eliza's best friend; gets married near the middle of the novel
General & Mrs. Richman- Eliza's friends; she stays with them in the beginning
Julia Granby- visits Eliza, warns her against Sanford; Eliza's confidant at the end
THEMES: women are man’s inevitable dupe and prey (NB 51); a seduction novel
LITERARY DEVICES

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27.
THE PIONEERS
(1824)
James Fenimore Cooper
Characters, themes, literary devices

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CHARACTERS: Oliver Effingham, Episcopalian married to Elizabeth Temple, a Quaker; Templeton Hall, made of a “composite order”; Judge Temple; Chingachgook; Natty Bumpo; John Mohegan (Christian Indian)
THEMES: “how people of disparate backgrounds can coexist peacefully in the new nation” (JT 108). Convenience over strife; free country; newness; law enforcement; natural law v. man-made law (“The laws alone remove us from the condition of savages”); waste (Natty protesting the hunts and clearings). Mysteries/secrets: connection b/w Oliver, Natty & John Mohegan; Last-minute rescues
LITERARY DEVICES: detailed descriptions of the land, frequent mentions of the revolution; America as melting pot (variety of religious beliefs and nations represented in Templeton).

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28.
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS
(1826)
James Fenimore Cooper
Characters, themes, literary devices

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CHARACTERS (SN): Hawkeye, aka Natty Bumppo, “a man without a cross”; Magua, the novel’s villain, a cunning Huron aka Le Renard Subtil; Major Duncan Heyward, a young American colonist; Uncas, Chingachgook’s son, the ;ast of the Mohicans, noble, proud, self-possessed, falls in love with Cora Munro, suffers tragic consequences for desiring a forbidden interracial coupling, thwarts the evil Magua’s desire to marry Cora, functions as Hawkeye’s surrogate son; David Gamut, young Calvinist attempting to carry Christianity to the frontier through the power of song (ridiculously out of place in the wilderness); Chingachgook, one of two surviving members of the Mohican tribe; Cora Munro, Colonel Munro’s eldest daughter whose dark complexion derives from her mother’s “Negro” background; Alice Munroe, Cora’s half-sister; Colonel Munro, the commander of the British at Ft William Henry.
THEMES: endless rescuing; fear of anarchy; the pale-faced English reeking havoc on the world through creating half-breed types like Cora and Magua, whose mixed-race, alcoholism would never had occurred but for trading Brits. Cultural Miscegenation & the “harmony of warfare” (XIX).
LITERARY DEVICES: “Thought is articulated as the interaction among kinds and classes of men” (JT 106), i.e., stereotypes.

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29.
HOPE LESLIE
Catharine Sedgwick
Characters, themes, literary devices

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CHARACTERS: Hope Leslie- the colonial heroine
Everell Fletcher- her "adopted" brother, later husband
Magawisca- the Native American heroine--saves Hope & Everell from Pequot attacks
Sir Philip- the villain who tries to kidnap Hope; pretends to be a Puritan
Esther Downing- Hope's friend, a niece of Governor Winthrop
Governor Winthrop
THEMES: woman protagonists who have heroic capacities; this novel trying to sacrilize the land- the land had been used/lived on by Indians; the novelborrowing native ritual & involving white people in the sacralization of the land to connect the white people to the land; fear of miscegenation
LITERARY DEVICES: anachronisms- Magawisca echoing of Patrick Henry-"I demand of thee death or liberty”; punning on "hope"

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30.0.
William Cullen Bryant
Person & themes

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-Trained in Greek and Latin
Was taught a harsh Calvinism that held that the Fall of Adam and Eve had brought about the Fall of Nature as well
Influenced by the melancholy and sometimes scarifying meditations of the British "graveyard poets" of the previous decades, such as Thomas Gray ("Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"), etc.;
Wordsworth's near-pantheistic view of nature in Lyrical Ballads
Imitated the romantic tradition of 19th c. writing-also relates to the Puritan and neoclassical traditions from which it emerged
Influenced by painting
THEMES: emerged from his rural experiences & were those of the romantic poets in Eng. lit.: nature, mutability, death, poetry, & the self; nature- as subject of description and as source of insight, as a point of comparison for human growth, and as a revelation of God; landscape- the Berkshires: forests, rivers, mountains, & the seasons; also the prairies; the "language" of nature

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30.1.a.
poems
William Cullen Bryant

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"TO A WATERFOWL" (1815): "He who, from zone to zone,/ Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,/ In the long way that I must tread alone,/ Will lead my steps aright" (last stanza); God connects speaker & waterfowl- guiding them both; apostrophizing the bird- poetry is a universal language; traces bird's journey away from the threatening fowler toward its friends. "THANATOPSIS" (1817) (means "meditation on death"): Nondoctrinally meditative effort to accept mortality in rational rather than religious terms: e.g.- death reunites people with others who have died; the 1821version concludes with a fervent injunction to trust in something/someone: B' s Calvinistic earnestness outlives his commitment to particular doctrines; "To him who in the love of Nature holds/ Communion with her visible forms, she speaks/ A various language"; death as path toward decomposition and human mingling w/ the earth; describing death as a comforting sleep "THE PRAIRIES" (1832): "These are the gardens of the Desert" (1) "The great heavens/ Seem to stoop down upon the scene in love,--/ A nearer vault, and of a tenderer blue,/Than that which bends above our Eastern hills" (31-4); references "mound-builders" & the dead; imagine that Indians destroyed these builders; the "vanishing Indian"; “The red-man, too,/ Has left the blooming wilds he ranged so long,/ And, nearer to the Rocky Mountains, sought/ A wilder hunting-ground"

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33.
A New Home, Who’ll Follow
(1840)
Caroline Kirkland
Characters/stories/themes, THM

Back 74

STORIES: Narrator (pseudonym Mary Clavers); the Danforth’s with whom they stay.
Henry Beckworth (whose beckoning to Agnes is worthwhile); Agnes, who Henry loves though she marries and widows repeatedly always while he’s away; Job Jephson, the man who delays Henry (the Job element of the Henry story-within-a-story demonstrates the Old Testament nature of this text, the patience one must have on the frontier in order to make it- - compare w/Uncle Tom’s Cabin which is purely New Testament love).
Everard and Cora: romantic youth who flee New York to wander through the woods; always silently looking back as they become rural folks
***Simeon Jenkins: a man who minds the main chance of drinking, gambling, tobacco and politics, who represents the economics and shallow intelligence (but local flair and native genius) of democracy.
Hannah Parsons and Cyrus Whicher : a Hester Prynne/Dimmesdale couple of sorts though he becomes a “patriot” bandit rather than face the pregnant Hannah.
THM: part of the women of the republic model of moderately conservative narratives that demonstrate how a nation stabilizes the middle class, i.e., through toughening up through a little privation and abstinence, moving west, and settling the wilderness. Yet the narratives are also slightly more romantic, of a local-color/slice-of-life genre, thus slightly more experimental in form, akin to Hawthorne’s stories, thus not entirely shaped with an aim in mind.

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34.1
Ralph Waldo Emerson
THM

Back 75

THM: there is a discrepancy between the world of facts and the world that humans think; indirection; how to reconcile the individual with society; flow of reality; read each fact for its spiritual meaning; adjusting the balance between society and solitude; words are signs of natural facts and natural facts are signs of spiritual facts; not tragic because always seeking reconciliation (FOM 184). Heavily influenced by Carlyle whose own THM is: history is made present & the universal is in the local.

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34.2
Transcendentalism
THM

Back 76

THM: “romanticism in a Puritan setting” (FOM 104); Andrew Jackson metaphysics; Emerson = education to attain intuition; Democratic Vistas = nature’s laws in the city, perpetuation; Thoreau = nature’s laws all by the self

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39a.
"Resistance to Civil Government"
(1849)
Thoreau
Themes and literary devices

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THEMES: 1. "that government is best which governs not at all" but are we prepared for this??? 2. Quality not quantity-- individual appeal not mass appeal 3. what's more free, to reject the state or go berry picking? LITERARY DEVICES: 1. Reverse logarithm logic-- 1,000, 100, 10 honest men, "aye, if one HONEST man, in this State of Mass., ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor [sic], it would be the abolition of slavery in America." 2. Irony of writing: just a document

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39e.
"Ktaadn"
(1846)
Thoreau
Characters, themes, & literary device

Back 78

CHARACTERS: McCauslin, Uncle George
THEMES: 1. Burkean sublime & otherness of nature-- "Talk of mysteries!--Think of our life in nature,--daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it--rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?" 2. Rural versus Urban; Nature versus Civilization
LITERARY DEVICE: Apostrophic moments in linear narrative

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41.k.
"Ichabod"
(1850)
John Greenleaf Whittier

Back 79

an attack on Daniel Webster, whose championing of the Fugitive Slave Bill (part of the Compromise of 1850 that said that Northern states must return runaway slaves caught w/in their borders) made him anathema to the abolitionists
discourse of "heaven," "angels," "Satan," etc.
expresses intense frustration & disappointment in Webster's decision to back the bill-
calls for pity & mourning over Webster, rather than anger
Ichabod = the glory is departed from Israel / inglorious
uses the line “Forevermore!”
from those great eyes
The soul has fled:
When faith is lost, when honor dies,
The man is dead!
Then, pay the reverence of old days
To his dead fame;
Walk backward, with averted gaze,
And hide the shame!

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42.i.
"Sonnet -- To Science"
(1829, 1845)
Edgar Allan Poe

Back 80

Built on the Romantic commonplace that the scientific spirit destroys beauty, a notion exemplified by Wordsworth's "The Tables Turned" and by Keats's "Lamia" ("Philosophy will clip an angel's wings")
sonnet form- strict rhyme scheme, seemingly self-enclosed
"Science! meet daughter of old Time thou art/ Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes!"- both time and science inflict change
- poetry vs. science- the speaker asks science "Why prey'st thou thus upon the poet's heart,/Vulture! whose wings are dull realities!"
- mythology- references to Diana, Naiads, etc.(see Milton's "Nativity Ode")- science has driven out these (here Romanticized) figures
-dreams- "science" has taken from the speaker "the summer dream beneath the shrubbery" suggests that science, in some way, has caused the speaker loss- science as antithetical to imaginationTHM: science is portrayed as evil. Poe uses words like "preyest," "Vulture," and "torn," to describe science's impact on mankind. Poe does not see science and scientific development as a good thing; rather he feels that science "alterest all things with thy peering eyes." (http://www.usna.edu/

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EnglishDept/poeperplex/sonnet.htm)

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42.l.
"To Helen"
(1831, 1845)
Edgar Allan Poe
Scansion Factoid

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"Helen, thy beauty is to me/ Like those Nicean barks of yore,! That gently, 0'er a perfumed sea,/ The weary, way-worn wanderer bore/ To his own native shore"
journeying- "weary, way-worn wanderer"
for the speaker, Helen evokes "the glory that was Greece,! And the grandeur that was Rome"
Psyche- goddess of the soul (Poe uses the word "soul" frequently in his poems and stories see Emerson)
SCANSION FACTOID: trochaic substitution is frequently used in iambic lines, often at the beginning:
HELen, thy BEAUty IS to ME
LIKE those NICEan BARKS of YORE

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Each of these first two lines of Poe's "To Helen" begins with a trochaic substitution; the poem goes on in perfect iambic tetrameter lines until the pattern ruptures again with the two key lines that end the second stanza: "TO the GLORY THAT was GREECE / AND the GRANDEUR THAT was ROME."

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42.ff.
"Ligeia"
(1838, 1845)
Edgar Allan Poe

Back 84

epigraph to the tale- fabricated to fit the desired effect; Glanvill (1636-1680) was a Cambridge Platonist ( 17th c. English religious philosophers) who tried to reconcile Christianity & Renaissance science
1st-person narrator: "my memory is feeble through much suffering"
"Ligeia! Buried in studies of a nature, more than all else, adapted to deaden the impressions of the outward world, it is by that sweet word alone-by Ligeia, that I being before mine eyes in fancy the image of her who is no more"
L compared to goddesses; the narrator dwells obsessively on her face, eyes
inadequate language- "Ah, word of no meaning!;" "Words are impotent to convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which L wrestled with the dark shadow"
iIIness/opium/madness- L and Rowena fall ill and die; narrator addicted to opium; claims that, during her illness, R's "reason seemed fast tottering from her throne;" immediately before the narrator beholds L/R revived, explains, "there was a mad disorder in my thoughts-a tumult unappeasable"
knowledge- Ligeia very knowledgeable; unknown, secretive
houses, chambers as representative of the psyche- L made her "way into my heart by paces so steadily and stealthily progressive that they have been unnoticed & unknown"

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42.hh.
"The Fall of the House of Usher"
(1839, 1845)
Edgar Allan Poe

Back 85

crossing of borders and thresholds that brings the narrator into the "perverse world of Roderick and Madeline
doubling throughout
family/house/incest- P creates confusion between the living things and inanimate objects by doubling the physical house of Usher with the genetic family line of the Usher family, which he refers to as the house of Usher; employs the word "house" metaphorically, but also describes a real house; not only does the narrator get trapped inside the mansion, but we learn also that this confinement describes the biological fate of the Usher family- the family has noenduring branches, so all genetic transmission has occurred incestuously within the domain of the house
"tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne" - exact phrase in "Ligeia"

Front 86

42.ii.
"William Wilson"
(1839, 1845)
Edgar Allan Poe

Back 86

January 19 is P's own birthday as well as WW's- identity/naming- "Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation" - doubling- "WW" is Poe's most sustained character study of the doppelganger
"William Wilson" anticipates the major theories of Freud; P's notion of the rivalrous double predates Freud's concept ofthe repressed, unconscious alter ego by at least half a century- like Freud, Poe associates the alter ego with a universal psychological condition, unaffected by specifics of time or place- WW's double follows him across Europe and from childhood into adulthood
death/sympathy- "Death approaches; and the shadow which foreruns him has thrown a softening influence over my spirit. I long, in passing through the dim valley, for the sympathy--I had nearly said for the pity-of my fellowmen"
family- "I have come of a race whose imaginative and easily excitable temperament has at all times rendered them remarkable"
masquerade- disguise, identity; it is at a masquerade party that Wilson-narrator kills the other Wilson while ultimately killing himself; then sees a mirror instead of the other Wilson

Front 87

42.jj.
"The Man of the Crowd"
(1840, 1845)
Edgar Allan Poe

Back 87

Part of a tradition of stories about mysterious strangers; also drawing upon the legend of the Wandering Jew, who refused to let Jesus rest outside his house & whom Jesus punished by dooming him to wander the earth until the Second Coming
"It was well said of a certain German book that ... it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told" [see Hawthorne's Seven Gables]
spectating narrator mentally organizing the crowd according to their presumed class/job (according to their clothing and manners)- trying to bring order to the seeming chaos of faces- to stave off fear?
variety of kinds of people [see de Crevecoeur]
the individual in the crowd; the narrator pursuing a man with an "idiosyncratic expression" "to know more of him"
"This old man, I said at length, is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. it will be vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds"

Front 88

42.oo.
"The Gold-Bug"
(1843)
Edgar Allan Poe

Back 88

CHARACTERS: William Legrand who goes mad after finding and being bitten by a bug thought to be made of pure gold; Jupiter, his African American servant; pirate “Captain Kidd”
LOCATION: Sullivan's Island in South Carolina
TRANSLATED CRYPTOGRAPH: A good glass in the bishop's hostel in the devil's seat / forty-one degrees and thirteen minutes northeast and by north / main branch seventh limb east side shoot from the left eye of the death's-head /a bee line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.THEME: a mockery of transcendentalist attempts to read nature? Or a celebration suggesting that a perfect reading that is exquisitely translated and obeyed to a ‘T’ produces $14 million in gold.

Front 89

42.qq.
"The Purloined Letter"
(1844, 1845)
Edgar Allan Poe

Back 89

Concerned with text as power- "With the employment [of the letter] the power departs"; in investigations, one must cultivate "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent"- hidden in plain sight- according to Dupin, "the over-largely lettered signs and placards of thestreet, escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious"
"Purloined Letter" redefines the mystery genre-turns away from action toward intellectual analysis; focuses more on the relationship between the Paris police and Dupin, between the ineffectual established order and the savvy private eye
the action, relayed by flashbacks, takes place outside the narrative frame; the narrative itself is told through dispassionate analysis- Dupin and the Minister are more doubles than opposites; the revenge aspect of the story, which Dupin promises after the Minister offends him in Vienna, perhaps derives from their threatening similarity

Front 90

42.vv.
"The Philosophy of Composition"
(1846)
Edgar Allan Poe

Back 90

P campaigned for deliberate artistry rather than uncontrolled effusions [contra Bryant]
"Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents,& esp. the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention" ("the end, where all works of art should begin")
stresses "effect," "originality": "It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition-that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem"-stress on organization, order [see "Man of the Crowd"]
in a poem, one must have 1) unity of impression (read in one sitting); 2) choice of impression/effect ("Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem"); 3) tone ("melancholy is ... the most legitimate of all the poetical tones); 4) "pivot upon which the whole structure might turn"- "variation of the application of the refrain"
"it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring from direct causes"; "it is the excess of the suggested meaning-it is the rendering this the upper instead of the undercurrent of the theme, which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind) the so called poetry of the so called transcendentalists"

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43.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
THM, style, slavery quote, Bercovitch’s theory

Back 91

THM: dealing with the tragic effects of the mystical (transcendental) world’s isolation from an expanding, industrializing nation
deep historical consciousness composed of images; social isolation = innate depravity; “Puritanic gloom” (FOM 190); isolated individual has “a cold inability to respond to ordinary life” (228)
STYLE: finding where the actual and the imaginary meet
SLAVERY QUOTE: he urged Charles Sumner to “let slavery alone for a little while.”
BERCOVITCH’S THEORY: “By temperament he was not a Jeremiah. He was too much of an ironist to adopt outright the Puritan mode of ambiguity, too good a historian wholly to espouse the American teleology, too concerned with personal relations to entertain the claims of American self” (SB 205)

Front 92

43.f.
"The Maypole of Merry-Mount"
(1836)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Characters, themes, literary devices, THM

Back 92

CHARACTERS: Edgar & Edith (half Eden, Half Eve); Endicott
THEMES (from Wikipedia): the social tension caused by the Puritans in early America. Endicott and his Puritan followers suppress freedom and individuality; "jollity" and "gloom" are said to be contending for an empire; Hawthorne chose to use "jollity", "mirth" and "gloom" and not "joy" or "woe" or "sadness." Real joy, Hawthorne seems to be saying, arises spontaneously out of contrasts. The only time he mentions it is when the youth and maiden suddenly realize that their mirth is visionary and that by truly loving they had subjected themselves "to earth's doom of care and sorrow, and troubled joy, and had no more a home at Merry Moun.t"
LITERARY DEVICES: personification of nature (like Taylor’s personification of values and Robert Frost to some extent- - West Running Brook); allusive blend- - half classical, half barbaric.
THM: Hybridity; the apex of joy (marriage of lovers) ushers in a new existence full of responsibility; the confluence of passion and reason

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43.j.
"The Artist of the Beautiful"
(1844)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Characters, themes, literary devices

Back 93

CHARACTERS: Peter Hovendon; Annie, his daughter; Owen Warland, Holgrave-like watchmaker furiously at work on something new, imitates nature, peculiar, microscopically minded, afraid of steam engines for their size (compare to Henry Adams), cares “no more for the measurement of time than if it had been merged into eternity,” renders “the harsh dissonances of life” more “tuneful,” socially outcast by the respectable people who don’t like time to be anything other than commerce or heavenly, in love with Annie; Robert Danforth (Puritan-name, i.e., Samuel Danforth), a blacksmith
THEMES: iron (reality) versus gold (ideality); gossiping/overhearing; raw strength versus delicate ingenuity / labor v. intellectual work; science and manual dexterity paralleled to spirituality and force; perpetual motion; the valuable versus the practical; social anxiety; “plain style” (compare to William Bradford) versus the beautiful; the “spiritualization of matter”; melodrama of secrets; the Sisyphean nature of art; common sense; loving life is freedom but loving an object of life is anxious (compare to woman’s fiction,” especially because “iron” gets affiliated with domesticity - - puritans = the domestic; Annie becomes like a protagonist in woman’s fiction); domesticity becomes the beautiful through the creation of babies; scorn for artists; artists scorn for the public; the paucity of symbols to an artist.

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43.k.
"Rappaccini's Daughter"
(1844)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Characters, themes, literary devices

Back 94

CHARACTERS: Giovanni Guasconti, visiting student; Signor Giacomo Rappaccini, the famous Doctor; Beatrice, his daughter; Signor Pietro Baglioni, competing professor.
THEMES: the father cares “infinitely more for science that for mankind” and “would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest, or whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard seed to the great heap of accumulated knowledge”; possible to read the Paduan town as “the north” (Giovanni is a called a southerner). In this north, they drink “lachryma” and study life (but do not live it?); the garden is the austere abolitionist community were all looks rosy but is full of poisonous feelings toward nature as it is actually free (little lizards, flying bugs, and flowers die in this garden). But equally the garden becomes the gothic, timeless south that has escaped the competition that fuels the north; the garden changes depending on one’s location. Inside, the plants are experiments like the interracial production of southern slaves, positioning Rappaccini as Jeffersonian in his inventive detachment (“all men are created equal”). We must recall that Hawthorne was very hesitant about abolition. Ultimately, this story presents healthy systems that become poisonous when interwoven, so malevolent that even the shared Christian symbolism is worthless.
LITERARY DEVICES: allusions to Dante throughout.

Front 95

43.l.
"Ethan Brand"
(1850)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Characters, theme, literary devices

Back 95

CHARACTERS: Bartram, narrator, a lime-maker; Ethan Brand, he who went searching for the unpardonable sin and found it in his heart; Three Worthies: Lawyer Giles (a lawyer/soap manufacturer, fragment of a human being), stage-agent, savagely-drunk doctor; a German Jew w/ dioramas.
THEMES: the consequences of yielding to pride, the triumph over the sense of brotherhood -- what happens when “the cultivation of the brain eats out the heart” (Melville -FOM 345)

Front 96

44.
THE SCARLET LETTER
(1850)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Characters, themes, literary devices

Back 96

CHARACTERS: Hester Pryne - - good that has been wasted, Arthur Dimmesdale - - a Jonathan Edwards-type minister (ahead of his time), indecisive & full of anguish but capable of rousing the emotions; Chillingsworth - - physician who can read mens’ souls (a transcendentalist?), Pearl, the freedom of a broken law.
THEMES: sins of passion versus sins of principle; a purgatorial course; typology on the cope of heaven (A) is actually just diseased imagination though (Winthrop does die)
LITERARY DEVICES: symmetrical plot built around 3 scaffold scenes; multiple choice - was there an A? why? (FOM 276); opens with a scene of the sepulchers of the father - - allusion to Emerson’s nature - - followed by a reference to Anne Hutchinson who may have smelled a rose outside the prison - - a comment on how nature gets moralized, symbolized and represented but not spiritualized.

Front 97

45.1
THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES
(1851)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Characters, Preface

Back 97

CHARACTERS: Hepzibah Pyncheon “embodiment of decayed gentility” (FOM 324); Clifford, Hepzibah’s brother, is a tragic victim of fate; Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, whose alluring smile hides a cruel soul; Holgrave & Phoebe Pyncheon: Within the novel’s morally ambiguous maelstrom, Phoebe emerges as a voice of reason. Holgrave makes the mistake of thinking he can read her like a book and is subsequently forced to retract this condescending view (SN); Colonel Pyncheon (who represents European aristocratic views of property); Matthew Maule (younger and older)- - older Maule represents the Locke’s view of property as produced through labor (WBM 92).
Holgrave: half anarchist (class-conscious radical) who wants to rip America to pieces and half hero who marries into the Puritan clan, joins the consensus (SB 206). Holgrave, “who inveighs against all property” (WBM 96)
PREFACE: readers: do not try to “assign an actual locality to the imaginary events.” Is Hawthorne trying to avoid the social responsibilities of the novel or “to provide in its radical fictionality a revolutionary alternative to the social conservatism of the novel” (WBM 87)? The departure from the real means a departure from real estate, from property.

Front 98

45.2
THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES
(1851)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Key scene, themes

Back 98

KEY SCENES: Phoebe and Clifford watching the Italian boy with his barrel organ and monkey, replicating Keats’ Urn but Americanized and rendered tragic (rather than romantic); “It might so fascinate him that he would hardly be restrained from plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies. […] a deep, deep plunge into the ocean of human life, and to sink down and be covered by its profoundness, and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated, restored to the world and to himself.”
THEMES: history as heredity and descent; Pyncheon family v. rising democracy; aristocracy merging into the great mass of humanity; the economics of witchcraft charges; sewing anew the seeds of evil; trying to find “the amount of human nature contained in ancient superstitions” (FOM 205).

Front 99

47.1
MOBY-DICK
(1851)
Herman Melville
Stylistic THM, genre

Back 99

Stylistic THM: images of nature and work replicate mental experiences and show the eternal nature of each individual; “relaxed deliciousness of imagery [haunted by symbols of] dread” (FOM 125); heightened reality - “more reality than real life can show”; nature unfettered.
GENRE: reality fiction -- the evocation of immediacy + Homeric universalism - symbols subordinate to concrete expression to fend off abstraction

Front 100

47.2
MOBY-DICK
(1851)
Herman Melville
Themes

Back 100

THEMES: civilization is no better than missionary work - ruinous capitalism; an effort to unmask “his age” (376); full entrance into a range of possible experiences (inversion of Hawthorne’s multiple choice); how can we obey nature?; “Then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into the blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul”; “the tragedy of extreme individualism, the disasters of the selfish will” (656); calm is the “fragile envelope of storm” (289)

Front 101

48.
PIERRE
(1852)
Herman Melville
Characters, themes

Back 101

CHARACTERS: Pierre Glendinning, 19, grandson of a revolutionary war general (Hamlet); Lucy (Ophelia); Reverend Falsgrave (Polonius); Charlie Millthorpe (Horatio); Glen Stanly (Laertes); Mary G. (Gertrude); Isabel
THEMES: following impulses like Ahab but without malice; “The heart! The heart! ‘tis God’s anointed; let me pursue the heart!”; the end of the bloodline is not replaced (as in Shakespeare) (FOM 474, 477-8)
Horological: absolute time
Chronometrial: relative time

Front 102

48.
PIERRE
(1852)
Herman Melville
Literary devices, THM, genre

Back 102

LITERARY DEVICES: pamphlet “Chronometricals and Horologicals” (there is no transcendental correspondence)
THM: “There is an optical illusion in every person we meet…The individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new and very unlike what he promised himself.” (Emerson, “Experience”); “the necessity and the difficulty for art to portray the bewildering contradictions of the spirit” (FOM 314). Creating an American Hamlet who acts decisively and w/o meditation.
GENRE: psychological chaos (FOM 474)

Front 103

51.
THE WIDE, WIDE WORLD
(1850)
Susan Warner
Characters, themes, literary devices

Back 103

CHARACTERS: Ellen Montgomery, “the genre’s most submissive heroine” (NB xxxix); Aunt Fortune, a middle-aged spinster; fashionable Mrs. Dunscombe; Alice Humphreys, a young neighbor who lives with her father, a minister, dies; Elliott, Scottish relatives
THEMES: national pride (republicanism in a monarchical world) recapitulated on the level of national history and the domestic sphere (where the notion of the consent of the governed factors into domestic squabbles); female linked to child, i.e., dependent, thus limiting the revolutionary potential - - anti-revolutionary/pro-stability of a revolutionary national form; power and the lack of it; “taking pleasure where it is found” (NB 145); “to negotiate without being destroyed by the powerful unjust” (NB 145). Marriage: “the means of establishing a family that is not a biological unit but a community of loving adults assembled under one roof” (NB 149); Freedom: “being left alone, protected and comfortable, to pursue one’s own interests” (NB 150); Job-like trials of faith” (JT xvii).
LITERARY DEVICES: opening scene like Poe’s “A Man in the Crowd” (which is a complete misreading of the text in which literary form is massively subordinate to aim. i.e., national form - - republicanism); lachrymosity

Front 104

52.
RUTH HALL
(1855)
Fanny Fern
Characters, themes, literary devices

Back 104

CHARACTERS: Ruth and Harry, Dr. Zekiel Hall and Mrs. Hall, Floy, John Walter
THEMES: Decision Making v. Deliberation, Bitch mother-in-law, generational power, marriage as prison, community of (& because of) writers
LITERARY DEVICES: 3rd person, novel, sentiment, Dickensian, Epistolary

Front 105

53.
UNCLE TOM'S CABIN
(1852)
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Characters, themes, TH quote, literary devices

Back 105

CHARACTERS: Little Eva; Eliza; Topsy; Miss Ophelial St. Claie; Tom; Simon Legree; Eliza & George Harris; George Shelby (good Master George who comes for Tom); Cassy & Emmeline (who do the haunting)
THEMES: separation of families; sudden bursts of feeling, redemption as the changing of hearts one at a time, tears to produce grace; slavery is not the cause - - not feeling a certain sympathy is the cause of suffering - - slavery is the symptom; history and laws subordinated to eternal truths; men are peripheral - - women are central; the bourgeois slave owners more horrifying than the aristocratic (WBM 104); slavery is a despotism
“O, Topsy, poor child, I love you!” said Eva, with a sudden burst of feeling….
LITERARY DEVICES: mythmaking that puts women at the center of power (JT 125); sermonesque; redefining power; Little Eva’s death martyr-like; conversion of Topsy; a reenactment of the same biblical dramas re-embodied in “stereotypical” characters - - a repetition, not a new narrative arising from idiosyncratic character decisions (like THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY) (JT 134). A plot that is not Aristotelian probability but design. Hortatory address of the readership; a jeremiad of middle-class women (JT 141). A middle-class female mothering utopia novel (JT 141).