Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20021

Day 1 January 7, 2002

1. Names. Introductions. Syllabus. This class as both a thematic course and a kind of "second time through" American lit, alongside Survey with some minor overlaps. Pass out handouts: Rowlandson, Filson, Franklin, for Wed., Jacobs and Douglas for Friday, then into Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick.

Some words on journals. For first one, send it to me at gundyj@bluffton.edu; use your preferred email account. I'll put all those addresses together and make a list; starting Friday, send your journal around to the whole list.

2. On Campbell's "monomyth": the kingdom is in danger, so a man goes on a journey, undergoes trials, struggles with the forces of evil, overcomes them, returns triumphantly with the gift that will save the community.

"Real world" questions/problems re Campbell:

How is the quest defined?

How is the hero chosen?

How does he/she relate to the community afterward? What if the hero is unsuited to boring middle-class life after the big adventure?

What about those "forces of evil"? What if they turn out to be human beings, not incarnations of the powers of darkness?

Whose experience does the Campbell version of the myth leave out or distort? Women, native Americans, blacks?

3. What other myths of heroes? Jesus? John Wayne? Rambo? Rocky? Luke Skywalker? Dennis Quaid in Independence Day? Shane? Frodo? Harry Potter? What qualities do they share? "Ordinary," yet special. Their secret nobility revealed after a period of obscurity and/or persecution. ("Maybe I'm a king!") The need for a quest, a journey, and to overcome evil by violence without becoming entirely subsumed in violence (putting on the Ring, going over to the Dark Side).

Questions/problems: hero's relation to society and to God/the gods: where does he fit? What are his qualities? Competence, skill in warfare, self-sacrifice?

Further question: heroes, of course, are supposed to triumph. But what when they don't? Tragic heroes in Shakespeare, in Greek drama, etc. What such in U.S.? Oedipus: Stafford writes "First he won so well he lost; then he lost so well he won."

Things going so badly wrong only the merest shreds can be salvaged?

How real are these myths? How do they relate to actual life?

What psychological needs do they serve?

How do the myths exist, persist or become transformed in American writing?

What do the particulars of American history and geography do to myths?

How do conscious literary artists remake or transform or parody them?

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20022

Day 2 January 9, 2002

1. Names. 3 days for SL, durn it, but so it goes. Skim Custom House sketch, focus on stuff about Hawthorne, writing, find the letter, less on descriptions of people there.

Note that I'll put my notes, which many times include batches of stuff that I don't get said in class, on the class web site periodically, esp. so that you can consult them while working on exams. Note also plans to get Kari involved in this class, esp. in developing a web site with resources on authors and themes. If you come up with such, please let me know.

2. Thanks for journals, which were very interesting and a good start. I had 10 of 13 by 11:00. I'll compile a group list this afternoon or tomorrow morning, send everybody a message. Send me your address asap if you didn't get one done for today.

Three rather different versions of the American Hero for today. I want to think with you about their qualities as "heroes," maybe more deeply than most of the journals did.

Talk about captivity narrative, views of nature and the wilderness and the other, Promised Land vs. Howling Wilderness. The Errand into the Wilderness. A man went on a journey.

The captivity narrative. Slotkin: "A single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God." (94) Note the mythic character of the narrative: ease/fall/testing/return. Note also that being forcibly carried into it was just about the only way for a woman to encounter the wilderness.

Slotkin says that bondage to the Indian is representative of the bondage of the spirit to the flesh and of the self-exile of the Pilgrims from England. The temptation to Indian marriage and "devilish" cannibal Eucharist had to be resisted; the ultimate return to community is akin to conversion. He also says the last passage about wishing for affliction shows fear of "the double-edged promise of the New World: the opulent rewards, which might make the spirit too secure and unready for the test, and the freedom from artificial restraints, which placed the whole weight of responsibility for the maintenance of virtue in thought and action on the lonely individual" (104).

Do you understand why this was popular? We love to hear about the sufferings of others, don't we, esp. women and children, esp. coupled with clear and not too threatening moral teachings? Cf. the spate of recent woman-as-victim TV movies?

She has an attractive style, I think, quite readable compared to many others of her time, a blend of vivid physical description and moral concern.

How does Rowlandson fit into Campbell's stages? She does go on an errand and return, though her heroism is mainly in surviving, not in taking some dramatic action as we typically expect from heroes. She's more Martyr than anything, hmm? Does she ever become "well adjusted" in the modern sense, in Pearson's sense? She doesn't even think of thinking in those categories.

3. What about Filson's version of Boon? The hunter, the pioneer, the breaker of the wilderness; not at ease within society, he must go out into the wild, learn from it, master it, and return. Note that the style here is almost entirely artificial in its smooth, bland, effete lyricism: Boon himself wrote things like "kilt a bar" on trees, mostly. And the motive is not disinterested--he wants to sell real estate in Kentucky, persuade people it's now safe to settle there.

Filson/Boon. His "errand into the wilderness" is less piously (personally) motivated than the Puritans'; consider the opening paragraph, which argues that whatever we do will further God's designs, regardless. It also assumes rather cavalierly that God is on his/our side, hmm? And on the side of cities and farms, vs. stinking wigwams and hunter/gatherers. Not much sense of Noble Savages there, hmm?

Boon seems partly interested in settlement, partly in just having a good old time with his buddies in the woods. The scene where suddenly the Indians break in upon them, they're abruptly captured: that primal American sense that we may at any moment be set upon by hostile strangers? That we must always be on our guard? (r)MDIT>>Deliverance(r)MDNM>>, the James Dickey novel, where the hero is an ordinary Joe who has to kill a murderous hillbilly with a bow and arrow to win his manhood.

Boon's stripped of all civilized trappings, including companions, except his gun, which is his main mode of relating to the wilderness, hmm? Another primary American scene, when he triumphs over the temptation to Puritan melancholy and self-doubt by killing the buck and feasting on it, looking out over the Ohio valley. The sense there of primal innocence and happiness and satisfaction, moment of romantic nature-worship: "It just doesn't get any better than this." In the beer commercials of course there are male companions, but often no women. (Unless the Swedish bikini team drops in.) But this moment is punctured, and Boon enters a round of battles, captures, escapes, trials, victories and losses in which that initial simplicity and calm become very quickly only a nostalgic dream. He does open the land, of course, he drives the Indians out, he wins; we're all living out the "happily ever after . . ."

What about the Indians in these stories? In Filson they're less purely brutes, after that opening invocation, than in Rowlandson; they are worthy opponents/captors/teachers, sometimes violent but not entirely inhuman, not merely demonic; still they are the enemy. Boon as "Instrument ordained to settle the wilderness": the sense of divine backing is crucial, of course, to American experience. Manifest destiny, God on our side, and all the rest. One major gap still remaining in this course is a first-person Indian voice from this time period; I regret that, but I haven't found one yet.

Note, too, that this hero is manufactured, made up, changed into a figure only vaguely resembling the real man--for commercial purposes. In his story hunting and fertility, violence and progress, are inseparably connected. The hunter must learn from the Indians, yet preserve some civilized essence of his own, mainly sentiment toward women and children. The struggle for space is underway, and violent repression of the Indians seems the only way to make the country safe for settlement, for women and children. "We continued our pursuit through five towns on the Miami Rivers . . . burnt them all to ashes, entirely destroyed their corn, and other fruits, and everywhere spread a scene of desolation in the country."

Slotkin: "An American hero is the lover of the spirit of the wilderness, and his acts of love and sacred affirmations are acts of violence against that spirit and her avatars." (22) Also Lawrence, of course.

4. Franklin: His lists and schedules and maxims. And, we should recall, his willingness to bend his own rules. The myth of the self-made man, who walks into Philadelphia with only a Dutch dollar and a copper penny, and through hard work and clean living emerges as a rich and powerful and virtuous man . . . There are only two stories, I heard once: "A man went on a journey . . ." and "A stranger came into town . . ." We've been talking about the first one, but this is the second: the hero who becomes one by conquering the city rather than the wilderness, whose triumph is in society rather than for it. The self-made man, the American Adam, all that stuff. The famous lists and charts. What do you make of all this? He strikes me as partly brilliant and partly frightening. He's a pragmatist, a planner, an operator, one of those guys who's always on the make. One of those guys who's great fun to be with if he decides that he likes you.

And Lawrence's view of Franklin: rather radically skeptical, overall. On the extirpation of the savages, on his dry set of virtues, on his parsimonious sense of the "soul." Lawrence's alternate list. http://xroads.virginia.edu/HYPER/LAWRENCE/dhlch02.htm. From that chapter:

"Which brings us right back to our question, what's wrong with Benjamin, that we can't stand him? Or else, what's wrong with us, that we kind fault with such a paragon?

Man is a moral animal. All right. I am a moral animal. And I'm going to remain such. I'm not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton as Benjamin would have me. 'This is good, that is bad. Turn the little handle and let the good tap flow,' saith Benjamin, and all America with him. 'But first of all extirpate those savages who are always turning on the bad tap.'

I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine. I don't work with a little set of handles or levers. The Temperance- silence-order- resolution-frugality-industry-sincerity - justice- moderation-cleanliness-tranquillity-chastity-humility keyboard is not going to get me going. I'm really not just an automatic piano with a moral Benjamin getting tunes out of me.

Here's my creed, against Benjamin's. This is what I believe:

'That I am I.'

' That my soul is a dark forest.'

'That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.'

'Thatgods, strange gods, come f orth f rom the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.'

' That I must have the courage to let them come and go.'

' That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.'

There is my creed. He who runs may read. He who prefers to crawl, or to go by gasoline, can call it rot.

Then for a 'list'. It is rather fun to play at Benjamin.

1. TEMPERANCE

Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don't sit down without one of the gods.

2. SILENCE

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

3. ORDER

Know that you are responsible to the gods inside you and to the men in whom the gods are manifest. Recognize your superiors and your inferiors, according to the gods. This is * the root of all order.

4. RESOLUTION

Resolve to abide by your own deepest promptings, and to sacrifice the smaller thing to the greater. Kill when you must, and be killed the same: the must coming from the gods inside you, or from the men in whom you recognize the Holy Ghost.

5. FRUGALITY

Demand nothing; accept what you see fit. Don't waste your pride or squander your emotion.

6. INDUSTRY

Lose no time with ideals; serve the Holy Ghost; never serve mankind.

7. SINCERITY

To be sincere is to remember that I am I, and that the other man is not me.

8. JUSTICE

The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.

9. MODERATION

Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.

10. CLEANLINESS

Don't be too clean. It impoverishes the blood.

11. TRANQUILITY

The soul has many motions, many gods come and go. Try and find your deepest issue, in every confusion, and abide by that. Obey the man in whom you recognize the Holy Ghost; command when your honour comes to command.

12. CHASTITY

Never 'use' venery at all. Follow your passional impulse, if it be answered in the other being; but never have any motive in mind, neither offspring nor health nor even pleasure, nor even service. Only know that 'venery' is of the great gods. An offering-up of yourself to the very great gods, the dark ones, and nothing else.

13. HUMILITY

See all men and women according to the Holy Ghost that is within them. Never yield before the barren.

[ . . . . . . . . . . .]

" Benjamin, in his sagacity, knew that the breaking of the old world was a long process. In the depths of his own underconsciousness he hated England, he hated Europe, he hated * the whole corpus of the European being. He wanted to be American. But you can't change your nature and mode of consciousness like changing your shoes. It is a gradual shedding. Years must go by, and centuries must elapse before you have finished. Like a son escaping from the domination of his parents. The escape is not just one rupture. It is a long and half-secret process.

So with the American. He was a European when he first went over the Atlantic. He is in the main a recreant European still. From Benjamin Franklin to Woodrow Wilson may be a long stride, but it is a stride along the same road. There is no new road. The same old road, become dreary and futile. Theoretic and materialistic.

Why then did Benjamin set up this dummy of a perfect citizen as a pattern to America ? Of course, he did it in perfect good faith, as far as he knew. He thought it simply was the true ideal. But what we think we do is not very important. We never really know what we are doing. Either we are materialistic instruments, like Benjamin, or we move in the gesture of creation, from our deepest self, usually unconscious. We are only the actors, we are never wholly the authors of our own deeds or works. IT is the author, the unknown inside us or outside us. The best we can do is to try to hold ourselves in unison with the deeps which are inside us. And the worst we can do is to try to have things our own way, when we run counter to IT, and in the long run get our knuckles rapped for our presumption.

So Benjamin contriving money out of the Court of France. He was contriving the first steps of the overthrow of all Europe, France included. You can never have a new thing without breaking an old. Europe happens to be the old thing. America, unless the people in America assert themselves too much in opposition to the inner gods, should be the new thing. The new thing is the death of the old. But you can't cut the throat of an epoch. You've got to steal the life from it through several centuries.

And Benjamin worked for this both directly and indirectly. Directly, at the Court of France, making a small but very dangerous hole in the side of England, through which hole Europe has by now almost bled to death. And indirectly in Philadelphia, setting up this unlovely, snuff-coloured little ideal, or automaton, of a pattern American. The pattern American, this dry, moral, utilitarian little democrat, has done more to ruin the old Europe than any Russian nihilist. He has done it by slow attrition, like a son who has stayed at home and obeyed his parents, all the while silently hating their authority, and silently, in his soul, destroying not only their authority but their whole existence. For the American spiritually stayed at home in Europe. The spiritual home of America was, and still is, Europe. This is the galling bondage, in spite of several billions of heaped-up gold. Your heaps of gold are only so many muck-heaps, America, and will remain so till * you become a reality to yourselves."

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20023

Day 3 January 11, 2002

1. Names. Scarlet Letter starting Monday--read at least through ch. 9, "The Leech." I forget which edition I ordered . . . but the chapters are short, and we shouldn't have much trouble with finding passages.

Everybody get the list of names?

About journals--my only suggestion would be that specifics are often useful to give weight and detail to your general statements. People are doing well at getting past "like" and "don't like" to real issues and substance, but that's an ongoing challenge.

2. Pick up with Lawrence's view of Franklin: rather radically skeptical, overall. On the extirpation of the savages, on his dry set of virtues, on his parsimonious sense of the "soul." On Franklin's God, a rather vague and Deist one. Lawrence's alternate list.

3. Interesting range of reactions in journals for today. Some found Jacobs less than convincing/sympathetic--want to talk about why?

Jacobs and Douglas: Self-definition and heroism depend a great deal on your subject position, your relation to the society in which you exist, hmm? Rowlandson lives beyond the edge for a little but returns to the middle, Franklin moves to the very top, Boon on the fringe, but Jacobs and Douglas must define themselves against the dominant society, they're under it, they mustdefy or resist it simply to survive as independent human beings.

Cf. Jacobs with Rowlandson? For the women, surviving captivity and preserving their virtue, or something like it, are the keys. For the men, it's measured violence, not going berserk, but not yielding either. Again, I don't make these observations because I think they reveal something essential about men and women, but because I think they suggest important cultural distinctions and values of their times. In Douglas the key scenes are the fight with Covey, in which he determines to resist, to refuse to serve, and the scene with the ships in the bay, which shows his psychological oppression but also his imaginative power to visualize and interpret the scene, to imagine freedom, and (in the context of the story) to pursue and achieve it. Cf. Jacobs in her attic hideaway, catching glimpses of her children through the little hole she's made, laying low until she can make a break.

Jacobs and the sentimental tradition: she appeals to the shock of attacks on her virtue, as Douglas also notes incidentally; Uncle Tom's Cabin, as influential as anything in crystallizing abolitionist feeling in the north, also dramatizes the ways slavery disrupted families and led to sexual abuses. What about the question of audience in these two? Does she appeal to a female reader, Douglas to a male one? Such questions are important re 19th-c. lit in America in general; Hawthorne and the "damned mob of scribbling women," Baym's essay on "Melodramas of Beset Manhood" about male authors canonized despite their lack of popularity, e.g. Hawthorne and Melville, largely because they appeal to white male literary critics. . . .

The intro to Jacobs introduces the issue of the "patriarchy," an important category for feminist thinking and criticism. What about the relation of Jacobs to Mrs. Flint? Mrs. Flint seems to fit the category of "oppressed oppressor," according to some analysis . . . is Covey in Douglas's narrative in a similar position? What sort of life does he have, really? It's reading against the grain to dwell on this too much, but Covey is himself "a poor man, a farm-renter," we're told, who is able to farm his land no doubt only because he gets cheap labor through his reputation as a slave-breaker. He's a person who does inexcusable things, and he has more ability to choose to change than the slaves do, obviously, but within the system he is acting more or less rationally--in his own self-interest, economically at least--if not ethically. Breeding the slave woman so she has twins is a rational act . . . we breed cattle, don't we?

In both of these, as in Rowlandson, note that their oppression is not total, their captivity is not absolute; they find allies, they manage to visit others who help them, they're connected to people slightly better off. There's Jacobs' grandmother, who protects her for years, and her children, who give her strength just by being present. What about Sandy Jenkins, who gives Douglas the root, for instance? I wouldn't read that supernaturally, but psychologically there's the suggestion that the root is an emblem of his right to resist, and of his membership in a community that recognizes that right. I suspect this means not that things weren't really so terrible, but rather that they were luckier than most, who without these minor but essential outside helpers were never able to escape, to learn to read and write, to tell their stories.

It occurs to me to suggest that both of these people, while they emphasize their individual struggles and triumphs of course, as we expect them to, also clearly indicate the importance of other people for them. Cf. Franklin's egocentrism, his concern for getting ahead, for appearing humble as a means of self-promotion, his belittling of the other printers in Philadelphia . . .

Jacobs: another one: woman, again, who triumphs through perseverance, hiding, cleverness, not through violence. Moral ambiguity and agonizing, being forced into moral compromises by lack of power.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20024

Day 4 January 14, 2002

1. Names. Keep reading for next time. I got most journals . . . Web site is starting to take shape. We'll have more time to work on Melville and MD. If you come across sites that seem helpful, let us know.

2. Starting in on Scarlet Letter Note the new movie version is perhaps admirable but doesn't much resemble what we're reading here. One of the "great books"; how many read it in high school? Also, it seems to me, a very strange book, essentially ambivalent, filled with inner tensions and contradictions. Hawthorne noted that reading it gave his wife a headache, 263-264 in Leverenz essay.

Almost the only "classic" American novel with romantic love at its center . . . in the 19th century, anyway. A peculiar fact in itself. Then there's the peculiar treatment of that love here: its consummation coming a year before the book begins, whatever courtship or wooing preceded that consummation left entirely to our imagination, and the novel itself being almost entirely concerned with the aftermath of what is, really, a failed romance. Hawthorne and Melville very close during its writing; both with sense of wickedness and transgression about what they were doing. And the treatment of female suffering.

The custom house sketch: look for 1) relation to past, to heritage; 20-22. Hawthorne's ancestors killed witches.; 2) relation of author to present society, people he works with there, 23, 25, 27-28 the patriarch, and food, 30-31 the old, dim warrior. 34 on Hawthorne and the others. Contrast of this life with his wild intellectual days, 35, Brook Farm and the transcendentalists and all that. 3) 37 ff. discovery of the story and effort to write it, what stands in way and what makes it possible. Moonlight and firelight, 44-45. Finally he's thrown out of office, and then he is able to write the story. What about him? Is he shy retiring guy, or active self-promoting bureaucrat? 42-44. Important to recognize that this is historical fiction, cast well before Hawthorne's own time.

In relation to heroism and humility: what do we have here? A book about a woman who submits to a community that judges her sinful. She wears the scarlet letter, it seems, almost willingly. She suffers, it seems, far more than she would need to, and persists in her role when it would be easy for her to escape it.

What kind of hero(ine) is she, then? Is her heroism in her humility? See ch. 13, which we'll talk about next time: "Another View of Hester."

What about the other characters, the pastor and sometime lover Dimmesdale, the wronged and vengeful husband Chillingworth, the beautiful but enigmatic love-child Pearl? And (the other major actor, who may pass unnoticed) the narrator, a pervasive and ambivalent presence, one whose sympathies seem to shift repeatedly . . .

Cf.David Leverenz, 264. "TSL's strange power . . . derives from its unresolved tensions. What starts as a feminist revolt against punitive patriarchal authority ends in a muddle of sympathetic pity for ambiguous victims. Throughout, a gentlemanly moralist frames the story so curiously as to ally his empathies with his inquisitions. . . . his characterizations of Hester and Chillingworth bring out Hawthorne's profoundly contradictory affinities with a rebellious, autonomous female psyche and an intrusive male accusor." Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Ross C. Martin. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1991).

One question critics have turned over and over: who is the hero?

Look at the opening of the story proper: what happens there, for tone, symbolism, themes, setting, establishment of all those things? Civilization is the prison and the cemetery; it's ugly, repressive, joyless. But the wild rose-bush exists only with considerable difficulty.

-What about Hawthorne's Puritans? The Custom House sketch mentions his own ancestors who burned witches and such, as does the intro. Clearly H. is skeptical about their religious fervor and its effects on human beings. Even so . . . how do they come across? Dour, strict old men and humorless big women? Any hint of real religious feeling, of fruits of the spirit? Dimmesdale? Nina Baym says they're presented as merely "self-satisfied secular autocracy," into "authoritarian state with a Victorian moral outlook." Nina Baym, "Passion and Authority in The Scarlet Letter," NEQ 43 (1970) 209-230.

Baym says H. doesn't present Puritans' view of their purpose in New World, their covenant. The power structure is presented as outsider/unbeliever might perceive it. (214) It's authoritarian and conservative, assoc. with old men. D. fears being thrown out of company of patriarchs.

-What about the style? What is the voice of the narrator? How are events presented? Richard Chase: it's a series of tableaus, "all picture," a "possessive" imagination that refuses to relinquish the characters to our immediate possession. Lots of generalized, subjective, interpretive narration; he tells more than he shows.

-Who is the hero? What are heroic traits here? Whose side is Hawthorne on?

-Is this a woman's novel? How are woman's issues involved? Hester as Dark Lady, temptress, too beautiful and sensual to be trusted? Later in the critical survey the editor notes how hard the New Critics strained to make someone other than Hester the main character.

-Sketch each of the main characters. How do each of them change? What relationships develop between them?

3. Step by step:

ch 2: meeting the Puritans: what are they like? The big women, giants in the earth, cf. the pale thin maidens of the sort he married. Hester also as robust beauty, the Dark Lady . . . she won't be humiliated, she's heroic and almost transhuman.

ch. 3: We meet Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, D's entreaty.

ch. 4: the interview. Chillingworth accepts some of the blame; he's too old and too cold for her, she never loved him. But he insists he'll know the father. He forces her to keep his identity secret. End of chapter: he's compared to the Black Man, not for the last time.

ch. 5 Hester at Her Needle. Re-entry into the world, kind of day-to-day stress she must bear up under. Why does she stay? Her skill with needle earns her a place in this world. Question of what a woman can do, also not for the last time. 89 the letter starts to affect her, she imagines it allows her to see into the hearts of others, cf. Y.G.B. The chapter ends with letter, red-hot again, as imagined by "the vulgar." Typically Hawthorne to float these sorts of conjectures before us without committing himself to them . . .

Ch. 6 Pearl: "of great price," also of great cost, of course; what does Hester expect of her? Why dress her as she does? airy sprite, little elf, imp of evil . . . 98 she sees Dimmesdale's face in Pearl. 100 "I have no Heavenly Father." No earthly one either, evidently . . . Note the method of generalized narration with an occasional tableau inserted, brief conversations punctuating long explanations. Also the method of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a novelist not usually thought of in the same breath to my knowledge. . . . also cf. him for "magic realism," cf. Hawthorne's romances. Not exact, but some affinities.

Ch.7: Governor's Hall: 103 Pearl as another scarlet letter, similarly decorated. What sort of place is it? Wealthy, even opulent. They've been drinking. Distorted reflections, 106.

Ch. 8: will Pearl be taken away? 111 Pearl says she was plucked from the rosebush . . . a work of beauty out of nature, a work of art? She knows her catechism but won't say it. Vs. a work of God out of a strictly theological order. Cf. Hawthorne writing the book. . . Dimmesdale speaks up for her, persuasively. Chillingworth is preoccupied with figuring out the father. Mistress Hibbins the witch and the Black man return at the end. Many chapters end with somesort of equivocal supernaturalism, hmm?

Ch. 9: The Leech. Even then a dual meaning. 117 he's withdrawn his name "from the roll of mankind" for a new, dark purpose. His medicine: European elaboration, Indian simplicity; he's needed and valued. Dimmesdale is failing obscurely; Ch. is engaged to keep him going. Intimacy grows between them . . . D. is wide-ranging intellect as well as deeply conservative, 121-22. The town comes to think Ch. is Satan or his emissary, end of chapter again.

What else is to say? Questions to ask, maybe:

-What sorts of force are involved here? Religious, legal, moral, personal? There's no violence but it's certainly not a "peaceful" book either.

-What are the effects of the scarlet letter? How is it presented and discussed? What does it stand for, and what does it do? New England Primer,

-What other repeated themes/images are there? Water, signs, medicine, rosebush, light/dark, the Black Man, the scaffold.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20025

Day 5 January 16, 2002

1. Names. Finish book Friday, then into Moby-Dick. No class Monday for MLK Day. My text has 521 pages, 135 chapters; that suggests at least 100+ pages per class. It's best to read ahead; there will always be things you can return to in your journal, surely.

Note about "Some Views" added to web page. There's a link to that page on Jenzabar, by the way.

Speaking of journals, lots of interesting things in them this time. Maybe start with some of them, as we talk about this middle section of the book.

The pairings: Pearl and Hester, Chillingsworth and Dimmesdale. People mentioned these groupings; they seem resonant as well, hmm?

Baym: 217 "Pearl is Hester's sin and Chillingworth is Dimmesdale's." H. sees it as beautiful, wild, unmanageable, unpredictable child; D. as vengeful, embittered, offended husband. P. is H's id, Ch. is D.'s superego.

The middle scaffold scene. And then Hester, D. and Pearl in the forest. Tableux, static scenes with the characters placed very carefully, emblematically. Symbolic, or allegorical? They aren't reductive like Pilgrim's Progress, mere representations of vices and virtues.

The scene in the forest: description, 175. The Black Man, Mistress Hibbins. The encounter with the pastor: how does this go? He says she's happier than him because her scarlet letter is in the open. She tells him about Chillingworth. He blames her. What kind of guy is he, anyway? What do you suppose the one time, evidently, that they were together as lovers might have been like?

The central line, 186: "a consecration of its own." This is pretty much a central belief of our time, isn't it, that romantic love is as sacred as anything, that just about anything else can be sacrificed to a genuine passion?

She says let's leave: into the wilderness, or back to Europe. 188: Do anything, save to lie down and die! I'll go with you!

What about this? Today it doesn't strike us as esp. shocking, and even in Hawthorne's time it wasn't exactly unknown . . . it does come to poor Arthur as something of a shock, but he decides to go with her all the same. Hester tries to cast off the scarlet letter, and takes off her cap, and all her beauty pours back with the sun . . . but Pearl makes her put it back on, and as she does the sun fades again. Pearl refuses to make up to him.

Another point: from Baym: view of Puritans here is very much that of a skeptic, an unbeliever in the faith, whatever we think of how H. presents the community and Hester's relation to it. Says H. doesn't present Puritans' view of their purpose in New World, their covenant, makes them into merely "self-satisfied secular autocracy," into "authoritarian state with a Victorian moral outlook." The power structure is presented as outsider/unbeliever might perceive it. (214) It's authoritarian and conservative, assoc. with old men. D. fears being thrown out of company of patriarchs.

One stray thought from Gundy:

Is this also a massive subversion of "the patriarchy"? That Election Day scene, Dimmesdale marching with all the Great Fathers while the women and mere mortals look on . . . him preaching while Hester listens outside by the scaffold. Dimmesdale's "fall" is essentially his inability to give up his place among the great men. Hester's achievement is to persevere despite them, seeming to accept their categories but eventually subverting them.

D., despite his reputation as public servant/preacher, is ultimately only self-absorbed and fearful of damage to his reputation. His weakness is his refusal to do the right thing either for Hester or for himself. He makes only conventional admissions of guilt, which he knows are safe because the community will only read them as conventions.

He's a failed Christian because he never really repents, never accepts responsibiliity for his sin, except maybe in the final scene.

218 H. is torn between wish to feel that society has judged her rightly, and deeper conviction that what she has done is not sinful. Thus the amoral artistry of her decorating the letter, an assertion of her pride in what she's done and a masked defiance of the authorities.

221 Pearl functions to express all the "resentment, outraged pride, anger, and even blasphemy that H. feels" but cannot voice. Cf. the witches, who rebel but believe themselves evil, H. refuses to believe herself evil. ((NOTE: good. but what about Pearl's insistence that H. put the letter back on??))

Second scaffold scene, 144 ff. All the protagonists are there. How have they changed from the first one? Again, signs and wonders. A for Angel?

Compare "Purloined Letter" for triads and concealments: Hester/ Chillingworth/Dimmesdale, H/D/Pearl. 100. 146: Chillingworth as Lacanian analyst. Wouldn't this image of the analyst make him squirm, though?

162 Tongue of Flame and mountain-top--cf. the Catskill Eagle.

166 "To the untrue man, the whole universe is false." Cf. Ahab.

174 Dimmesdale "had expanded his egotism over the whole expanse of nature."

180 Hester's distance:"This might be pride, but was so like humility, that it produced all the softening influence of the latter quality on the public mind."

192 Chillingworth's transformation and fate, again cf. Ahab.

"Another View of Hester": how has she changed? How does she feel toward the community, even while submitting to its punishment? A complicated thing: she's submissive, but not really repentant, hmm? The romantic view that love should conquer all, vs. the view that a law is a law, a sin a sin? "The scarlet letter had not done its office." 184 on the Woman Question. Radical difficulties, just to begin to make change. Note also her radical division: between outward submission and inward rebellion.

Hester with Chillingworth: she begs him to ease up on Dimmesdale, for his own sake as well as Dimmesdale's. C. himself recognizes he's been made into a fiend by his lust for revenge, but puts it all down to "dark necessity" (167). Cf. Ahab on fate and so forth: men who refuse to change, out of what? Ego?

173 Hester lies to Pearl about the scarlet letter.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20026

Day 6 January 18, 2002

1. Names. Again, into MD next week. Read especially for characters, for shifts in style, for the passages that step back and offer symbolic/interpretive stuff. It is possible, of course, to read some parts more closely than others.

2. Last day on Hawthorne--I'd like to decenter the discussion some, encourage everybody to contribute. The journals today were both insightful and strikingly diverse in what they focused on, so let's try this--I'll give back your journals, pay attention or don't to what I highlighted, let's just go around and let everyone talk a bit about something in your journal.

(notes from last time)

192 Chillingworth's transformation and fate, again cf. Ahab.

Ch. 20: What's Dimmesdale's reaction afterwards? Desire to do crazy, sinful things? But he settles back into writing a new sermon . . . why? Has he already repented? Can't he handle freedom? He imagines going out in a burst of glory . . . Baym 229: released from iron Puritan frame, his imagination surrounds him with horrors. He's less like her than she imagines, much more conservative and in need of that rigid framework.

Election Day: the carnival atmosphere; the procession of the patriarchs and Dimmesdale in the middle of them; of the sermon we hear only the tone, not the words; he's an artist, his voice an instrument; what comes through is his sense of his own sin . . . We tend to regard Dimmesdale as hardly sinful at all, hmm, except in his refusing to accept his guilt and take his punishment? Baym: D. is artist in his voice, which speaks from the heart, not reason, but is "unable to identify his 'self' with the passionate core he regards as sinful, he is even less able to admit that this sinful core can produce great, true sermons." (225)

His final confession: note effect on Chillingworth and Pearl: what happens to each of them? Ch. wastes away, his purpose gone; Pearl finally becomes human. Do we accept that Dimmesdale dies in a state of grace?

The ending: various accounts, again; what do we choose? What is the moral? Do you accept the "Be true!" thing, or does that seem too simple? Why does Hester return? The last line? Emblem of the somber vision of the book: red of passion/individuality against black of authority, community, order? To be heroic is to accept one's fate, not to demand that the world answer to our conceptions of it? To yield to the judgment of the community even when we believe it is wrong?

Is this a vision we accept? Is it deeply conservative, as Bercovitch maintains, or radically subversive with a certain wavering at the end, as Benstock suggests? Or does it hold those two visions in tension, refusing to choose, letting us decide from the multiple options, as we're forced to decide what we believe about the letter A's on Dimmesdale's breast and in the sky?

What about Hester as heroine? Her free thinking, feminism, refusal of patriarchal categories--how do we integrate that with her acceptance of discipline, her return to the community to live out her days, her seeming acceptance of its judgment?

3. What about the handout? What from that did you respond to? Lots of rich ideas there, I think, many of which we've touched on already in one way or another. How do we sum this up?

I esp. like Leverenz on "unresolved tensions."

Another reader-response sort of question: who do you identify with? Hester or Dimmesdale? I find him pretty much repulsive, myself, though maybe it's because I can identify him with myself on some level. I find Hester much more sympathetic, though I'm not sure I believe the end. What I want to have happen there is not to have her reunited with Dimmesdale--he's too much of a coward to be worthy of her--but to have her spring free somehow, recognize her guilt but also the possibility of grace, which is also biblical after all. Jesus said go and sin no more, he didn't say punish yourself forever. Or is it not possible for her because she never truly repents? But if she never truly repents why does she come back? I don't accept Bercovitch's claim that "we" accept the ending as inevitable (345)--do you?

This book certainly isn't about conventional heroism. It is I think about a very enduring question, how to be heroic within a community that has its own very tight ideas about what that means. It's about women's heroism, which we've already seen in Rowlandson and Jacobs is a very different thing than men's. It's about time, it's about space . . .

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20027

Day 7 January 23, 2002

1. Names. Keep reading, what else? Some cartoons, to start.

2. Melville and Moby Dick. He was b. 1819, distinguished N.Y. family, father died at 12 though and left the family broke. Went to sea in 1837 as cabin boy, at 22 spent 18 months on the whaler Acushnet, deserted the ship in the South Pacific, lived among cannibals for a while, returned in 1844. Made various other voyages . . . First books were on his travels: Typee, Omoo, Redburn, White-Jacket. Popular in proportion to their "exciting" qualities . . . again, the problem of writing popular literature, making money at it, vs. writing "serious" novels, is crucial to Melville's writing career. With MD he more or less lost his popular audience, sank into literary obscurity, worked as a customs inspector, wrote little fiction and rather bad poetry until the last years of his life. His reputation didn't really begin to rise until ca. 1920.

He seems to have begun this book as a rather conventional sea story. But he met Hawthorne halfway through the writing of it, wrote "Hawthorne and his Mosses," a kind of manifesto for his own work. He found a clue in Hawthorne for the method of MD: the search for mystical depths of meaning, interest in the power of blackness, in unconventional religious questing and questioning, in a sense of innate depravity and original sin. Their relationship eventually cooled; Fiedler says both of them can't help but feel that writing a book is a satanic revolt, and probably Hawthorne was uneasy about Melville's disbelief in immortality. Hawthorne, anyway, calls Scarlet Letter "hell-fired," Melville says "I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as a lamb." Melville also discovered Shakespeare about this time, took from him a dramatic, elevated, artificial language for his "democratic hero-villain" and a dramatic technique for some scenes; also soliloquies and combats of wits, tragic "nihilistic truth-telling" and bleak vision. Ahab speaks mostly in blank verse set as prose

The result on the book was the rambling, mixed, heterogeneous conglomeration that we have. Two main threads: Ahab's tragedy and Ishmael's Bildungsroman, and then all the catalogs and whaling-industry stuff. One mark of the splicing: Bulkington, who survives only to p. 105. With all this revised ambition, but with time and financial pressures pushing him to get something done, he kept the humorous early chapters and Bulkington, who has no function in the final version.

335: "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method."

3. Who is Ishmael? In Gen. 21 he and Hagar are cast out of Israel. God makes a covenant with his brother Isaac, but "God was with the lad" Ishmael, too. Sometime schoolteacher, we learn . . . why does he go to sea? His melancholy and temptation to suicide? What does the represent to him? Cf. Ahab: Ishmael's attracted to death and its restfulness. Ahab wants to strike at evil and blot it out. Newton Arvin, 549: self-destructiveness vs. urge to murderous destruction of the other. Ishmael is dreamy, a bit of a drifter, an observer; Ahab is obsessed by the desire to act, once and for all.

What's his attitude toward authority? Sort of pragmatic obedience, with inner reservations? Note he's a Presbyterian, with Calvinist roots. . . . very much a free thinker and asker of questions, esp. about religion and social categories.

And Ahab: in the Bible he's a wicked king, the husband of Jezebel; he worships Baal, and 450 of his prophets are destroyed by Elijah after a contest in which they fail to get Baal to set fire to their sacrifice.

4. What's the tone of the early chapters? Breezy, often comic, though with portents of doom and death? Might be a conventional adventure-at-sea novel.

5. What about Queequeg? The dark companion, the Natural Man. Chingachgook in Leatherstocking Tales, Jim in Huck Finn. How do they become such quick friends? Is their something weird in their domestic, bedded bliss? Well of course there is. 33 ff, 57 ff. Ishmael decides he can worship with Queequeg; is this broad-minded tolerance or cowardly casuistry? "First congregation of this whole worshipping world": Ishmael is a tolerator, a unifier, and in strict terms a heretic. The carefully diverse cast of whalemen and Melville's insistence on their common humanity and refusal of white supremacy, orthodoxy, conventions. Since his potential readers were mostly rather conventional members of the governing white order, this created difficulties.

On the "inn" scenes, though, as Alaina notes: The 19th century mores on men sleeping with men, women with women, quite different from our own. The 20th century in America was much more homophobic . . .

6. Style and method. Typical motion of chapters from matter-of-fact to symbolic, speculative, metaphoric language. Ch. vii, the Chapel, 41 ff. Second, piling up of alternative views and perspectives, e.g. "Extracts" at the beginning. Truth is multiple, complex, to be sought among the welter. Where does Melville stand among it all? Layers of irony and ambiguity.

Conventions: the heroic sea-journey, with exotic adventures, cannibals, etc.

Ch ix, the sermon: Father Mapple's basically orthodox reading of Jonah and the whale, the lesson being subordination to the will of God and determination to stamp out evil, "Kill, burn, and destroy all sin," (54). Is this the real lesson of the book, or is it subverted by Ahab's story?

7. The whaling industry: as application of technology and imperialism, possessing, exploiting: 18,000 whalers in 1840's, 1/2 new each voyage, 2/3 deserted each voyage as Melville himself did. General shortage of fats and oils, pre-petroleum . . .

The Pequod: half-Christian, half-savage, owned by "fighting Quakers," themselves a colorful and ambiguous batch, not willing to spill the blood of their fellow men but with no such qualms about mere whales. All sorts of signs and portents about their loading, Elijah the prophet (95), and the men who sneak aboard.

And (finally) they're off! What happens in the early stages? Ishmael's voice almost disappears; static chapters on whaling industry and on crew members; we get the first hints that Ahab is a man to be reckoned with.

3. Topics for discussion. Some structures: the sea-journey. The quest myth. The struggle between good and evil. Between activism, seeking to destroy evil, and nonresistance, seeking to somehow live within the world. In our terms, between "heroism" pushed to its extreme in Ahab, and "humility" almost at its extreme of quietism and going with the flow in Ishmael.

Religion: Mapple's sermon on Jonah, its orthodox yet disturbing overtones, vs. Queequeg's paganism, vs. Ishmael's tolerance and openness, 57 ff. Symbolism of Ishmael leaving Father Mapple for Queequeg? Mapple's sermon is more or less conventional theology, but with disturbing overtone; foreshadowing Ahab's determination to strike out at evil whatever the cost, and sharing his confidence that we can know what is evil and what is good. Ishmael, in contrast, is up on the mast head dreaming and meditating, 148-50, with "the problem of the universe revolving in me." Circular images, revolving, vs. linear ones like the harpoon and the lance. 203 ff: the mat-maker, meditation on fate, free will, chance.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20028

Day 8 January 25, 2002

1. Names. Hang in there . . . all worthwhile journeys involve a certain amount of tedium.

2. Today I hope we can both look at some particular passages in the first 200 pp. and start to sort out some of the main themes and tensions that Melville sets up in the early going. The ship, the journey, other structures and characters, religion, politics, space.

Let's begin, in fact, with Olson on SPACE.

2. The Pequod: half-Christian, half-savage, owned by "fighting Quakers," themselves a colorful and ambiguous batch, not willing to spill the blood of their fellow men but with no such qualms about mere whales. All sorts of signs and portents about their loading, Elijah the prophet (95), and the men who sneak aboard.

3. Topics for discussion. Some structures: the sea-journey. 221 the liminal point, crossing into "dismal realm" after long voyage south. Around the Horn of Africa, into the Indian Ocean and then into the Pacific. The Moby Dick Map.

The quest myth. The struggle between good and evil. Between activism, seeking to destroy evil, and nonresistance, seeking to somehow live within the world. In our terms, between "heroism" pushed to its extreme in Ahab, and "humility" almost at its extreme of quietism and going with the flow in Ishmael.

Religion: Mapple's sermon on Jonah, its orthodox yet disturbing overtones, vs. Queequeg's paganism, vs. Ishmael's tolerance and openness, 57 ff. Symbolism of Ishmael leaving Father Mapple for Queequeg? Mapple's sermon foreshadowing Ahab's determination to strike out at evil whatever the cost, and sharing his confidence that we can know what is evil and what is good.

Ishmael, in contrast, is up on the mast head dreaming and meditating, 148-50, with "the problem of the universe revolving in me." Circular images, revolving, vs. linear ones like the harpoon and the lance. 203 ff: the mat-maker, meditation on fate, free will, chance.

What about politics? 113 equivocal celebration of democracy, as ordained by God. Does Ishmael buy it? Certainly Ahab's no democrat, as Olson notes. 117 the ship as Anacharsis Clootz delegation: "a German-born baron who appeared at the bar of the French assembly in 1790 at the head of 36 foreigners, and in the name of this 'embassy of the human race,' declared that the world adhered to the Declaration of the Rights of Man." (Matthiessen 410) The crew as carefully distributed amongst all the races of the world, though (of course) the white guys are in charge. Pronounced As: änäkärss klots , 1755-94, Frenchrevolutionary, self-styled Orator of the Human Race. Born near Cleves and a member of the lesser German nobility, his given name was originally Jean Baptiste. Fanatically devoted

to humanitarian ideals and to the liberal ideas of the Encyclopédie, he came to Paris in 1776 and spent his large fortune for the advancement of those ideas. After the outbreak of the French Revolution, he headed (1790) a delegation of foreigners as "ambassadors of the human race

to the National Assembly; he adopted the name Anacharsis and was elected to the Convention, the revolutionary assembly, where he was an ardent supporter of the liberation of Europe in the name of the ideals of the Revolution. Aligned with the Hébertists (see Hébert, Jacques René), he was executed when that faction fell in Mar., 1794, during the Reign of Terror."

What else? Ahab, 119 ff. Finally appears, "ungodly, god-like man." "Like a man cut away from the stake." His long wound. First speeches are grousing and snapping as Stubb; he's not Capt. Kirk nor Picard, is he. 146: not truly in the world. 157 "I'd strike the sun if it insulted me." Starbuck accuses Ahab of blasphemy, but Ahab insists that MD is the agent, if not the principal, of evil itself, of "an inscrutable malice." And then he tries to sweet-talk Starbuck, to minimize what he's doing. Ritual, ceremonial quality of the drink he makes them take from the harpoon, the oath they swear on 159 to kill MD. Following: soliloquies, crew dancing, Pip's fears. Ahab's madly determined, Starbuck knows he's outmatched, Stubb merely laughs it all off.

Whales and the whale. All that lore, to slow the pace of revelation, as the voyage is long and tedious? As ballast, as someone says? To suggest how much we don't know among all that we do?

Moby Dick: First real mention of him isn't till 155; all the harpooners know of him. 169 ff: folklore, unreliable hints and rumors, supernatural overtones. Is he ubiquitous and immortal, like God, or like Satan? 175: Ahab sees him as personification of evil.

The whiteness of the whale. As symbol, as mystery, whiteness that "appalls." Cf. polar bear, shark, Jove in bull, white dog, all sacred, godlike beings. White Squall. Cf. this chapter to Whitman's catalogs for piling up of detail. 185: both holy and appalling, indefinite, representing the "heartless voids and limitless space." Olson on SPACE as the essential American reality, "A dumb blankness, full of meaning."

The Essex. True story of ship destroyed by whale. One function of all the lore is to convince us the story is realistic, that it could happen.

From Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel: The essential themes are those projected in Queequeg and Fedallah, rep. of the beneficent and destructive aspects of the id. Also Tashtego and Dagoo: 4 quarters and 4 elements:

Queequeg yellow water

Fedallah brownfire

Tashtego red air

Dagoo blackearth

"Q. stands for the redemptive baptism of water (or sperm), and around him the 'Western' or sentimental . . . develops; while Fedallah stands for the destructive baptism of fire (or blood), and around him the gothic or Faustian romance which is its other half unfolds." Queequeg wins, says F. (530)

531 It's also a love story, but one of the sentimental companionship of males "passing the love of women." But M's also aware of the taboo nature of such love; thus Q. is black. Thus the stuff about squeezing the sperm, puns on it, assoc. of Whale's penis with cassock and with Yojo; it's essentially anti-Christian, perhaps Platonic. Ishmael plays finally the role of sacred virgin in meeting w. Q. He tends to think of himself in passive, feminine role (534), and calls their rel. a marriage very early. Triggers memories of evil stepmother, almost all we learn about I's past. "climbing up his mother's chimney??"" Continual assertion of the innocence of I and Q's connection.

Stuff about the loss of the mother: not just Ishmael, but Ahab, who later says that he knows all about the father but has lost the mother.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 20029

Day 9 January 28, 2002

1. Names. Brief meditation on complaining only to be sociable, especially to people who are likely to find that complaining merely tedious in its own right. How interested are you in the question, "Did my classmates enjoy the experience of reading today's assignment?"

Some Thoughts and Questions on Moby Dick.

1. Series of encounters with other ships: The Town-Ho, 228 ff: conflict leading to mutiny; MD appears when S. the mutineer is on the point of murder; MD punishes the unjust, kills the one who incites the mutiny, the others escape more or less unpunished. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.???

The Jeroboam, 293 ff.: MD singles out those who oppose him. He kills the mate Macey, but leaves the others and the boat untouched.

1a. The Whiteness of the Whale, 178 ff. "The palsied universe lies before us like a leper." As symbol, as mystery, whiteness that "appalls." Cf. polar bear, shark, Jove in bull, white dog, all sacred, godlike beings. White Squall. Cf. this chapter to Whitman's catalogs for piling up of detail. 185: both holy and appalling, indefinite, representing the "heartless voids and limitless space." Olson on SPACE as the essential American reality, "A dumb blankness, full of meaning."

The Essex. True story of ship destroyed by whale. One function of all the lore is to convince us the story is realistic, that it could happen.

Queequeg yellow water

Fedallah brownfire

Tashtego red air

Dagoo blackearth

Stuff about the loss of the mother: not just Ishmael, but Ahab, who later says that he knows all about the father but has lost the mother.

2. Ahab: with the albatross, 223--24. Monomania: all is part of his quest, all around the world. Note that in another treatment he would be the unequivocal hero: St. George and the dragon, Beowulf, all those stories. Melville's most radical move, probably, is his complication of the heroic myth, and especially his skepticism about locating and destroying evil. But cf. Lord of the Rings, say, where the heroic quest is not to conquer evil by force but to destroy it by resisting its lure.

Pearson's version of the hero, just for a further complication.

291: Ahab speaks to the whales' head. Like Faust he wants knowledge beyond the human; Fedallah is Satan to his Faust, says Fiedler. Then speaks of being converted . . . 303 Stubb thinks Fedallah is the devil, bargaining for Ahab's soul. 306

296: crazy Gabriel warns him: beware of the blasphemer's end. Again, like Shakespeare, Melville uses the madman and the fool as voices for uncomfortable truth-telling, stuff running counter to dominant line. Gabriel thinks MD is the Shaker God, not the Devil.

3. Ishmael.

His first chase after a whale very nearly ends in death; lost in the fog, run down by the ship, barely saved; he immediately decides to make out his will, 216.

224: with the Albatross he says that around the world leads only to the starting point; he's reflective, skeptical of action. Linear vs. circular time: he's pre-Christian, or post-Christian, while Ahab is a heretical Christian.

His study of the whales. All the bad portrayals; 251, no way to know that they really look like; still, he studies them exhaustively. He wants to learn, not know. Both book-study and very careful direct observation, e.g. descriptions of whale hunts and equipment and carcasses: the two heads, one on each side.

Ishmael and Queequeg: "Monkey-Rope" shows, in effect, married life, after the honeymoon (Fiedler 537). Again Q. is the active one, Ish. the passive provider of stability. But when Ahab enters the marriage business is pushed into the background.

4. The Sea: 221 "devilish charm," crossing into dismal and dangerous seas around cape: crossing into spirit realm? 259 as awful, cannibalistic: world "red in tooth and claw." 290 ff as reservoir of mystery, representative of all the 2/3 of the world's surface that's hidden away, under a foot to five miles of water. What is down there that we don't know? Giant squid, kraken, dragons?

5. Catching the first whale, killing it, taking it apart for blubber and sperm. This is the time-honored American way of dealing with what's bigger than we are, of course: organization, teamwork, technology. Putting up with unpleasant, hard, disgusting work for the sake of profit.

A sense of wonder at the power of technological organization is one of the running sub-themes of this book: that we can catch Leviathan on a hook, cook him down and use him for what we want. Cf. the question in Job. The long, half-comic dialogue between Stubb and the cook: 282, "who is not a cannibal?"

A whale-head on each side means the boat can't sink, says Fedallah; but what does he know?

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200210

Day 10 January 30, 2002

1. Names. Thanks for journals; they did seem a bit more focused and substantive, overall. Give out exams and Pearson stuff for those who missed: Katie, Sarah, Aron, Tony.

2. Items for today--scattered; we'll try to pull together and systematize some on Friday.

Erin:Fedallah as devil 303 and passim. Stubb says he doesn't fear the devil--which tells us something about him. Can you kill the devil? Unhealthy and unwholesome, Ahab's shadow. Cf. Chillingworth as Dimmesdale'? The shadow, Jung says, is where we put the parts of ourselves that we don't want to acknowledge. But they don't go away, they just go out of our sight.

Alaina: why is Queequeg so morbid? Meanings of the doubloon?

Magda: "Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish"--how does it fit into the structure? What's property and what's there for the taking? Last paragraphs slip into political and economic and class musings. Who's owned and who isn't? Justice? Power?

Leslie: re "Heads or Tails": why should the whale belong to the Duke? Are we supposed to be mad about this? Ishmael's ambivalent about democracy, but hardly enamored with monarchy either, hmm? Plenty of resentment here.

Eric: narrative and descriptive passages. The Doubloon chapter, again: what's going on there? The characters each read it differently, according to their qualities. We learn about them from their readings; Ahab's egotism, Starbuck's piety, Stubb's humor as defense, Flask's reducing all to money and animal pleasures, 960 cigars. Manxman: signs, prophecies. Queequeg: compares it to his tattoos. Fedallah: fire worship. Pip: the ship's navel, bound for the bottom of the sea.

Leah: The sperm whale as lacking a face, 351. As God? Angry at God? Ahab is surely angry at Moby Dick--the question is what MD is, and/or represents. Power, surely, but malice or something else? Inscrutability? The Grand Armada chapter, 358 ff, entering the calm at the heart of the storm, 360. Melville on that "live in the all" feeling," in letter 534-535.

Tony: Ahab losing his leg: a comic scene? A constant reminder. Sympathy for his obsession with retribution . . .

Chad: Does the Whale's magnitude diminish? No, Ishmael says, it's impossible that we'd ever catch all the whales. He's confident and has (it seems) evidence and reason on his side, he's just wrong, is all.

Jill: Ahab's odd behavior, other encounters with the whale (?). Are we supposed to think Ahab was already psychotic?

If time, read from Lawrence.

"    So ends one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world, closing
up its mystery and its tortured symbolism. It is an epic of the sea such as no man
has equalled; and it is a book of esoteric symbolism of profound significance, and
of considerable tiresomeness.

But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.

The terrible fatality.

Fatality.

Doom.

Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America. Doom!

Doom of what?

Doom of our white day. We are doomed, doomed. And the doom is in America. The doom of our white day.

Ah, well, if my day is doomed, and I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am.

Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul, doomed. His great white epoch doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed: The spirit, doomed.

The reversion. 'Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern.'

That great horror of ours! It is our civilization rushing from all havens astern.

The last ghastly hunt. The White Whale.

What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.

And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black, east and west, Quaker and fireworshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom and our suicide.

The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of upper consciousness and the ideal will. Our blood- self subjected to our will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitic mental or ideal consciousness.

Hot blooded sea-born Moby Dick. Hunted maniacs of the idea.

Oh God, oh God, what next, when the Pequod has sunk?

She sank in the war, and we are all flotsam.

Now what next?

Who knows ? Quien sabe? Quien sabe, senor?

Neither Spanish nor Saxon America has any answer.

The Pequod went down. And the Pequod was the ship of the white American soul. She sank, taking with her negro and Indian and Polynesian, Asiatic and Quaker and good, business- like Yankees and Ishmael: she sank all the lot of them.

Boom! as Vachel Lindsay would say.

To use the words of Jesus, IT IS FINISHED.

Consummatum est! But Moby Dick was first published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what's been happening ever since?

Post-mortem effects, presumably.

Because, in the first centuries, Jesus was Cetus, the Whale. And the Christians were the little fishes. Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes."

-D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200211

Day 11 February 1, 2002

1. Whitman and Dickinson for next week: here's a schedule for Whitman.

2. OK, so things finally get exciting.

The conclusion: we do get the action/adventure climax, hmm? Three days of battle, all plotted carefully to once again show us Ahab's utter refusal to stop, and MD's equally stubborn and even more massive refusal to be conquered. Finally, he destroys not just Ahab but the Pequod too, and everybody but poor Ishmael, who's left another orphan.

So what do we conclude about this book? Side note on flawed masterpieces and brilliant failures. I read an essay once that argued that great writers are great because they take foolish chances, and often fail in the midst of their successes. Surely the greatest writers are the easiest to parody. Constantly risking absurdity, etc. Certainly if he wanted Melville could have written a more reader-friendly book. The sci fi epics I read routinely show more sense of plot and pacing and what it takes to keep readers engaged in a long journey. Yet I can't help but agree with those who find this a great, essential American novel, with all its difficulties.

Some polarities and oppositions:

a. Calm vs storm, Pacific and sweet mystery (442) vs. typhoon and "The Candles": faces of nature associated with Ishmael and Ahab, respectively.

b. Acquiescence, meditation, passivity, immersion, vs. defiance, action, determination, individualism."The Symphony, 492: "Why this strife of the chase?" His abandonment of family. Fate and free will and all of that.

c. Ishmael as hero/coward vs. Ahab as hero/villain: both seem incomplete, don't they? Cf. epic hero like Odysseus, tragic hero like Lear? What if we go back to Pearson's scheme of the hero? Where would you place each of them on it?

2. Other points:

a. Ahab's doubles/shadows: Ishmael, Fedallah, Queequeg; Q. as only true alternative, one who combines a moral sense and the ability to act? Ahab and Pip, the one other who understands him best; Ahab and MD himself, both grizzled, wounded, both with instinctive malice. Ahab and Starbuck, the conventional "good" man who keeps begging Ahab to stop but can't make anything happen.

b. Pip as Shakespearean fool, with vision of "vast, oceanic universe" (383-4). Ishmael accepts that vision, but is less deeply immersed in it; Ahab sympathizes but feels fated to oppose rather than to accept it, to penetrate and conquer the mystery. Is is mere blankness? Creature-kinship? God? What lurks behind the wall?

c. Marriage motif: pairs of whales in Grand Armada chapter; Ishmael "wedded to Queequeg; rescue of Tashtego from whale's head as midwifery and rebirth. Late references to Ahab's wife and son: sense that he's broken some sort of natural law by neglecting his wife. References to absent mother, 462, and the "stepmother world," 491. The Bachelor, the only happy ship, the only one that has a successful voyage. The general absence of women does seem a loss, I think, in the terms of the book: note Ishmael is picked up at the end by the Rachel. Sense of being orphan. He's cut off from family throughout . . . technology as isolating, separating force? There's plenty of manly love of comrades, but otherwise it's an impoverished set of relationships, hmm?

d. Cannibalism: Pequod as cannibal craft, try-works where "fritters" are used to cook out the oil, Stubbs' supper, the sharks, all men as cannibals. the killing that's part of life, of survival.

e. The hunt: is Ahab's problem that he lacks a proper stance toward what he hunts? Mythic hunters, e.g. Actaeon or Orion, who approach the hunt with lust or hatred in their hearts are destroyed. In American Indian lore, in the Christian eucharist, the eating is an act of love, of sacred marriage, performed with gratitude and reverence and respect for the sacrifice involved. Ahab's stance is the Puritan extreme: he thinks he must either conquer/destroy the natural world or be captive of it. (Slotkin) He thinks, like Father Mapple, that sin must be sought out and destroyed, and (key) he thinks that whatever is natural and powerful, bigger than he is, must be sinful and evil if it's not God.

The secret motto, Melville said, is the baptism in the devil's name in "The Candles." Fire-worship, defiance, the fiery father, the God of Wrath. Where is the mother, Ahab asks on 462. Indeed.

Olson says removal of Christ and the Holy Ghost from the book is significant, not for economy, but because "Of necessity, from Ahab's world, both . . . are absent. . . . the conflict in Ahab's world is abrupt, more that between Satan and Jehovah, of the old dispensation than the new. It is the outward symbol of the inner truth that the name of Christ is spoken only once," when it's torn from Starbuck. The forgiveness and grace of Christ are curiously lacking.

f. The whale revealed: first description of it as both male and female, majestic, godlike, powerful, but not malicious until it's attacked. It destroys only after repeated provocations; the first day it quite delicately avoids killing anyone, the second it takes only Fedallah. "God resisteth the proud," John M. Brenneman uses as his main text. In Melville's theology, as in the Mennonites', the sin of pride is very nearly the worst one.

g. D.H. Lawrence: Moby Dick is a prophecy of the fall of white European/American civilization due to its relentless and perverse "reason," its attempt to control and destroy whatever it cannot understand, its devotion to material progress, exploitation and repression of natural, sexual, and deeply human forces. Ishmael may believe that there are too many whales for us to kill them all, but we know better, and just maybe Melville did too.

And that killing, he suggests, is finally suicidal . . . The final image of catastrophe, of the inexorable revenge of the forces of nature when we challenge and torment them beyond all forgiveness, is one that should strike us as even more terrifying than it was in Melville's day. If Spaceship Earth goes down, there will be no Rachel along to pick up the survivors.

h. This book draws us into a realm of titanic, perhaps ultimate forces, ones that seem to dwarf the human beings that challenge them. That image of Pip's little head afloat in a vast immensity of water . . . of Ishmael, later, floating on the coffin. Machado: "Oh God, your sea is so great, and my boat is so small."

Our planet, the only one we know that has any hope of keeping us alive, afloat in the vacant and enormous darkness around it. What can we know, and what can we be, among all this? Melville is far from a soggy save-the-whales New Ager; he scoffs at Goethe's "live in the all" dictum, even as he recognizes there's something to it. (See his letter to Hawthorne, 534-5.) And yet this seems to me a deeply cautionary book, a warning about the dangers of the sort of God-is-on-our-side, absolutist thinking that assumes we can externalize, locate, target and destroy all the sevil in the world. Pogo: We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200212

Day 12 February 4, 2002

1. Names. Dickinson handout. More Whitman for next time.

2. Whitman: getting started. Show the overhead, the famous visual of manifest destiny. Like Melville, Whitman is both entranced by the magnitude and capacity of American civilization and frightened by it . . . By the mid-19th century, Whitman's time, it seems all things were ready for someone like him to come along and claim them, to hope to be the spirit of American democracy, large, inclusive, major. Emerson's call for the emergence of an American poet, and a truly American literature. "Song of Myself" as the magnum opus of his magnum claim, but "Open Road" is something like that vast sprawling poem in miniature, with many of the same themes and maneuvers. Show his picture.

He wanted to be the American poet, to be central. But it was a long work. He wrote reviews of his own books, trying to pump them up. He read Emerson and tried to be the poet that Emerson said was due to emerge; he got a complimentary letter from Emerson re the first edition of Leaves of Grass and scandalized both Emerson and many others by quoting the whole thing in the second edition without consulting Emerson.

What's "heroic" and new in Whitman's poetics? Personality, form, and language, says Calvin Bedient. (Voices and Visions 8). The heroic as the "divine average," not the extraordinary but the sum of all the ordinary.

Both the form and the subject matter were shocking. Where was rhyme and meter? Where were order and decorum and propriety and concern for the niceties? What if ladies were to encounter such blatant immoralities?

On sexuality and homosexuality in Whitman: see the handout. I think Reynolds is correct about the differences between Whitman's time and ours, in which homophobia has all but erased expressions of same-sex love between people who aren't sexually involved. If so, then the shocking element of his work in its time was likely that it was so explicit about sex, not that it was homoerotic.

"I Sing the Body Electric": read this in conjunction with the material from Reynolds' book about Whitman's America and the body-mores of his time. Reading the poem again, I do wonder if Reynolds doesn't protest a bit too much; it seems unlikely that Whitman would feel the need for a poem like this if he weren't reacting against some degree of unease about the body. Anyway the poem gives us the body as sacred, as of the soul, not as "brother pig" or as some nasty burden to be carried around until we can dispense with it. Much in the Western tradition, all the way back to Plato, regards the body as the weak and untidy vessel for the Soul, which is what matters and what is (at least potentially) pure and holy. Cf. Scarlet Letter, where bodies, esp. the female body, are covered up, hidden away, regarded with fear as the site of/sight that might generate "unholy" desires. Cf. Ahab and Ishmael on the whales; Ishmael's recognition of the massive physicality of Moby Dick as beautiful and a-moral is much akin to Whitman's sense of the body.

On the open road: Lawrence, again, says this is the great American innovation: a morality of process rather than destinations, not journeying toward heavenly mansions but life on the road. "It is a new great doctrine. A doctrine of life. A new great morality. A morality of actual living, not of salvation. Europe has never got beyond the morality of salvation. America to this day is deathly sick with saviourism. But Whitman, the greatest and the first and the only American teacher, was no Saviour. His morality was no morality of salvation. His was a morality of the soul living her life, not saving herself. Accepting the contact with other souls along the open way, as they lived their lives. Never trying to save them. As leave try to arrest them and throw them in gaol. The soul living her life along the incarnate mystery of the open road." (in Shapiro, Prose Keys, 247).

Lawrence thinks that Whitman went wrong in acting out this vision, was too eager to subsume everything into himself. Certainly "Open Road" tries that, hmm? A sort of crossing into a mysterious, visionary world, ecstatic experience there, glimpses of secrets, claim of visionary unity and vision of the universe as a great road, as "progress of souls," with the emphasis on progress there, no doubt. "Reception, nor preference nor denial." Ishmael, not Ahab.

"I think whoever I see must be happy," 121. Wow, hmm? The mystery of others, of The Other as philosophers put it. When he ordains himself his own master, what does that mean? An ecstatic, Emersonian vision, out of schools and into the welter of experience. "The excellence of things," 122.

Against heaping up things, against "bat-eyed and materialistic priests," the journey with no arrival, no destination. Consider this against the Puritan morality in which life begins with original sin, proceeds as a great drama of good struggling against evil and culminates in judgment.

Going toward something great, though the journey is also entangled with this secret, dark other who appears in sec. 13, the one of "secret silent loathing and despair," "skulking and hiding."

Call to struggle and war and privation, let's go! How do we read all those calls to move? I think the visionary optimism needs to be seen against a background of loneliness, fear, isolation, depression; hope is a choice and a duty. Note the recognition of difficulties and suffering near the end, sec. 14, 127. He wants us to come with him, he implores us, but what if we don't?

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200213

Day 13 February 6, 2002

1. Names. Dickinson for Friday, and essay-exams. Please do come ready to talk about the poems. Chopin next week. It's a short novel, 190 pp. in my edition; let's read carefully and well.

2. On with Whitman. People were less won by these, not surprisingly, but I hope we can think carefully about them anyway. They are, as many of you noticed, less "optimistic" and more "depressed," for some pretty good reasons that I want to discuss.

"Out of the Cradle" and "As I Ebb'd": Shore odes, crisis poems. Abrams and the Greater Romantic Lyric. Lone speaker in nature, confronting some crisis, interchange with natural world that leads to some kind of resolution.

The first of childhood, of awakening to the awareness of death and the vocation of poet. Hero as artist, as solitary singer, as wounded into song by depth and intensity of awareness. His vocation comes out of reconciliation of opposites (death/life, sea/land), consciousness of totality, assertion that the acceptance and recognition of death is the beginning of wisdom and poetry. The bird's song, mournful but beautiful, in response to the loss of the beloved. Opera and ocean as structural analogies: rhythm of waves in opening lines, aria/recitative business.

"As I Ebb'd": an even deeper crisis of confidence here, sense of the inadequacy of his poems to the mystery of being, the vulnerability of laying them out to by judged. He recognizes here the gap between himself and nature, "mother" and "father" who speak, but not in human language, as of course the bird and the sea in "Cradle" don't either, really. A strong contrast to the rampant ego of some of the other poems. Written in 1860; Whitman wanted to be the "good gray poet," benign, potent, serene father-figure for America. But the country wasn't all that interested; it was going to war. His own father was dying in 1855 but Whitman strove to keep him out of the poems; now, in sec. 3, he comes in, is faced and confronted. And Whitman's own failure, his insignificance, is confronted and accepted as well.

3. The Drum-Taps poems: out of his experience as wound-dresser and camp visitor in Civil War. He spent a lot of time and energy at it; it was a sobering experience, as we might expect I suppose. These poems less centered around the "I," more objective and descriptive: brief moments from war experience concretely rendered. With Matthew Brady's photographs as records of the war; Whitman was as patriotic as anyone, yet despite the occasional glimpses of beauty the center of these is on personal, individual suffering, compassion, and mourning. These are not "heroic" war poems, are they? Few exploits of battle and triumphant victories in them.

Beautiful moments in the field, quiet times in camp, at night; field hospitals, dying men, the physicality of the body that Whitman so celebrates elsewhere, here the object of an enormous tenderness and grief.

The three dead men, one old, one young, one perhaps "the face of the Christ himself" . . .

These poems have a simplicity of presentation but (it seems to me) an extremely subtle and elusive quality about them, as though even Whitman himself is trying to avoid thinking his way to some conclusive point of view about these events, intentionally restricting himself to recording and personal impressions rather than larger, "political" statements. They aren't anti-war poems, yet they certainly would not be useful in mustering enthusiasm for the next great patriotic struggle . . .

"Lilacs . . ." Another poem about loss and grief and trying to find strength to continue. In the long tradition of the elegy, complete with a procession of mourners and eventual consolation.

4. Where to start on "The Sleepers?" It's similar in some ways to "Open Road," but here the journey is at night, and there's a considerably different feel about it, isn't there? Is "Sleepers" less insistently egocentric, less arrogant? Its insistence on unity comes without the idea that Walt himself is the great unifier/agent/container: They unite, not they are me. The darkness of sleep as strange, solemn, sometimes nightmarish, though healing as well. In fact at the beginning he says that he's confused, contradictory, feeling uncertain. Sex here is ecstatic, and even rather explicit for the mid-19th century, but not without guilt and trauma. Waiting for lover, then remembering lover; identification in part 2 that involves loss of self, blankness. Dying swimmer: where does he come from? Confusion, disasters, lots of water and defeat here. What about the Indian squaw? There's a return home in 7, with everyone "averaged" and made beautiful in sleep. Zweig: sleep is to the poet as soil is to grass, "nourishing ground linking him to a life beyond himself." And they unite, join hands, beautifully, without lust or anger or categories.

Finally, Whitman confronts the problems of human inadequacy, incapacity, ugilness, evil, as much as he asserts the Imperial Self or the belief in Progress. He takes on the task of creating himself as poet-hero, as Representative Man, and he is honest enough to recognize and revise that self as he goes, to re-create himself in relation to a society that is resistant or indifferent to his idealistic visions of it. If it's a little frightening, given his peculiarities, that he is and remains the American poet in a way no one else does, it's also (for me) reassuring that he is as earnest and complex a searcher for truth, for the true way of life, for the real Open Road as opposed to all the false ones, as he is. We'll see a variety of responses to him as we go on; many American poets, in particular, have felt compelled to answer or respond in many and various ways.

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200214

Day 14 February 8, 2002

1. Names. Collect essay-exams. Start Awakening on Monday; back to the journals.

Cf. Dickinson to Whitman: he as expansive, public, gregarious, sprawling; she as concentrated, private, reclusive, circling inward. Sewing up those little packets of poems and putting them away in her desk . . . Like Rowlandson and Hester, she's a woman in a Puritan society, though a less rigid one than theirs; like Hester she's a rebel, quiet but subversive, asks radical questions while remaining within her original context.

Like Whitman she writes to create herself, to create a persona she can live in and with. Like Melville and Hawthorne, she's preoccupied with ultimate questions: if God is a cruel God, or is merely indifferent natural processes, what holds life together and gives it meaning? What does death mean? Love? Hope? The artist as hero, as maker of meaning, vs. the servant of God or men.

Wendy Martin, in Columbia Lit. History: she's "the ghost that haunts American literature," her isolation was self-imposed strategy to get time and space to write. Her "radical questioning, reworking and often rejection of conventional language, poetic style, theology, feminine roles, and attitudes toward her world." (610) Separation from social context protected her from conventional opinion. [NOTE: again cf. Hester] She gained sense of herself "as an independent thinker and writer" through youthful "series of conflicts with powerful male figures." "In order to achieve psychological and artistic autonomy, she had to undergo a 'civil war' of the self against the very authorities--religious, familial, literary--she sometimes sought to follow." (610)

Resistance to submission to all-powerful God; alternate self-possession and self-abnegation. "The shore is safer, but I love to buffet in the sea." Rejected theology of absolutes of salvation and damnation, and accepted "the experiential discontinuity and linguistic ambiguity that characterized her life." (611)

Also need to resist her stern father, who thought academic work was harmful to her health. "Father buys me many books--but begs me not to read them--because he fears they joggle the Mind." (611) Competition with brother Austin; eventually she won recognition among the family as the creative one, ccess to father's library, exemption to schedule.

Also struggle for psychological autonomy: "I've ceded--I've stopped being theirs." And to receive validation as an artist. Higginson, who was often overwhelmed by her intensity, as in her definition of poetry: "If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. Is there any other way? (614)

Martin sees her poetry as "intended [in part] to demolish patriarchal poetic conventions." (619) Rejects subordination for relationship and interconnection. Oxymorons, unusual metaphors, deliberate indeterminacy. Movement from passive femininity to autonomous womanhood. Etc.

3. These poems: what's to say?

The versions of 216: the key to both of them is that the resurrection doesn't happen.

241: what, then, isn't true, if the look of agony is? Cf. the moral of Scarlet Letter?

303: I still remember Lannie Conrad my good friend trying to write a paper about this poem. Note how she writes about "The Soul" as though it's a part of the self with powers all its own. Something about how little control we have over who we choose to fall in love with? About how we reject the ones who really want us, who are "good" for us? Confrontation with the irrational within us.

449: What angle do you have on this one? What's it mean to "die for Beauty"? How are we supposed to feel about these two? Are they heroes, or fools?

What's the tone of these? resignation? The shy, frail, timid belle of Amherst? That is the older stereotype; the new one is something else. Shira Wolosky: "The overwhelming effect of Dickinson's verse is not delicacy. It is ferocity. Dickinson is an assertive and determined poet, as much fury as maiden, whose retirement is a stance of attack, whose timidity is aggressive." Dickinson: a world where God is not a comforter but a terror? where cathedral tunes bring depression, like winter light. Cf. Arnold she's also troubled by a sense of vanishing, of falling away, something that we see in Wordsworth and in Whitman, in poems like "As I Ebb'd . . .". The last stanza of 632 is the crux, hmm? Beware of misreading because we want these people to be more orthodox than they are. Also beware of course of thinking we need to accept their ideas just because we're studying them.

These poems show, I think, the struggle for autonomy, the attraction/fear of being taken and controlled. E.g. "I cannot live with you," 640. Sense there that the beloved is too intense to handle, or her emotions about him. That he's "good," served Heaven, while she "could not"--she never joined the church, never had a conversion experience.

The Open Road: Dickinson's version is going to Heaven, all along, resisting conversion to orthodoxy when everybody in Amherst was getting saved at revival meetings. 1545, the Bible as antique volume, stories whose telling seems "faded" besides the captivating music of Orpheus.

Power: 754: My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--. Taking on the power of the male, the phallic rifle; it's an equivocal gain, though. Guarding the Master's head, not sharing the pillow. The power to kill, without the power to die."

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200215

Day 15 February 11, 2002

1. Names. Exams back Wed., I hope. Handout with some critical stuff, much of it a bit dated, but some useful ways into the book perhaps. Might spin off further journals from this, esp. if you've read the book before as a number of you clearly have.

2. What about The Awakening? It was controversial from the start, at first for its suggestion that women had sexual feeling at all, much less that they might be attracted to men besides their husbands. "Too strong drink for moral babes," "should be labeled poison." It was banned and then ignored, rediscovered only in mid-century; Chopin's reputation has risen steadily since, largely on the basis of this book, partly for exactly the things it was criticized for: the recognition that women do have sexual feelings, that they might be attracted to men other than their husbands, that they might be less than perfectly satisfied with being "mother-women," their identities swallowed up in their husbands and children. A good deal of criticism on it, and a good deal of argument about whether Edna is hero or mere victim, bold individualist or mere neurotic.

The style: much crisper and leaner than Melville and Hawthorne, much more in the "realistic" tradition, though still filled with imagery and interiority.

Some stuff: character revelations, set-up of relationships in early chapters. The birds as symbols of her situation. Creole society: influence of French, Catholic, aristocratic, cf. Edna who's Kentucky/Mississippi Presbyterian stock. She's baffled by the frankness and flirtaciousness of Creole society, but it's held within rigid boundaries; it's acceptable for Robert to spend time with her, as long as it's platonic.

Ch. 3 Edna and Leonce quarrel about the children. Ch. 4 on mother-women. Creole society seems to offer freedom to women, but it's talk only.

Awakening, itself: where mentioned, and how?

25: early hint of "awakening," 28 re the sea, cf. Whitman. And cf. Melville as well, the sea as vast, untamed, alluring, beautiful, equivocal, perhaps dangerous. 26-34 her childhood comes out through talk with Adéle; attraction to inaccessible lovers, fear of real self-disclosure? 35 Adéle warns Robert to leave Edna alone, she might take him seriously. 44: music, solitude, naked man, the sea. Following she becomes a swimmer, one threshold crossed perhaps. 48 on "the unlimited," dangers of losing herself in it. 49: 28's again, Robert's fantasy. (days in moon's cycle?) Increasing element of the fantastic. 52 Leonce comes home and wants her to come to bed with him, but she refuses; 53 awakening.

Note how vague and confused it is just what she's awakening to. How would you react, if you were her husband?

55 off to the Cheniere with Robert, the lovers, the woman in black, Mariequita. The snakes in the old fort: the sensual life? Her leaving the mass, sleeping, waking up, eating--seems a ritual, doesn't it? As though she's entering a new life. The threshold, the liminal: there's a crossing here. 63: again Robert plays along with her fantasies. Is he her enabler?

Day 16 February 13, 2002

1. Names. Essay/exams back. They were quite strong overall; perhaps the nature of this kind of thing is to ease the strain to memorize and remember, and I'm not quite sure what that means for learning and retention, but what the hey. The best ones were strong on detail and written well, and found ways of organizing and developing ideas that allowed for real analysis and discovery as well as restating the basic elements of the texts.

EMail: Unknown user: adial3_80@hotmail.com

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2. Edna's awakening, part two. More than just sexual, that's a consensus from the journals . . . but what, then?

Hero-quest into self: mingling/confusion of inner and outer. Pearson would say that she's, what, the Wanderer, surely. First stage: Feels isolation, alienation. Second: "Chooses to embark on quest, flees captivity, finds treasure of self." Third: "Discovers can be oneself and have love and community." "To find and name one's own truth," on the other side of page.

The problem is, of course, what keeps Edna from accomplishing this quest.

Step 1: swim, start of journey.

Step 2: Cheniere, crossing threshold.

Step 3: The city, trials to be passed.

Step 4: The helpers: Reisz, Dr. Mandelet, Arobin.

Her own house

The dinner party: what will be enough?

79: Sacrifice and the children. Her "self" as sacred, above all. The cult of the individual? She reads Emerson, "Self-Reliance," no doubt, but he puts her to sleep.

83: Going back to the city: away from the sea and the domination of the matriarchs there. First thing she does is stop her Tuesdays "at home." Léonce chastises her, but she doesn't care, nor does she explain really. 87 seeking herself in half darkness, but the voices aren't hopeful; she tries to destroy her ring but can't.

93 The Ratignole's domestic harmony: tone here? Their "fusion"? It doesn't fit Edna; she begins to "do as she likes," the road to disaster warns Matthew Arnold.

Working on her art in the studio on the top floor, 96-97. Seeking expression through this art, but she's not satisfied with it.

98 ff. Help from Madame Reisz? Is she a witch, in the technical sense? What sort of helper? Music . . . in her room on the top floor, with the windows open: Bachelard would tell us the top floor is the place where art takes place, the highest kinds of thought and expression, but there's risk there too: she warns Edna it will take nerve, and strong wings, to be an artist. Difference between sexual awakening and some other, more general, kind of awakening here? Crucial passage on 106-07. The music, Robert's letter, strange things going on in her head, tears.

3. What is it that these men represent to her? Robert runs away. Edna's self-absorption and reveries frighten him, as does his realization that she's attracted to him. It's all right for him to spend time with her, to flirt playfully, to treat her as his "lady" in the old courtly love way, which is strictly platonic. But when she begins to signal that she's seriously attracted to him it's another thing, he's both attracted and scared, has to flee lest he violate decorum.

Arobin: what about him? She has not much real interest in him, does she? Her first time with him, 138 ff: she cries a little; isn't ashamed, but neither is she really satisfied. He's merely a body, hmm? She's not in love with him, she succumbs it seems more from curiosity and because she can than anything else. She learns from him that she can find sensual pleasure, but it's not more than temporarily satisfying, is it? What would satisfy her, we might ask? Is Robert worthy of the emotion she attaches to him? or just a vehicle for her longings?

c. Wolff on Chopin: The Awakening interests us not because Edna's a prototypical woman, but because she's so human. Her fantasy life is intense, her outer life less so. She's schizoid in Laing's terms, 266. Her hidden self is primarily oral, 268. Sleeping and eating dominates her "adventure" at the island, and her party too. The Freud passage on oceanic feeling is here too. This inner self is "orally destructive, a limitless void" (272). Connection with time in womb, pregnancy, fusion with other. But Adèle's confinement and ordeal give Edna no hope of finding that union again. Her final act is regression to infancy, only way of satisfying the demands of insatiable oral self.

"In this way, then, the ego detaches itself from the external world. Or, to put it more correctly, originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive -- indeed, an all-embracing -- feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it. If we may assume that there are many people in whose mental life this primary ego-feeling has persisted to a greater or less degree, it would exist in them side by side with the narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of maturity, like a kind of counterpart to it. In that case, the ideational contents appropriate to it would be precisely those of limitlessness and of a bond with the universe -- the same ideas with which my friend elucidated the `oceanic' feeling . . . The feeling of happiness derived from the satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse untamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that derived from sating an instinct that has been tamed."

-Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200216

Day 17 February 15, 2002

1. Names. Gatsby and Their Eyes to come, a week on each. Let's try to have Gatsby read by Wed., so that next Friday we can have a wider/deeper discussion. Web links on both that and Chopin are up and running.

2. The journals for today were extremely interesting, I think, mainly because they were so ambivalent and so passionate. Edna's character and especially her final decision are so compelling and so disturbing, I think, that it's hard not to be both moved and angered by her. Yes?

So what do we make of it all. Maybe we can try to sort out some possible reasons for/ways of thinking about her suicide, categorize them, evaluate them.

Pass out "edna p journey" sheet, talk our way through that . . .

Dr. Mandelet: he warns her, he realizes she's in danger, but she won't open up to him either. Who does she really talk to? Certainly not Leonce; she refuses to explain anything to him, doesn't she?

The big dinner party: it should be her triumphant moment, and for a while it is, although finally it seems to fall flat. She's the regal woman, 148, but she still longs for something more. What? One critic [Wheeler] suggests the Victorians made a religion of sexuality, the "angel in the house," the one who gives the man all he can know on earth of the transcendent. The other side of course is horror at "unholy" love, the "desecration of a sacred vessel." But this book shows that sex isn't enough to fill a person's life with meaning, even romantic love isn't. Spilled wine, hurried departures. "Is that all there is?"

Robert: his return. What is he to her, really? What does she want from him/with him? Some fantastic fusion of selves, some love that would be its own sanctification, cf. Scarlet Letter? There seems an insatiable quality in her desires, hmm? For absolute possession of the beloved?

If she's so committed to him that nothing else matters, why then does she run off to Adele's labor? It doesn't seem surprising when he's gone on her return, does it? From watching Adele and talking to the doctor, she comes to see love only as a trap, to ensure that the race goes on . . .

What about that last scene? Why go back to the sea to end it? What has she learned, and what hasn't she learned?

What has she "awakened" to, really? Wheeler: Her five awakenings: "1) a sense of personhood; 2) a sense of "true love" as self-consecrating; 3) the awareness of sensuality independent of love; 4) the discovery that love is only a biological trap; and 5) existential despair--the conclusion that there is no exit but self-destruction." (123)

What doesn't she find? A society that will allow her to fulfill all her desires? A society that will help her to adjust her desires to those that are socially desirable? The right man? Some critics see her as merely an ego out of control, someone who wants more than anyone can have. Others see her as a victim of a society that allows women to want only certain carefully prescribed things, and destroys anyone who goes outside the boundaries. Others say she didn't have the nerve or the will or the stamina it takes to complete the sort of quest she starts on, to become a--what--self-actualized individual?

Seems to me that the frustration we feel at the end of the book comes from this sense that she's given up too soon, that she's chickened out when the going got tough. Sure she's got problems . . . but others do too. Cf. Hester Prynne, and the way that book ends with her coming back and living out her long, lonely life? That Jack Gilbert poem about the heroic: not the beautiful brief gesture, the cavalry going out against the tanks to be slaughtered, but the long haul, the life lived bravely. What if, say, she had decided that her real task was to educate LSonce, to help him be the kind of husband that she needed and deserved?

Studies in American Lit: Heroism and Humility Spring 200217

From Critical Theory text essays:

4. Walker on The Awakening: argues for centrality of the culture of which Chopin wrote, the Acadian world and its importance to the novel. Edna not as feminist hero/martyr but as naturalistic victim of society that she never really understands. She has a sensual awakening but never awakens to an intellectual understanding of her own actions, and thus drifts into death.

Hmm? Note that here the social/historical is not connected quite so directly to the author, though Walker could have done more to do so; Chopin lived in that culture and knew it well

Shaw: Shifting points of view in The Awakening gradually move us from external view of Edna to (at last) her interior perceptions in last scene. Some sharp insights: "She dabbles in self awareness much as she dabbles in art, evincing a fatal dilettantism . . ." (199). But a lot of this seems sort of strained and doubtful to me, at least. Again, she works with an implied reader whose reactions and thought processes she claims to be able to describe in some detail.

4. Yaeger on Awakening: Edna's problems are linguistic and social, not psychological; she seeks a language for understanding her desires, one that she can't find. Mere adultery is only mildly transgressive, not revolutionary. Her absence of speech is the key. 436: Edna lets Robert's utopian narrative structure her desires. Lacan and metonymy (that again!)

438: Lyotard's "différend": something that asks to be put into sentences, but can't be. The novel asks for a language that Edna can't find. Thus her final retelling of her story, 439, is a radical betrayal of the original awakening.

Ff.: traces "linguistic counterplot [of] . . . dis-articulate meaning." (440) Mere traces of what she might have said and thought, going beyond boundaries, 443 ff. She also lacks "speech community" 444 that will share her concerns. Foucault and heteropia and "unspoken orders." 446: "Within the novel an extraordinary register of speech is always opening up and then quietly shutting down."

NOTES ON KATE CHOPIN, THE AWAKENING

Ringe, Donald A. "Romantic Imagery in Kate Chopin's The Awakening." American Literature 73 (1972): 580-588.

Ringe claims critics "construe her theme too narrowly," as merely sexual freedom or feminism. He connects "awakening" to the romantic "image for the emergence of the self or soul into a new life" (581). Thus he reads the book as depicting Edna's "process of developing self-awareness as she reacts to what she perceives as not-herself--the physical world and the people in it." (582) He connects this to Emerson's theory of correspondence, and the romantic use of the sea, which "serves here a double purpose for the individual: it invites `the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.'"(583, quoting the novel 34) The sea can thus cause the soul to lose itself either in outer infinity or inward one. Cf. Pip in Moby Dick, and Melville's use of the sea generally. Ishmael too.

Ringe, Donald A. "Romantic Imagery in Kate Chopin's The Awakening." American Literature 73 (1972): 580-588.

The other image that's key is the city, the symbolic opposite to the sea, as Auden points out. It's community, social organization. Vs. both sea and "happy isle." As Edna becomes her "real self," though, we discover that it "will brook no interference from others" (584), that she's alone most of the time. Cf. the self-absorbed Madame Reisz and Mrs. Ratignole, who surrenders herself to others. "Edna . . . never really achieves the loss of self in love for another, and . . . is never presented as submitting herself to worship God in communion with others" (585). She's selfish, and wishes to possess Robert though she won't let anyone possess her. Thus her final awakening is hopeless; the truth about herself is "for her no lasting union with anyone is possible" (586). So she ends up drowning in the lonely abysses of solitude, like Shelley's Alastor (my comparison). "In defending her self against the threat of community, she loses it in the infinity suggested by the expanse of the sea" (587). Chopin's key concern, then, is "the relation of the individual self to the physical and social realities by which it is surrounded, and the price it must pay for insisting upon its absolute freedom" (588).

Ringe, Donald A. "Romantic Imagery in Kate Chopin's The Awakening." American Literature 73 (1972): 580-588.

NOTE: Good on the sea and the city, but too eager to moralize her death as her own damn fault. No recognition that the union she's looking for isn't possible because the social organism she inhabits won't allow it, or even perhaps allow her to imagine it clearly. There's a subtle anti-feminism at work here, suggesting that she should stay in her place and not make these outrageous demands.

Koloski, Bernard. "The Swinburne Lines in The Awakening." American Literature 75 (1974): 608-610.

He quotes the whole sonnet Gouvernail begins to quote on p. 149, noting that it "reinforces the atmosphere of impending death," of the presence of death behind the wild and sensual activities of the party.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. "Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's The Awakening." American Quarterly 25 (1973):449-471.

The criticism she reviews sees the power of the novel as growing from confrontation between heroine and repressive force of stifling sexual standards or tedium of provincial marriage or being merely a possession, an object. But its importance lies in "its ruthless fidelity to the disintegration of Edna's character" (450). She's not "woman" but human. She's lived a dual life from the outset, concealing her inner questions, daydreaming rather than revealing herself to others. She's frightened of emotional involvement from the first, fantasizes about the safely unattainable "tragedian," marries Léonce because he's safe and won't threaten her inner self. She's a schizoid as R.D. Laing describes them, her personality "a set of defenses which have been established as an attempt to preserve some semblance of coherent identity" (453). Thus she can't relate to others except in cataclysmic terms. Léonce is not a brutal villain, more indifferent than anything, but she sees herself as his possession. She's both tempted and terrified by the idea of "possession," with its threat of engulfing her into nothingness. There are the lovers, and the woman in black. So she tries to have a non-adult relationship with Robert, incorporating him into her own personality or trying to. When he's in Mexico she can have the affair with Arobin, which is safe because she has no feeling for him. When he returns, she can't finally yield to his plea to stay; "Both of Edna's selves are truly betrayed and barren, and she retrenches in the only manner familiar to her, that of a final and ultimate withdrawal" (456). Like Laing's schizophrenics, she can relate only to objects or images, not to real persons.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. "Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's The Awakening." American Quarterly 25 (1973):449-471.

Edna's puzzled by the Creole freedom to express feeling, even passion, without transgressing the limits. She's starving for such freedom, but fears that the "hidden self will emerge as voracious, omnivorous and insatiable" (457). Her "awakening" is sensuous, but not wholly or even primarily sexual. The "succulent" Adèle attracts her, her intimate scene with her is much more sensual and intense than the pale scenes with Robert. He's somewhat like her in his seeking "safely unattainable" women. The day of the boat trip he makes her a meal rather than kissing her, it's on that level that her appetite is awakened. Her appetite gets "fixated at the oral level," in fact. All kinds of food stuff, a sleep-and-eat pattern repeated throughout; the dinner scene, of course. Yet even the party leaves her yearning for some indefinite further satisfaction. Wolff cites Freud on those fixated in the oral phase, still longing for "limitless fusion with the external world," the "oceanic feeling"; again cf. Melville and Moby Dick. Edna remains fixed in this fundamental longing, again connected with the sea. "She has achieved some measure of personal identity only by hiding her `true self' within--repressing all desire for instinctual gratification. Yet she can see others [the Creoles, Adèle] who seem comfortably able to indulge their various sensory appetites and to do so with easy moderation. Edna's . . . . inner being cannot be satisfied. It is an orally destructive self, a limitless void whose needs can be filled, finally, only by total fusion with the outside world, a totality of sensuous unfolding. And this totality means annihilation of the ego" (464) NOTE: This is quite similar to Ringe's argument, though posed in more psychological terms. Again it's persuasive in a narrow sense, but too willing to translate her whole situation into mere pathology. Her problem seems to me a failure of imagination, as well as of identity. And a failure of society, which offers no models of integrated and yet fully functioning persons. Everybody in the book is incomplete, except maybe the doctor.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. "Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's The Awakening." American Quarterly 25 (1973):449-471.

Given this vulnerability, Edna seeks people who might help her: Mademoiselle Reisz, the artist, and her painting. But Edna's too passive to be a real artist. A real genital relationship? All her attempts are badly flawed; she can't become a "mother-woman" like Adèle. But Adèle does have a "rewarding adult relationship" with her husband, they're described as fused into one and talk happily and freely together. But Edna wants some kind of pre-verbal fusion, one impossible in this world. She won't even try to talk to Léonce. Her affair with Robert is "genuinely narcissistic" (467); he's really "a part of herself," a "figment of her imagination." She tells him nothing else matters, but then runs off to Adèele's confinement, where she isn't really needed. Why? Because "to have stayed with Robert would have meant consummation, finally, the joining of her dream-like passion to a flesh-and-blood lover" (468). She's unconsciously ambivalent about actually attaining him; finally realizes her "inner emptiness." Edna needs to be with Adèle at birth to view again that sense of oneness, that oceanic feeling, she can't recover. But what she experiences is a bad, painful birth, a separation that gives her no comfort. "Nature's cruel message" is "an awakening to separation, to individual existence, to the hopelessness of ever satisfying the dream of total fusion" (470). She finally regresses "back beyond childhood, back into time eternal" (471)

Wheeler, Otis B. "The Five Awakenings of Edna Pontellier." The Southern Review 11(1975): 118-128.

Wheeler says the book outraged early reviewers not because Edna commits adultery and then destroys herself, but because she "rejected the pervasive Victorian notion that sexual love is, or should be, a variety of religious experience" (118). Cf. "Dover Beach," Hester's "What we did had a consecration of its own!" The "angel in the house" in Coventry Patmore. Their reverence for married love "is matched by the Victorian horror of `unholy' love," which must be "the desecration of a sacred vessel." (119) Chopin examines and rejects both Victorian roles, the "angel in the house" and the "scarlet woman," through Edna. Her five awakenings: "1) a sense of personhood; 2) a sense of "true love" as self-consecrating; 3) the awareness of sensuality independent of love; 4) the discovery that love is only a biological trap; and 5) existential despair--the conclusion that there is no exit but self-destruction." (123)

Wheeler, Otis B. "The Five Awakenings of Edna Pontellier." The Southern Review 11(1975): 118-128.

Stuff about not being mother-woman, about the sea and the threat of loss of self in it. Secular baptism in scene where she learns to swim, then the boat trip and the serpents and long sleep, "coming through the ritual of erotic love into the presence of life's essential vital mystery" (124). Final awakening: alive, she's "a prisoner of the social order . . . and of the biological order" (125). She "now understands that the possibility of religious transport through love . . . [either marital or extramarital] is a delusion" (125). So she refuses the assigned roles of wife, mother or lover, but in doing so is alienated from "life-defining and life-supporting relations" (125). Thus the book is also a rejection of "the pervasive nineteenth-century faith in the individual, in spite of the Whitmanesque imagery" (126). NOTE: In these terms, it seems like a sort of quasi-naturalist, quasi-realist book, might be compared to Crane's Maggie.

Thornton, Lawrence. "The Awakening: A Political Romance." American Literature 52 (1980): 50-66.

Cf. Edna to Emma Bovary, but Edna is more aware of "political crises related to her position." (50) Edna is deceived both by her private vision and by Grand Isle society, which seems to grant women more latitude than it really does. Edna really has nowhere to go. The bird as image, of the self that would free itself, the naked man/woman along the beach. Men are free to go places, women must remain. Madame Reisz sees that Edna doesn't have the disipline or clarity of vision needed by the artist and the rebel. She's a free woman, but an imperfect model, abrasive and egocentric. Edna's "imaginative life belongs to the realm of fantasy" (56); she can't connect it to the real world. Her "imagined self has no substance . . . . none of her visions of her self, or of a future, achieve clarity" (58). Marriage is the inescapable and monolithic fact of the novel (59).

Thornton, Lawrence. "The Awakening: A Political Romance." American Literature 52 (1980): 50-66.

This isn't an "erotic novel"; as an American woman, Edna mistrusts her senses, but discovering the "dark aspects" of her self "leads to increased self-knowledge that isolates her from human contact, rather than providing a means by which she could experience emotional and physical gratification" (62). Yet the understanding of life she thinks she finds in sex with Arobin is deceiving; it doesn't help her escape. Her vision has been enlarged, but the conditions of her life remain. Her children still bind her to a life that doesn't fit her. NOTE: All these critics treat her as not fully "awake," in the sense Thoreau or Stafford or Denise Levertov is, and they are right. She recognizes her limits and struggles against them, but never manages to imagine a life that might be satisfying within the inevitable limits of being human. Freud's "love and work"? She has neither . . .