outline_us_lit

CHAPTER4THE ROMANTIC PERIOD,1820-1860: FICTIONWalt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne,Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, EmilyDickinson, and the Transcendentalistsrepresent the first great literary generation producedin the United States. In the case of thenovelists, the Romantic vision tended to expressitself in the form Hawthorne called the “romance,”a heightened, emotional, and symbolicform of the novel. Romances were not love stories,but serious novels that used special techniquesto communicate complex and subtlemeanings.Instead of carefully defining realistic charactersthrough a wealth of detail, as most Englishor continental novelists did, Hawthorne, Melville,and Poe shaped heroic figures larger than life,burning with mythic significance. The typical protagonistsof the American Romance are haunted,alienated individuals. Hawthorne’s ArthurDimmesdale or Hester Prynne in The ScarletLetter, Melville’s Ahab in Moby-Dick, and themany isolated and obsessed characters of Poe’stales are lonely protagonists pitted against unknowable,dark fates that, in some mysteriousway, grow out of their deepest unconsciousselves. The symbolic plots reveal hidden actionsof the anguished spirit.One reason for this fictional exploration intothe hidden recesses of the soul is the absenceof settled, traditional community life in America.English novelists — Jane Austen, CharlesDickens (the great favorite), Anthony Trollope,George Eliot, William Thackeray — lived in acomplex, well-articulated, traditional society andshared with their readers attitudes that informedtheir realistic fiction. American novelistswere faced with a history of strife and revolution,a geography of vast wilderness, and a fluid andrelatively classless democratic society. Americannovels frequently reveal a revolutionary absenceof tradition. Many English novels show a poormain character rising on the economic and socialladder, perhaps because of a good marriage orthe discovery of a hidden aristocratic past. Butthis buried plot does not challenge the aristocraticsocial structure of England. On the contrary,it confirms it. The rise of the main charactersatisfies the wish fulfillment of the mainlymiddle-class readers.In contrast, the American novelist had to dependon his or her own devices. America was, inpart, an undefined, constantly moving frontierpopulated by immigrants speaking foreign languagesand following strange and crude ways oflife. Thus the main character in American literaturemight find himself alone among cannibaltribes, as in Melville’s Typee, or exploring awilderness like James Fenimore Cooper’sLeatherstocking, or witnessing lonely visionsfrom the grave, like Poe’s solitary individuals, ormeeting the devil walking in the forest, likeHawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown. Virtually allthe great American protagonists have been “loners.”The democratic American individual had, asit were, to invent himself.The serious American novelist had to inventnew forms as well — hence the sprawling, idiosyncraticshape of Melville’s novel Moby-Dick,and Poe’s dreamlike, wandering Narrative ofArthur Gordon Pym. Few American novels achieveformal perfection, even today. Instead of borrowingtested literary methods, Americans tend toinvent new creative techniques. In America, itis not enough to be a traditional and definablesocial unit, for the old and traditional gets left36