Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
fatality that attends all such eorts of perverted wisdom, perished there, at the feet
of her father and Giovanni. Just at that moment Professor Pietro Baglioni looked
forth from the window, and called loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed with horror,
to the thunderstricken man of science,”Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is THIS the
upshot of your experiment!”
4.13.6 Reading and Review Questions
1. How, and to what eect, does Hawthorne mix the real and the fantastic
in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux?” How, if at all, does this mixture
compare with those in “Young Goodman Brown?” Why is this mixture in
“Major Molineux” related to the American Revolution?
2. In “Young Goodman Brown,” why does Hawthorne place the story’s
setting in the Puritan past? What is he suggesting about the eect of this
past on the American consciousness or spirit?
3. In “The Minister’s Black Veil,” is Hooper already estranged from his
fellow humans when he dons the black veil, or does the veil cause this
estrangement? Why? How do you know?
4. How does the veil’s color connect Hooper’s experience with that of Young
Goodman Brown? Why?
5. What is the attitude towards the intellect in “The Birth-Mark” and
“Rappaccini’s Daughter?” Why? How do you know?
4.14 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
(1807–1882)
Like his contemporary Alfred,
Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow wedded sound
and sense in epical poetry on the nation’s
lore and history. Unlike Tennyson,
Longfellow drew not upon Arthurian
legend but upon American stories and
legends. He wrote about Native American
lives, particularly that of the Ojibwe in
The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and the
Plymouth Colony in The Courtship of
Image 4.13 | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Miles Standish (1858). The metrical Artist | Thomas Buchanan Read
Source | Wikimedia Commons
facility, exible rhyming, and romantic
License | Public Domain
characterizations in Longfellow’s poetry
made his work immensely popular with readers in both America and England.
However, he was dismissed by later generations for a time as overly traditional
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