( - )

“Young Goodman
cd Brown” [1835]

-Central figure in American Renaissance 1

-High praise in his lifetime and after. His short stories reviewed by
Poe and Melville. Admired by many different reasons.
-His fiction invites multiple readings (studied by poststructuralist, : Moral issues (secret sin and 3
new literary, feminist…) hidden gilt)
-Revolt VS the sentimentalized literary culture of the time. He was brought up a Unitarian, but his writings showed
-His moralizing sketches in domestic topics are no longer popular. Calvinist concerns.
-His dark/troubling short stories are now popular.
Most of his writings about colonial history of New
-His pure style (aesthetic qualities) won his universal applause.
England and its Puritan past (showed an ambivalent
-Carefully polished prose style.
attitude towards the Puritans).
-His use of grammatically complex and rhetorical subtle mode of
-> He saw them as great, but didn’t like their self-
literary discourse.
righteousness and intolerance.
-He experiments with literary forms and techniques.
*Meticulous. *Deliberately used He didn’t like that the Puritans saw sin as part of life but
*Highly conscious. were intolerant with transgressors.
archaisms to give colonial
*Rigorous verbal economy. Puritans separated people into 2 groups: the saved and
flavour to his work.
*Concentration of effect. the doomed, whereas Hawthorne was interested in the
mix of good and evil in each individual.
“Young Goodman Brown” 2
-> He claimed such severe introspection caused more
-Original use of allegory (he allegorizes evil)
harm than good.
-Faith is aptly named / Young Master Anybody / Forest -> His own
evil mind. Used Allegory (double meaning that allows the story to
be interpreted on two levels). Similar to the fable or the
: -Witchcraft stories (popular among magazine
parable. Used to convey moral messages.
audiences) especially the witchcraft delusion of 1692.
-He turned the Puritan allegory against them
-New England Puritans (the results of their intolerance).
-He rejected Puritanism
-Many people in the 17th century believed in spectral evidence.
-He can be seen as an allegorist or a master of symbolism
The devil could only appear in his follower’s bodies.
-He adopted the didactic framework of the traditional
-Keep in mind when reading that the protagonist does not
allegory.
represent the 1st generation orthodox Calvinism but 3rd
generation. Confused/ troubled Puritans.
-Brown does not behave like a genuine saint and he didn’t heed --> Dream vision 4

the warning of “presumption”. -Journey into the forest, both physical and psychological.
Has an- unconscious desire : Adventure
/ to learn about story.
evil, finds it in
-This is about shattered faith.
He’s the hero. Proud.
his inner self refuses to accept it
-Considered his best work but he did not include it in his Twice-
Told Collection. : Description
-Hermeneutic gap (pieces of inforeport. (Actions)
withheld from theNo
direct/indirect
reader to createspeech.
suspense) -> The final question “was it a
st
--> He used archaisms to give a colonial flavor. 5 dream” /is an example of it. : Time of the 1 settlers
st
-Plain style. Sentences not very long. Direct speech -> dynamic. Creation of the Virginia Company and 1 English
--> Young Goodman Brown: Protagonist.
-Style. Easy to understand. Allegory and symbolism not so easy. establishment @ therd beginning of the 17th century.
rd
Declining religion. 3 generation of Puritans. Very naïve,
-3 person limited omniscient. Authorial intrusion some times. : Latin & Greek quotations.
immature, overconfident
rd and presumptuous.
-Purity of style. Rhetoric, paradox and archaism. (Seneca) Uses 3 person narrative.
-Faith: Stability and domestic sphere in Puritan world.
*Setting: Supernatural dark forest with a path that closes behind Pure-hearted. Religious :feeling.
Savages, devils, beastly and
him. Forests are territories of the devil. Anything can happen. threatening. But he is fascinated.
-Old Man/Devil: Appears to be an ordinary man. Devil
-Plot is circular. Begin and ends with Faith and her pink ribbon. could be any man. Can appear in: any Complex relationship
context.
-Didactic framework of traditional allegory turned against Puritans history and rhetoric -> Blends facts and fiction.
*Flat characters: Faith=faith, Goody Cloyse=goodness,
6
Traveler=evil, Y. G. B.= Every man, Brown) Color of the earth. Forest=Eden/Evil The Bible-Genesis Good/Evil
-Predestination. Faith=Purity Pilgrim’s Progress Past changes present
Path= evil or good Salem Witch Trials Religion
-Lack of final closure. Reader must decide dream or not?
Serpent staff= The King Philip’s War Nature is evil
devil Protestant Persecution Fire/Light
 UNIT 13
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
"Young Goodman Brown"

From A Study Guide: Hawthorne is one of the major writers of the American
Renaissance on the grounds of his polished prose style; The Scarlett Letter is an
outstanding example of "psychological romance", a genre which allowed the
incorporation of mysterious or supernatural elements to explore the irrational forces that
affect human minds; his ambivalent attitude toward Puritanism is reflected in his
writings, being the focus on his innovative use of allegory which he subversively
transformed in order to question the mythology set up by Puritan allegory; Hawthorne's
original use of the allegorical method in YGB made it a masterpiece defined as a
gloomy allegory of evil written by an author obsessed with original sin and eternal
damnation, allowing also many other interpretations; YGB draws conclusions about
philosophical, historical, psychological, ethical and aesthetic aspects; appraise how plot
works in YGB not only to evaluate Hawthorne's dexterity but also to learn how to apply
the same critical skills to the analysis of any other short stories and novels. The clever
use of deliberate ambiguities allows readers to speculate about divergent meanings.

His work has been considered worthy of close scrutiny up to the present, favourably
reviewed by his contemporaries (Poe and Melville), and as his fiction invites multiple
kind of readings, he has been studied by critic schools like Post-structuralism, New
Criticism, Historicism, Feminism and Deconstructionism.
Our age values irony, paradox, symbolic complexity, psychological depth, subtlety, and
clever use of ambiguities which allow readers divergent meanings. There is a tendency
to view his work as a revolt against the sentimentalized literary culture of his time, since
he expressed his resentment towards women writers who were achieving commercial
success from whose methods he wanted to distance himself. However he also tried to
reach the widest audience with conventional pieces, we prefer the innovative ones in
which he questioned established ideas and subverted traditional procedures, like his
darker and more troubling short stories.
Work: One aspect of his prose is his purity of style for he was a meticulous and highly
conscious artist who experimented with literary forms and techniques. Through his
rigorous verbal economy, he achieved great concentration of effect, although his prose
style was perceived as old-fashioned even in his own time since he deliberately
employed archaism in order to give colonial flavour to his writings.
Nowadays we call him a "novelist" but in his own time he was proclaimed the finest
American "romancer". Romance is a fictitious narrative in prose or verse with
marvellous and uncommon incidents, while novel is presumed to aim at fidelity, the
probable and ordinary course of man's experience (realistic novel). Rather to strive for
verisimilitude, he withed to be able to incorporate mysterious or supernatural elements
because romance gave him the freedom to explore the irrational forces that affect the
human mind.
Allegedly he had an ambivalent attitude toward Puritanism, for although he had learnt
about the failures and achievements of this community he found also greatness in them
but was appalled by the intolerance, which led them to persecute dissenters. He disliked
the rigid Puritan minds, which were aware that sin is a part of everyday life and
nevertheless were incapable of dealing with transgressors. Puritan doctrine separated
people into two groups, the saved and the damned not considering the good and evil in
each individual, a theme that Hawthorne deemed of utmost importance. He sought to
demonstrate the damaging effect of certain Puritan teachings that led to an excessive
preoccupation with sinfulness, which made ordinary people more vulnerable to
temptation.
He expressed his clearest convictions through allegory and therefore he revealed his
stand on Puritanism through his innovative use of this mode. In allegory there is a
double meaning that allows a story to be interpreted on two levels: a surface level and a
deep one, which is understood through the first. It is a literary form closely related to
fable and parable, used to convey moral messages or teach ethical principles, a form
employed by the first Puritan colonists to set up a mythology of the New World.
Hawthorne adopted the didactic framework of allegory to question such a mythology
and for subversive purposes: to turn the Puritan allegorical method against the Puritans
themselves.
His movement towards secularized allegory helped to mould the technique of
symbolism, which would be cultivated in the 19th c. and some critics consider him an
allegorist while others see him as a symbolist. In the difference between allegory and
symbolism, the former points to a referent, which stands outside itself and demands a
strict correspondence between the concrete and the abstract idea; on the contrary,
symbolism is able to embody abstract realities and allows for multiple possibilities of
meaning. Instead of tag him in one of the both, is safely to conclude that he rendered
these two related modes very effectively in his prose.
"Young Goodman Brown"
It is probably the tale that best illustrated his original use of allegorical method, in
which he allegorizes evil. Not only names are allegorical, expressing what characters
represent, but also places and things (e.g. Faith is "aptly named"; the protagonist has an
Everyman-like name). The meaning of the journey is evident, being a typical motif in
allegorical writings, but the forest is subject of speculation for when Brown enters it, he
is really entering his own evil mind.
YGB, apart from the allegorical interpretation, can be analysed from other perspective
since its accounts of moral, philosophical, historical and psychological aspects.
Regarding the sources of this masterpiece, his most important debt was the witchcraft
delusion of 1962, considered a humiliating passage in the history of his nation which he
saw as the direct result of the intolerance of the Puritans. The guilt he felt about his
ancestors' involvement in the persecution of Quakers and in Salem witchcraft trails
comes out in YGB.
Regarding this, it is relevant in YGB the spectral evidence, since in the 17th c many
people believed in spectres, a satanic intervention since it was commonly accepted that
the devil only assumed the shape of his sworn (declarado) disciple, upon which many
accusations of witchcraft were based. This practice was condemned by the 19th c.
historians whose works influenced Hawthorne's treatment of the theme.
The protagonist does not represent orthodox Calvinism (first-generation Puritans) but a
declining form of religion. Brown behaves as an extremely naïve, immature,
overconfident and presumptuous third-generation Puritan, who had no doubts about his
place amongst the saved. Calvinist preachers warned against "presumption", which is
the act of declaring one's salvation already certain, explaining that their doctrine of
predestination was not an excuse for moral evasion. Goodman takes the risk of getting
involved with the devil, having a partial and distorted vision of the Puritan catechism.
His failure to understand the evil led to the gloomy ending of YGB, a story about
shattered faith.
Images suggest darkness versus light; contrast day/night; antithesis good/evil.
Pink ribbons contribute to Faith's characterization. Pink is white (pure, innocent) + red
(passion, depravity): good and evil in human nature.

The point of view swings between the narrator and the title character.
The journey into the forest can be considered both a physical and psychological
journey. Goodman Brown has an unconscious desire to learn about evil, and discovers it
in his inner self but refuses to accept this dimension of his personality.
Through "hermeneutic gaps" are pieces of information are withheld by the writer to
enhance curiosity and interest: the final question "was it a dream?" is an example.
Exploratory Questions
- Melville detected the darkness in Hawthorne's work. Indicate the images that suggest
darkness versus light and analyse their function. To what extent does the contrast
between day and light correspond to the antithesis between good and evil in the tale?
- The pink ribbon (mentioned 5 times in the tale) is an important factor which
contributes to the characterization of Faith. As the colour pink is a mixture of white
(associated with purity and innocence) and red (linked with passion and the scarlet of
depravity), it may symbolize the inevitable coexistence of good and evil in human
nature.
- Impartial omniscience does not allow the narrator any evaluation of the characters, but
since Hawthorne's narrator is not a detached observer, we are often aware of the
existence of an author/narrator who even addresses the reader. Look for examples of
authorial intrusion.
- Lawrence observed that Hawthorne, Poe and Melville "refuse everything explicit and
always put up a sort of double meaning". Find them in YGB.
- Some critics consider Hawthorne as a sceptic or agnostic whose interest in Puritan
conscience was intellectual, although there is a strong Calvinistic strain in his work
evident in his distrust of human nature. Melville was fascinated with the "great power of
blackness in him [Hawthorne] which derives its force from its appeals to that
Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original sin.
- According to Christian theology, both presumption and despair are two great sins,
consider their relevance to this short story. To explain how Goodman Brown shifts from
one extreme position to the other, you may want to attention to the acts that undermine
his confidence.
- Melville suggested that Hawthorne sometimes "directly calculated to deceived the
superficial skimmer of pages", so careless readers can be mistaken when skimming
YGB. Note that Hawthorne was concerned with the difficulties of interpreting
absolutely.
- YGB presents an interesting example of his fictional treatment of female characters.
Hawthorne showing that patriarchal society victimizes women, thus consider whether
the narrator reveals sympathy for Faith and how various kinds of women are classified
in the witches' meeting.
- Note that the word "dream" is used 6 times, what elements may lead readers to thing
Goodman Brown has had a dream?
- Analyse his use of direct speech bearing in mind that he avoided colloquial idioms
which might not sound as refined as the rest of his prose. He often sets Goodman
Brown's thoughts in quotation marks, providing us with examples of direct thought (a
submode of the narrative mode called speech).
- "The Colloquy of the Dogs", Cervantes's novella, contains many important motifs
which appear in YGB, which is the uncertainty of the meeting, was it for real or a
dream?
- Poe: "The style of Mr. Hawthorne is purity itself. His tone is singularly effective, wild,
plaintive, thoughtful, and in full accordance with his themes". Longfellow praised him
for "the exceeding beauty of his style".
- Some critics contend that Hawthorne's works, successively reinterpreted from
different perspectives, resist any final interpretation. Explain how you interpret the tale
bearing in mind the distinction between meaning (what a work means for its author) and
significance (what a work signifies for its readers).
- Analyse the descriptions of the woods as the devil's territories and point out
similarities with the way other American authors have described wilderness as the realm
of evil.
- Compare Hawthorne's attitude to nature with that of Emerson and Thoreau, especially
with the way the forest is depicted. The three of them were close friends and saw the
same landscape when they were living in Concord, but Hawthorne did not share the
optimistic spirit of his Transcendentalist friends nor their belief in the goodness of
human nature.
From A Study Guide: writing about plot
Plot refers to the unfolding series or pattern of events in a narrative or drama. When we
write about the plot we should not simply discuss what happens in it, or merely give a
summary of its action, but conscientiously explain the way events are arranged in a
temporal sequence, paying attention to how they are ordered and why they are linked.
Plots usually arise out of a network of aims and desires expressed by characters that
engage with each other while trying to achieve differing aspirations. The starting point
of a piece of fiction is often the exposition of a conflict situation experienced by two or
more characters that antagonize each other.
Since a plot necessarily moves in a certain direction, readers tend to anticipate its
trajectory, because their knowledge of other plots helps them predict the path. Yet, not
all plots are easily predictable, because a trajectory may be diverted by the introduction
of an unexpected element.
Most short stories follow a pattern of: 1) exposition: the introductory material that
supplies readers with information about the conflict situation in which characters are
involved; 2) rising action: the complications that entangle characters and plunge them
into further conflict; 3) climax: the moment of greatest suspense, emotional tension or
excitement; 4) falling action; 5) resolution. Few short stories are balanced as evenly.
The climax does not generally fall right in the middle of the story, because the bulk of
many narratives is spent building up the crisis or turning point of the conflict.
A distinction must be drawn between two temporal sequences which may or may not
coincide: 1) the order in which the events recounted in a story are supposed to have
happened; 2) the order in which such events are presented in the text and the reader
learns them. Events may be presented in chronological order, but authors may prefer to
depart from a chronologically ordered pattern by moving back and forth between past
and present: analepsis (flashback) and prolepsis (anticipation).
A highly effective way of plotting a short story or a novel is by basing it on a journey.
"Young Goodman Brown" may be discussed as both a physical journey into the forest,
and a psychological journey in which the protagonist has an unconscious desire to learn
about evil, and discovers it in his inner self, but refuses to acknowledge this dimension
of his personality.
Plot and setting are two important narrative elements that are often considered together
when analyzing fiction. Setting is the spatio-temporal location, together with the social
and historical context, in which the events of a story happen. Note that it is certainly
nighttime and presumably Halloween, the night of October 31. Setting is linked to
atmosphere, the prevailing mood and feeling evoked by a text. Atmosphere arises from
the mixed evocation of physical location together with other circumstances that help
readers perceive the concrete details of a scene as if they were visualizing it. Landscape
accurately reflects what is going on in the minds and hearts of the characters. Physical
location parallels the thoughts and feelings of the protagonist. Dark forest is an adequate
space to locate a series of incidents that reveal the author's pessimistic vision of the
natural world.
The plot can be analyzed in relation to its theme, since the chief issues at work may be
easily discovered when one ponders the underlying causes of events and sums up their
importance. For instance, how the plot gradually foregrounds the theme of isolation, as
the protagonist turns out to be one of Hawthorne's typical self-imprisoned character; or
how the plot discloses the theme of the mixture of good and evil in all human beings.
The plot can also be examined in relation to its characterization. Static characters
remain the same from the beginning to the end, whereas dynamic characters undergo
some kind of transformation over the course of the narrative.
Plots generally contain gaps and ambiguities. The most common gap in fiction is the
hermeneutic gap, also called information gap. When readers detect enigmas or gaps,
they search for clues and hypotheses. Hermeneutic gaps can be either temporary or
permanent. The author may withhold information so as to add suspense, enhance
interest, increase curiosity, and later achieve maximum impact. Sometimes the
information that readers expect is never given.
Closure may exist: 1) at the level of questions; 2) at the level of expectations. Closure at
the level of questions means that the question raised throughout the narrative are finally
answered. When a narrative ends in such a way as to satisfy the expectations, it is said
to have closure at the level of expectations. For instance, knowing the destinies of the
characters who fall in love in a fairytale provides closure at the level of questions, while
learning that such characters "got married and lived happily ever after" furnishes
closure at the level of expectations. Many narratives have closure at the two levels: no
important secrets are left unexplained and the conflict situation corresponds to whatever
reader anticipated. Any narrative may lack closure at one or at both levels. For example,
a tragic ending for the lovers (instead of a happy marriage) would provide closure only
at the level of questions in a fairytale, not at the level of expectations.
Short stories basically differ from novels in length, an essential feature which implies a
greater economy concerning all their narrative elements, including plot, because the
events recounted in a brief piece of fiction cannot be as numerous as in a long one.
Short stories have only one plot, whereas novels often have multiple plots.
Any critical evaluation of plots entails an attentive appraisal of their construction or
design. Causality may be either implied or made explicit, and some writers manage
better than others when manipulating the causal links, which bind a plot together.
Abbott claims that one of the keys to the success of all narratives is the author's ability
to build up "chains of suspense and surprise, which keep us in a fluctuating state of
impatience, wonderment, and partial gratification.
 El Joven Goodman Brown
Young Goodman Brown; Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

Al anochecer, el joven Goodman Brown salió a la calle del pueblo de Salem. Al cruzar el umbral, volvió la
cabeza besar a su joven esposa. Y Faith, nombre que le resultaba muy adecuado, asomó su hermosa cabeza a la
calle dejando que el viento jugueteara con las cintas rosas de su gorra mientras hablaba con Goodman Brown.
-Querido -susurró acercando los labios a su oído-: te ruego que dejes tu viaje para la mañana y duermas esta
noche en casa. Una mujer sola es acosada por sueños y pensamientos que a veces le dan miedo. De todas las
noches del año, esposo mío, te ruego que te quedes conmigo precisamente ésta.
-Mi amor y mi Fe -contestó el joven Goodman Brown-. De todas las noches del año, ésta es la que debo
pasar lejos. Mi viaje debe hacerse entre este momento y el amanecer. Pero mi dulce y bella esposa, ¿es que
dudas ya de mí, cuando sólo llevamos tres meses casados?
-¡Que Dios te bendiga entonces! -dijo Faith moviendo las cintas rosas-. Y que lo encuentres todo bien cuando
regreses.
-¡Así sea! -gritó Goodman Brown-. Reza, querida Faith, y acuéstate al anochecer, así ningún daño te
sucederá.
Se despidieron, y el joven siguió su camino hasta que, cuando estaba por de girar la esquina junto al templo,
miró hacia atrás y vio la cabeza de Faith que seguía observándole con un aire melancólico, a pesar de sus cintas
rosadas.
-¡Mi pobre y pequeña Faith! -susurró, pues tenía el corazón afligido-. ¡Soy un perverso al dejarla! Y hablaba
de sueños. Me parece que cuando lo hacía su rostro estaba turbado, como si un sueño le hubiera advertido del
trabajo que hay que hacer esta noche. Pero no, no: pensar en ello la mataría. Es un ángel sobre la tierra, y tras
esta única noche me mantendré aferrado a sus faldas y la seguiré hasta el cielo.
Con tan excelente resolución para el futuro, Goodman Brown se sintió justificado para apresurar su
propósito maligno. Había tomado un camino que oscurecían los árboles más tristes del bosque, y que al
apartarse de la carretera principal se convertía en un estrecho sendero. Todo era realmente solitario; y en tal
soledad es peculiar que el viajero no sepa quién puede ocultarse en los innumerables troncos o las gruesas
ramas que hay sobre la cabeza, de manera que con sus pasos solitarios puede estar pasando entre una multitud
invisible.
-Podría haber un indio diabólico detrás de cada árbol -dijo Goodman Brown para sí, y miró con temor hacia
atrás al tiempo que añadía-: ¡El propio diablo podría estar a un codo de mí!
Mirando hacia atrás, recorrió una curva del camino, y al volver a mirar hacia adelante vio la figura de un
hombre con atuendo grave y decente sentado al pie de un viejo árbol. Se levantó al acercarse Goodman Brown
y empezó a caminar al lado de éste.
-Llegas tarde, Goodman Brown -le dijo-. El reloj del Old South estaba sonando cuando llegué desde Boston, y
de eso hace ya más de quince minutos.
-Faith me entretuvo un rato -contestó el joven, asustado por la aparición repentina de su compañero,
aunque no fuese inesperada.
En el bosque había ya una oscuridad profunda, que era todavía mayor por la zona que ambos estaban
recorriendo. Por lo que podía discernirse, el segundo viajero tendría unos cincuenta años, aparentemente de la
misma posición en la vida que Goodman Brown, y se le asemejaba considerablemente, aunque quizás más en la
expresión que en los rasgos. Aun así, podrían haberlos tomado por padre e hijo. Y sin embargo, aunque el
mayor iba vestido tan simplemente como el joven, y era de maneras igualmente simples, tenía ese aire
indescriptible de alguien que conoce el mundo, y que no se sentiría avergonzado en la mesa del gobernador ni
en la corte del rey Guillermo. Pero lo único que en él podía considerarse notable era su bastón, semejante a
una gran serpiente negra y tan curiosamente trabajado que casi se le veía dar vueltas y retorcerse como una
serpiente viva. Evidentemente aquello era una ilusión ocular ayudada por la luz incierta.
-Venga, Goodman Brown -le gritó el compañero-. Llevamos un paso muy apagado para el principio de un
viaje. Si tan pronto te has cansado, toma mi bastón.
-Amigo, si he convenido encontrarme contigo aquí, ahora prefiero regresar por donde vine- contestó el otro
cambiando su paso-. Tengo escrúpulos de tocar el asunto que tú sabes.
-¿Eso opinas? -contestó el de la serpiente-. Sigamos caminando, y razonemos mientras tanto; si yo te
convenzo no volverás. Sólo nos queda un poco de camino por el bosque.
 -¡Es demasiado lejos! ¡Demasiado! -exclamó el buen hombre reanudando la caminata-. Mi padre nunca
habría entrado en el bosque con tal recado, ni su padre antes de él. Hemos sido una raza de hombres honestos
y buenos cristianos desde los tiempos de los mártires; y seré el primero con el nombre de Brown que tomó
nunca este camino y siguió...
-En tal compañía, dirías -observó el de más edad- ¡Bien dicho, Goodman Brown! He conocido a tu familia
como una más entre los puritanos; y eso no es decir poco. Ayudé a tu abuelo cuando azotó a la mujer cuáquera
por las calles de Salem; y fui yo el que durante la guerra del rey Felipe llevé a tu padre un nudo de pino de tea,
cocido de mi propio hogar, para que prendiera fuego a un pueblo indio. Ambos fueron buenos amigos míos; y
hemos dado muchos paseos agradables por este camino, regresando alegremente tras la medianoche, y sólo
por ellos de buena gana sería amigo tuyo.
-Si es como tú dices, me maravilla que nunca hablaran de esos asuntos -contestó Goodman Brown-. O en
realidad no me maravilla, sabiendo que el menor rumor les habría expulsado de Nueva Inglaterra. Somos gente
de oración, y de buenas obras además, y no permitimos esas maldades.
-Sean o no maldades, tengo aquí en Nueva Inglaterra muchos conocidos -contestó el viajero del bastón
retorcido-. Los diáconos de muchas iglesias han bebido conmigo el vino de la comunión; hombres selectos de
diversas ciudades me nombraron su presidente; y una gran mayoría del Gran Tribunal y del Tribunal General
apoyan firmemente mis intereses. Además, el Gobernador y yo... aunque eso son secretos de Estado.
-¿Es posible que sea así? -gritó Goodman Brown mirando con asombro a su impasible compañero-. Sin
embargo, nada tengo que ver con el Gobernador y el Consejo; ellos tienen sus modos, que no son normales
para un simple esposo como yo. Y si siguiera adelante contigo, ¿cómo iba a aguantar la mirada de ese buen
anciano, nuestro ministro, en el pueblo de Salem? Ay, su voz me haría temblar tanto en el día del Sabbat como
en el del sermón.
Hasta ese momento el viajero de más edad le había escuchado con la debida gravedad; pero entonces tuvo
un ataque de risa irreprimible que le hizo agitarse con tanta violencia que su bastón, semejante a una
serpiente, realmente parecía sacudirse con simpatía.
-¡Ja, ja, ja! -reía una y otra vez, hasta que recobró la compostura-. Bueno, sigamos, Goodman Brown,
sigamos; pero te ruego que no me mates de risa.
-Pues bien, terminemos el asunto -contestó Goodman Brown sintiéndose molesto-. Piensa en mi esposa,
Faith. Rompería su corazón, tan querido para mí; y entonces estaría rompiendo el mío.
-No, si ése fuera el caso, deberías seguir tu camino Goodman Brown -respondió el otro-. Pero no creo que
veinte ancianas como la que va cojeando delante de nosotros hicieran a Faith daño alguno.
Mientras hablaba señaló con el bastón a una figura femenina que estaba en el camino y en la que Goodman
Brown reconoció a una dama muy piadosa y ejemplar que de joven le había enseñado el Catecismo, y seguía
siendo su consejera moral y espiritual junto con el ministro y el diácono Gookin.
-Realmente me maravilla que Goody Cloyse esté en este bosque profundo a la caída de la noche -respondió-.
Pero con tu permiso, amigo mío, tomaré un atajo por el bosque hasta que dejemos atrás a esa cristiana. Como
no te conoce, puede preguntarse a quién acompañaba y adónde iba.
-Sea así -respondió el compañero-. Acorta por el bosque que yo seguiré por el camino.
El joven se desvió, pero observó a su compañero que avanzaba tranquilamente por el camino hasta que
estuvo a la distancia de un bastón de la vieja dama. Entretanto ella avanzaba lo mejor que podía, con una
velocidad singular para una dama de tanta edad, y murmurando entretanto unas palabras que no le llegaban
con claridad, sin duda una oración. El viajero extendió el bastón y tocó el cuello arrugado de ella con lo que
parecía ser la cola de la serpiente.
-¡El diablo! -gritó la piadosa anciana.
-¿Es que Goody Cloyse no conoce a su viejo amigo? -preguntó el viajero poniéndose delante de ella e
inclinándose sobre su agitado bastón.
-Ah, ¿verdaderamente es su señoría? -exclamó la buena dama-. Sí, por, cierto que lo es, y con la misma
imagen del viejo chismoso de Goodman Brown, el abuelo de ese estúpido. Pero, ¿podrá creerlo su señoría?, mi
escoba ha desaparecido extrañamente; sospecho que robada por esa bruja a la que todavía no han ahorcado,
Goody Cory, y eso que la tenía ya toda untada conjugo de apio silvestre, cincoenrama y acónito.
-Mezclado con buen trigo y la grasa de un niño recién nacido -añadió la forma del viejo Goodman Brown.
-Ah, su señoría conoce la receta -exclamó la anciana-. Si es lo que yo estaba diciendo, todo dispuesto para la
reunión, y sin ningún caballo que montar, decidí venir a pie; pues me han dicho que esta noche toma la
comunión una agradable joven. Pero ahora su señoría me prestará el brazo y llegaremos allí en un momento.
 -Difícilmente podrá ser eso -respondió su amigo-. No puedo prestarle mi brazo, Goody Cloyse; pero si quiere,
aquí está mi bastón.
Nada más decir eso, lo arrojó a los pies de ella, donde quizás asumió vida porque era uno de los bastones
que su propietario había dado anteriormente a los magos de Egipto. Aunque Goodman Brown no podía tener
conocimiento alguno de ese hecho.
Alzó la mirada asombrado, y al volver a bajarla ya no vio ni a Goody Cloyse ni al bastón en forma de
serpiente, sino sólo a su compañero de viaje que le aguardaba con tanta tranquilidad como si no hubiera
sucedido nada.
-Esa anciana me enseñó el Catecismo -dijo el joven; y ese comentario simple estaba repleto de significado.
Siguieron caminando mientras el mayor exhortaba a su compañero a que mantuviera una buena velocidad,
hablando tan adecuadamente que sus argumentos más parecían brotar en el pecho de quien le oía que ser
sugeridos por él mismo. Mientras avanzaban tomó una rama de arce, que le sirviera de bastón de paseo y
empezó a quitarle las hojas y ramitas, que estaban humedecidas por el rocío de la noche. En el momento en
que sus dedos las tocaban, se marchitaban y secaban extrañamente, como si llevaran una semana al sol. Así fue
avanzando la pareja, a muy buen paso, hasta que de pronto, en un oscuro ensanche del camino, Goodman
Brown se sentó sobre el tocón de un árbol negándose a ir más lejos.
-Amigo mío, estoy decidido -dijo tenazmente-. Ni un paso más daré por este motivo. ¿Qué me importa si una
perversa anciana prefiere ir hacia el diablo cuando yo pensaba que se dirigía al cielo? ¿Es eso un motivo por el
que debiera, abandonar a mi querida Faith y seguir a la otra?
-Más tarde pensarás mejor en eso -dijo con toda tranquilidad su compañero-. Siéntate aquí y descansa un
rato; y cuando creas que puedes ponerte otra vez en movimiento, mi bastón te ayudará a seguir.
Sin decir nada más, arrojó a su compañero el bastón de arce y rápidamente desapareció de su vista como si
se hubiera desvanecido. El joven permaneció sentado al lado del camino, animándose y pensando con qué
conciencia tan clara se encontraría con el ministro en su paseo matinal, y que no habría de apartarse de la vista
del buen diácono Gookin. Y qué tranquilo sería su sueño esa misma noche, pues no habría de pasarla de forma
perversa, sino pura y dulcemente en los brazos de Faith. Entre esas meditaciones dignas de alabanza, Goodman
Brown oyó cascos de caballos por el camino, y le pareció aconsejable ocultarse en la linde del bosque
consciente del propósito culpable que le había conducido hasta allí, y del que ahora, felizmente, se había
apartado.
Le llegaron entonces con claridad el ruido de los cascos y las voces de los jinetes, dos voces ancianas y graves
que conversaban discretamente mientras se aproximaban. Esos sonidos pasaron a pocos metros de donde se
hallaba escondido; pero debido a la profundidad de la oscuridad no pudo ver ni a los viajeros ni sus corceles.
Aunque las figuras rozaban las ramas pequeñas que había al borde del camino. Goodman Brown a veces se
agachaba y otras se ponía de puntillas, apartando las ramas y metiendo la cabeza tanto como se atrevía sin
discernir más que una sombra. Lo que más le irritó de aquello es que habría jurado, de ser posible tal cosa, que
había reconocido las voces del ministro y del diácono Gookin, trotando tranquilamente tal como solían hacer
cuando acudían a alguna ordenación o un consejo eclesiástico. Y cuando estaban todavía a una distancia desde
la que podía oírlos, uno de los jinetes se detuvo para coger una vara.
-De entre las dos cosas, reverendo señor, preferiría perderme una cena de ordenación que la reunión de
esta noche -dijo la voz que se asemejaba a la del diácono-. Me han dicho que va a estar parte de nuestra
comunidad, desde Falmouth y más allá, y vendrán otros de Connecticut y Rhode Island, además de varios
curanderos indios, quienes a su manera saben de lo diablesco casi tanto como el mejor de nosotros. Además va
a recibir la comunión una buena y joven mujer.
— ¡Por las Potestades, diácono Gookin! — Contestó el otro con el tono solemne del ministro-.
Apresurémonos o llegaremos tarde, y ya sabe que nada puede hacerse hasta que yo esté allí.
Volvió a escuchar los cascos; y las voces, que de manera tan extraña hablaban en el aire vacío, se perdieron
en un bosque en el que nunca había habido iglesia alguna ni había rezado un cristiano solitario. ¿Adónde,
entonces, podían acudir esos hombres santos en la profundidad del bosque pagano? El joven Goodman Brown
tuvo que apoyarse en un árbol, pues estaba a punto de caer al suelo desmayado y cargado con la pesadez de su
corazón. Miró hacia arriba, al cielo, dudando de que realmente existiera un cielo encima de él. Pero allí estaba
el arco azul en el que brillaban las estrellas.
-¡Con el cielo arriba, y Faith debajo, me mantendré firme contra el diablo! -gritó Goodman Brown.
Mientras seguía mirando hacia arriba, al arco profundo del firmamento, y elevando las manos para rezar,
una nube cruzó presurosamente el cenit, aunque no había ningún viento que la moviera, y ocultó las estrellas
brillantes. El cielo azul seguía siendo visible, salvo directamente encima de su cabeza, donde aquella masa de
nubes negras se dirigía velozmente hacia el norte. Y arriba, en el aire, como si surgiera de la profundidad de la
nube, brotó un sonido de voces confuso y dudoso.
Hubo un momento en el que le pareció que podía distinguir el acento de conciudadanos suyos, hombres y
mujeres, tanto de seres piadosos como faltos de religión, con muchos de los cuales se había encontrado en la
mesa de la comunión, y a los otros los había visto alborotando en la taberna. Pero al momento siguiente, tan
inciertos eran los sonidos, dudó de si no habría oído más que el murmullo del viejo bosque que susurraba sin
que hubiera viento. Volvió entonces a escuchar con más fuerza esos tonos familiares, que a diario escuchaba en
Salem bajo la luz del sol, pero que hasta entonces no había oído nunca saliendo de una nube durante la noche.
Luego escuchó la voz de una mujer joven que se lamentaba, y que con una vaga pena pedía un favor que quizás
le afligiera obtener; y toda la multitud invisible, juntos los santos y los pecadores, parecía estimularla a que
siguiera adelante.
-¡Faith! -gritó Goodman Brown con dolor y desesperación; y los ecos del bosque se burlaron de él gritando
¡Faith! ¡Faith!, como si unos seres infelices y confusos la buscaran por el bosque.
Todavía estaba traspasando la noche el grito de pena, rabia y terror cuando el infeliz esposo retenía el
aliento esperando una respuesta. Hubo un grito que fue ahogado por un murmullo de voces más altas que
acabaron convirtiéndose en una risa lejana mientras desaparecía la nube oscura dejando el cielo claro y
silencioso por encima de Goodman Brown. Pero algo aleteaba ligeramente por el aire y se posó en la rama de
un árbol. El joven lo cogió y contempló una cinta rosa.
-¡Mi Faith ha desaparecido! -gritó tras un momento de estupefacción-. Nada bueno queda en la tierra; y el
pecado no es sino un nombre. Ven, diablo; pues a ti se te ha dado este mundo.
Enloquecido por la desesperación, de la que tanto y con tanta fuerza se había reído, Goodman Brown cogió
el bastón y se puso en marcha de nuevo a tanta velocidad que más parecía volar por el bosque que caminar por
él. El a camino fue haciéndose más salvaje, con menos huellas, y al final desapareció dejándole en el corazón de
una oscura espesura, mientras avanzaba todavía con el instinto que guía a los mortales hacia el mal. El bosque
entero se pobló de sonidos: el crujido de los árboles, el aullido de los animales y el grito de los indios; a veces el
viento sonaba como la campana de una iglesia distante, y a veces producía un estruendo mayor alrededor del
viajero, como si la Naturaleza entera se estuviera riendo y burlando de él. Pero él mismo era el horror principal
de la escena y no se acobardó ante los otros horrores.
-¡Ja, ja, ja! -rió con fuerza Goodman Brown cuando el viento se rió de él-.Veamos quién ríe más fuerte. No
creas que vas a asustarme con tus diabluras. Ven, bruja, ven, brujo, ven, curandero indio, ven el propio diablo,
aquí tenéis a Goodman Brown. Podéis tenerle tanto miedo como él a vosotros.
En realidad en todo aquel bosque hechizado no había nada más temible que la figura de Goodman Brown.
Seguía volando por entre los pinos negros, blandiendo su bastón con gestos frenéticos, lanzando a veces una
blasfemia inspirada y horrible, y otras veces riendo con tal fuerza que los ecos del bosque le devolvían la risa
como si estuviera rodeado de demonios. En su propia forma, el diablo resulta menos espantoso que cuando
brama en el pecho de un hombre. Así prosiguió su veloz carrera hasta que vio delante de él, estremeciéndose
entre los árboles, una luz roja, como si se hubieran prendido fuego los troncos caídos y las ramas en un claro, y
justo en la medianoche levantaba hacia el cielo su misterioso resplandor. Se detuvo, en una calma de la
tempestad que le había impulsado hacia adelante, y escuchó el crescendo de lo que le parecía un himno que se
elevaba solemnemente desde la distancia con el peso de muchas voces. Conocía la melodía; era habitual en el
coro del templo del pueblo. Los versos se apagaron y se alargaron con un coro que no era de voces humanas,
sino que estaba formado por todos los sonidos de la oscura soledad, que sonaban juntos en una horrible
armonía. Goodman Brown gritó, pero su grito se perdió en sus propios oídos por sonar al unísono con el grito
de lo deshabitado.
En un intervalo de silencio, avanzó hasta que la luz brilló plenamente. En un extremo de un espacio abierto,
cercada por la oscura muralla del bosque, se levantaba una piedra que tenía una semejanza tosca y natural con
un altar o un púlpito, y estaba rodeada por cuatro pinos encendidos, con las copas ardiendo y los troncos sin
tocar, como velas en un servicio nocturno. El follaje que había crecido en la parte superior de la roca estaba
ardiendo, lanzando sus llamas hacia la noche e iluminando bien toda la zona. Ardía cada rama colgante, cada
guirnalda de hojas. Conforme la luz roja crecía y menguaba, una numerosa congregación alternativamente
brillaba para desaparecer luego en la sombra, y volver a surgir, por así decirlo, de la oscuridad, poblando
enseguida el corazón de los bosques solitarios.
-Una compañía grave y vestida de oscuridad -citó Goodman Brown.
 Y en verdad así era. Entre ellos, estremeciéndose entre las tinieblas, surgían rostros que al día siguiente se
verían en la mesa del consejo provincial, y otros que un sábado tras otro miraban devotamente hacia los cielos,
inclinándose benignos sobre los bancos atestados, desde los púlpitos más sagrados. Algunos afirman que
estaba allí la señora del Gobernador. Al menos había damas de elevada posición que la conocían bien, y esposas
de maridos honrados, y viudas, una gran multitud de ellas, y doncellas ancianas, todas de excelente reputación,
y hermosas jóvenes que temblaban pensando que sus madres las espiaran. O bien el brillo repentino de los
destellos de luz sobre el campo oscuro confundieron a Goodman Brown o reconoció a una veintena de
miembros de la iglesia de Salem, famosos por su especial santidad. El buen diácono Gookin había llegado, y
aguardaba junto a la sotana de ese santo venerable, su reverenciado pastor. Pero acompañando
irreverentemente a esas personas solemnes, de buena reputación y piadosas, esos ancianos de la iglesia, esas
castas damas de ingenuas vírgenes, había hombres de vida disoluta y mujeres de fama manchada, infelices
entregados a todo tipo de vicio malo e inmundo, incluso sospechosos de crímenes horribles. Era extraño ver
que los buenos no se apartaran de los perversos, ni los pecadores se avergonzaran junto a los santos.
Desperdigados entre sus enemigos de pálidos rostros estaban los sacerdotes indios, o brujos, que a menudo
habían hecho temblar el bosque nativo con encantamientos más horribles que cualquiera de los conocidos por
la brujería inglesa.
-Pero ¿dónde está Faith? -pensó Goodman Brown; y cuando la esperanza entraba en su corazón, se echó a
temblar.
Brotó otro verso del himno, una melodía lenta y triste, como de amor piadoso, pero unida a palabras que
expresaban todo lo que nuestra naturaleza es capaz de concebir acerca del pecado, y sugerían oscuramente
mucho más. La ciencia diabólica es insondable para los simples mortales. Cantaron un verso tras otro, y todavía
el coro del bosque desértico se dejaba oír como el tono más profundo un potente órgano; y con las notas
finales brotó un sonido como del viento cuando ruge, los torrentes precipitados, las bestias que aúllan, todas
las demás voces del inarmónico bosque se mezclaron y acordaron con la voz del hombre culpable en homenaje
al principal de todos. Los cuatro pinos ardientes arrojaron llamas más elevadas y descubrieron oscuramente
formas y visajes de horror en las columnas de humo que había sobre la impía asamblea. En el mis momento el
fuego que había sobre las rocas se lanzó hacia arriba formando sobre su base un arco ardiente en el que
apareció una figura. Dicho sea con reverencial la figura no guardaba la menor similitud ni en el ropaje ni en las
maneras corte ninguna divinidad solemne de las iglesias de Nueva Inglaterra.
-¡Que se adelanten los conversos! -gritó una voz que se repitió en ecos por los campos y rodó por los
bosques.
Ante esa palabra Goodman Brown se adelantó desde la sombra de los árboles y se acercó a la congregación,
hacia la que sentía una detestable hermandad por la simpatía de todo lo que de perverso había en su corazón.
Casi habría podido jurar que la forma de su propio padre muerto le pedía que se adelantara, mirándole desde
una columna de humo, mientras que una mujer con los rasgos oscuros de la desesperación adelantaba la mano
advirtiéndole que retrocediera. ¿Era su madre? Pero no tenía poder para retirarse ni un paso, ni para resistirse
ni siquiera en pensamiento, desde el momento en el que el ministro y el bueno del viejo diácono Gookin le
tomaron por los brazos y le condujeron hasta la roca ardiente. Hasta allí llegó también la esbelta forma de una
mujer cubierta por velos conducida entre Goody Cloyse, esa piadosa maestra del Catecismo, y Martha Carrier,
que había recibido del diablo la promesa de ser reina del infierno. Una bruja furiosa es lo que era. Y allí estaban
los prosélitos, bajo el dosel de fuego.
-Bienvenidos, hijos míos, a la comunión de vuestra raza -dijo la figura oscura-. Así habéis encontrado pronto
vuestra naturaleza y vuestro destino. ¡Hijos míos, mirad detrás de vosotros!
Se dieron la vuelta y destellando en una llama, por así decirlo, fueron vistos los veneradores del maligno; la
sonrisa de bienvenida brilló oscuramente en cada rostro.
-Allí están aquellos a los que habéis reverenciado desde la juventud -siguió diciendo la forma negruzca-. Les
considerabais santos y os apartabais de vuestros pecados, comparándolos con sus vidas de rectitud y sus
devotas aspiraciones al cielo. Pero aquí están todos en la asamblea que me venera. Esta noche os será
concedido conocer sus actos secretos: cómo los ancianos de barbas canas de la iglesia han susurrado palabras
lascivas a las doncellas jóvenes de sus casas; cómo muchas mujeres, deseosas de llevar ropa de luto, han dado a
su marido al acostarse una bebida y le han dejado entrar en el último sueño apoyado en su pecho; cómo
jóvenes imberbes se han apresurado a heredar la riqueza de los padres; y cómo hermosas damiselas han
cavado pequeñas tumbas en el jardín y me han invitado solamente a mí al funeral de un recién nacido. Por la
simpatía que produce el pecado en vuestros corazones humanos, olfatearéis todos los lugares -ya sea la iglesia,
el dormitorio, la calle, el campo o el bosque- en donde se haya cometido un crimen, y os alegraréis al
contemplar que la tierra entera es una mancha de culpa, una enorme mancha de sangre. Mucho más que eso.
Os será dado conocer en cada pecho el misterio profundo del pecado, la fuente de todas las artes perversas que
proporciona inagotablemente más impulsos malignos que los que el poder humano puede manifestar en
hechos. Y ahora, hijos míos, miraos unos a otros.
Así lo hicieron; y con el resplandor de antorchas encendidas en el infierno el hombre infeliz contempló a su
Faith, y la esposa al esposo, temblando delante de ese altar sin santificar.
-Ahí estáis pues, hijos míos -dijo la figura en tono profundo y solemne, casi triste en su horror desesperado,
como si su naturaleza en otro tiempo angélica pudiera lamentarse todavía por nuestra raza miserable-.
Dependiendo de los corazones de los otros teníais todavía la esperanza de que la virtud no fuera sólo un sueño.
Pero ahora ya no os engañáis. El mal es la naturaleza de la humanidad. El mal debe ser vuestra única felicidad.
Bienvenidos otra vez, hijos míos, a la comunión de vuestra raza.
-Bienvenidos -repitieron los veneradores del diablo en un grito de desesperación y triunfo.
Y allí estaban ellos en pie, la única pareja que parecía vacilar todavía al borde de la perversión en este
mundo oscuro. En la roca se había abierto de manera natural un hueco. ¿Contenía agua enrojecida por la luz
fantástica? ¿O era sangre? ¿O quizás una llama líquida? Allí sumergió la mano la forma del mal, preparándose
para poner la señal del bautismo en sus frentes, para que pudieran compartir el misterio del pecado, ser más
conscientes de la culpa secreta de los demás, tanto de hecho como de pensamiento, de lo que podían serlo
ahora de la suya propia. El esposo miró a su pálida esposa y Faith le miró a él. ¡Qué sucias desdichas les
revelaría la siguiente mirada, temblando juntos ante lo que revelaban y lo que veían!
-¡Faith! ¡Faith! Mira hacia el cielo y resístete al perverso -gritó el esposo.
No pudo saber si Faith le obedeció. Apenas había dicho aquello cuando se encontró en medio de la soledad,
escuchando el rugir del viento, que se apagaba en el bosque. Caminó hasta la roca y al tocarla la notó fría y
húmeda; y una rama colgante, de las que habían estado encendidas, salpicó su mejilla con el rocío más frío.
A la mañana siguiente el joven Goodman Brown entró lentamente en la calle del pueblo de Salem mirando a
su alrededor como un hombre confuso. El buen ministro estaba dando un paseo por el cementerio para
fortalecer el apetito para el desayuno y meditar su sermón, y lanzó una bendición a Goodman Brown cuando
pasó junto a él. Éste se apartó del santo venerable como para evitar un anatema. El viejo diácono Gookin se
dedicaba a la oración en su casa, y las palabras santas de su rezo podían escucharse a través de la ventana
abierta.
-¿A qué dios reza el brujo? —citó Goodman Brown.
Goody Cloyse, esa excelente cristiana, estaba en pie desde primeras horas de la mañana junto a su reja,
catequizando a una niña pequeña que le había llevado medio litro de leche matinal. Goodman Brown se apartó
de la niña como si lo hiciera del propio diablo. Dando la vuelta a la esquina del templo, espió la cabeza de Faith,
con las cintas rosas, que miraba ansiosamente la calle y se alegró tanto al verle que resbaló por la calle y casi
besó a su esposo ante el pueblo entero. Pero Goodman Brown la miró dura y tristemente al rostro y pasó a su
lado sin saludarla. ¿Se había quedado dormido Goodman Brown en el bosque y sólo había tenido un sueño
desbocado de un aquelarre?
Así sea si usted lo prefiere. ¡Pero, ay, ese sueño fue un mal presagio para el joven Goodman Brown! De
aquella noche temible surgió un hombre severo, triste, oscuramente meditativo, desconfiado cuando no
desesperado.
El día del sábado, cuando la congregación cantaba un salmo, no podía escuchar porque un himno de pecado
entraba en sus oídos y ahogaba la melodía santa. Cuando el ministro hablaba desde el púlpito con poder y
elocuencia fervorosa, y con la mano sobre la Biblia abierta, acerca de las verdades sagradas de nuestra religión,
de las vidas santas y muertes triunfales, y de la bendición o la desgracia futuras que no podían expresarse,
entonces Goodman Brown palidecía, temiendo que el techo cayera sobre el blasfemo y sus oyentes. A menudo,
despertando de pronto en mitad de la noche, se apartaba del pecho de Faith; y por la mañana o al atardecer,
cuando la familia se arrodillaba para rezar, fruncía el ceño y murmuraba algo para sí mismo, miraba
severamente a su esposa y se marchaba. Y cuando hubo vivido mucho tiempo, y llevaron hasta su tumba un
cadáver blanquecino, seguido por Faith, que era ya una mujer anciana, y por los hijos y los nietos, formando
una procesión numerosa, no tallaron ningún verso de esperanza en su lápida, pues triste fue la hora de su
muerte.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

 Herman Melville (1819-1891)
“Moby Dick” [1851]

-Melville and Hawthorne were seen in terms of one another. 1

Nowadays they are seen as having 2 different literary styles.
-Melville had exotic settings (sea novels) Hawthorne domestic.
-Melville faded away. Rediscovered in the 20th century.
*Ishmael is a projection of himself. Presbyterian, worried about
innate depravity and original sin (pessimistic).
Sources
-“Mocha Dick: or the White Whale of the Pacific”
-Read a lot of Shakespeare and yellow novels.
-Confluence in Hawthorne and Melville. Same cultural settings.
*White Whale may represent -> spirit of evil or agent of justice
of heaven to punish Ahab’s defiance of God or the ultimate
mystery of the universe (symbol. Destructive powers).
-Color white stands for nothing. Absence of color.
-Metaphysical valve of Moby Dick is an enigma. Indestructible
and cannot be defeated nor apprehended by any human mind.
Readings
-Loomings -> 1st chapter. Ishmael -> Narrator and only survivor.
-Two passages from chapter 2 introduce Captain Ahab.
-Ch 36. Captain Ahab nails a gold coin to the mast for the first
sailor to sight Moby Dick. Makes them swear to help him kill it.
Closure in Moby Dick
-2 macro questions: “Will Ahab and his crew ever find the White
Whale?” and “If they do, will they be able to kill it?”
-Pequod encounters ships that know the whereabouts of the
Whale. It keeps the reader bound to the story.
- Outcome of the deadly confrontation. 1 survivor. Novel over.
-Added chapter about the grand opening of Ishmael’s dry goods
store in New London would be inappropriate.
-Not encouraged to ask about Ishmael as he is not part of the
hunt of the White Whale.
Quotes and allusions -Lots of Greek and Roman references.
-Ishmael: Son of Abraham. Outcast, exile, no experience.
-Cato: Shakespearian character that commits suicide.
-Seneca and the Stoics: Roman thinker. Stoics said humans
should be free from passions and calmly accept divine will.
-Narcissus. Greek mythology, falls in love w/ himself.
-Fates controlled by the gods. -Pythagorean Maxim.
-Greek God Jove -Cellini: Perseus
-Gabriel: from the New Testament.
Breakdown: Melville was difficult for some to read 2
because of his extravagances, neologism and recondite
allusions.
Diction: Ishmael operates in a lyrical and comic mode. Long
and complex sentences, rhetorical questions, full of
allusions and references. Vocabulary ornate to generate a
sense of grandeur and magnitude. Purposes: Elevate the
dignity of the novel. Characterize and differentiate Ishmael
from the rest of the characters. Ahab is more dramatic.
“Moby Dick” 3
-Melville didn’t like allegories. He considered them and
inferior way of writing. He created the end of all allegories.
We never know if the whale is evil or an agent from Heaven
to punish Ahab or the ultimate mystery of the universe.
*His allegories are complex and ambiguous.
*Ishmael asks questions. Never finds answers. Just Qs.
*Every sign he sees leads to another one.
-Melville warns us NOT to read it as an allegory.
-The Whale’s value is enigmatic. Therefore superior.
-Mostly 1st person. Retrospective, he tells us about his past.
*1st excerpt=Ishmael 1st person narrator. Prevalent mode of
his chapter is the comment. He explains why he embarked.
*Other 2 excerpts. Ishmael as an omniscient narrator. Ahab
is described. Ishmael reports a series of events. Most
important things are the things that happen, not the
thoughts or reflections of Ishmael.
-Reliable narrator. He tells us what he sees, we believe him.
-Presbyterian. He had discovered Transcendentalism and
was skeptical about the dark side of humanity.
4
Themes --> The darker side of human nature. 5
-Limits of human knowledge
-How past changes present (the whale took off his leg, it all
changed – desire for revenge)
Calvinist religion -> free will, damnation and predestination.
-Good VS Evil. Nature is dangerous.

symbols--> Pequod and its polyglot Foreshadowing--> Ishmael tells us Characterization of Ahab--> He is
crew=ship of the world. that water has magical powers. presented as an old sailor. Grey hair,
-The mean on the sea= sea of -Fates have drawn him to this trip. robust and heavy. One of his less cut off
unpredictability (anything can happen) -He sets out on a “forbidden” sea. by Moby Dick.
-Light (whale)/dark (sea). -Captain Ahab surrounded by mystery. -His major wish is to kill the whale not
-Coffin-> Life (as a lifeboat) and death. -Owner of the Inn -> Peter Coffin. only for cutting off his leg. He also sees is
-Moby Dick-> Human’s inability to -Talks of Cato’s suicide. as the embodiment of evil.
6 7 8
understand the World.
 UNIT 14
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby-Dick

From A Study Guide: Melville and Hawthorne's writings exemplify the literary
phenomena or influence and confluence: both authors were equally concerned with the
basic issues of Calvinistic thinking (innate depravity and predestination), shared the
same dark vision of nature and human experience, but Melville's subversive use of
symbolic allegory is related to, but not derived from, Hawthorne's; Melville achieved
fame as a travel writer of the South Seas exciting adventures and remote exotic settings
of his romantic novels, especially Typee, in which he mixed autobiography,
anthropology, fictional adventure and social criticism; Moby-Dick is not simply a
"romance" of whaling adventures but a deep exploration of human nature and evil;
aspects of Moby-Dick: mixing genres and blending of sources, Ahab's quest for the
mysterious figure of the white whale, high diction with Latinate vocabulary,
complicated syntax (very long sentences and superabundance of subordinate clauses),
and circumlocutioum (digression, wordiness).
Note: the hyphenated form Moby-Dick refers to the book while the unhyphenated to the
whale.

Hawthorne and Melville were perceived as writers who cultivated different literary
styles because no attention was paid to their darker and more complex writings, the
ones that make the two authors appear so similar in our eyes at present.
Work: Urged by his family, Melville put the oral account of his adventures at the see in
Typee, a work in which he mixed autobiography, anthropology, fictional adventure and
social criticism. It included controversial aspects like the description of sexual relations
and strong criticism of colonial policies and missionary activities. The key to its success
was the exotic novelty of the South Seas. He wrote four more novels inspired by his life
at sea: Omoo, Mardi, Redburn and White-Jacket.
After meeting Hawthorne, who had just made national reputation with The Scarlet
Letter, Melville wrote "Hawthorne and His Mosses" an essay that records his euphoria
about Hawthorne's short stories and reveals the new direction in which he was heading
his own fiction.
Moby-Dick
After Hawthorne's personal influence and that of his short stories, Melville recast the
book The Whale, which would become Moby-Dick and took him a year of labor to
transform a light-hearted narrative of whaling adventures into a deep exploration of
human nature and evil. The House of the Seven Gables and Mobi-Dick were published
in the same year, but Melville's strange book did not suit the literary taste of his
contemporaries. His shifting away from his early style disappointed which discouraged
readers interested in romantic stories of sea adventures.
Critics declared that Moby-Dick was not a proper novel since they were not used to the
mixing of genre that would later characterize many modern novels. The book
encompassed romance, drama and epic as well as features typical of lesser genres as
sermons, treatises on natural history, tall tales and technical manuals. Its odd structure is
one of the signs of its aesthetics modernity. Its differently structured sections were
warmly welcomed by modern readers, as are its multiplicity of voices, its experiments
in point of view, its symbolism, and its iconoclastic style.
Melville originally intended Moby-Dick to be a romance of adventure emphasizing the
first-person narrator of the story with the author's personal experience of 2 years as a
harpooner. He fashioned Ishmael, the narrator of Moby-Dick, as a projection of himself,
a Presbyterian who speculates about the basic issues of Calvinist thinking, free will,
predestination and damnation. Melville voices his own preoccupation with the problem
of innate depravity and original sin, since he did share neither Transcendentalist
enthusiastic confidence in human goodness nor its optimistic view of nature. Melville's
pessimistic spirit made him aware of the dark side of humanity, and being a no believer
was skeptic who suffered in his private life.
His years at sea provided him with a wealth of first-hand experiences. Also, a magazine
article and Owen Chase's narrative of a Shipwreck of a whale-ship were his sources,
although Melville did not pretend to offer a faithful narrative of true events. In his
romance he felt free to mix fact and fancy.
Some critics have pointed out that Melville is America's most Shakesperian writer,
since from him he understood the nature of tragedy and incorporated it into his work.
Apart from Shakespeare's influence, Moby-Dick presents features derived from
subliterary popular genres such as the sensational yellow novels and the grotesque
native humor, mixed with scientific discussions and philosophical speculations. The
work was dedicated to Hawthorne but the similarities between both writers may be due
to the phenomenon known as confluence: writers nurtured in the same cultural
atmosphere may be alike in many respects and develop similar traits not attributable to
the direct impact of one on the other. Melville's use of symbolic allegory is related to,
but not derived from Hawthorne's.
It is the story of Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of a huge white whale in the Pequod,
with its polyglot crew that would represent the Ship of the World navigating on the Sea
of Unpredictability, where Good and Evil are confronted. Ishmael warns the readers lest
they be misled into thinking that the novel articulates a strict unequivocal
correspondence between the abstract and the concrete, as conventional allegories do.
Melville undermines allegory itself by foreshadowing the end of all formal allegorical
vision. Whereas old allegories were intended to facilitate the teaching of moral
principles by establishing clear connections or simple parallels between the spiritual and
the material worlds, Melville deliberately used the allegorical mode in an ambiguous
and complex manner in order to focus on the impossibility of finding any interpretative
clues leading to objective truths. He employed an allegorical framework to voice his
skepticism persuaded of the impossibility of reaching any final meaning grounded in
transcendent authority.

Ishmael keeps asking questions and every sign generates a number of different
meanings he feels unable to reconcile. Readers share with the narrator the difficulties in
bringing together into a coherent whole the multiplicity of meanings: the white whale
may represent the spirit of evil, or an agent for the justice of heaven to punish Ahab's
defiance of God, or the ultimate mystery of the universe taken it as a symbol of nature0s
creative and destructive powers. The narrator analyses the symbol of whiteness making
it stand for nothingness, an "absence of color", "a colorless, all-color of atheism". By
constructing his novel around the mysterious figure of the white whale he intended the
metaphysical value of Moby Dick to remain enigmatic: the final proof of the superiority
of the white whale over all the other creatures, since it can neither be defeated
physically nor even apprehended by any human mind.
The first chapter introduces the character of Ishmael, the narrator and sole survivor of
the Pequod. The two passages from chapter 28 introduce the character of Captain Ahab.
In the first part of chapter 36 Captain Ahab nails a gold coin to the mast as a reward to
the sailor who first sights the white whale.
Exploratory Questions
- The first-person narrator is a specially-created persona or construct. Ishmael is both
the firs-persona narrator and a character. Pay attention to how the relationship with the
reader is established by the famous opening words "Call me Ishmael". This line has
come to symbolize orphans, exiles, and social outcasts, because it makes reference to
the son of Abrahanm. Ishmael was formerly a school- teacher who left the life of theory
to pursue the more practical life at sea, and confesses he is a poet.
- Loomings definition: a frame or machine for interlacing at right angles two or more
sets of threads; to come into sight in enlarged or distorted and indistinct form often as a
result of atmospheric conditions; to appear in an impressively form. Melville declared
that the novel was made of a terrible fabric woven of ship's cables, so the main theme is
related to the hard and masculine sea world. The weaving metaphors show how the
novel was created by using many allusions to the Bible and Greek mythology.
- Comment on the diction (choice of vocabulary and arrangement of words) of Ishmael,
note that he operates in a lyrical and comic mode, set in contrast with Ahab's dramatic
and tragic mode. Ishmael's diction is characterized by long and complex sentences,
rhetorical questions to make his statements and reflections clear and full of allusions
and references and the vocabulary is quite ornate to generate a sense of grandeur and
magnitude. His purpose is to elevate the dignity of the novel and to characterized and
differentiate Ishmael from the rest of the characters of the story.
- Which of the four main narratives modes prevails in the first chapter? It is the speech
the one that prevails since Ishmael tells the reader reason why he has decided to embark
on a ship and give justifications based on his own reflections by alluding to many
biblical and mythological facts using also rhetorical questions. The speech is a narrative
mode through which the words and thoughts of fictional characters are rendered.

- Foreshadowing is a device to create expectation or to set up an explanation of later

developments. Throughout the book there is a sense that people are driving on to their
doom, and paradoxically, the character who is most obsessed with death from the very
beginning is the only survivor.
- It is argued that Melville's attraction to ancient writers became integral to his complex
response to romanticism. Are there signs of an ironical use of his sources? Moby-Dick is
grandiloquent, complex and highly evocative just like the Greek and Roman classics,
and many references to them cab be found in the novel such as Jove, Poseidon,
Narcissus, etc. Ishmael makes clear that the genre of the novel is not so appreciated as
high genres like tragedies or comedies.
- Some references to the great white whale make him represent beauty while others tend
to emphasize the terror he inspires.
- The four main narratives modes are used for Ahab's characterization, described by the
narrator but also reported by his actions, the way he speaks and what comments are
made about him. He believes himself omnipotent and makes a deep impression to
everyone to gradually reveal in much more detail along the novel. Ahab is presented as
an old sailor, with gray hair, robust and heavy, whose major wish is to kill the whale.
- The dramatic episodes in 36 do not seem to be controlled by Ishmael as the initial
chapters were, for he has ceased to be a fictional narrator and has merged into an
omniscient narrator. The prominent first-person narrator of the first chapter has
disappeared from chapter 36, although he will return again, transformed in chapter 41.
In the first excerpt, Ishmael is the first-person narrator, so the narrator and the main
character of the chapter are the same person, and the prevalent mode is the comment. In
the other two excerpts, the narrator is still being Ishmael but as an omniscient narrator
or a third-person narrator telling what happens through the outside, thus Ishmael is
reporting a series of event. In the second and third excerpts the most important things
are the things that happen and not the thoughts or reflections of Ishmael.
- Compare and contrast Hawthorne and Melville. In YGB an old-fashioned style can be
appreciated because of the archaisms which Hawthorne used to give a colonial flavor to
his work. It is also written in a plain style because the sentences are not very long and
the use of direct speech makes the work quite dynamic, although it is not easy to be
understood not because the style but the symbolism and the allegory. Melville's style is
quite more complex, taking into consideration that the narrator is Ishmael himself,
therefore the chapter gives an introspective reflection about different matters. In the
other two chapters, the style is simpler since Ishmael is a third-person narrator and the
narrative seems to be more objective and dynamic.
From sources out of the syllabus of the course: Moby Dick: in a sense is not a character,
as the reader has no access to the White Whale's thoughts and feelings, or intentions.
Instead, Moby Dick is an impersonal force, one that many critics have interpreted as an
allegorical representation of God, an inscrutable and all-powerful being that humankind
can neither understand nor defy. Moby Dick thwarts (frustrar, impedir) free will and
cannot be defeated. The majority of a whale is hidden from view at all times, only the
surface of the ocean is available for human observation and interpretations, its depths
conceal unknown and unknowable truths, which can lead to the metaphor for the human
relationship with the Christian God: God is unknowable and cannot be pinned down
(condicionado).

From A Study Guide: Writing about genre

The classification of texts has always been a major concern of literary theorists and
critics. Two important types of classification, or paradigms are period and genre:
1. Period is a paradigm for classifying texts chronologically, sorting them into groups
which fall into a historical sequence. Literary history has been divided up into periods
identified by a monarch's reign, an influential author, a significant historical event or an
artistic movement. There are controversies about when the periods of literary history
begin and end. Not all literature written during one particular period can be labeled
under its name.

2. Genre is a paradigm for classifying texts into different categories according to certain
shared characteristics. The properties of the text itself provide the main basis for its
classification. Texts may be classified on the basis of formal arrangement (thyme and
rhythm are properties of poetry, and enacting (representar) distinguishes drama), subject
matter (story of one's own life is autobiographical genre) or attitude (for instance satire).
Drawing on systems of literary classification can help people to make sense of what
they read, but classifying texts is not an easy mechanical procedure. Terminological
confusions arise because the different periods and genres are loosely defined, and the
words used to designate them are often under dispute.
Since system of literary classification fit into aesthetic and social frameworks that are
not stable, the criteria for classifying texts into genres have evolved over the centuries.
Aristotle classified texts into three groups: lyric, epic and drama. Until the Renaissance
the major classical genres were: lyric, epic, tragedy, comedy and satire. In modern time
are fiction, drama and poetry. Nowadays, a simple list of genres and sub-genres might
include, among many others, the following terms: tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy,
mystery play, lyric poetry, pastoral, satire, autobiography, romance and novel, and
hierarchical relations are established. The terms tragedy, comedy and tragicomedy are
placed under the heading of drama, which has achieved the status of meta-genre. Novel
has been divided into a number of subgenres: autobiographical novel, epistolary novel,
Gothic novel, historical novel, mystery novel, novel of manners, picaresque novel,
plantation novel, realistic novel, and sentimental novel.
We recognize the distinctive qualities of one genre by contrasting it with other genres.
Novel and romance achieved a rather stable fixity of meaning in the 19th c., and were
often contrasted. Today, the dividing-line or boundary between them is not perceived
clearly, apart from the fact that the novel is more realistic that the romance. Nowadays
we rarely speak about romance, and we define a novel as "any extended piece of
narrative prose fiction". The novel genre is undergoing a sort of permanent revolution,
as it shows ample room for innovation and variation. Novelists generally question
tradition forms, and the conventions of the novel are characterized by their flexibility
and constant change.
Moby-Dick does not show a clear membership in a single genre, but draws on the
discursive properties of several genres. Far from exemplifying what most people would
expect from a typical novel, it displays various generic conventions, and this is the main
reason why its early critics declared that it was not a proper novel.
Aspects suggested analyzing Moby-Dick.
- Explain why Ishmael is said to operate in a lyric mode, and pay attention to the
emphasis on the expression of his mood, emotions and feelings.
- Just as we speak about "poetic" passages in a novel, we also refer to its "dramatic"
scenes. Can you find any dramatic passages in chapter 36? Note how the stage
directions below the title of "The Quarter-Deck" point out the theatrical nature of one of
the 13 dramatic chapters.
- Apart from the divergent fate of the two characters, there are other reasons why
Ishmael strikes many readers as a comedic figure that provokes laughter, while the
figure of Ahab as a tragic hero rouses fear.
- To what extent "Loomings" show a satirical edge? What is the target of Melville's
satire?
- Philosophical speculation in the first chapter makes it read like an argumentative
essay. There are also passages of "Loomings" that echo the genre of spiritual
autobiography.
- In the 19th c. some writers ceased to respect the strict separation of genres. How are
present-day readers likely to react to the book's generic heterogeneity or its alleged lack
of generic consistency?
- Chase called Moby-Dick an American epic. Bearing in mind how the term epic is
defined, note the characterization of Ahab as an epic hero, as well as the epic nature of
his search for the white whale.
- An interpretation of its first chapter as a social critique can be also developed.
- One of the main difficulties that readers find when first approaching Moby-Dick stems
from the fact that they anticipate a straightforward narrative of whaling voyage, yet
come up against something entirely different. To what extent the mixing of various
generic conventions add to the elusiveness of meaning?
“A Psalm of
cd
Life” [1838]

-One of the Fireside poets. 1

-Read by ordinary people. Very popular in his time.
-Lost popularity. His “sentimental masculinity” (sailing and
fighting in wars) is looked down on now (after 1920).
-Meter and rhyme (now people prefer unrhymed verse)
“A Psalm of Life” What the heart of the Young Man said to the Psalmist
-His best known short poem. People were still unstable after the
Panic of 1837. Its triumphant tone was invigorating and shooting
-Tone of heroic confidence.
-Domestic style of masculinity later considered effeminate. He
tried to counter this with references to war and sailing activities.
-Shipwrecked brother. We are all together=brotherhood
-Used a condescending tone towards his audience
-His imagery has proved faulty (cows don’t go into Battle) can’t
leave footprints in sand in an hour glass (must be on a beach).
-When published it was a great success
He saw himself as a moral guide. He used didactic
moralizing and was concerned w/ cultural and moral values.
-Wrote about conventional topics in an easy manner.
-Wanted people to see that life was more than material things.
-He disliked controversy and extremes. No political of theological
debates (he was an abolitionist, though)
-Sensory imagery so readers could “SEE” what he described.
: 4 line stanzas=quatrain. Rhyming quatrains: 4
ABAB, CDCD, EFEF for each of the nine stanzas.
-8 syllable line followed by a seven syllable line. Trochaic
2 tetrameter (4trochaic feet w/ 4trochees)
-Ideas of Jorge Manrique, Calderón de la Barca and Goethe.
-Quotes from the Bible.
-Check Nacho’s notes on the poem.
–Primary message: Life is beautiful. 5
-First person perspective. Tone is neither positive nor
negative, strictly honest.
-Careful choice of words. Each has its own meaning and
3
adds something important to the “life” of the poem.
-Imagery is the sole method of expression in the poem.
-Figurative language. Lots of metaphors and symbolism.
-Punctuation very important. Exclamation to emphasize.
-Fireside poet. Writings could be read by families.

6
-Purpose of life and significance of death is a heroic and confident tone and informal diction.
-Uses funeral imagery: mournful, empty, dead, grave, sorrow, end, fleeting, funeral, battle, dumb, sublime, departing, leave behind,
solemn and fate. “Muffled drums are beating funeral marches to the graves”.
-Material life is finite.
-Interested in living, NOT dying. Living= doing/creating. We should not conform to mournful passivity.
-Optimism/joy/faith/our lives on earth have meaning
-Inner world of human nature. Now ridiculed and parodied for his FAULTY IMAGERY.
-Cattle not to partake in battles. Battles not fought on bivouacs.
-Sands of time -> Footprints in the sand do NOT show immortality (get washed away).

7
-The central Transcendental concepts in “A Psalm of life” are basically nonconformity and Carpe Diem.
-Longfellow rejects the nation that life is an “empty dream” to be endured or wasted until death and expresses that people should
appreciate their life on earth as precious and deal and act to make a spiritual, moral or intellectual mark on the world.
 UNIT 15
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"A Psalm of Life"

From A Study Guide: a clear example of shift in poetic taste of the best-known
"Fireside Poets"; examine his great technical skill, widely admired for his dexterous
command of meter, rhythm and rhyme; interpret "A Psalm of Life" as an illustration of
the domestic style of masculinity, within the historical context of the 1937 Panic and the
ideological context of Transcendentalism, taking into account both the praise and the
negative exegesis to which this once successful poem has been alternately submitted.

He contributed to the so-called "flowering of New England" since ordinary people read
his verses when the love of poetry was more common than it is today, coming to be
known as one of the "Fireside Poets" of the 19th c.
He has lost the canonical status he held for many years allegedly on the grounds of this
advocacy of a "sentimental" masculinity, which once was the source of his broad appeal
and eventually became the causes for decanonizing him. The great technical skill of this
learned academic poet, praised for his dexterous command of meter and rhyme, has
been turned against him in an age which prefers unrhymed verse. Apart from despising
regular forms, in regard of content, our age also tends to be suspicious of the success
achieved by dealing with conventional topics treated in an accessible manner. None of
the exoticism, eccentricity, iconoclasm, nonconformity, spontaneity, obliqueness and
ambiguity that we appreciate nowadays is to be found in Longfellow's poetry.
Life: He became the Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard College. He had
the feeblest (pobre) interest in politics and, though deeply religious, was fond of
harmony in all his relations.
Work: His first collection of Poem, Voices of the Night, was a best-seller. Poems on
Slavery, eight antislavery poems prompted by the African slave revolt aboard the
Amistad did not please either side, for it lacked of the current abolitionist literature
expected, and also others readers were dissatisfied with the mere mention of the subject
in dispute. From then on, the author evaded such polemical contemporary matters, and
turned to history.
Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie was the symbol of the expulsion in 1755 of 14.000
French-speaking from what is now the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, on the eve of
the Seven Year0s War, when the British military deported these settlers, who called
themselves Arcadians.
In The Song of Hiawatha, greeted with similar enthusiasm in America and in Europe,
Longfellow attempted to create an American epic to satisfy the patriotism of his fellow
citizens exemplifying the spirit of his country for readers abroad. His source was Algic
Researches and Longfellow, unaware of the fact that it substantially distorted the
original Chippewa stories, viewed The Song of Hiawatha as a faithful rendering of tribal
legends, which he tried to honor, hardly imagining the attacks it would receive in the
20th c on the grounds of fostering stereotypes and romanticizing the Native People.

"A Psalm of Life"

It is his best-known poem which moved many of the author's contemporaries and
inspired Baudelaire's sonnet "Le Guignon", and also it has been derided, burlesqued and
ridiculed in modern times. Its tone of heroic confidence, praised in its days, has made it
an easy target of parody.
It has been analyzed as an instance of how Longfellow tried to develop a domestic style
of masculinity, since he objected literature begets an "effeminate spirit". To counter
these notions, this poem contains references to war and sailing activities, the world is
presented as a "broad field of battle" and the reader is encouraged to become "a hero in
the strife". The "shipwrecked brothers" suggests the notion that all men are united in
brotherhood, and although the "lives of great men" are explicitly offered as models of
conduct, the values exalted are the ones that were instilled into women at the time: "to
labor and to wait" (using the same phrasing to describe Evangeline's proper behavior).
The choice of imagery has been deemed faulty, for cattle are nor prone to participate in
battle, nor are battles fought in bivouacs (tienda de campaña, o carpa). Among the ill-
chosen images is that of "the sand of time", which seems to indicate the sand in a
hourglass, but since footprints cannot appear there, such sands must refer to the sea
beach, an unsuitable location for "great men" to leave a lasting mark. The image of
footprints in sand does not really help to suggest immortality.
Composed in the blank spaces of a letter of invitation and, before it appeared in the
Knickerbocker Magazine, the author read it to his college class. After its success, he
published "The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm of Death", which when it was
reprinted in the collection Voices of the Night, its subtitle was removed due to the fact
that it was intended as a counter part to the poem published a few months later. "A
Psalm of Life" came to be seen by its author as the first of a series of "psalms" in which
he planned to go on expressing his ideas about the purpose of life and the significance
of death. He adopted the stance of an old sage ready to lead his disciples by offering
them the ethical guidance.
Exploratory Questions
- Summarize "A Psalm of life": Life doesn't abruptly end when one dies, it extends into
another after life; humans must live their lives in constant anticipation for the next day
under the belief that it will be better than each day before it; art created during one's life
can be preserved indefinitely; Longfellow likens living in the world to fighting on a
huge field of battle; people should lead heroic and courageous lives and not sit idle; his
use of the word "strife" acknowledges that life is inherently difficult; he encourages to
have fait hand trust the lord; the 7th stanza describes how successful people in the past
have their lives copied, while those who failed serve as examples of ways of life to
avoid; the final lines of the poem echo the beginning ones and offer advice encouraging
all to work and try hardest to make their lives great and accomplish as much as they
can. Longfellow conveys his message by speaking directly to the reader providing his
reasoning.
- Scan the poem: Each stanza is four lines long, thus it is a quatrain with the rhyme
scheme "ABAB, CDCD, EFEF..." Each of the nine stanzas is written in rhyming
quatrains, eight syllable line followed by a seven syllables line. Longfellow used
trochaic tetrameter throughout the poem, a line of four trochaic feet. Tetrameter means
that the poem has four trochees, a trochee is composed by a stressed syllable followed
by an unstressed one.

- Comment on the literary sources of the poem, including the Bible, Jorge Manrique,
Calderon de la Barca and Goethe: Quotes from the Bible are in line 7 "Dust thou art, to
dust returned", and in line 22 "le the dead Past bury its dead". The poem reflects the
influence of Goethe, whose dynamic philosophy suggested to Longfellow the direction
of his rather moralizing and trite hymn to action. For Longfellow, Manrique's Coplas
was sober thoughts on life and death that had entered into his psyche, but he gives to his
poem a positive tone that Manrique's melancholy laments lacks. In line 2, "life is but an
empty dream" was inspired on the title of Calderon de la Barca "La Vida es Sueño".
- Find the words related to death and comment on the importance of the funeral imagery
in a poem primarily designed to exalt life, remembering that there are images pertaining
to senses other that of seeing, for instance, an image may also represent a sound. The
image that represents a sound is mentioned in lines 14-16.
- There are four general types of diction: formal (lofty and dignified), informal (suitable
for the normal conversation of educated people), colloquial (like everyday speech of
ordinary people) and slang. Long fellow mixes different kinds of diction in his poem,
whereas the expression in line 4 is very colloquial "And things are not what they seem",
in line 7 we can find an expression written in formal language: "Dust thou art, to dust
returnest". Most of the poem is not difficult to read and the vocabulary is plain and the
diction informal, the author mixed different types to highlight the most important lines
in the poem in which he focused to show his message.

- This poem has been very popular to all kind of people because the primary message of
the subject matter is that "life is beautiful". The lyrical clines and inspiring message has
been handed down through the years, bringing hope. The speaker is involved in the first
person perspective, where he is directly addressing the reader. The tone is neither
positive nor negative, but a strictly honest. The tone remains the same "encouraging"
style from beginning to end, and there is no change of tone. The only tension is between
life and death. Figurative language allows the reader to envision his words, and the
poem is almost entirely comprised of metaphors and Symbolism. Exclamation points
are used to establish emphasis on a particular line, there is no pattern to the punctuation,
strengthening the meaning of a phrase. He makes an earnest appeal to his readers not to
worry about the past or fantasize about the future.
- "A Psalm of Life" portrays a youthful soul, eager to uplift and encourage a psalmist
who lost their way. The poem gives a deeper understanding of how one should
approach the problems in life, exhibiting an encouraging and hopeful spirit.
- The tone of the poem is heroic confidence, which provoked much praise and also
made it easy target for parody. Longfellow tried to develop a domestic style of
masculinity on the grounds to the references to war and sailing activities, typically
masculine in the 19th c. The world is presented as a "broad field of battle" and the
reader is encouraged to become a "hero in the strife". The phrase "shipwrecked brother"
suggests the notion that all men are united in brotherhood. Nevertheless, the values
exalted are the ones instilled into women at the time, summed up in the line: "to labor
and to wait" (also used to describe Evangeline).
- Compare these views about poetry and Nature and those expressed by Emerson, taking
into account that this optimistic poem reflects its contemporary Transcendentalist
idealism. Emerson believed that human senses can know only physical reality and
fundamental truths of existence could only be grasped by intuition, focusing on his
attention on the human spirit and its relationship to nature. He believed that the human
spirit is reflected in the natural world, leading him to a fundamental belief: all forms of
beings (God, nature, humanity) are spiritually united through a shared universal soul
called the Over-Soul. The Central Transcendental Concepts in "A Psalm of Life" are
basically nonconformity and Carpe Diem, because the poem conveys one person's
attitude toward life on earth. People should appreciate their life on earth as precious and
real act to make a spiritual, moral, or intellectual mark on the world. We have to
celebrate life and work toward personal achievement.
- Contrast the views about labor by Longfellow with the ones expounded by Thoreau in
Walden. Longfellow's view of labor is that one should not labor long if expected results
are not forthcoming during one's life. It would be a complete waste of life to wait for an
award in the hereafter. The author tells the reader to prepare for anything that may come
about, and to never give up; be relentless in achieving your goal, but at the same time,
learn to be patient.
Walden opens with the announcement of a simple life supported by no one earning his
life by the labor of his hands only. Endorsing the values of austerity, simplicity and
solitude, Thoreau consistently emphasizes the minimalism of his lifestyle and the
contentment of it. He contrasts his own freedom with the imprisonment of others who
devote their lives to material prosperity.
From A Study Guide: Writing about poetry
When you analyze a poem you will need to read it more than once, and several readings
are always better than one or two. Since poetry has always been close to music, much of
a poem's beauty comes to life only when it is heard. Do not stop at the end of every line
where there is no punctuation because this absence signals an enjambment, which is the
running over of the sense and structure of a line of verse into the following one without
a pause. And end-stopped line is a line with a pause at the end which is typographically
indicated by a period, a comma, an exclamation mark, or a question mark. It is correct
to read and enjambed line or run-on line straight through, without giving any indication
of the line break you see on the page. The reason why you should not pause at the end
of a run-on line is that poetry is an aura art form, and therefore poems are written for the
ear. The sounds in a poem can contribute to the creation of a certain mod. Pay attention
to the poem's sound devices, such as:
- Assonance: the repetition of vowel sounds in stressed syllables.
- Consonance: the repetition of consonants sounds in stressed syllables.

- Alliteration: the repetition of the initial sounds in neighboring words or at short

intervals within a line or passage.
- Onomatopoeia: the use of words whose natural sounds evoke the object or action
involved.
A poem's elements do not exist in isolation, but work in unison to create a complete
experience. You should pay attention also to:
- Punctuation: marks which always function as signals for readers. Do not assume that
the end of a line marks the end of a sentence, unless it is concluded by a punctuation
mark. Identify both the caesuras and the enjambed or run-on lines in this poem.
- The rhythm and rhyme, which work together throughout a poem. Scanning the poem
means measuring the stresses in its metrical lines and determining its rhyme scheme. In
"A Psalm of Life" the English trochaic tetrameter can be studied with all its virtues and
vices. The meter of this poem is catchy and easily imitated, two qualities that made the
poem an easy target for parody. The lines containing eight syllables alternate with those
containing only seven, where the final unstressed syllable that would complete the
fourth trochee is missing.

- The forma structure is the way the poem is divided and goes together in terms of its
component parts. Identify the stanzaic form of the poem by observing how the
groupings of lines are set off by spaces on the page, and count the number of stanzas.
- The title serves as an introduction to it and will give you an initial sense of what the
poem is about. Bear in mind that the stanzaic form of this (eight-syllable alternating
seven-syllable lines) replicates the one used in may Protestant hymns, so that
Longfellow's choice of a form commonly associated with sacred songs can be viewed as
consistent with the subject matter of his poem.

- The theme is the central idea or main abstract concept in the poem.
- The speaker, to whom the voice in the poem belongs, is not to be taken at first glance
as equivalent to the poet, for it is often a created character, although in many cases they
may be virtually the same if we can assume that their thoughts and feelings coincide.
- The diction is the writer's choice of a particular range of vocabulary and arrangement
of words.
- The imagery of the poem is the use of a consistent pattern or collection of related
images that appeal to any of the senses, taking particular notice of visual imagery and
auditory imagery.
- The tone, noting that the repetition of long vowel sounds and nasal sounds helps
produce a melancholic effect, whereas short vowel sounds give a line the lightness and
speed that is necessary to convey a cheerful mood. Does the speaker's tone change?
- The emotional impact that the poem might have had on Longfellow's contemporaries
and the emotions it evokes in you at present. Take into account that poems relying on
clichés lose much of their capacity to elicit strong emotions.
You should include quotations from the poem to illustrate the points you make, giving
line numbers. Remember that an explication of a poem involves a line-by-line analysis,
and is not just a summary or translation of the poet's language into your own, but a
detailed interpretation of how and what the poem means. Do not expect to produce a
definitive reading, because poetry tends to break loose of definitions. You will be
exploring the poem rather than defining it.
“The masque
cd of the Red Death” [1842]
“The Raven” [1844]
-Powerful, disturbing and original.
-Aesthetics over ethics. Create beauty, not teach morality.
Condemned the heresy of didacticism. Art for art’s sake.
-Extravagant and eccentric subject matter.
- He influenced the French symbolist movement.
-New techniques, innovations, invented modern detective story
and hailed as inventor of science fiction.
-Was called drug addict and alcoholic who wrote weird stories
after he died. Now consider a tortured genius rooted in suffering
-Wrote w/ precision and revised constantly.
-Wanted his work to be judged on aesthetic criteria.
-Used close analysis (similar to New Criticism)
-He classified his own work as grotesque and arabesque.
-His works are very diverse but considered Gothic (fantasy,
irrational, supernatural).
-Poe was concerned with Gothic/Supernatural/Death.
-Wanted to produce Art for Art’s sake. Condemned didacticism
(he didn’t want to teach).
-Objected to Allegory (despised it). “The Masque of the Red
Death” can be seen as a parody of allegorical writings.
-He said poetry must be brief so as not to lose unity of effect.
“The Raven”
-It caused quite a stir. Poe claimed that it had been done step by
step with mathematical precision (was probably being ironic)
-The Philosophy of Composition: He liked brevity. Death of a
woman was the most poetical topic of the world.
-No direct reference to a woman but it shows the impact of the
death of three women in his life. His mother, the mother of a
friend and his foster mother.
-Same stanza from E.B. Browning “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”
-Setting: Normal house. Mysterious tapping on the door. Reflects
the feelings of the character.
-Time: Last hour or last month of the year. Death and decay.
-5 long lines of alternating octameters (8 feet) and heptameters
(7 feet) 16/15 syllables and a tetrameter (4feet/7syllables)
-Octameters are rare in classical verse.
-Rhyme scheme ABCBBB.
-Uses trochees (not iambs)
*Sound devices used: alliteration (weak/weary), assonance
(repetition of vowel sounds) and internal rhyme (it occurs within
the same line). Onomatopoeia (tapping and rapping).
-1st person singular.
-Binary: Light (Lenore)/darkness (Raven)
-Psychological, emotional, spiritual paralysis and despair.
-Cyclical united through the words: Nothing more/ever more and
nevermore.
-Careful diction. Uses foreign words and spelling.
1
“The masque of the Red Death” 3
-Poe was probably thinking about “Black Death” when he
wrote it. Blood and death. (Obsession w/ wife’s illness)
-Cholera epidemic, wife’s burst vessel, Banquo’s ghost in
Macbeth… all sources.
-Multifold significance, not just a horror story.
Relationship of art and nature.
-Prince Prospero represents his ideal artist-hero. He is
arrogant in thinking that he can avoid death so he is
punished. Not Shakespeare’s Prostero who controls the
situation through magic.
-It represents allegorically and literally DEATH.
-Binary concepts: life/death, light/dark, health/illness.
-Setting-> Removed from the real world.
-Personification-> Clock with its brazen lungs.
-Omniscient 3rd person -> Authorial narrative voice.
2 -He wants to control the natural cycle of life w/ his
imaginary powers by creating an artificial setting.
-The 7 rooms=7 stages of life from east to west.
-The colors: blue (birth, unknown), purple (blue+red.
Birth+blood), green (spring and yough), orange (summer
and autumn of life), white (age, white hair), violet (death
is near), black (death).
-Fit in death as a motif, not as a reality.
5 -Settings reflect inner personality of the character
-Death in luxurious settings makes it appear even worse.
-Lots of descriptions. Palace, rooms, colors, windows…
-Ebony clock caused silence and seriousness. Reminder of
mortality and the passing of time.
-Almost no direct speech. The prince asks “who dares?”
4
*Noise of clock (paralyzes partyers)
*Entrance of masked man.
Unity of effect:
-Plot/setting/language/diction/tone
-Title already gives us hints about the story
-Scenery is grotesque and arabesque
-Supernatural
-Clock -> Fear and tension. Contrasts with the party
atmosphere.
 UNIT 16
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Masque of the Red Death" - "The Raven"

From A Study Guide: identify the principles of aestheticism (the cult of "Art for Art's
sake") with Poe as the most famous exponent of this movement in America; Poe as a
short-story teller exerted influence on 20th c. culture through his creation of fictional
genres (detective story and science-fiction tale) and his analytical techniques that New
Criticism would later label as close analysis; Poe's classification of his fiction into
grotesque (which emphasizes disharmony) and arabesque (which stresses how every
narrative element contributes to the single effect of terror); Poe satirized gothic fiction
and parodied allegorical writing in TMOTRD, which is not a mere tale of horror but an
original aesthetic fable on the relationship between art and nature; apply Poe's "unity of
effect" to TMOTRD and "The Raven", and interpret both in the light of the essay "The
Philosophy of Composition" (mathematic calculation).

Poe was more interested in aesthetics than in ethics, since his main concern was
cultivating beauty, and he dealt with eccentric and extravagant subject matter.
According to his theory of taste, simplicity was not synonymous with good taste, and
excess was not invariably proof of bad taste. He held the opinion that poetic beauty has
the quality of strangeness and that poetry gives pleasure by being indefinite, explicitly
condemning the "heresy of didacticism".
The origins of the cult of "Art for Art's sake" were found in German writers of the
romantic period who agreed on the autonomy of art. Poe exerted a strong influence on
the French Symbolist movement.
By borrowing themes from popular culture, experimenting with new techniques and
making innovative use of the narrative conventions, he created several fiction genres:
the modern detective story, and he has been credited to invent the science fiction tale.
Poe's conception of the writer as artist implies the consideration of art as an end in
itself, not as a means to convey any kind of political or moral message. By applying
what would later be known as close analysis, he foreshadowed the New Criticism
theory.
Work: In Boston he published his first book of poetry under an assumed name but his
second collection of poems was published under his own name. Stories and book
reviews earned him a position as editorial assistant and principal book reviewer in
Southern Literary Messenger.
Her cousin Virginia, who would later become his wife, in 1842 would have a violent
haemorrhage, being the first sign of the tuberculosis which would kill her five years
later. Poe suffered the constant fear of losing her, and he was driven to alcohol and
drugs in his most painful moments.
Poe began his creative career as a poet, with three collections of poetry before he saw
his first piece of fiction in print: Tamerlane and other Poems (first collection), signed
by a Bostonian; Al Aaraaf, Tarmelane, and Minor Poems (second collection); Poems
(third collection). In the preface to his last collection The Raven and Other Poems, he
summed up what poetry has always meant for him: "With me poetry has been not a
purpose, but a passion".
In the early 1830s, he turned to the short story. His theory of "the unity of effect or
impression" accounts for his preference for "the short story prose narrative, requiring
from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal" to the ordinary novel, which "cannot
be read at one sitting" and thus "deprives us of the immense force derivable from
totality". Nevertheless, he published a novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
His first collection of short fiction was Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840),
which contained 25 pieces. He classified his own fiction into the two categories
borrowed from Sir Walter Scott:
- Grotesque: tales drawn upon a northern European tradition in which one aspect of the
character is heightened for a marked comic effect. The essential elements are:
disharmony, and a clash of opposites.
- Arabesque, in which everything contributes to the single effect of terror: setting,
characterization, plot, theme and style.
The Gothic tradition, characterized by the use of the fantastic, irrational and
supernatural, emerged in the 18th c. as a reaction against the rationality and order that
dominated the Age of Reason, depicting the dark atmosphere of haunted castles and
wild picturesque landscapes during the medieval period. By the 19th, Gothic no longer
implied "medieval" but simply referred to works intended to inspire with macabre plots
full of horror, violence, mystery and suspense. Poe's Gothic pieces were satires on the
German and British examples of the genre.

"The Masque of the Red Death"

The colour red rather than black's death points to the idea of mortality linked to blood,
which also points to Poe's obsession with Virginia's illness. Inspired by an incident
reported to have happened after a cholera epidemic in Paris, one of the dancers
disguised as the personification of the disease at a masked ball. There can be found
details from the presence of Banquo's ghost and the banquet scene in Shakespeare's
Macbeth.
The tale has multifold significance, it is not a mere tale of horror, and can be read as an
original aesthetic fable on the relationship between art and nature. Prince Prospero
represents Poe's ideal artist-hero. Poe defined the poet as a man of "taste" rather than of
"pure intellect" or "moral sense". When Prospero isolates himself with his courtiers, his
behaviour does not follow the dictates of a "pure intellect" or a "moral sense", but of his
"taste" to build a symbolic equivalent of nature.
Prospero wants to control the natural cycle of life with his imaginative powers by
creating an artificial setting he confidently feels able to manipulate at his will. His
desire to cultivate beauty is reflected in the design of his imperial suite that reduplicates
the cycle of life and inevitable closes with death. The seven connected rooms represent
the seven stages of one's life, from birth to death, and they are laid out from east to
west, thus evoking the daily course of the sun. The colours are symbolic, starting with
blue and ending with black, the fourth or middle room being orange, analogous to
midday. Red windows doe not correspond with that of the black decorations, linking the
symbols of blood and death. Prospero represents death in the last chamber, maybe in an
attempt to fit death into his scheme as a motif. "Red Death" was not a mere plague, but
death itself.
"The Raven"
Poe discussed it in "The Philosophy of Composition". The idea of the poem as the result
of a mathematical calculation rather than the product of an inspired genius can be
interpreted ironically. Almost everything Poe wrote is qualified by the prevailing
duplicity or irony he used to mock himself and his readers: his emphasis on the
principle of brevity upon his belief that a true poem must be brief so as not to lose its
"unity of effect of impression", the impact made upon the reader.
The death of a beautiful woman was for the author "unquestionably, the most poetical
topic in the world". Most analyses of "The Raven" mention the impact of the deaths of
three women the poet loved: his mother, Jane Stith Stanard and Mrs. Allan (Poe's foster
mother). Virginia was still alive, but she has already filled him with the sense that at any
moment he would lose her as well.
Poe used the same stanza form that Elizabeth Barrett employed in "Lady Geraldine's
Courtship", a poem he admired for its "fierce passion" and "delicate imagination". The
stanzas are formed by five lengthy lines of 16, 15, 16, 15 and 15 syllables, an
alternation of octameters and heptameters. The fifth line repeats a smaller or greater part
of the fourth line. Then follows a very short sixth line of only 7 syllables, the 4 feet that
form a tetrameter. The octameter is rare still in English verse, "The Raven" is among the
few examples of it. The rhyme scheme is unusual, abcbbb, the b being identical
throughout the whole poem. He pretended to no originality regarding the trochaic
rhythm. The trochee, a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an
unstressed one, is not as common in English poetry as its reverse, the iamb.
Poe employs a number of sound devices most of which are different kinds of repetition:
alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme. He also uses the sound device of onomatopoeia.
Exploratory questions:
-Most of Poe's stories have a continual motif of obsessive- compulsive behaviour. The
main psychological obsession here is the way to escape from Red Death.
-It is said that Poe does not create characters, only atmosphere. Here he creates the
mystery moment when Prospero discovers the guest in white like a phantom. Also
through the clock.
-Poe always sought to awaken powerful emotions in his readers. As an arabesque, to
create a mood of terror he depicts a gigantic clock of ebony which represents a reminder
of mortality and time passing, described with human features. The black room
symbolizes death and the red curtains are like flood of blood.

- Poe confronted the death experience by focusing on its most macabre aspects. "The
Masque of the Red Death" is an allegory that explores the inevitability of death, and the
ebony clock represents the lifetime or the time to die.

-There is a biblical reference in the last paragraph.

-The festive and horrific are combined in the masquerade. The strange lights coming
from the windows and the clock which sounds every hour let people know their time
has arrived. The strange guest is a persofinication of the plague.
- The tale contains several foreign words and foreign spellings, intended to produce a
striking effect. Poe later moved toward a simpler prose style. Foreign words give the
text a more elegiac sound: masquerade, avatar, that moves toward a simpler prose style
to give the text more vividness and anxiety.
-Prospero represent Poe's ideal notion of the artist as a man who withdraws from natural
life in order to create an artificial life.
- Poe has been extolled as the writer of a "genuinely new Gothic". By consciously
manipulating and laying bare some of the conventions of the German romantic tale and
the English Gothic romance, Poe transformed the genre. The author was writing a
parody of a formerly serious form. The sublime relied on the power of the mind over
nature which corresponds to Prospero's defiant attempt to control nature with his
imaginative powers.
- Poe sometimes used allegory despite his dislike for what he considered an inferior
literary form. He often parodied certain genres. Can the tale be interpreted as a parody
of allegorical writing? Allegories: rich people dancing inside isolated from what is
happening outside, trials to avoid death, the Red Death: a plague the clock is also the
death.

- Poe defined the nature and scope of the short story, emphasizing the importance of
brevity and focus. He believed that long narratives lost effectiveness, because "unity of
effect or impression" could only be achieved in a work that the reader might hold in the
mind all at once.
- We generally compare for the purpose of noting similarities, whereas we tend to focus
on differences when we contrast. Poe is highly the darkest writer of the three. His gothic
style has nothing to do with the romantic style of Hawthorne and Melville. While Poe
tries to avoid allegory, Hawthorne uses it freely but Poe rather prefers short tales to the
long romances of the two.

From A Study Guide: Writing about the unity of effect

Writers employ characters, plot, setting, theme, tone, diction and figurative language to
create a total effect on the readers of their texts, just like painters by using color, light,
texture and line. This overall effect is part of the experience created by the interaction
between the words printed on the page and the readers, which can cover a whole range
of human emotions including awe, delight, comfort, excitement, nostalgia, surprise,
fear, shock, horror, and grief. The various elements do not exist in isolation, but fit
together to form a coherent whole that makes a striking impression upon us.
In writing about the unity of effect you have to take into consideration how the various
elements of the story are combined and contribute to the overall effect of the whole,
how the different constituents add up to make a complex unified whole, showing how
the unifying idea or theme holds the work's conflicting components together. You have
to note oppositions, tensions, ambiguities and paradoxes, and then consider how all
these relate to the story's cohesion assuming that everything in the text (figures of
speech, point of view, diction, tone, and so on) is carefully calculated to contribute to
the story's organic unity.
Some questions can assist you in the analysis:
- How does the title relate to the story?
- State the theme.

- What conflicts are emphasized by binary oppositions like art vs. nature, health vs.
illness, life vs. death, joyfulness vs. sorrow, and light vs. darkness?
- What is most striking in the author's choice of vocabulary and his arrangement of
words? Find any example of "the measured and fateful cadence" that Poe's critics
praised so much.
-What is the prevailing mood evoked and what visual, auditory images, figurative
language have a share in bringing about it? The pervasive atmosphere of mystery
contributes to the impact of the story.
- How are the spatial locations of the scenes described, are they connected by unity of
location? Does setting match mood? How incongruousness of a gloomy location with a
cheery mood becomes a striking combination (the festive and the horrific elements).
- How important the time is for the construction of this story?
- How do setting and plot interplay in this narrative? Poe wanted to make his story as
short as possible because he believed that long narratives lost effectiveness.
- What Prince Prospero's symbolic connotations does his nave have? He is the only one
whose words are quoted in the story, speaking only once.
- How are basic gothic motifs intertwined? e.g. the awareness of death, the
preoccupation with evil...
 Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)
“The narrative
cd
of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
an American Slave written by himself” [1845]

Genre: Slave narrative, autobiography. 1

Text: It became popular and encouraged other fugitives to
publish their own narratives. Unlike Olaudah Equiano he was “The narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American
born a slave. His father was a white man, his mother a slave. Slave written by himself” 3

Work: Embellished style. Many prefer the original versions. Themes:

-Slavery: Compares slaves to animals. Dehumanized.
-Rhetorical figures-> metaphor, irony, synecdoche… Chiasmus
-Education: Self-improvement incredibly important.
his fav. “You have seen how a man was made slave, you shall see -Family
how a slave was made a man”. -Suffering: Learns to overcome it.
-Speak and write as visible sign of his manhood or humanity. -Wisdom of America: Vision of slavery in the country.
-Racist charges of black inferiority and public pressure. -Religion: Abolitionists were faithful Christians. He has
-Oratorical rules and conventions in his lectures. harsh criticism for “Christian” slave owners.
-Truth: Wanted to probe that what he told was true.
-Atypical experience of slavery. Was given more opportunities.
Symbolism, allegory, imagery
Narratives: Avoided some of the conventional features. Didn’t -White sails symbolize freedom, forbidden for blacks.
include the typical climax. He refused to indulge his white
-Female suffering
audience in a servile way.
-City (chance to learn) VS country (cruelty).
Author’s Monologues: Form-> Short sentences, numerous
questions and exclamations, use of apostrophe and antithesis.
Tone
-Reserved and emotional. Angry about slavery.
*Content-> Development of thoughts, emotions, changes in tone
-Human/subhuman discourse in his arguments and its imagery. Writing Style
-Dilemma between being convincing and demonstrate
Narrator: 1st person singular to make readers empathize w/ him that he was an intellectual person. Tries to write in a
Influence: Romantic. Heroic fugitive. Heroic loner. plain straightforward style and uses elevated style.
-Characterization: Direct-> We are told directly and
explicitly about the character’s personalities.
Elements of Romance: 2
*Slave = hero
*Fight against Covey = Triumphant romantic hero
*Mysterious settings = Adds drama and adventure.
*Unexpected plot twists = Adds drama and adventure
*Scenes of horror and violence = serves the popular appetite for
sensationalism.
*Overcoming hardships = Climax is NOT his escape.
*Happy ending = He is now an educated free man through his
own efforts.
 UNIT 17
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself

From A Study Guide: the slave narrative, born in the 18th c was developed between
1820 and 1860 in direct relation the abolitionist cause; he exerted influence by the three
versions of the autobiography which he drew upon his personal experience as a slave, as
a fugitive and as a full-time salaried orator at the service of the abolitionist movement;
he contributed to the advancement of African Americans through his journalism, public
performances, his support of President Lincoln, which turned him into one of the most
important black political leaders in American history; examine the author's superb
command of many rhetorical figures (metaphor, irony, synecdoche, apostrophe, paradox
and chiasmus) and his shaping of an effective counter-discourse that would challenge
the proslavery arguments of political speeches subverting oratorical rules and
conventions of the hegemonic discourse of the period.
The literary genre known as slave narrative helped the abolition cause by bearing
testimony to the cruelties of the "peculiar institution". These autobiographies exerted a
strong influence on public opinion and thus were recognized as very effective tools in
advancing the antislavery movement. Thrilling accounts of heroic journeys into
freedom captivated the imagination of readers immersed in the atmosphere of
romanticism.

Life: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by

Himself (1845) has become a classic in African American Literature. A second revised
and extended version was My Bondage and My Freedom, and a third one The Life and
Times of Frederick Douglass.
He was born a slave, inherited the condition from his black mother, although his white
father was suspected to be his mother's master. Mrs. Auld kindly started teaching the
boy to read but eventually she became opposed to let him study. The acquisition of
literacy would be for him "the pathway from slavery to freedom".
Douglas had to give most of his earnings to his master but managed to save enough to
envisage a good plan to escape. With the aid of his future wife, he made his way north,
first to New York City. He found difficulty in obtaining steady employment in the
North because of racial discrimination against blacks in the free states. After he met the
famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, he was unexpectedly launched on a new
career as a salaried lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Through his
speaking tour of Great Britain and Ireland, he obtained funds provided by British
admirers to purchase his manumission from Hugh Auld, and also edited the North Star,
the most influential of the black journals in the country. During the Civil War he
became a consultant to President Abraham Lincoln, advocating that former slaves be
armed for the North.
Work: Douglass' writings were linked to his political concerns, and his contribution to
non-fiction on the grounds of the autobiographical and the slave narrative genres earned
him an outstanding place in the American Literature. The author intended his Narrative
to be a literary work of art and deliberately tried to embellish his style. Nevertheless,
readers prefer the original version where the writer demonstrated his superb command
of many rhetorical figures: metaphor, irony, synecdoche, apostrophe, paradox, chiasmus
and other varieties of antithetical clausal constructions. His most often quoted statement
is the chiasmus (the inversion of the second of two paralleled phrases) "You have seen
how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man".
Douglass had the desire to show his ability to speak and write well as a visible sign of
his "manhood" and "humanity", and although he developed his artistic talent by drawing
inspiration from books such as The Columbian Orator and from abolitionist literature
he had to explain in his Narrative how he had reached such a sophisticated degree of
accomplishment. It provided enough details of how its authentic author, not a
ghostwriter, had managed to become a master rhetorician who used language of
American middle-class culture and adopted the symbols of Christianity.
The purported goal of any slave narrative was to reveal the truth about slavery by
describing a representative personal history that might stand for the experiences of all
slaves and for the character of black people in general.

In his Narrative he avoided some of the conventional features of the slave narrative
genre, like the typical climax of escape, because disclosing information about his
procedure would have alerted slaveholders and damaged other prospective fugitives'
plans. He preferred to finish his Narrative by indicating that arrival into the free states
was not the conclusion but only a step in the life of someone who, having evaded
slavery in the South, still had to confront racism in the North under various forms (e.g.
segregation laws).
Exploratory questions
- Douglass addressed northern readers as innocent people who needed to be enlightened
about the evils of slavery. The author did not simply let the facts of his life speak for
themselves, but interpreted their meaning from his own perspective. List instances of
abuse he exposed: ignorance as a tool of slavery; abuse of female slaves; dehumanizing
effects of slavery (slaves are treated as animals).
- Antiliteracy state laws were often justified on the grounds that slaves would
"misunderstand" or "misuse" the power given to them by the ability to read and write.
Douglass understands literacy as a path to freedom and thus he presents his own self-
education as the primary means by which he is able to free himself, and as his greatest
tool to work for the freedom of all slaves.
- A monologue is a long speech given by a single person who is alone. This literary
device is used to reveal the private thoughts and emotions of an individual character.
The Chesapeake Bay monologue regarding its form has short sentences, numerous
questions and exclamations, and the use of apostrophe and antithesis; and regarding its
content the development of thoughts and emotions accompanied by changes in tone.
Apostrophe: a figure of speech in which some absent or nonexistent person or thing is
addressed as if present and capable of understanding. Antithesis: the juxtaposition of
sharply contrasting ideas in balanced or parallel words, phrases, grammatical structure
or ideas. Douglas changes of tone show us he is really angry. The employment of short
sentences, numerous questions and exclamations reinforce the intensity of his
monologue.
- "shrouded ghosts" and "the tomb of slavery": These sailboats were reminders of the
vessels used to transport thousands of men, women and children to a strange land where
their humanity was tripped from them.
- Douglass' narrative powerfully deploys the human-subhuman discourse both in its
arguments and its imagery. Slaves are treated as animals. Slave owners value slaves
only to the extent that they can perform productive labour; they often treat slaves like
livestock, mere animals, without reason.
- The transformation Mrs. Sophia Auld underwent is an instance of the moral
degradation of slaveholders that Douglass exposes. Slave-owning men tempted to
adultery and rape, and perverted religious sense to remain blind to the sins they commit
in their own house.
- The author refused to use dialect and continued to cultivate the American bourgeois
modes of expression he had learned during his Baltimore years in the Auld household.
He had to provide enough details of his life in order to prove he was the authentic
author, not a ghostwriter. He managed to become a master rhetorician who used the
language of American middle-class culture and adopted the symbols of Christianity.
- Douglass refused to gain credibility by affecting a literary ineptitude that would have
met his prejudiced readers' expectations. He combined report and description with
comment. He gave a romantic focus on emotion and on the celebration of individual
selfhood through his self-portrait as a 'heroic fugitive'. He avoided some of the
conventional features of the slave narrative genre, for example, he did not include the
typical climax of the escape and pursuit scenes, allegedly because disclosing
information about his procedure would have alerted slaveholders. He preferred to finish
his Narrative by indicating that arrival into free states was not the conclusion but only a
step in the life of someone who still had to confront racism in the North under various
forms. He had to provide enough details of his life in order to prove he was the
authentic author.
- He, as a first-person narrator, tried to engage his readers and enter into empathy with
them. The author established a discursive relationship with his public by building a
bridge of sympathetic identification between the northern white reader and the southern
black fugitive. He tries to provide evidence for the abolitionist cause.
- Some abolitionists tried to encourage more self-restraint because they feared that this
bold and vehement mode of address could be damaging to the movement. The author
intended his narrative to be a literary work of art and deliberately tried to embellish his
style.
- Characters features of romanticism can be found in the passages, particularly on the
attention to the romantic focus on emotion and on the celebration of individual selfhood
through Douglass' self-portrait as "heroic fugitive". He poses a Byronic figure
apostrophizing the Chesapeake Bay ships and when he presents himself valiantly
overcoming Edward Covey in an unequal physical struggle.

- Douglass' Narrative is a representative text of black men's literary tradition. He is

concerned with the formation of identity, and he presents himself as a paradigm of
masculinity, especially in the climatic scene of his fight with Covey, the master is
depicted as the aggressor and the slave's reaction is justified as self-defence. Douglas
manipulated his reader's feelings by exploiting sentimental strategies, presenting
himself as a virile subject, caught by the legs.
- Douglass share with Equiano some features, they locate their quest for freedom within
a Christian context, and the stress the value of freedom for personal and spiritual
development. Both ex-slaves had to refute claims that blacks were intrinsically inferior.
Equiano had criticized the brutality of slave-owners, no the institution of slavery itself,
whereas Douglass wanted to reveal the evils of America's "peculiar institution". The
"Written by Himself" of both titles lets us detect prejudices. Douglass focused on
authenticity rather than interest, and his main theme was escape, not travel (as Equiano).
Douglass wrote with an urgency and passion directed toward these abolitionists.
Equiano and Douglass relied on their faith to get through hardships, reflected in the
writings of both men, and they relied on it to question the hypocrisy of a "Christian"
slave owner. While Equiano used his spirituality to convert the nonbelievers, Douglass
always used it to question the morals of human bondage.

- Douglass' work is also an obligatory point of reference in the study of American

autobiographical traditions, and he consciously tried to model himself after Benjamin
Franklin. Both authors stress their talents when they proudly present themselves as
archetypal self-made men worthy of admiration. Douglass' autobiography lacks the self-
critical and self-questioning that makes Franklin admits his mistakes. Douglass used
sophisticated style and learned tone, and Franklin used plain style, colloquial without
being familiar, because the latter did not have to demonstrate he was intelligent and
educated, did not have to prove anything since he was white.
From A Study Guide: Analyzing the techniques of persuasive writings
Rhetoric can be defined as the art of using language for persuasion by employing
special devices. Aristotle distinguished ethos (the characteristic attitude of the speaker),
pathos (the audience's emotional response) and logos (the logic of the argument).
Writers are persuasive when they manage these three elements skilfully.
- With respect to ethos, writers must create speakers who present themselves in such a
way that they carry authority and gain sympathy for their cause. We have to ask
ourselves who is the speaker and if s/he is placed in a position of authority to lead to the
exertion of influence on the readers' thought.
- Regarding pathos, writers must move their audiences to take particular action. They
must create a favourable disposition in their readers by making emotional appeals to
arouse deep feelings (fear, hostility against opponents, pity for innocent victims).
- Concerning logos, writers must carefully build the logic of a strong rhetorical
argument. When evaluating logos, you should provide answers to the questions: how
well is the argument articulated? What logical proofs are used?
Douglas manipulated his readers' feelings by exploiting sentimental strategies in his
narrative text, which is pervaded by masculine values. He invariably presented himself
as a virile subject, asserting his manhood (combat with Covey), also adopted a highly
emotional tone. He also experimented the antebellum sentimentality exposing a
common fact of life in slavery: family separation. The author resorted both to rational
and emotional appeals in order to elicit his audience's compassion at the loss of his
mother.
Audiences appreciated the well-articulated arguments that were brought to the reform
movements of 19th c America. Douglass turned to the Enlightenment discourse of
liberty and equality to shape a counter-discourse that would challenge the proslavery
contentions.
Some people were convinced that slave narratives were the creations of white
abolitionists. Douglas called upon his personal experience to assure his readers about
his authorship.
Consider the notion of truth and point out the elements that lend a tone of veracity to it.
Look for examples of verbal irony, and note the difference between the truth that
readers may supply and what the text literally says. Proslavery readers attacked slave
narratives seizing upon any inaccuracies to contend that the whole work was a fraud and
the authors felt the need to corroborate their assertions with extensive evidence.

Regarding the impassioned apostrophe to the Chesapeake Bay white-sailed ships,

Douglass's contemporary readers expected large doses of pathos, and therefore most
features of this passage would have proved very effective in his time.
He provided evidence of his education by using quotations from literary sources and an
extensive vocabulary, exhibiting an uncommon mastery of many rhetorical figures.

Style: elaborate
Tone: emotional
Audience: white pro & antislavery
Romantic features: focus on emotion
Self-portrait: heroic fugitive
Themes: Importance of education to be free; age; negative effects of slaver: on slaves
by their dehumanization; on slaveholders by their moral degradation.
Rhetoric devices: repetition: words related with understanding or learning. Chiasmus:
the inversion of the second of two parallel phrases, a verbal patter in which the key
elements are expressed, and then reversed. The Chesapeake monologue. Change in tone
from pessimistic to positive. Apostrophe: an animal, a thing, a place, an abstract quality,
an idea or a dead or absent person is addressed as if present and capable of
understanding (addressing the ships in the bay). Antithesis: a contrast or opposition of
thoughts, usually found in two different sentences.
Narratives modes: Description, not focused on the development of a particular mood or
an atmosphere.
Report: real facts chronologically related.
Speech: direct and indirect.
Comment: it is the prevailing mode.
 Harriet beecher stowe (1811-1896)
cd
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” [1852]
-Great social impact. She was an active abolitionist who wanted
to change the course of events by affecting public’s opinion.
-Woman. Wrote “sentimental” sub-literature
-Uncle Tom=derogatory term to refer to blacks.
-Tom is praised, intelligent, sensible, peaceful, forgiving, stoic…
*Has integrity, dignity and strength of character
*He is victimized under the whip for helping escape some slaves.
*Christ-like figure. Tom is the real hero.
-Careful in her writing. Slave’s perspectives.
-Principal theme is: EVIL. Many levels: moral, political…
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
-Eliza’s son Harry and Tom get separated. After Tom’s death Eliza
and Harry are reunited in Canada.
Breakdown
-When Lincoln met Stowe said: “So you are the little lady that
wrote the book that has started this great war”.
-She didn’t see black as inferior. Blacks were more docile,
childlike, simple and affectionate.
-3rd person omniscient narrator
-Excellent for idioms/dialect/black vernacular.
-Puritan background, treats evil->slavery->sin. Moral duty to
write and speak out against slavery.
Compares treatment of slaves to those of animals
-Slaves come to market fed and cleaned, sleek and shiny.
-They are kept merry so they have no time for reflection.
-Buyers examine and comment on them
-Pushed and pulled, told to jump, to show their muscles.
-Men at the auction talk about how they get rid of “nigger airs”.
Religion
-Quotes from the Bible.
-Susan and Emmeline sing a song to Mary.
-Susan reminds her daughter that no matter what, she should be
faithful to the Lord.
-Slaves’ faith in God helps them to go on.
-Sees civil laws in conflict. Wants to justify civil disobedience.
-Slavery is destroying society.
-Simon Legree is evil, not a good Christian.
-Tom is tortured and killed -> Christ. Martyr.
-She doesn’t use lots of figurative language but uses parallelism,
allusions and quotes.
*Sexual abuse by whites on black women: Susan 3
remembers how the white trader had looked her daughter.
-Feared for Emmeline being sold to a life of shame
-She wishes she wasn’t so attractive. She has curls.
-The man before the sale touched her bust. Slaves have no
1
protection.
Characters
2 -Character description is direct.
-St. Clare slaves to be sold. Tom, Adolph, Susan, Emmeline.
-Evil character: Simon Legree. Stiff hair, coarse mouth, dirty,
spitting tobacco juice…
Literary strategies
-Wrote a key to justify the attacks that her writings produced.
-Veracity (asked for info from Douglass)
-Characters defined by the color of their skin.
-Characters are revealed by their speech.
*Mr. Skeggs (loving kindness, speech lively and pleasant),
Sambo (black, happy and carefree), Adolph (speaks like a
white), Emmeline and Susan (soft spoken, speak like whites,
speak of the Bible), Mr. Legree (quick, mean harsh…)
Irony in her work 4
*Slaves inclined to pine and forced to be merry.
*Susan and Emmeline were sold for trading in slaves was
“rather too much money to be lost on principle”.
*Calls traders connoissereurs. Auctioneers brilliant and
talented men.
*Benevolent man tries to bid on Emmeline and loses.
How she deals with families
*Wants whites to see that blacks have feelings. Same as
whites.
*Wants readers to identify with these families.
 UNIT 18
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

From A Study Guide: Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most influential book ever published in
America, considering its unanimous recognition as a popular classic; the recent literary
theory and today's current trends of criticism increasingly value politically engaged
writings since no longer are biased against works produced by women and authors
derogatorily dismissed as "sentimental"; the novel is a reaction against the Fugitive
Slave Act in by its author and her social religious background who openly advocated
law-breaking in the form of civil disobedience; UTC was shaped by Stowe's personal
experience as a woman raised in a family of preachers and reformers, as a devoted
Protestant, as a teacher, as a wife of a professor of Biblical Literature, and as a mother
deeply concerned with slave parents whose children were sold away; the aspects most
celebrated in the novel are: its combination of different sources, its setting, its polemic
characterization, its endorsement of the romantic racialism common in the abolitionist
circles, its blending of sentimentalism and realism, its treatment of the theme of evil in
its theological, moral, economic and political dimensions.

The novel has a greater social impact than any other book in the entire history of
American literature. Its author was an ardent abolitionist who wanted to change the
course of events in her country by transforming the climate of public opinion over the
issue of slavery.
Life: Stowe had an orthodox Calvinist upbringing, which explains the Puritan
background in her work. Her successful novel stemmed from her firm determination to
contribute to the antislavery cause, as she felt it was her moral duty to react immediately
against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it illegal to aid any runaway slaves
arriving in the free states, and required northerners to assist in the capture and return of
fugitives to their southern owners.
Stowe's son Charley had died at the age of eighteen months during a cholera epidemic,
and his death made her sympathize with the plight of the slave mothers whose children
were sold away from them.

Work: The National Era began the serial publication of a story initially scheduled for 14
weeks, which would later run more than a year. Ten days before the last installment
appeared, the entire work was printed under the title of Uncle Tom's Cabin; or Life
among the Lowly.
The novel was praised by renowned writers and philosophers (such as Emerson,
Tolstoy, Longfellow or Henry James), who recognized it as "triumphant". Frederick
Douglass defended Stowe through his newspaper, and while using different methods
they were joined in a common cause. The opposite proslavery camp critic's response
was overwhelming hostile. Accused of ignorance and inaccuracy, Stowe realized that
her novel could not stand alone, and felt obliged to justify what she had written by
producing documentary evidence.
She replied with A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and
Documents upon which the Story is Founded, an annotated selection of documents
assembled by herself and her brothers in order to authenticate her fictional portraits by
corroborating them with actual facts.
Stowe's novel bears the direct influence of the slave narrative tradition, the African
American autobiographies of the 1840s. The fictional character of Uncle Tom does not
stem from one single source, but is more likely a combination of disparate elements. He
was the origin of the pejorative term "Uncle Tom", which refers to a thoroughly
subservient black zealously (fanatic religious) intent on pleasing whites. This stereotype
does not correspond to Stowe's characterization, but to the distorted image aroused from
the influential stage version loosely based on the novel.
Tom's central characteristic in the novel is this religiosity, his strength of faith.
Everywhere Tom goes in the novel, he manages to spread some of the love and
goodwill of his religious beliefs, helping to alleviate the pain of slavery and enhance the
hope of salvation.
Stowe's Uncle Tom reveals that she unreservedly lauds him throughout her novel. He is
intelligent, sensible, peaceful, forgiving, stoic and generous in his response to the
human needs that require his assistance, of blacks and whites alike, showing business
capabilities. He wants freedom for himself, but not at the expense of harming his family
or his community of fellow slaves. His integrity, dignity and strength of character help
him stand his final trial. He is victimized, though he dies not out of submission to
Legree, but to uphold his conviction rather than capitulate to his cruel master's torture.
There is no servility or passivity in Tom's attitude, but what we would now cold
nonviolent resistance. In Stowe's religious mind, it was the sacrificial offering of the
innocent, cast in the role of the perfect Christian, the martyr. Tom is presented as a
Christ-like figure by emphasizing parallelisms, as the true hero of the story, although
our contemporary readers are more inclined to see the hero in the intrepid George
Harris, who breaks the law -like Frederick Douglass in real life in order to free himself.
Stowe wished to take into account the slave's own perspectives, and wrote to Frederick
Douglas asking him for information about life on a cotton plantation. Until the first
decade of the 20th c, she was honoured among African Americans, but later in the
century she began to be accused of portraying the slaves of her novel condescendingly.
Uncle Tom's Cabin has drawn criticism for its alleged racism, since 19th century
intellectuals embraced a kind of racialist thinking, which held the notion that each racial
group has special innate gifts or particular inbred qualities. Romantic racialism: the
belief, common in abolitionist circles, that slavery constituted the oppression of "one of
the best races of the human family". Abolitionist contended that one of the worst evils
of slavery was that it led to the degradation of a "naturally virtuous" people (again
Caliban in The Tempest, corrupted by Trinculo and Stephano). Stowe opposed 18th c
theories that had denied the humanity of blacks, and subscribed to the romantic
racialism of her time, not to be confused with modern racism, for she did not endorse
racist claims of black inferiority.
Analyzing Uncle Tom's Cabin within the scope of the author's and her first audience's
surrounding culture implies considering the religious beliefs of evangelical
Protestantism, essential to understand that the principal theme of the novel is the
problem of evil, which Stowe treats on different levels (theological, moral, economic
and political dimensions). We nowadays tend to place in separate spheres various
modes of discourse, but she blends theological with political discourse in the jeremiad
tradition: a long literary work, usually in prose, but sometimes in verse, in which the
author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained
invective, and always contains a prophecy of society's imminent downfall. Hers is a
prophetic voice publicly exhorting to spiritual renewal and social reform, vindicating
religious conversion linked to moral regeneration, both necessary for any social change.
She denounces the civil laws regulating slavery, in conflict with the higher religious
laws suppressed, advocating law-breaking in the form of civil disobedience to the
Fugitive Slave Act.
Any historicized interpretation of Uncle Tom's Cabin requires considering the 19th c
cult of domesticity. Stowe used the analogy of the nation as a family under threat
establishing a connection between the domestic and the political spheres. Slavery
destroyed family, endangering society itself, to both masters and slaves, both black and
white families, conveying the message that the inhumanity of owning people was
harming everyone.
Stowe was convinced that the domestic sphere had a potential transforming power to
radically change society. Her ideas about the sacredness of the home and the sanctity of
the family was informed by the most advanced cultural feminist ideology of her own
time, struggling over the issue of maternal power. Motherhood plays a fundamental role
in the novel.
The novel: The sale of Tom and Eliza's little son Harry generates two plots that start in
Kentucky and proceed in opposite directions, north and south. The plots are linked from
time to time by events, and after Tom's death they reunite the surviving characters in
the safety of Canada.

Possible exam questions:

- How characters differ from Douglas to Stowe.
- Stowe and Chopin demythologize the idyllic portraits of the plantation novels, the
myth of the Old South.
- Exposition of prevailing discourses that dehumanized slaves.
- Compare and contrast literary strategies by Douglass, Stowe and Chopin dealing with
issues of races and gender.

Main theme: the problem of evil

The novel borrowed elements of plot and characterization from Samuel Eliot's slave
narrative too.

Genre and race: Women often take the actively moral role in the novel, idealized as
almost angelic mothers, wives, and counselors, becoming guiding moral lights: Mrs
Shelby, Mrs Bird, St. Clare's mother and Legree's mother. Men are portrayed as gruff,
avaricious and morally weaker than women. Uncle Tom provides the one exception
serving as the role of moral guide. There is a parallelism between the position of
disempowerment held by both white women and black slaves. Stowe does not explicitly
make a connection between the oppression of women and the oppression of blacks, but
she does imply it through her structure of parallelism and contrast.
Opposites: black/white; freedom/slavery; North/South; happiness/unhappiness;
men/women; good/evil; life/death.
Binary oppositions: we find in the structure of the novel two opposing plots, the slave
narrative and the escape narrative: different directions, both literally and symbolically.
Eliza and her husband travel ever farther north finding freedom and happiness, while
Tom travels ever farther south, entering into martyrdom and death. This is apt for a
book that critiques a politically divided nation, a society organized by differences of
skin colour and gender.
Discourses that dehumanized slaves: quotes in the novel manifest that slavery is both
dehumanizing and robs one the natural rights to self-determination. Also, the sorrow
that families feel in parting. Each Stowe's scene, while serving to further (impulsar,
promover) character and plot, also serves to persuade the reader that slavery is evil, un-
Christian, and intolerable in a civil society. Stowe even shows the evil of the "best" kind
of slavery.

Writing style and diction: Stowe's writing style combines vivid characterization and
description with realistic dialogue, describes characters using outwards appearance as a
metaphor for personality. Dialogues are written phonetically to reflect the southern
accent dialect. Character's manner of speaking is a symbol of his/her social class and
education. An important aspect of her style is the diction, particularly the manner in
which the white characters refer to slaves: as "articles" when trading, as "critters"
(bicho) or animals which serves as justification of treating them as such.
Exploratory questions:
- Stowe uses an omniscient narrator, who speaks directly to the reader, explaining facts
and discussing moral and political issues as well as establishing intimacy.
- The old subtitle pointed out dehumanization and objetctification to which slaves were
subjected.

- Slaves are treated as animals: "well fed, well cleaned, tended and looked after, that
may come to sale sleek, and strong and shining".
- The characters of Susan and Emmeline are respectfully dressed, first quality material
and well cared for. The mother is good looking but the daughter is beautiful. They are
taught to read and write by a pious woman.
- There are hints of sexual abuse by whites on black women.
- Characters are types. She uses metonymic devices. Legree is the antithesis of Tom,
first described physically ("bullet head"). Metonimy: is a figure of speech in which a
thing or concept is called not by its own name but rather by the name of something
associated in meaning with that thing or concept. La parte por el todo.
- Characters are revealed by their speech, the importance of the dialogues. Mr. Skeggs's
speech is lively and pleasant, urging the negroes to have fun. Sambo's is a negro speech,
happy and carefree. Adolph speaks like a white. Emmeline and Susan are soft spoken,
pious and speak like whites, speaking of the Bible. Mr. Legree's speech is quick and
mean. He doesn't believe Tom, and gives orders.
- Irony in the novel: "slaves are incline to pine"; 30.000 dolar are "rather too much
money to be lost on principles" (Susan and Emmeline's onwer).
-The Bible is used to fight against the sin of slavery.
-We can see that this novel was first written as a series in: "A slave warehouse" are the
first words written, they automatically situate the reader and remind him/her where s/he
left off; the mentioning of time: "it was a day or two after the conversation between
Marie and Miss Ophelia"; it ends with a Bible quote.
- Plantation novel defended slavery. How did she demythologize the idyllic portraits
offered by these novels? Stowe showed the cruelty, the fear of the mother, the fear for
her daughter and their separation; she showed how they were treated like animals and
were not happy; also how they were poked and prodded (pinchar), dehumanized.
From A Study Guide: Writing about setting
This is intended to enhance your awareness of the visual quality of Stowe's writings by
focusing on the place setting of chapter XXX: the outside of the slave warehouse in
New Orleans, the men's sleeping room, the women's sleeping room, and the auction
room. Writing about setting implies much more than simply describing the location and
also involves considering the time setting of the text. It is also important to elucidate
how time and space work in the narrative, explaining why these two features are
significant in creating atmosphere and conveying mood. Setting can be used to cover
other dimensions such as the social context and historical milieu.
Settings in UTC play a significant role, the depiction of Tom's cabin illustrates the
author's ideas about home and family, and provides her with an appropriate
environment to introduce the protagonist in close-knit relationship with his relatives and
other members of the slave community, who are assembled to eat, learn and pray under
one roof. The cabin is presented as a site of physical, emotional and spiritual
nourishment. Likewise, in the chapter entitled "Dark Places", Stowe's descriptions of
the interior and exterior of merciless and morally corrupt Simon Legree's decaying
plantation is set in contrast with St. Clare's state.
Lengthy expository description of setting is common in most nineteen-century novels.
She begins several chapters by directly focusing on physical surroundings with
relatively few details, and then gradually establishes other implicit elements.

Titles often emphasize the importance of setting: "The Slave Warehouse" draws
attention to the import of the specific place, where the slaves await sale at auction.
In a short story or in a chapter from a novel, the scenes may be connected by unity of
location and/or unity of time, but authors may prefer to use place shifts and/or time
shifts. Shifts in place setting within chapter XXX deserve careful attention. What is the
effect of moving from outside of the slave warehouse to its interior?

The main geographical setting of chapter XXX is New Orleans, but there is an episode
that takes place in New York (lines 126-37).
Space and time are two closely linked categories. Note that, apart from the explicit
references to "night", nighttime is implicitly evoked with phrases such as "in the
moonlight which steals though the grated window".
Settings often have a striking appropriateness with regards to other narrative elements,
such as theme, plot, characterization and mood. Setting is expressive of the subject
matter and emphasizes the story's meaning. Note how the theme of hypocrisy is
highlighted by the contrast between the neat exterior of the slave warehouse and what is
going on inside.
Since a narrative presents a sequence of events, which are situated in space and time,
plot and setting are necessarily related to each other, always working in concert. Given
the specific surroundings portrayed in this chapter, do the incidents reported by the
narrator seem to be in-place or out-of-place?

External surroundings often contribute to the indirect presentation of a character,

because settings may shape and reflect the feelings of the characters and reveal traits of
their personality. Does the setting influence the character's behaviour in this particular
chapter?
Setting often matches mood but setting and mood may also be sharply contrasted. How
is Tom's mood wet in contrast with the general atmosphere, which prevails in the men's
sleeping room? How is the sorrowful mood of Susan and Emmeline reflected in the
setting of the women's sleeping room?

People function as part of the setting, and often merge with space as part of the
description, so that social context can be inferred from a number of spatial and temporal
details.
“Song of myself” [1881]
cd

-His poetry marked a turning point in American Literature. 1

-Most famous work “Leaves of grass”. Slender volumes of 12
poems started in 1855. Total of 389 poems after 37 years writing
-Wrote w/ vividness, originality and power. Lacked structure.
-Free verse.
-His poetry didn’t fit in with his time. Seemed vulgar compared “Song of myself”
3
to the Fireside Poets. -Word order. Frequent use of ellipsis and anaphoric
-Used alliteration, assonance, repetition of words/phrases. frame of reference.
-Antithesis of Longfellow’s.
-Saw himself as the bard of the nation. Spoke as and for the
-Speaker divides his personality into at least three parts:
people but he wasn’t so popular in his lifetime. 1) “I” – Involves itself in everyday stuff like politics,
fashion and what he is going to eat.
2) “Me, Myself” – Stands apart from the “I” and
2
*Appeared vulgar, lack of structure, not family reading. He was observers the word with an amused smile.
provocative and controversial. 3) The “Soul” that represents his deepest and most
*Didn’t follow any conventional rules of poetry. He was intense universal essence.
-A child asks him what the grass is. He doesn’t have an
and passionate. Influenced by Transcendentalists. Long and
answer, which gets him thinking about all kinds of things,
complex poems. especially about people buried in the earth who came
*Set rhythm but no rhyme. Verses are fluid. Natural speech before him.
patterns of American vernacular. -He believes in:
*Free verse. Untraditional topics (prostitution, homosexuality), *Everyone is equal including slaves
used metaphors for sexual organs. *Truth is everywhere but unspeakable.
*Invisible connection and understanding exist between
*American speech, slang, colloquial expressions.
all people and things.
*Bard of the common American.
*Death is a fortunate thing, not something to fear.
*Wrote about Nature-> Democracy and friendship, life, sex, -He is opposed to:
death, antislavery… *People who think they preach the truth.
*Inspiration in everyday life, working class people, marginalized *Feelings of guilt and shame about the body.
activities. *Self-righteous judgments.
*Saw humans and their creations (cities and buildings). -Have faith in the order of nature.

4 5
-States what he’s going to do in the
poem. Celebrate himself (all humanity)
-Ground rules. We believe whatever he
believes and we take on whatever roles
the speaker takes on.
-Offers the atoms of his body.
-His soul another character. Speaker
and soul, 2 slightly different things.
-Describes the air as perfume.
-Wants to get naked and go to the
riverbank. He is in love w/ the air.
-Grass. Green is the color of hope.
-It’s God’s handkerchief or the child of
all the other plants or a hieroglyphic.
-The grass grows. People buried. He
decides that they don’t fully disappear
bc we belong to the same web of life.
-Describes people according to their
vocation. Particular role in society.
-Optimistic attitude. He is not naïve, tho.
-Limb amputated, it drops in a pail.
-Beautiful memorable explanations of
the roles people play.
-He only judges the judgers.
-Claims to be like all those people.
-He’s the union of opposites: Old/young,
foolish/wise, south/north, mother/father
-He is aware of the fault lines of the
cultural battle. Danger of civil war.
-Nature is fine the way it is.
-His words, the grass he walks, the air he
breathes are ours too.
-Grass=Leaves/pages of the poem.
6
-Present fades away. What’s next?
-One of his most famous poems/lines.
-He embraces contradiction.
-He sees a hawk and feels humbled.
-The ending day=metaphor for death.
-His hair is white, he dissolves into the
air. Very powerful imagery. To find him
we have to look at the ground under
our boots. He gives good health to
those who walk over him.
-Ends the poem: we shouldn’t be
discouraged if we can’t find him.
-Identity, visions of America, friendship
(and democracy), spirituality (body and
soul), nature.
 UNIT 19
WALT WHITMAN
"SONG OF MYSELF"

From A Study Guide: Whitman revolutionized the landscape of American literature not
only by rejecting conventionally poetic English, also by introducing subject matter
traditionally considered unsuitable for poetry; regarding his innovations in form and
content, he focused on experiments with free verse, characterized by fluid lines of
different lengths, structured according to the cadences of natural speech; his experience
as a self-made man coming from ordinary background, his democratic ideals and his
professional activities in journalism and politics shaped his poetry, paradoxically
recognized by educated audience of scholars and artists, rather than by the working
class the author had primarily addressed; appraise Whitman's progressive visual ability
to portray reality, his antislavery stance, the central position that the Civil War had in
his work and the impact the assassination of Lincoln made on his poetry; Leaves of
Grass grew over from twelve to 389 poems along 37 years career; examine 1891 edition
of "Song of Myself" concentrating on the expression of the author's personality, his
symbolic vision of an egalitarian society, the power inscribed in the visual images, the
suitability of free verse for the expression of the poem's ideological content.
Walt Whitman's fame rests upon Leaves of Grass, the collection which started in 1855
as a slender volume of twelve poems and grew over the span of a thirty-seven-year
career until it eventually contained 389 poems, considered the America's greatest single
book of poems. He began to write when the Fireside Poets (Longfellow) dominated the
American literature scene, and compared to them, both his language and his subject
matter seemed vulgar, while his apparent lack of structure did not suit the taste of those
who expected poetry to follow strictly the rigid patterns of traditional verse, an
innovation that later won him admirers all over the world.
Form: Whitman broke away from the standard metre and rhyme schemes of English
poetry. His free verse has no regular metre and no equal line length, nor rhythmic
arrangement. The overall effect has a melodic character because the variable patterns of
sound used by the poet are created by means of alliteration and assonance, and by the
repetition of words and phrases. Verse lines have different lengths structured according
to the cadences of natural speech.
Content: He rejected conventionally poetic English and replaced it with the language of
common American speech, introducing subjects traditionally considered unsuitable for
poetry. His democratic ideals led him to expand his fields of interest to the daily lives of
ordinary people, and activities habitually marginalized. He saw himself as a bard for his
whole nation, with a voice drawn from America's vernacular, a popular language. He
called for a literature for the masses but which was never read by the mass readership of
his day.
Life: Walt Whitman was the epitome of the self-made man from an ordinary
background who proclaimed his working-class origins. He attended Brooklyn's only
public school, which at the time had the social stigma of the poor because it only
enrolled students unable to afford private schools.
Whitman compensated for the little formal education he had received in his early years
by reading widely and by attending the theatre and the opera. His personality was also
shaped by the Quakerism, the Deism and also his father's admired belief that one's duty
is to enjoy life guided by the intuitions of one's soul, which would become the
foundation of Whitman's religious thought.
Work: At the printing office he really acquired his reading and writing skills and also
developed an appreciation of the aesthetics of the page evident in the layout of his
poetry, which also introduced him to the connected worlds of journalism and politics.
An important aspect of his ideology that had a direct impact upon his journalistic and
poetic career was his opposition to the extension of slavery into the western territories.
Unlike the abolitionists, who opposed slavery on moral grounds, Whitman supported
"free soilers", who were not against the institution itself, but simply against the presence
of slaves in the new territories. He travelled down to Mississippi to occupy a new
position as a member of the staff of the New Orleans Crescent, where he witnessed
slave auctions. He later considered that this southern sojourn had been crucial to his
maturing as a poet. His return to Brooklyn provided him with a chance to absorb the
variety of the American landscapes showed in his articles in his progressive visual
ability to portray reality as a painter would.
He became an active member of Free Soil party and the editor of its newspaper, called
the Brooklyn Freeman. His contribution to this political paper in the midst of a turbulent
period are interesting because they include his most passionate antislavery journalism.
He finally came to defend the thesis that the institution of slavery itself was
incompatible with the egalitarian ideals of the American Revolution.
The gloomy climate of economic depression and social disunion of the pre-Civil War
years pervaded Whitman's poems of this period. His contact with the war came through
the hospitals where he volunteered as a male nurse. Out of his experiences nursing
wounded soldiers grew his volume Drum-Taps, a collection of fifty-three poems he
incorporated into the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. The "Drum-Taps" cluster
(Whitman called his groupings of poems "clusters") of the final edition of Leaves of
Grass contains forty-three poems.
The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln at the end of the war affected Whitman
much more deeply than any event in the war itself. First he wrote two short poems, and
during the summer of 1865 he composed the great elegy "When Lilacs in the Dooryard
Bloom'd", later included in Leaves of Grass with other poems as a cluster entitled
"Memories of President Lincoln". He held a minor post in the Department of the
Interior in Washington until an accident related to his poetry provoked his dismissal,
which illustrates how the poet's views on gender and sexuality challenged the
predominant social attitudes of his time.
Whitman's explicit celebration of sexual freedom often shocked and offended his first
audience. Many of his contemporaries saw him not merely as vulgar, but as corrupt for
his alleged obscenity. In the cluster poems "Children of Adam" he exhorted a return to
the Garden of Eden by recovering the sexual innocence of Adam and Eve before the
Fall. Whitman did not use taboo words, but his early readers found "gross indecencies"
in his use of daring sexual imagery, particularly in his obvious metaphors for sexual
organs. Curiously enough, his handling of homosexuality was largely unnoticed, since
"The Calamus" cluster, with thirty-nine pieces, celebrated the "beautiful and sane
affection of man for man" and were initially taken as innocent poems of male
comradeship and brotherly love. Recently, the "Calamus" cluster has come to be
interpreted as a group of overtly homoerotic lyrics.
Whitman declared himself both "the poet of the Body" and "the poet of the Soul". His
poetry stressed the importance of the physical self. Democracy was his most distinctive
and central theme. He thought that America was the great democracy where each
individual could evolve to spiritual perfection and in his Democratic Vistas he
suggested that American poets could spread the idea of democracy throughout the
world.

Whitman continued to revise and expand Leaves of Grass, never changing the name of
the book. He published six separate editions of his work developing it in an episodic
way and sometimes altering the titles of his poems. In the 1881 edition he decided on
their definite arrangement ant titles. The order was made permanent and the book
continued to grow with annexes.

Central themes: the importance of the physical self; democracy is his most distinctive
theme.
The most frequent literary device in "Song of Myself" is anaphora. He also introduced
subjects traditionally considered unsuitable for poetry: captured the rhythms of urban
life; portrayed the daily lives of ordinary people; made the city the setting for poetical
works; celebrated America in a mystically imagined Union.

He was inspired by Thomas Paine's Age of Reason.

Analysis of "Song of Myself"
Discovered a poetic form as raw, free, unfinished, expansive, experimental, full of
promise as his Transcendentalist conception of his country.
Emphasizes diversity in nature and in people; a joyous celebration of the human self in
its most expanded, spontaneous, self-sufficient, and all-embracing state. It observes and
interacts with everything in creation and ranges feely over time and space. The speaker
affirms the divinity of the universe (human body is part of this universe). The "I" of the
poem is the human self-experiencing transcendental nature, witnessing the turbulent
activity around, enjoying being what it is, being alive in the flesh. There is a crucial
emphasis on the "I" that emerges from the speaker's self-performance. He becomes his
transgressor self, a Transcendentalist version of the American tall-tale hero.
Structure: There are no linear progression of themes through the poem; the different
sections express the same themes from different angles; incorporates his listener/reader
into the poem; nature speaks free of the limitations of poetic convention; he locates
himself and his poems outdoors (outside conventions); based on repetition of words,
phrases, and parallel syntactical structures.

Idea behind the poem: individual identity is temporary but transcendent; the cycle of the
life renews itself constantly (conquers death).
Tone: joyous and mystical; modulations in tone, description and emotion between the
body and soul; proud and personal pose; addresses the reader directly.
Metaphor: leaves of grass= poems in his book= individual being part of nature. Grass
symbolizes individual self.
Style: simplicity; freedom in word order; frequent use of ellipsis; anaphoric frame of
reference; use of catalogues.
• First section: The speaker celebrates in himself the qualities that he has in
common with the reader; his own individuality and that of other people; the
poem represents an entire body reclining on the ground, leaning and loafing
(relaxing): "observing a spear of summer grass" (l.2). A spear of summer grass:
symbol of the individual; symbol of the natural world; symbol of democracy.
• Number 6: anaphora: "it may be... it may be... it may be..." Handkerchief (l.4): a
present offered by God to mankind; a reminder of divinity; a symbol of the new
life embodied by greenness.
• This section 15: presents a lengthy catalogue that emphasizes human diversity;
ends by merging human diversity into a harmonious union; presents both
individual portraits and group scenes in rather long lines. Portrayal of people:
treats them with dignity and respect; emphasizes the importance of the working
class; presents them in a variety of settings, both in the country and in the city;
portrayal of the national character of Americans through various kind of evils:
physical (sickness, pain); psychological (despair); social (injustice, oppression:
slavery, prostitution). People are described: by their occupations; by their
relations to other members of their family; by their ethnicity. Lines 42-44: "The
prostitute draggles... nor jeer you": the speaker rebukes (reproach) the men and
extents compassion to the woman.
• Section 16: Anaphora: "at home..., at home... (l. 10-12). Emphasizes that the
speaker has lived in Canada, Vermont, Maine and Texas; emphasizes the
speaker has several homes; emphasizes the speaker feel more comfortable in
some parts of North America than in others. The speaker identifies with:
Americans from different parts of the country; people of every condition,
occupation and creed; men and women.
• Section 17: tries to merge his identity with that of the reader; uses anaphora "If
they are not... If they are not... If they are not... (L2-4); "This is the grass that
grows... This the common air that bathes..." (L 5-6); uses line of varying length.
• Section 51: "look at my face, while I snuff the sidle of evening", suggests the
evening darkness is coming on and the speaker is anticipating his death.
• Section 52: Yawp: loud or coarse talk or utterance: "I sound by barbaric yawp
over the roofs of the world".
In this section the author declares an end to his wandering and talking. The
poem's last sections are marked by the urgency of his departure: by last-minute
preparations, last words of advice, and reluctance to leave at all until his listener,
who is also his student and comrade, brother and sister, speaks his or her own
word in response. Standing accused by the free-flying hawk, Whitman
reluctantly but also joyously sounds the last words of his "barbaric yawp",
dispersing himself into the elements themselves.
 • Line 3: " I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world" suggests that the
speaker of the poem joyously joins with the hawk mentioned two lines above,
rather than merely observe the bird.
• Line 9: "I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love" suggests
that the speaker perceives existence as a continuum and believes in a kind of
rebirth in the regenerative natural world.
Historical context: Whitman's lifetime saw both the Civil War and the rise of the United
States as a commercial and political power. He witnessed both the peak and the
abolition of slavery. His poetry is thus centred on ideas of democracy, equality, and
brotherhood. In response to America's new position in the world, Whitman also tried to
develop a poetry that was uniquely American, that both surpassed and broke the style of
its predecessors. "Leaves of Grass", with its multiple editions and public controversies,
set the pattern for the modern, public artist, and Whitman, with his journalistic
endeavours on the side, made the most of his role as celebrity and artist.

Exploratory questions:
- What kind of relationship does the poet establish with his reader in the first section of
SOM? What aspects of his personality does the author express? He establishes a
relationship or "communion" between the writer and reader by saying that "every atom
belonging to me as good belongs to you". The poet gives readers details that make them
match the "persona" of the poem with the real author: "here/I, now thirty-seven years
old in perfect health being..." He considers himself natural, honest, easy and tries to
portray himself in this way throughout the whole writing. Whitman praises simplicity of
character, and rejected boasting. He desires truth, since he thinks that secondary desires
makes us ignorant and close mind.
- The grass, which is the most commonplace plant on earth, appears as a formal
structuring device, starting with the close attention devoted to a single spear or leaf of
grass. What does he suggest about himself by associating himself with the grass? How
is the grass related to life and death? What double meaning may Whitman have
intended when he called his book of poetry "Leaves of Grass"? To what extent does the
"spear of grass" allow the poet to praise the individual self and the green "handkerchief
of the Lord" serves to extol the democratic masses? With his democratic vision he
contributed to performing the cultural work of reshaping an American national identity.
"Leave of Grass" highlights the beauty of the individual. Each leaf or blade of grass
possesses its own distinct beauty, and together the blades form a beautiful unified
whole. Multiple leaves of grass thus symbolize democracy, another instance of a
beautiful whole composed of individual parts. Whitman considered each of his poems
to be a separate leaf or blade of grass: because they were divine; because they were
symbolic of life and cycles of birth and death; because they were significant both
individually and in the mass. Grass is democratic, it grows everywhere, and tends to
equalize in height, not tall, not above the crowd.
- Whitman was fascinated with the power inscribed in visual images and often thought
of his work in relation to painting, for he had the dexterity of a realist painter. What
images of common people can be found in the sections read? To what extent could they
have inspired American visual art? Analyse Whitman's powers of observation, his
ability to swiftly render realistic details, his attention to individual portraits of people in
different occupations, to group portraits and to the portrayal of masses of people.
Section 15 is a large depiction where the readers find accurate portraits of common
people of his time, represented by their occupations, alone or in groups: the contralto,
the carpenter, the farmer, the spinning girl, the machinist, the groups of newly-come
immigrants, etc. Whitman mixes men, women, children and extremely different social
classes and professions to highlight the equal importance of each of them in conforming
to a society. He paints a precise image of his country at the time, using masses as a valid
topic for art representation for the very first time. Other artists, such as talented painters
would follow after him.
- Critics have commented on Whitman's egalitarian attitude to women, a rather
uncommon attitude in his time. The fact that the "mankind" he celebrated specifically
included women is illustrated by these often quoted lines: "I am the poet of the woman
the same as the man./ And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man". Explain
how women are represented in the poem: Whitman uses the idea of equality to convey
his belief that God is the divine creator to all things and they should all be treated
impartially. Men and women are the same. The author is implying by his catalogues of
people that all them are items of equal value, evident in the dissimilarities of the people
of what they are doing: "the one-year wife" who gives birth to her first child and the
"clean hair'd yankee girl", who works as a seamstress (costurera). The images of these
two women can be construed as having a higher social status than a woman who has a
child out of wedlock or one who is a beggar. Whitman emphatically reveals that they
have one similarity: they are equal because they are all the divine creation of God.
- Whitman demanded a new freedom in poetry, breaking with the tradition. Free verse is
a particularly suitable vehicle for the expression of Whitman's ideas. Form and content
suit each other in Whitman poetry. Unlike the writers that advocated the cult of "Art for
art's sake", Whitman valued literature for its moral and political efficacy. His language
and his subject matter seemed vulgar and his apparent lack of structure did not suit the
strictly rigid patterns of traditional verse. Regarding form, Whitman broke away from
the standard metre and rhyme schemes in English poetry and explored the possibilities
of free verse instead, with a rhythmic arrangement. Verse lines have different lengths
and are fluid because they are structure according to the cadences of natural speech.
Whitman developed the predominant form in modern poetry. Regarding content, he
introduced subjects that had been traditionally considered unsuitable for poetry. He
captured the rhythms of urban life and made the city an appropriate setting for poetical
works, including daily lives of ordinary people habitually marginalized.

- Whitman's catalogues constitute one of the most important stylistic features of his
poetry and an integral part of his poetic theory. They are now interpreted as an effective
realistic technique to encompass the nation all-inclusively by capturing the empirical
detail of "real" existence. The cataloguing technique may serve as a democratizing
device. Whitman uses this to enlist many different profiles of common people of his
time. Cataloguing has a great importance to develop an important theme of his, the
vision of a democratic and egalitarian society in which all persons, no matter profession
or condition, are equals.
- Varieties of evil lurk in the poet's field of vision when he portrays the national
character of America: physical (sickness and pain); psychological (despair); social
(injustice and all forms of oppression, including slavery and prostitution). In spite of
such negative aspects, Whitman's catalogue of American attributes is essentially
optimistic. He really believes in the transcendent power of Love, brotherhood and
comradeship, and shows a strong and optimistic faith in democracy and equality. He
thought that America was the great democracy where each individual could evolve to
spiritual perfection.
- "Song of Myself" begins with the personal pronoun "I" and ends with "you". The
advice the speaker gives to the reader suggests about Whitman's view of life and death,
and the ending of the poem is an "articulation of endlessness". From Whitman's point of
view, death is nothing but a new beginning, a different part of the life, related to his idea
of God: to Whitman, god and nature are the same, and life is perceived as an
endlessness cycle movement. For him, each leaf or blade of grass is divine though
common, and symbols of life and cycles of birth and death ever renewed. So, like grass,
life kept growing, being cut and growing again. Whitman focused on the life cycles of
individuals: people are born, they age and reproduce, and they die.
- Whitman's diction. He once said about his book of poetry: "I sometimes think the
Leaves is only a language experiment". Whitman's use of language sometimes supports
and sometimes contradicts his philosophy. He often uses obscure, foreign, or invented
words. It is not meant to be intellectually elitist but is instead meant to signify
Whitman's status as a unique individual. Democracy does not necessarily mean
sameness. The difficulty of some of his language also mirrors the necessary
imperfection of connections between individuals: no matter how hard we tray, we can
never completely understand each other. The diction is confrontational and
conversational.
- Whitman thought of himself both as the poet of the city and the poet of nature. Unlike
most "Nature writers", he did not focus on the adversarial relationship between human
beings and the natural world. He saw humans and their creations, including cities, as
inextricable components of a harmonious natural world. He includes cities and citizens
in the natural world, considering them as part of nature.

- How does Whitman articulate the mélange of lyrical emotion and socio-political
didacticism? He articulated in two ways: Relation to socio-political didacticism, he
reflects real society much more than the rest of his contemporary poets; relating to
lyrical emotion, by creating spontaneous and organic poetry rather than preset and
regular poems, divided into sections of varying rhythm and size, and mainly, by
drawing everything in his poems from real life, avoiding reduction, simplification and
closures.
- According to him, as poems should be spontaneous and organic rather than preset and
regular, they must be divided into sections of varying rhythm and size rather than
constrictive rhyming stanzas. Everything in poetry - verse form, subject matter and
vernacular language, must be drawn from life and be true to it. Reduction,
simplification and closure, (the effect of finality and completeness) must be avoided. He
puts it in practice through: free verse; use of repeated images, symbols, phrases and
grammatical units as substitutes for regular rhythm and rhyme; use of enumerations and
catalogues; use of anaphora and epanaphora (each line hangs by a loop from the line
before); contrast and parallelism in paired lines; varying line lengths with varying
number of syllables per line; "envelope": identified a short beginning line, long middle
lines, and a short ending line; idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation.
- Song of Myself demands great attention to its readers because of his word order,
frequent use of ellipsis and his anaphoric frame of reference. How can the author's self-
proclaimed accessibility be compatible with the difficulties that the readers encounter
when interpreting his poetry? The concept of celebrating who he is as a human being,
even if it is flawed, contradictory, or imperfect. .
- Compare and contrast Whitman and Longfellow's poetry. Longfellow thinks that
eternal doesn't reflect reality while Whitman looks for the eternity in real and
perceivable things. Longfellow was close to abolitionists. Whitman's poetry was
influenced by transcendentalists, who tried to make American life more democratic.
The similarities stand on both literary schools which popularized democratic ideas. To
support democracy Longfellow wrote his most famous poem "The Song of Hiawatha"
which reflected the dissatisfaction with the discrimination of the Indians. Whitman
wrote a book of poems "Leaves of Grass", where he poeticized nature and democracy.
Talking about nature it is also one of their similarities. The "Song of Hiawatha" was
also the beautification of nature. The same intention is in "Leaves of Grass". Their
poetry nature is the symbol of freedom and democracy.
From A Study Guide: Applying an author-oriented approach
Whenever we approach a text, we look for meaning, and as we try to make sense of the
words printed on the page, we may often wonder if what we infer coincides with what
the author meant. Authorial intention, the author's intended meanings or effects,
constitutes a controversial matter since many critics completely refrain from speculating
about it when they analyze texts. Some objections stem from the opinion that searching
for the author's intention encourages readers to seek a single meaning rather than a
plurality of meanings. It has also been argued that authorial intention is indeterminable
because there is no infallible way of verifying it, since not even the authors who
comment on their works can be trusted as reliable guides to their own writings. Some
scholars warn readers about the deceptive nature of the debates about "the real author"
(the person who wrote the text), and propose instead the concept of "the implied author"
(also called "the inferred author") which can be defined as what an author projects when
writing a text and what the audience infers when reading it. Instead of discussing the
author's intended meaning, we may talk about the implied authorial views that emerge
in a text.
New Criticism school dismisses any pondering on authorial intention as illusory and
futile, and insist on interpreting the texts paying exclusive attention to internal evidence,
without regard to any extrinsic factors, including biographical consideration. They are
inclined to read literary texts as independent works of art rather than as the reflection of
their author's state of mind. Author-oriented critics establish a direct link between the
literary text and the biography of the writer. The literary production of a romantic poet
can be conveniently be analyzed from this critical stance, since romanticism placed
authors at the centre of their writing and emphasized that they found the material for
their works within themselves.
Consider the concept of persona, which in literary criticism refers to a speaker that is
created by a writer to tell a story or to speak in a poem. You should not assume that a
poem's speaker is always like its author, but you should not dismiss the possibility that
poets may choose to model their speakers on their own personal experience. When the
author added lines 6-14 to "SOM", he attached to its first section an autobiographical
character that did not exist in the original version of 1855 (e.g. he mentions his age and
speaks as an American born of American parents).
Whitman invariably characterized himself as someone sincere and straightforward when
addressing his readers. What is the stated purpose of the first section of "Song of
Myself"? Is it plausible that the thoughts and feelings expressed by the first-person
speaker in this section coincide with Whitman's?
 Several Works: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
“This is my letter to the world” “Safe in their Alabaster chambers”
“I taste acdliquor never browed” “I felt a Funeral in my Brain”
“I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” “My Life had stood – a loaded Gun”
st th
-Compared w/ W.W. 1 rank of 19 century poets. Original and
innovative style anticipated the modernist movement. 1
-Refused to become a Christian. Listened to sermons and studied “Safe in their Alabaster chambers” 1859 3
-Epistolary exchange between the writer and her sis-in-law.
the Bible but felt spiritual apathy.
-Poems short and compact. Extraordinary sharpness. -Susan praised the first stanza and advised her to treat it as
a complete poem.
-Compressed language response to the Civil War period and the
Golden Age that followed. -To Susan’s criticism of the second stanza, the poet
responded with an entirely new only. Then she wrote two
Themes: Nature, death, immortality. In her poems: Alliteration,
more versions. There are 5 manuscripts of the poem.
assonance and consonance, simile, metaphor and analogy. -Marked contrast between the somnolence of the ideas and
-Multifaceted sensibility. Beautifully suggestive Language. the vitality of the birds and bees. Later versions emphasized
-Parataxis: Placing related phrases in a series w/o the use of how the universe remains in never ending motion while the
connecting words. dead are motionless in their graves.
-Capitalization: 18th century. Common to use capital letters for -The opening unvoiced “S” strikes again in “sleep”, “satin”
the initials of nouns. She capitalized various words. and “stone”.
-Elliptical style: It leaves room for endless speculation about -Check Nacho’s notes on the 2 versions of the poem.
meanings and intentions.

“This is my letter to the world” 1863
2
-Presented as introduction to all of her work.
-Traditional hymn meter. Quatrains of alternating iambic
tetrameter and iambic trimester lines. Stanzas in 4 lines in
alternate lines of 8 syllables (4 metrical feet) and 6 syllables (3
metrical feet). Occasionally she changed the meter.
-Symbolism: Letter->Her own isolation to the world.
-Personification: Nature told with tender majesty. Her message
is commited to hands I cannot see.
-Emily is trying to say she is secluded and the world doesn’t
reach out to her. She doesn’t want to be judged harshly for
separating herself from the world, she just wants to belong.
“I taste a liquor never browed” 1861 4
-It was first published anonymously. Titled: The May-Wine.
-Innocent mature poem about the intoxicating joy she
experiences when she’s overwhelmed by the beauty of the
spring scenery. Air compared to liquor. Bird drinking nectar.
-Nature as a source of delight.
-Literary sources can be found in Emerson.
-She wittily plays with the language of alcohol and
inebriation to create an extended metaphor with humor.
-Quatrains, iambic tetrameter and trimester. Rhymes of
various styles.
-Drunk on air=nature. She’ll be drunk forever. Image
drinking at an inn.

“I felt a Funeral in my Brain”
-Death of consciousness <- depression
-Semantic oddness. Figurative level.
-Extended metaphor (funeral). Mental
process. Mourners are a metaphor.
-Sequence of mental events. When
she wrote the poem she was in perfect
control of her mind.
-Last 2 lines: Alienation and inability to
communicate. Speaker’s descent into
irrationality.
-Poem doesn’t finish. “Then” last
word. Nightmare – horror of madness.
-Lines 6,9,12,14,15 auditory imagery.
5 “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died”
–Experience of death by capturing the
last thoughts of the speaker 6
surrounded by mourners.
-Imagery emphasizes connection of the
senses. Links sound and color.
-Vision fails. Imagery and buzzing fly
has been traced to Elizabeth
Browning’s Aurora Leigh.
-Tone: Calm, even flat, her narrative is
concise and factual.
-Iambic tetrameter/iambic
trimester/pauses -> dashes.
My Life had stood – a loaded Gun”
-One of her most discussed poems.
-Feminist interpretations. Female creation
is perceived as a form of aggression.
-Gun: Symbolizes the power and violence
-Lines 1,6,17,23: The gun becomes and
extended metaphor throughout the poem
as it becomes representative of the
speaker’s power.
-Themes: violence, power, gender,
morality.
-Extended metaphor. The speaker is
closely connected to the gun and it
eventually becomes the loaded gun. 7
 UNIT 20
EMILY DICKINSON
"This is my letter to the world" - "Safe in their Alabaster Chamber"

"I taste a liquor never brewed" - "I felt a Funeral in my Brain"

"I heard a Fly buzz - when I died" - "My Life has stood -a Loaded Gun"

From A Study Guide: together with Whitman, Dickinson is placed in the first rank of
19th c radically experimental poets; she led a creative life in virtual isolation voiced her
thoughts in a corpus of 1789 poems; applying close analysis you can study her formal
features, such as the poem's idiosyncratic spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and
lineation, to discover hidden meanings bearing in mind that her complex texts defy
authoritative interpretation since the writer never asserted her authority as a poet and
even questioned authority itself; explore Dickinson's indirection and linguistic
economy, paying attention to the conciseness and sharpness of her elliptical style, in
contrast with the wordiness or verbosity of her contemporaries; her originality stemmed
from her visual power and technical skill in expressing her multifaceted sensibility in a
beautifully suggestive language that allowed her to present her main themes fusing
experience and feeling: concerning nature, death and immortality, pain and suffering.

The admiration she inspires continues to grow in proportion to the gradual disclosure of
her genuine talent. Before her death only ten of her poems had been printed, but at
present the Dickinson corpus numbers 1.789 poems, although early editions were made
to conform to the conventional standards of her contemporaries. She is often compared
with Walt Whitman and placed of 19th c radically experimental poets whose original
and innovative style anticipated the modernist movement.
Life: Dickinson continued to listen to sermons and studied the Bible, but felt a spiritual
apathy that prevented her from experiencing conversion. She never married and tried to
avoid domestic duties in order to devote all her energy to reading and writing. It has
been argued that she suffered a depression with a serious psychotic breakdown. Her
brother married Susan Gilbert, her best friend.
Work: Dickinson ceased to visit other people's houses and correspondence remained her
preferred means of communicating with her friends, addressing Susan primarily. The
Unitarian minister Thomas Wentworth published in the newspaper an editorial entitled
"Letter to a Young Contributor", offering advice and encouraging unknown poets to
send him their work. Dickinson wrote to him enclosing four of her poems and although
he received the impression of a wholly new and original genius and acknowledged her
talent, he was disturbed by her metrical unconventionalities.
Her letters are her only prose available to the public from which many of them can be
read as poems, just as many of her poems can be read as letters, for she challenged
traditional notions of boundaries between genres since in some of her letters she even
switched from prose to verse in the middle of a sentence. Her poetry makes her
enigmatic figure still more complex because she constantly manipulated her appearance
and position through frequent metamorphoses: "When I state myself, as the
Representative of the Verse -it does not mean -me -but a supposed person, in fact
anyone and anything. "
It is interesting the reason that caused most of her poetry to remain "unprinted", more
accurately "unpublished", for she chose a method of publishing which consisted in
circulating her manuscripts among her trusted friends. Because the conventions of print
violated the characteristics of her poetry (the ten poems printed in her lifetime had been
altered and given titles without her consent) she valued her autonomy and was reluctant
to have her work edited.

In 1863 she wrote more than three hundred poems. She copied selections of her poems
in ink onto sheets of letter paper that she bound with string, but did not sign or put her
name on these hand-sewn albums which would come to be known as "fascicles", nor
did she label, number, or given them any titles.
After her death, her sister Lavinia discovered about 900 poems in manuscript and
wanted to publish them. She first asked Susan, who began work, but unsatisfied with
the progress she asked them back and gave them to Mabel Todd, a writer and lecturer
who had been Austin's (Susan's husband) mistress for thirteen years. Working with
Higginson, Todd produced a collection of 166 poems and together they tried to render
them more palatable to 19th c taste by adding titles, dropping capitalization,
regularizing spelling, erasing dashes, reforming syntax and changing line and stanza
divisions. They selected 192 for a second volume entitled Poems by Emily Dickinson,
Second Series. Todd had the sole editorial responsibility for a third collection of 166
new poems.
After Lavinias's death, Dickinson niece (Susan's daughter) inherited the collection of
manuscripts that had remained in the Dickinson family and published them in volumes
that came out in 1914, 29, 30, and 1935. Not until 1955 did the accurate collection of
Dickinson's poems appear. Johnson tried to reconstruct the fascicles that had been
dismantled, dated the poems and numbered them, leaving them untitled, as the author
had left them. Both Johnson's numbers and the first line of each poem have been for
years the accepted way of identifying the poems. Johnson's numbers, however, may
become obsolete after Ralph W. Franklin's three-volume variorum edition, because their
numbers do not coincide. Franklin also brought out a facsimile edition where to observe
peculiarities of lineation, punctuation, and calligraphy.
Her first editors wanted her poems to be accepted by their contemporaries for which
they felt the need to make them conform to the 19th century standards of verse decorum
and tended to delete the author's radical experimentation. Recent editors are concerned
with rendering her manuscript poems as faithfully as possible into print.
All her work defies authoritative interpretation, since she questioned authority itself.
Trapped between doubt and certainty, she was willing to admit that there are not final
answers to the great traditional questions. Instead of favouring straightforwardness, she
preferred indirection. Conveying meaning in an oblique or indirect manner invariably
leads to creating a multiplicity of suggestions that are perceived by readers in various,
and sometimes conflicting ways. Much had been written about her scepticism regarding
her treatment of crucial themes, such as religion. May of her poems indicate that she
was deeply concerned with divinity and often explored notions of God.
Dickinson's poems are short and compact in accordance with the brevity and
conciseness of her style, characterized by an extraordinary sharpness. Her compressed
language had been seen as a response to the pompous verbiage of the Civil War period
and the Gilded Age that followed. Her passion for economy in language gives all her
utterances an epigrammatic character. Her aphoristic verses are the root of her elliptical
style, which often results in obscurity. Readers feel as if they were undertaking an
experiment intended to discover hidden meanings. Neither were her main themes new
(nature, death and immortality), nor were the formal features unusual (alliteration,
assonance and consonance, simile, metaphor and analogy). Her originality stemmed
from her power and skill in expressing her multifaceted sensibility in beautifully
suggestive language, presenting themes in the full context of intellect and feeling,
fusing them together.
"This is my letter to the World"
In the first volume of her Poems, the editors printed a regularized version of this little
piece and turned it into a sort of prelude. It is a humble appeal of the speaker, who sends
to the World her letter-poem containing a message that comes from Nature.
Concerning form, this poem clearly exemplifies how Dickinson adapted to her purpose
the Congregational hymns she often sang. She used the traditional hymn metre, which
consisted in quatrains of alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimester lines,
stanzas of four lines in alternate lines of eight syllables and six syllables, but she
interrupted this regularity in the meter (line 5 has only seven syllables) and rhyme (lines
5 and 7).
Self evaluation: The poem subtly refers to Nature as a source of poetic inspiration. It
can be interpreted as a message addressed to readers whom the poet fears might be
inclined to judge her harshly. It suggests that the poet is a sort of messenger merely
conveying the news originating in Nature.
The poetess states that her communication was one-sided affair as hitherto the world did
not 'write' to 'Me' the simple News that Nature told. As the world fails to comprehend
and communicate the principles of Nature she endeavours to do the same. She
intercedes on behalf of God who the 'Me' emblematizes.
Her message is dedicated to "Hands I cannot see", which points to God with the
capitalization of 'Hands', as a metonymy since the part refers to the whole.
The 'letter' in the first stanza appears to symbolize the entire collection of Dickinson's
poetry. The 'simple news that nature told' refers to what her letter contains; it
emphasizes the messages of new information in her surroundings that she desperately
hopes to share with the world, so the 'tender Majesty' symbolizes her desperation.
Nature continues to give her inspirational wisdom to write about in 'her message is
committed' in the second stanza. In addition, 'hands that cannot see' symbolizes the
world that never replied or showed itself to Dickinson. The final two lines explain why
the world never reaches out to her, it is because what Dickinson included in her poems
are causing the editors to show disapproval; they object to Dickinson's poems and are
afraid that everyone else will judge her.
This is a narrative poem that stresses the fact that the poet is the actual speaker in the
poem. The rhyme scheme is ABABCBDB, in pentameters, which first take off with a
trochee and then eventually transforms into regular iambs.
Throughout the poem, a figurative language is found by means of the personification:
'the simple news that Nature told'. Also, the apostrophe because Dickinson is not
exactly addressing herself to every single person in the world, and the world is absent in
action because it never gave her any feedback.
"Safe in their Alabaster Chambers"
The first version was published in the Springfield Daily Republican, with the title "The
Sleeping" added. The punctuation was altered, the capital letters eliminated, and the
poet's division into lines was also changed. Todd and Higginson published it as a three-
stanza poem, arranging its lines in three quatrains. They combined the first stanza with
the two versions of the second one. Johnson treated it as a two-stanza poem in two
versions.
The context is the epistolary exchange between the writer and Susan, who praised the
first stanza and criticized the second. The most important remodelling took place when
the author replaced the first word of the fourth line in the first stanza, "Sleep" by "Lie",
transferring the focus from the notion of slumber into that of stasis (inmobilidad). The
earlier version focuses on the marked contrast between the somnolence of the dead and
the vitality of the birds and bees. The later version emphasizes how the universe
remains in never ending motion while the dead are motionless in their graves.
The opening unvoiced "S" sound is the key note of the first stanza, the "S" of silence,
that strikes again in "Sleep", "Satin" and "Stone". The various levels of imagery are
among the most interesting features of this open-ended poem, which has been
interpreted in opposite ways: the expression of the author's belief in Resurrection; or the
transgression of conventional piety giving no consolation or hope because its
conclusion implies that it is the physical world rather than its spiritual counterpart that
continues to exist.
Self-evaluation: The poem indicates that life continues while the dead remain in a
perpetual slumber. It is framed as a series of iconic contrasts that operate within the
poem. It uses the clichés of death-as-night and death-as-sleep to subvert conventional
beliefs about death and immortality.
Apathy of the living world to the dead bringing forth the understanding that: no matter
how grand and mighty you are in life, in death you are nothing. The living world does
not care and your death is trivial as "soundless dots on a disk of snow". Gradually the
narrator reflects on the nature of death, the eternal rest, safe from sorrows, joys and
terrors of the living world. There is no regard for time or living.
This poem is ironic because of the safety of being dead is not what we would want to
be. 'Alabaster' means expensive and beautiful, but also cold and unfeeling. 'Chambers'
begins the metaphor of the tomb being a home and the dead being asleep. If the sleepers
are 'members of the resurrection' why are they still sleeping and buried in the ground?
The term 'resurrection' and 'meek' call up the promises of Christ that the meek would
inherit the earth and enter into the kingdom of heaven.
The second stanza describes the indifference of nature to the dead, the rebirth of spring
contrasts with the isolated dead, which does not hear the joyful sounds of nature, for
their ears are 'stolid' (unemotional). The gifts and accomplishments of the dead are
buried too, making them useless.
"I taste a liquor never brewed"
For quite a long time readers interpreted it as an innocent nature poem about the
intoxication that the author experiences when she is overwhelmed by the beauty of the
spring scenery. The air is compared to liquor, and the speaker -like a bird drinking
nectar -surpasses butterflies and bees in her capacity to luxuriate in sensuous pleasure.
Nature as a source of delight is a theme of Dickinson, but what is unique here is the
subversive aspect that is revealed when its last stanza is compared with the lines that
inspired it.

The literary sources are found in Keats and Thoreau, though the most obvious can be
traced to Emerson and his poem "Bacchus" and his essay "The Poet". Dickinson seems
to evoke some kind of transcendental experience similar to the ones described by
Emerson, but what is original in Dickinson is how wittily she plays with the language of
alcohol and inebriation to create an extended metaphor suffused with humour.

It is written in quatrains, alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter, with rhymes of

various styles between the second and fourth line of each stanza. Two of them end with
exclamation marks, which are uncommon in Dickinson's poetry and here aptly
emphasize the celebratory tone that pervades the whole poem.
Extra: Dickinson whimsically describes the exhilarating effect of nature. She uses the
metaphor of drunkenness or intoxication to express how the beauty of nature elates
(alegrar) her. Intoxication is a common metaphor: drunk on power.
"I felt a Funeral in my Brain"
It was published in Poems without the last stanza, through the removal of the terrifying
stanza not only becomes less frightening, but the poem may be interpreted as a
discourse on death rather than as the description of a psychic breakdown. Todd deleted
stanzas illustrating the theme of the descent into madness because she feared they
would upset readers, and for an additional reason: she had grouped Dickinson's poems
in four categories (Life, love, Nature, and Time and Eternity) and by omitting the last
stanza she could easily fit the altered version within the last category.
The poem is not about actual death in a biological sense, but about the death of
consciousness, which is linked to the experience of depression. The semantic oddness of
the first line makes it clear that the poet is working on a figurative level, because
nobody can literally "feel" a funeral in the brain. It is the feeling of a funeral that occurs
in the speaker's brain while experiencing a disturbed mental state. The articulated
ceremony of the funeral serves both to exteriorize and to give structure to a process that
is internal and chaotic. The mourners tread to and fro, a church service is conducted, the
pallbearers (portador) carry the casket to the graveyard and place it on a plank laid
across the grave while, in the belfry (campanario), the bell tolls its monotonous knell
(toque de difuntos). In the fifth stanza, the plank (table) suddenly breaks and the coffin,
instead of being lowered on ropes into the ground, drops down bumping against the
sides of the deep grave until it comes to a halt in the darkness at the bottom.
The extended metaphor of the funeral illustrates a mental process that is characterized
by monotony and repetitiveness, conveyed by the sense of hearing: the steps, the drum,
the bell. The spatial setting, suggested by the claustrophobic environment of the funeral,
is also important. In this gloomy atmosphere, the mind becomes numb. The last line of
the fourth stanza, "Wrecked, solitary, here" draws the readers' attention to a different
setting: that of an alien land where a shipwrecked mariner endures a solitude compared
to that of the corpse in the coffin. Instead of expanding on this new metaphor, the poet
returns to the funeral and introduces the final element of surprise. When "a Plank in
Reason" breaks, the speaker plunges into an abyss of unknowing, swept up in a vacuum
of chaos.
Dickinson's use of one's funeral subverts this convention in an original manner and with
dramatically effective results. We hear her mature voice as she records in the past tense
a sequence of mental events that may reflect a former personal crisis. Her detached tone
and the absence of emotive comment in her recollection render the poem exceptionally
poignant (conmovedor, emotivo).
Self-evaluation: The last stanza has all of the following effects upon the poem:
terrifying, clearly associated with a disturbed mental state, clearly related to the
confrontation with existential dread. The poem evokes all the terror of the isolated
individual. It charts (trazar) the stages in the speaker's loss of consciousness. It
establishes and orderly progression of thoughts through a recognizable sequence of
events.
"I heard a Fly buzz -when I died"
Posthumously published under the title of "Dying", it focuses on the experience of death
by capturing the last thoughts of the speaker, surrounded by mourners, but much more
attentive to the presence of a buzzing fly that blocks out the light. The originality here
stems from treating in terms of a grotesque partnership with the fly what is
conventionally considered as an absolutely private and serious event. The imagery
emphasizes the connection of the senses of hearing and sight by linking sound and
colour. The final ebb (reflujo, marea) of consciousness is depicted as a loss of sight,
which marks the ending of the poem. It concludes when vision fails, the unequivocal
sign that the speaker has just died. As it is written in the past tense, it is assumed that
the speaker is addressing readers not during the process of dying, but after death.
Sources: the imagery involving dimming light and the buzzing fly has been traced to
Elizabeth Browning's Aurora Leigh; also from Hawthorne's The House of the Seven
Gables.
Self-evaluation: The insect breaks the silence with an intrusive sound; it moves
constantly, in contrast with the stillness of death; it indicates that natural life goes one,
unconcerned by the death of one individual. The poet expresses deep feelings with
perfect control; links the senses of sight and hearing; emphasizes the contrast between
stasis and motion.
Dickinson's formal patterns: trimeter and tetrameter iambic lines; rhythmic insertion of
the long dash to interrupt the meter; an ABCB rhyme scheme. All the rhymes before the
final stanza are half-rhymes (Room/Storm, firm/Room, be/Fly), while only the rhyme in
the final stanza is a perfect rhyme (me/see). She uses this technique to build tension,
since a sense of true completion comes only with the speaker's death.
"My Life has stood - a Loaded Gun"
It exemplifies her technique of the "omitted center", a device by which the author
alludes to what seems specific, but in fact does not identify the people involved or
locate the events evoked. Instead, she omits information that is crucial to the
understanding of the poem, which may either cause frustration or be taken as deliberate
signs to indicate the gaps that poetry is purported to illustrate.
Adrenne Rich: "it is a poem about possession by the daemon, about the dangers and
risks of such possession if you are a woman, about the knowledge that power in a
woman can seem destructive, and that you cannot live without the daemon once it has
possessed you". She considered this a "central poem in understanding the condition of
the woman artist in the 19th c". Feminist interpretations basically emphasize how
female creation is perceived as a form of aggression. The speaker sees herself as a
loaded gun, a lethal weapon, which is understood as the poet's rejection of conventional
femininity because she would be presenting herself as everything that a woman is not
supposed to be.
The volcanic image of line 11 is interesting because feminist associate it with the
female writer, which shows that linguistic expression erupts out of silence, disrupting
the social structures of the male organization. Dickinson would have characterized the
Vesuvian power of her art by comparing her smile to the aftermath of a volcanic
eruption. The poetic image of the volcano in several of her poems becomes a violent
and extremely destructive force that burns and consumes.
Freudian analyses of the poem point to hypothetical aggressions and frustrations, being
a great deal of violence in it. The Owner or Master in feminist readings could be a male
muse or an image symbolic of certain aspects of the poet's own personality, the
masculine aspect of her psyche. There are also association with God or some kind of
divine power. The gun stands for the female artist in feminist approaches. The final
stanza has been analyzed to discover an answer to the riddle but there is no absolute
certainty. One of the most exciting interpretations is the one that identifies the speaker
with Death, that has "the power to kill" but not "the power to die", because it is lethal,
but is condemned to immortality.
Self-evaluation: It is written in quatrains; combines past and present actions; involves
an enigmatic speaker.
Exploratory Questions
- Scan the poems to find examples of exact (or perfect) and slant (or partial) rhyme:
In perfect or exact rhyme the vowel sounds are the same, and it occurs when two words
have the same stressed vowels and ending consonants.
In slant or partial rhyme, the vowel sounds are close but not identical, two words have
either the same stressed vowels or ending consonants, but not both, which makes the
ending sounds of the two words alike but not identical.
We can find rhyme in:

- "This is my letter to the World": in stanza 1 (world/told) and stanza 2 (see/me), exact
rhyme.
- "Safe in their Alabaster Chamber": in stanza 1 slant rhyme in noon/stone; in stanza 2
exact rhyme in ear/hear. In version 1861 we find exact rhyme in stanza 2 row/snow.
- "I taste a liquor never brewed": in stanza 3 we find exact rhyme door/more; in stanza 4
exact rhyme run/sun; in stanza 2 slant rhyme dew/blue.
- "I felt a Funeral in my Brain": in stanza 2 we find exact rhyme drumb/numb; in stanza
3 we find exact rhyme soul/toll; in stanza 1 we find slant rhyme fro/through, remarking
the contrast between an inwards and outwards world.
- "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died": in the last stanza we find exact rhyme in me/see. In
previous stanzas we find slant rhyme in room/storm; firm/room; be/fly, with the
purpose of creating tension between the senses of sight and sound.
- "My Life had stood - a loaded Gun": in stanza 1 we find exact rhyme in day/away,
also in the last stanza I/die; we find slant rhyme in other stanzas head/shared;
glow/through.
- Dickinson uses certain words related to feelings and sensation because of their
associated meanings. She does not need to make use of abstract words to make her a
metaphysical poet, specially related to Nature, Death, Immortality or Love. They are
just a lexical and metaphorical excuse to allude to other deeper feelings and sensations.
- Compare 1859 and 1861 versions of "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers": The author
replaced the word "Sleep" by "Lie", thus transferring the focus from the notion of
slumber into that of stasis. "Chambers" begins the metaphor of the tomb being a home
and the dead being asleep. That substitution was consistent with the contents of each of
the two versions, the earlier version focuses on the marked contrast between the
somnolence of the dead and the vitality of the birds and bees; the later version
emphasizes how the universe remains in never ending motion while the dead are
motionless in their graves.
- Transcendentalism had a profound impact upon Dickinson, and Emerson's Poems
became one of her favourite books. Nature is given metaphysical implications partly
due to his influence. To what extent can Emerson be a source of inspiration for "I taste a
liquor never brewed"?: This poem has been compared to Emerson's "Bacchus" and
some critics have suggested that Dickinson is parodying Emerson's poem. Both poems
are quite different in tone, Emerson's communicates an intense pathos much more
reminiscent of Dickinson in the poems which deal with her dark contemplations of the
mysteries of the cosmic process.
- Except for "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers", which emphasizes simultaneity, each
of Dickinson's poems presents a chronological sequence. Explain the structure in terms
of time: In I Felt a Funeral in my Brain the events are related in the past tense, to offer
an explanation of what has happened to the speaker. A nostalgic retrospective
represented without a feeling of terror, but with a sense of resignation for her loss,
whether her life or her mind. The structure in which the events are portrayed has a
beginning: the arrival of the mourners; a middle: they are seated for the funeral service
and the ringing of bells; and an end: the burial at the cemetery. This shows a
metaphorical relation creating the idea of a progressive loss of her mind just as natural
as she views the progression of life into death.
- Dickinson's use of imagery gives expression to main themes. She uses olfactory,
tactile, visual, auditory and thermal images, which include patterns of light/dark,
bee/flower, mind/body, life/death, all related to her main themes as life, death,
immortality and love.
In "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers", the imagery is used to describe the tensions
between mortality and immortality, the temporality and triviality of human life.
In "I taste a liquor never brewed", Dickinson describes an intoxicated unity of self and
nature. This poem describes not a scene but a state of mind. The tankards may be places
for real alcohol, or they may be her drinking vessel, in which pearl would refer to the
preciousness or rarity of the experience. The liquor never brewed must be a spiritual
and not a physical substance. She is drunk on the essence of summer days. The formal
diction of "inebriate" and "debauchee" spiritualizes the intoxication. She creates a scene
of endless summer with the image of "Molten blue" (a fluid sky along with a feeling of
dissolving into this shy) and the relatively simple images of bees, flowers, and
butterflies being sufficient.
In "I felt a Funeral in my Brain", we find a clearly auditory image, used to create a
rhythm through repetition, the feeling of a march. The use of sound of the "Bell" is
auditory imagery, reminiscent of the sadness when the "bell tolls" signalling the end of
a funeral, or of life.
In "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died", the significance of the buzzing fly in relation to
the dying person, and the double use of "see" in the last line. In quiet and inner calm the
dying person proceeds to bequeath his or her worldly possessions and finds his attention
withdrawn by a fly's buzzing. It is the culmination of the dying person's preoccupation
with cherished material thinsg no longer of use to the departing owner. In the face of
death one's concern with earthly belongings is a triviality.
-Dickinson's style creates an illusion of simplicity while conveying complex meaning.
The meter of "I felt a Funeral..." is the classic ballad meter of Dickinson which gives a
somber tone, similar to that of a funeral dirge (música fúnebre). The ABDB rhyme
scheme carries us through the poem until the use of slant rhyme wakes us up in the last
stanza, which causes us to notice that something of great importance has happened. The
rhyme is defiantly used to set a tone for the poem and generate a certain feeling, putting
us right there at the funeral. By using slant rhyme instead of exact rhyme for the final
paragraph she juxtaposes the ordinary cadence of the poem and startles us to make us
understand that something extraordinary has happened.

-The main purpose of a narrative poem is to tell a story, whereas that of a lyric poem is
to express feelings. Analyse "My Life has stood - a Loaded Gun. Joyous in tone until its
almost tragic last stanza, this poem presents an allegory about the pursuit of personal
identity and fulfilment through love. It is possible that the joy of the poem conceals a
satire directed back against the speaker which may be the chief clue to the meaning of
the last stanza. The life of a person as a loaded gun probably stands for all of her
potential as a person "but the power to kill" undercuts the earlier celebration of her
power.
The power to kill does not give identity and its satisfactions are misleading. The last
line presents an absolute paradox. The speaker-gun's inability to die will make the
owner-lover outlive her. The paradox can be resolved by assuming that "die" may have
a special meaning and possibly means to realize some kind of consummation or
identity, the creative and even the sexual. The poem has been interpreted as a comment
on the speaker's relationship with God or on her activity as a poet.
-Discuss Dickinson's treatment of pain and suffering: Her poems often express joy
about art, imagination, nature and human relationships, but her poetic world is also
permeated with suffering and the struggle to evade, face, overcome and wrest (arrebatar,
exprimir) meaning from it. Suffering is involved in the creative process, it is central to
unfulfilled love, and it is part of her ambivalent response to the mysteries of time and
nature.

-Dickinson employed capital letters to construct patterns of emphasis. The capital letters
emphasize significant elements of her poetry. She used irregular capitalization to
emphasize certain words; i.e. in "This is My Letter to the World", she capitalized the
words Wold, Me, News, Nature, Majesty, Message, Hands, Her and Sweet, because
those things were important to her. In "I Felt a Funeral...", Funeral and Brain were
capitalized alerting us to the thought that both the funeral and her brain are equally
important, and tied to each other. Mourners are awarded equal importance since they
contributed to the "death" of her brain in their unrelenting assault on her through the use
of repetition.
-Kamila Denman has argued that "Dickinson's punctuation is an integral part of her
exploration of language, used deliberately to disrupt conventional grammatical patterns
and create new relationships between words; and to affirm the silent and the nonverbal,
the spaces between words that lend resonance and emphasis to poetry". Dickinson uses
the dash to fragment language and to cause unrelated words to rush together. She draws
lines through the linguistic conventions of her society. Through her unconventional use
of punctuation and the dash, Dickinson creates a poetry whose interpretation becomes a
process of decoding the way each fragment signals mean. Her excessive use of dashes
has been interpreted variously as the result of great stress and intense emotion, as the
indication of a mental breakdown, and as a mere female habit.
Extra about the dash: She uses the dash to indicate interruption or abrupt shift in
thought; as a parenthetical device for emphasis; as a substitute for the colon since
dashes indicate incompletion and uncertainty; the dash both joins sentences so that they
have a boundary and resists that joining: it connects and separates; its traditional use is
informal.
-Dickinson's elliptical style leaves room for speculation and ambiguities; find any
particular challenging one: She will say no more than she must, suggesting either a
quality or uncertainty or one of finality.
-What are the main formal differences between Dickinson's and Whitman's poetry?
Whitman is a good example of also death-haunted as much as Dickinson.
“The Adventures or Huckleberry Finn” [1884]
Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Breakdown 1
1st person -> 13 year old unreliable narrator. Provides humor.
Innocent eye perspective. Everything is filtered through him. He
is naïve and ignorant.
-From the very beginning a comic tone is set. There is
seriousness below the surface. There is also irony.
-When Huck expresses himself as a narrator he uses American
English. When he quotes his own direct speech he uses his
vernacular language. Ordinary “Pike County”.
-Jim uses another dialect. Missouri Negro.
-He wrote it as is would be spoken. Twain read it aloud to see if
it was accurate. Huck is the illiterate son of the town drunkard.
-Breaks grammar rules:
*Wrong subjects verbs agreement *Double negatives
*Analogous use of irregular past tenses *Ain’t/Waren’t.
*Sivilize/civilize
-Lots of talk of death. Many references to death.
2
-Religion: We can see cynicism and mockery. Huck’s
encounters with Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas,
Twain satirizes the religion sensibility of the day.
*Huck finds the widow’s story of Moses boring and
unrelated to everyday life.
*Twain satirizes the pious Christians who professed
kindness and civility but bought and sold slaves.
*Huck bases his decisions on his experiences, his own
sense of logic. He doesn’t worry about going to hell.
*Twain criticizes the overly emotional people of the
revival meetings and the hypocrisy of the Christian
believers.

-Superstition and folktales.

*Jim initially appears foolish to believe so unwaveringly in these kinds of signs and omens, it turns out, curiously, that many of his
beliefs do indeed have some basis in reality or presage events to come.
-> Huck at first dismisses most of Jim’s superstitions as silly but later he comes to appreciate Jim’s deep knowledge of the world.
-> Huck killing a spider which is bad luck (countered this by turning in his tracks three times) then tied a lock of his hair with a
thread to keep the witches away.
-> Rattlesnake skin Huck touches that brings Huck and Jim good and bad luck.
-> Jim tries to interpret the dream that Huck says he had. (It wasn’t a dream, it was real)
-The River
*The journey down the river will be an escape from the hypocrisy of society’s corrupt institutions and a search for freedom from
that society for both, Huck and Jim. 3

-Humor and Irony 4

*Irony when Huck talks about Tom’s band of robbers and says something about being respectable.
*Widow Douglass tells Huck Finn not to smoke when she took snuff too, which is similar or even worse.
*Hyperbole
*Humor -> Huck pretends that everything that happened during the night of the fog had been just a dream. Jim was confused. At
first believed him and tried to interpret the dream.
*Picaresque -> Is a type of novel that deals with the adventures of a rascal (Huck Finn in this case)
It is a term commonly used to describe this book.
-It involves the combination of various elements.
-The hero of the book (known as the Picaro) is a realist and someone who adapts easily to new situations.
-Other characters often represent a combination of wildness and civility.
-River, nature, storm, animals (pigs and dogs mostly)
-Huck comes from a non perfect family. (Father a drunk).
 UNIT 21
MARK TWAIN (SAMUEL L. CLEMENS)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

From A Study Guide: American literary realism on Twain's work, who aimed at
accurately portraying the daily life of common people contributing to the creation of a
new national literature of democracy founded on stylistic innovation rather than on the
authority of British tradition; Twain made oral usage the basis of linguistic acceptability
rendering successfully authentic regional accents, paving the way for the acceptance of
vernacular speech; Twain used satire and resorted to wide-ranging humor not merely to
amuse, but to expose the flaws of a decadent "civilization" and correct the vices of
American society; the two novels wittily satirized the current "model boy" genre; AHF
provoked controversy by Twain's treatment of morality, language, race relations and the
institution of slavery and also adverse criticism for the way the novel ends; AHF shows
a caustic indictment of Southern society, a remarkably well-drawn characterization, an
accurate representation of spoken language, an archetypal quest for freedom, and the
symbolic role of the Mississippi river.
Samuel L. Clemens is best known under the pseudonym of Mark Twain, the pen-name
associated with his steamboat years on the Mississippi. His reputation is linked to The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was a
master of satire: the art of exposing folly or wickedness by mocking them. He resorted
to humour in the name of important values and values for crucial purposes, in order to
correct, censure and ridicule the vices of society by making them the target of derision.

Mark Twain, as an exponent of American literary realism, aimed at accurately

portraying the daily life of common people. One of his main concerns was to record
precisely the way he heard ordinary people by working carefully on the transcription of
different forms of vernacular expression, thus he avoided the bookish effects that often
marred (arruinar) previous attempts to transpose local idiom into literature. He did not
simply use slang and dialect words, but strove to reproduce in print the sounds as they
were pronounced in order to suggest authentic regional accents. His desire to create a
distinct American language based on the colloquial patterns of uneducated people
should be analyzed in the context of 19th century American democracy and the struggle
for cultural independence. By making oral usage the basis of linguistic acceptability
rather than giving an overall supremacy to the conventional English rules of grammar,
Mark Twain was questioning the authority of British tradition and transferring its power
to a new generation of American citizens, which paved the way for the acceptance of
vernacular speech in modern American literature.

Life: Clemens-Twain grew up in Hannibal (Missouri) where Tom Sawyer and Huck
Finn had their homes. He was apprenticed to a local printer and employed as a
typesetter and editorial assistant at various journals. He began his literary career by
writing homourous sketches for newspapers in the so-called "frontier humour" which
arose from the harsh conditions of frontier life, political controversy and oral story
telling (tall tales). In contrast to the sophisticated "urban humour", the subversive
"frontier humour" relied heavily on roughness, violence, exaggeration, distorted
perceptions, the grotesque and the absurd. Mark Twain's fusion of Southwestern frontier
humour with Northeastern urban humour would contribute to the development of a
genuine American humour. At his 24 he became a licensed steamboat pilot.
Work: Writing for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise he finally adopted the
pseudonym of "Mark Twain", a steamboat call which means "two fathoms deep" or
"safe water".
In California he listened to tall stories told by prospectors and used them in the plot of
the short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County". He began a new
career as a humourous lecturer. The first long works were travel books in which he
poked fun at conventional travelogues. His second book, Innocents Abroad, was very
popular because the satire of his loose narrative was directed not only at a pretentious
and decadent Europe but also at the "innocent" American veneration of the Old World.
Roughing It is a comic account of the author's somewhat fictionalized experiences as a
miner and journalist. A Tramp Abroad is about a tour he took though Germany,
Switzerland and Italy, and was his most innovative and least successful travel book.

Mark Twain's first novel, The Gilded Age was written in collaboration with Charles
Dudley Warner. It was an extended satire of the corrupt materialism that characterized
commercial and political life at the expense of public welfare in the post-Civil War
period. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was rooted in the author's own childhood
memories of frontier life in the river town of Hannibal. It was an environment very
suitable for developing such a provocative specimen of the modern "bad boy" literature
that clearly satirized the older "good boy" or "model boy" genre. Its popularity was even
surpassed by its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and in between he published
The Prince and the Pauper.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court emerged from his interest in British
history and his desire to experiment with time travel and dream narratives, and is a
combination of comic romance and political satire and an indictment of all kinds of
human tyranny.
The grief caused by the deaths of his son and two of his daughters made his pessimism
and bitterness to surface in the gloomy satire and philosophical brooding that
characterize the final twenty ears of his literary career.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Twain's most famous work has been very
controversial and various schools across the USA have banned and restored it to their
curricula. Early reviewers were concerned with the effect that its violent scene could
have on young people while more recent commentators raise charge of racism.
Objections have been raised to the narrator's historically accurate use of the word
"nigger" but the author himself was careful to avoid that offensive term. Twain was
against slavery and wanted to demonstrate the harm that the institution had caused to his
country, but he did not overcome certain racial prejudices about non-white people.
Therefore, he would be judged as racist if today's standards of political correctness were
applied to a thorough analysis of all his writings.
AHF expressed antislavery feelings but it is not an antislavery novel in the sense that
Uncle Tom's Cabin because it was published after slavery had been abolished. He wrote
it after the Civil War and Emancipation, a period failing to establish the necessary
conditions so that former slaves would be truly free. The novelist relied on his
memories of his boyhood in Hannibal, where most slaves were held as household
servants working under better conditions than the field labourers of the typical Southern
plantations. The two main characters were drawn from real life: Huck is drawn from
Tom Blackenship, an ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed but a good hearted boy; Jim
was Uncle Dan'l, a middle-aged slave sensible, honest patient, the children's comrade in
adventure, their adviser and ally in time of trouble".
Out of the forty-three chapters, the first eleven deal with adventures on land, twenty
chapters detail those that take place either on the raft that floats down the Mississippi
River or on its banks. The river dominates the geography of the novel and provides a
symbolic contrast with the land, where a decadent and perverted culture prevails. The
stinging satire of shore life soon becomes an indictment of Southern society and of
civilization in general. The dominant notions of morality are questioned and subverted
in subtle ways so that the audience may come to sympathize with the author's
ideological position. At the greatest moral climax, readers are made to feel that Huck is
doing "right" when he decides to do "wrong" by not returning Jim to slavery.
The last section has drawn adverse literary criticism, for the concluding episodes have
often been deemed weak, and the end seems too elaborate for our contemporary taste,
but the consensus is that this works is the archetypal American novel.
Its vernacular language remains a crucial feature of its literary quality. When Mark
Twain put into literary use the spoken language of the Southern lower and middle-class
society, he devoted particular attention to the speech of illiterate children and slaves.
Huck as a narrator uses the vocabulary and syntax of the uneducated son of the town
drunkard, and employs colloquial phrases and slang or vulgar expression but also
breaks grammatical rules. He makes errors of subject-verb agreement, uses double
negatives, and gets the past forms of irregular verbs wrong, using also the non-standard
"ain't" and "warn't" and misspelling some words ("sivilize").
It is the story of the life of an ignorant village boy, Huck Finn, son of the town
drunkard, who runs away from his persecuting father, and from a persecuting widow
who wishes to make a nice, respectable boy of him. He escapes with the widow's slave
and found a fragment of raft with which they float down the river by night to Cairo as
the destination, whence the negro will seek freedom but in a fog they pass the town
without knowing it.

Exploratory Questions:
- The Notice posted at the beginning of AHF is a typical example of the 19th c
American tradition of the cynical anti-preface. It sets the tone for the novel through
their mixing of humour and seriousness. In its declaration that anyone looking for
motive, plot or moral will be prosecuted, banished or shot, the Notice establishes a
sense of blustery comedy that pervades the rest of the novel.
It also sets the stage for the themes that the novel explores later and alerts us that the
lack of seriousness does in fact exist in the text. Twain's refusal to make any
straightforward claims for the seriousness adds a note of irony and charm. It links the
novel's sense of lighthearted fun with its deeper moral concern. It serves three purposes:
it is a satiric jab (golpe) at the sentimental literary style in direct contrast to Twain's
brand of literary realism; it also introduces the use of satire, a harsh and biting brand of
humour that readers will continue to see in the novel; and it is a convenient method by
which to ward off (mantener a raya) literary critics who might be eager to dissect
Twain's work.
- How is the first-person narrator constructed in the first chapter of the novel? Huck's
colloquial speech is very important, he directly addresses the readers in a friendly
manner so as to engage their sympathies. Twain uses a typical innocent eye perspective
that helps readers to see beyond the surface of reality. The effect is to emphasize the
narrator's imperfect or naive perception in order to encourage a superior and more
enlightened reader's awareness.

Huck reports the events and ideas through his own eyes, and often his innocence and
truthfulness contrast sharply with the Widow Douglas' sense of propriety. Huck uses the
vocabulary and syntax of the uneducated son of the town drunkard, not simply
colloquial phrases, slang or vulgar expression but also breaks grammatical rules: errors
of subject-verb agreement; the use of double negatives; wrong past forms of irregular
verbs; the use of non-standard "ain't", "warn't"; misspelling of certain words "sivilize".
Its first-person narrator, a youthful voice that delivers a rather serious scrutiny of racism
and slavery, defines the novel. Everything is filtered through Huck, since we have to
rely on him to interpret the story.
- Huck's preoccupation with death throughout the novel let some critics to consider "his
yearning for death". There are many references to it: "I don't take no stock indeed
people" when they talk about going to the good or the bad place, meaning going to
heaven and hell; "I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead", when he talks about
"the dog crying about somebody that was going to die"; "No, you feel like you are
laying dead still on the water".
- Mark Twain often satirized Christian customs and the hypocritical spiritual guidance
of certain religious instructors. Huck not only poked fun at the Widow's saying grace
before meals and mocked Miss Watson's conventional conceptions of heaven and hell,
but also took the liberty of making iconoclastic allusions to biblical personages such as
Moses. Remember Ishmael's mocking allusion to Adam and Eve as "the two orchard
thieves" in Moby-Dick, you may compare Mark Twain and Herman Melville in this
respect, taking into account that, although Melville could be irreverent sometimes, he
was always far from being cheerful.
Huck finds the Widow's story of Moses boring and unrelated to everyday life. Miss
Watson's concept of the "good place", where one would go around playing a harp and
singing all day does not appeal to him. Twain satirizes the pious Christian who
professed kindness and civility, but who bought and sold slaves as property before the
Civil War.

By focusing on Huck's education, AHF fits into the tradition of the bildungsroman: a
novel depicting an individual's maturation and development. Huck distrusts the morals
and precepts of the society that treats him as an outcast and fails to protect him from
abuse. This apprehension about society, and his growing relationship with Jim, lead
Huck to question many of the teachings that he has received, especially regarding race.
Huck choose to "go to hell" rather than go along with the rules and follow what he has
been taught, basing decisions on his own sense of logic. Although sometimes
considered a children's anecdote, AHF takes shots at Christianity that clearly illustrate
the author's viewpoint towards organized religion. Twain considers religion
superstition, for he has more respect for superstition than for religion. Huck expects bad
luck after accidentally killing a spider, and bad luck does follow in the form of Huck's
father returning and Jim being bitten by a snake.
- Huck plays with respect to these two women the role of an unruly boy who wants to
remove himself from the "female" world of conformity and rejects the conventional
standards of behaviour and values that both women represent, common in his time.
- Superstition is a theme that permeates the novel, to what extent do superstitious beliefs
and practices help to give a good insight into the character of Huck in the first chapter?
Whereas Jim initially appears foolish to believe in these kinds of signs and omens,
many of his beliefs do indeed have some basis in reality or presage events to come.
Huck at first dismisses most of Jim's superstitions as silly, but ultimately he comes to
appreciate Jim's deep knowledge of the world. Jim's superstition serves as an alternative
to accepted social teachings and provides a reminder that mainstream conventions are
not always right.
-Jim's character is later developed more fully, what does Mark Twain intend this
character to stand for? He is a complex character, at once a superstitious and ignorant
minstrel show stereotype (white men wearing blackface and red painted lips) but also
an intelligent human being who conveys more depth than the narrator is aware of. Some
critics have seen a consistency of character in Jim throughout the book, as a slave who
wears the mask of ignorance and docility as a defence against white oppression,
occasionally giving Huck glimpses behind the mask.
-Compare the features of Jim's speech to Huck's. Are there differences of Huck when he
expresses himself as a narrator and when he quotes his own direct speech? As a narrator
he uses the standard American English, while when he quotes his own direct speech he
uses his vernacular language, which is the Ordinary "Pike County". Jim uses another
kind of dialect, the Missouri Negro.
-One of the major elements in the novel is the characterization of Huck. Twain's choice
of a 13-y-o narrator supplies much of the humour in the novel. Huck reports the events
and ideas through his own eyes. Miss Watson holds herself up to Huck as an epitome of
a virtuous woman. He naively replies about the "good place" (heaven) "well, I couldn't
see no advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind I wouldn't try
for it". It is this kind of frankness that allows Twain to comment on the hypocrisy of
society through the eyes of a young and innocent narrator.

The theme of individual freedom is brought out in Huck's aversion to the Widow
Douglas and her attempts to change him. The journey down the river will be an escape
from the hypocrisy of society's corrupt institutions and a search for freedom.

-Analyse the characterization of Jim in the light of your reading of Frederick Douglass
and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The three authors emphasize the humanity of the slaves, but
the literary techniques by which they construct such characters differ considerably. (No
contestada).
- Leo Marx: "Huckleberry Finn is a masterpiece because it brings Western humour to
perfection and yet it transcends the narrow limits of its conventions". Mark Twain's
popularity has rested on his wide-ranging humour, whose cumulative impact is created
by various comic devices. Analyse the use of humour explaining the devices through
which such comic effects are achieved (irony, paradox, hyperbole, slang expressions,
and funny situations). Consider whether Twain's subversive humour raises any serious
issues.
Marx Twain was a master of satire. He did not poke fun at trivialities, but resorted to
humour in the name of important values and for crucial purposes, in order to correct,
censure and ridicule the vices of society by making them the target of derision. As an
exponent of American literary realism, he aimed at accurately portray the daily life of
common people, recording precisely the way he heard ordinary people talk. He strove to
reproduce in print the sounds as they were pronounced. There is irony when Huck talks
about Tom's band of robbers saying something about being respectable.
The widow Douglas tells Huck not to smoke, when she took snuff too. An example of
hyperbole could be when he says that the money they found was more than a body
could tell what to do with. Also when he says that he was listening to his heart thump
and he didn't breath while it thumped a hundred. A funny situation when everything that
happened during the night of the fog had been just a dream.
-Huckleberry Finn presents some typical features of the picaresque novel, genre
originated in 16th c Spain. Analyse the character of Huck as a picaresque hero, bearing
in mind that humour is a key element in picaresque novels. (This connects with
Frederick Douglass).

The hero of the book (known as the Picaro) is a realist and someone who adapts easily
to new situations, with a combination of wildness and civility, and the setting often
reveals humans and nature coexisting in harmony. There is a constant mention of
animals throughout the book, mostly pigs and dogs, as an example of wildness and
civility being intertwined. It is comfortable for Huck to be on the river, it is where he
feels most like himself. He interacts with nature on a very intimate level. He is
mesmerized by the storm.
-Lionel Trilling observed: "Most of the freedom in the use of language has to do with
the structure of the sentence, which is simple, direct and fluent, maintaining the rhythm
of the word-groups of speech and the intonation of the speaking voice".
The way a character speaks is closely tied to that character's status in society. Huck,
who was born in poverty, speaks much rougher, more uneducated-sounding dialect than
the speech Tom Sawyer uses. Jim's speech seems rough and uneducated, but it is
frequently not all that different from Huck's speech or the speech of other white
characters. Twain implies that it is society, wealth, and upbringing, rather than any sort
of innate ignorance or roughness, that determines and individual's educational
opportunities and manner of self-expression.
From A Study Guide: Writing about characterization
It involves focusing on the process through which the personalities of characters are
delineated and disclosed to the reader. When we write about characterization, we must
not only, indicate what characters are like, but also analyze the methods, techniques and
devices employed by the author to bring them to life and convey them to us. Flat
characters are built around a single trait or quality (e.g. the fool), whereas round
characters possess a variety of complex traits, which may even be contradictory. Static
characters do not change or evolve over the course of a narrative, whereas dynamic
characters undergo some kind of transformation.
Studying characterization within realist fiction turns out to be particularly attractive,
since the authors who followed the principles of this literary movement were very eager
to show characters as if they were real people. In order to be convincing, those writers
stove to avoid the kind of stereotyping which had been acceptable in the previous
romantic period, and worked hard at displaying motivated and plausible action on the
part of the characters they invented, giving credible reasons for their behavior, and
making them talk with the naturalness of ordinary conversation.
Twain, like many other realistic writers, was more interested in character than in plot.
Critics agree on his achievement in some respects, but they also disagree about his
accomplishment in certain cases as in the controversy over Jim's portrait which is
illustrative because it has been alternatively praised and condemned. Indeed, some
scholars contend that the characterization of the runaway slave challenges racist
stereotypes, whereas others argue that it reinforces 19th c derogatory stereotypes of
African Americans.
In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain launched the character of Huck in chapter 6,
and this piece of information may be relevant in explaining how the narrator of AHF
introduces himself in the first paragraph of chapter 1.
There are various ways in which approaching characterization, you can make a chart
with the names of the characters at the top and list under each name their main physical
and psychological features, as long as you take your chart not as an end but as a means
of developing the exercise. You should record that both Huck and Jim are superstitious,
even though the word "superstitious" never appears in the text, because you will infer
this essential quality of both characters from the episode of the spider (Huck) and from
Jim's interpretation of his false dream.
The commonest methods of fictional characterization correspond to the main narrative
modes: description, report, speech, and comment.
1. Description. Characters are often revealed through the description of their physical
traits, especially physiognomy, their attire, and surroundings. Some writers are
particularly keen on calling attention to the body by providing rather lengthy
descriptions, whereas others are able to evoke vivid pictures by providing a few details,
just like painters do. Miss Watson is graphically described with remarkable verbal
economy as "a tolerable slim old maid, with goggles on".
2. Report. The concrete actions performed by characters help us draw inferences about
their general behavior. For example, Miss Watson's efforts to teach Huck how to spell
demonstrate her engagement with education and contribute to portraying her as a typical
social reformer.
3. Speech. Characters may disclose a great deal of information about themselves both
by the way they speak, and the contents of their conversation. It is important to examine
how language creates differences. Characters may speak in a complicated or a
straightforward way, repeat certain words and phrases, rely upon common sayings and
proverbs, comment on themselves and state things about each other, and be laconic or
loquacious. Miss Watson's insistence on teaching table manners to Huck constitutes
clear proof that she is a strict woman, obsessed with etiquette.
4. Comment. Characterization can also be unfolded though the thoughts and evaluations
expressed by both narrators and other characters. For instance, the narrator's
observations about religion, which lead him to conclude that he sees "no advantage in
going where she was going", let us assume that Miss Watson is a pious woman who
feels certain about her spiritual salvation, but is utterly unable to attract Huck to the
kind of heaven she preaches about.

Some characters employ metaphors in distinctive ways displaying significant traits of

their personalities. Writers may also resort to establishing metonymic connections: Miss
Watson's metonymic identification with her goggles.

Names can contribute to characterization in various ways, for they may have symbolic
connotations, and they generally provide information about the character's status and
their relationships with others. Because huckleberries are small, in the early 19th c the
word came to stand for anything tiny, minor, or unimportant. The idiom "I'm your
huckleberry" meant either "I'm the person you are looking for" or (when used in teasing
self-deprecation) "I'm an inconsequential fellow".
Projection characters are the ones upon whom writers consciously or unconsciously
project aspects of themselves. The obsession with death which pervaded Mark Twain's
career is directly projected onto his portrait of Huck.
Characterization is particularly complex in the case of protagonists who are also first-
person narrators. Mark Twain chose an uneducated narrator, and used an innocent-eye
perspective. Author's use of irony by means of an unreliable narrator can be recognized,
as Miss Watson's saying a prayer before her meal is seen by Huck as "grumbling"
(quejarse) over the food.
Systematically casting certain groups of people in negative stereotypical roles amounts
to derogatory characterization, which may lead to charges of sexism, racism, ageism, or
other discriminatory practices. Jim's portrait is a case in point, even though the
acknowledged prototype of this fictional character was a real person, Uncle Dan'l. Many
readers have perceived Jim as one of the degraded minstrel caricatures that people
Twain's works, which include other examples written in the long-standing tradition of
American ethnic stereotyping. You may interpret the dialogue in lines 96-144 of chapter
15 in the same light, but be also aware of other views on this controversial matter, for it
has been argued that the ending of the chapter subverts the original meaning of the
minstrel show by displaying Jim's moral superiority, dignity and eloquence.
 Henry James (1843-1916)
cd
“Daisy Miller: A Study” [1878]
-One of America’s greatest novelist. Also a major British writer.
-Wrote: Novels, plays, biographies, memoirs, travel sketches,
essays and reviews.
-Intricate style and elaborate syntax (long sentences).
-Dense and subtle, various shades of meaning, precise choice of
words and well proportioned architecture.
-Wrote about upper class (mental state of cultivated people)
“Daisy Miller”
*It made him very popular
*Written about an anecdote told him by a friend. Heroine
partially inspired by his cousin Minny Temple, who died at 24.
*James called it a nouvelle. Modern critics call it novella.
*Divided into 4 chapters of equal length -> Two set in
Switzerland in the winter and two in the summer in Italy.
*Daisy ignores class structure and conventional codes of
behavior. Gives Winterbourne the impression she is a beautiful
flirt. She dies after catching malaria from walking with Giovanelli
in the Colisseum at night.
-> In the end he assures Winterbourne that she was innocent.
Theme
*Unconventional behavior of non-conforming American (how Americans behave abroad)-
*Sophisticated European society VS unconventional American behavior.
*Unlived lives. How lives would have been different under different circumstances.
*Concerned with “international theme”, drew from his travel experiences.
Breakdown
*3rd person/intrusive presence (giving opinions) very
subjective.
*We only know about Daisy what Winterbourne tells us.
Her character remains ambiguous.
*Ironical and sophisticated.
*Limited omniscient narration, told through consciousness
of a single character whose thoughts and feelings are
known by the narrator. All other characters only known
from the outside.
*James was a master of form. Wanted perfection in his
writing (same as was achieved in poetry all measured).
*Lots of exact description. (Physically and more)
*Daisy-> Fresh and young. (Like the flower)
*Winterbourne -> Old-ish and cold. (Two serious for his age)
*Eugenio de Manservant -> Name means well born/noble.
Acts like he owns the world.
*In general the characters are well spoken. (Exception of
Randolph Miller who uses the expression “blazes” -> Shows
him as the bumpkin that he is)
 UNIT 22
HENRY JAMES
Daisy Miller

From A Study Guide: Realism in American literature peaked in the 1880s in the works
of Henry James, regarded as a one of the greatest novelists and critics, also a major
British writer; he is a remarkably innovative master of form, famous for his dense,
subtle and meticulously polished prose, and as the creator of an intricate style; his
primary interest is in exploring his own inner life and the complexities of human
perception, the psychological traits of individuals, the refinements of sensibility, and the
mental states of cultivated people, bound by the codes of behavior of his wealthy
circles; his cosmopolitan upbringing in an intellectual family and his long sojourn in
Europe inspired his development of the "international theme" during his first phase of
his literary career; Daisy Miller is a best-seller and an extremely controversial novella
about the tragic encounter with Europe experienced by a prototypical, innocent and
naive American girl.
Born in NYC, he spent part of his life in his native land, and remained an American
citizen until shortly before his death, becoming an Englishman in 1915, having spent
most of his career in his beloved country of adoption. His work is ascribed to the history
of American literature and of English literature because the content of the work itself
and its influence upon the development of modern fiction on both sides of the Atlantic.
The 26 volumes of the New York Edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James
attests the extraordinary production of this prolific man of letters who wrote also plays,
biographies, memoires, travel sketches, essays and reviews.
His intricate style has discouraged mass audiences because his dense and sometimes
obscure prose, together with his elaborate syntax -marked by long sentences- requires
close attention in order to grasp the various shades of meaning conveyed by his
narrative. James applied to his prose the kind of concentration and scrupulousness that
is commonly associated with the writing of verse, thus his extremely precise choice of
words in his polished tales and novels contribute to the architecture in which all parts
are well proportioned and balanced. His technical experiments in the practice of fiction
are appreciated in conjunction with his essay "The Art of Fiction", which marked a
turning point in the theory of the novel.
He wrote almost exclusively about the individuals he observed at close hand in his own
milieu for he was primarily interested in exploring the complexities of human
perception, the refinements of sensibility, and the mental states of cultivated people,
bound by strict codes of behavior.
Life: His father was an eccentric philosopher, and his older brother was one of he most
influential American philosopher of his time. Of the many journeys James undertook,
the one of 1869-70 stands out as the most important because it was the first time he
traveled as an independent adult, at his 26. His Grand tour was a 15-month sojourn in
England, Switzerland and Italy.
Work: The "international theme" would become one of the great subjects of Jamesian
fiction. As he traveled, he drew on materials for creating his characters from the
observation of upper-middle and upper class tourists and expatriates he encountered in
the refined atmosphere of luxurious hotels. He depicted the wealthy American families
he came upon while they were touring in the Old World which undertook their traveling
as if it were a painful duty, rather than an enjoyable activity. James did not remain at the
superficial level presenting beautiful scenes, for the development of the international
theme meant for him a detailed exploration of the basic oppositions he found between
America and Europe. He examined the vicissitudes of American innocence and
inexperience when confronted by European moral relativism and social sophistication.
he contrasted what he perceived as the cultural barrenness or shallowness of America
with the richness of the old European traditions. In his biography Nathaniel Hawthorne,
James attributed the narrowness of Hawthorne's thinking to the lack of having a rich
literary culture placed before him and stressing the "provinciality" of his native country.
He developed the international theme during the first of the three phases which divided
his literary career:
1. In the first one, Daisy Miller is about a prototypical innocent and naïve American
girl's tragic encounter with Europe. This phase ended with the publication of one of his
masterpieces, The Portrait of a Lady, acclaimed as a major achievement of American
fiction.
2. The second phase has been divided in three parts:
- In the first part he temporarily abandoned he international theme and wrote three long
novels in the naturalistic mode.
- In the second part of his second phase, he abandoned fiction for five years of writing
drama, but his seven plays failed even more completely.
- In the third part he returned to fiction taking a new turn, and devoted the following six
years to a complex kind of experimental writing in which he assimilated the techniques
derived from the theater and probed the serious literary possibilities of a popular genre
such as the ghost story. He explored three important themes: threatened childhood in a
corrupting adult world, the psychology of supernatural or paranormal phenomena, and
the nature of success and failure in literary life.
3. In the third phase, his "major phase", James wrote three very elaborate and polished
late novels marked by an increasingly baroque prose style, in which returned to the
international theme.
Daisy Miller: The technical skill seems much higher which made its author a popular
writer, generating an abundance of critical comment characterized by an exceptional
degree of controversy. Its publication occasioned such an intense debate that society
almost divided itself into Daisy Millerites and anti-Daisy Millerites.
The author stated that DM had originated in an anecdote of an American lady whose
young daughter had picked up a good-looking Roman of vague identity with whom she
exhibited innocently. The mother of this piece of gossip provided James with the basis
for the fictional heroine, partly inspired by James's beloved cousin.
James referred to DM as nouvelle, and modern critics have classified it as a novella,
which is in length neither a novel nor a short story, but half-way between. It is divided
into four chapters, from which two are set in Switzerland in the summer, and two take
place in Rome during winter. Daisy arrives in Europe cheerfully ignoring class
structures and conventional codes of behavior. Winterbourne has the impression that
she is just a beautiful flirt. She also provokes scandal among the Roman community of
Europeanized American ladies, who are shocked by her free manners. Eventually Daisy
dies of malarial fever.
Exploratory Questions
- Although he is a minor character, Randolph plays an important role at the beginning of
the story, not only by introducing his sister, but also by putting forth the "international
theme" that will be developed in the novella.
- James was interested in limited-omniscient narration, which would later become his
trademark. His stories are generally told through the consciousness of a single character,
whose thoughts and feelings are known by the narrator, whereas all the other characters
are only observed from the outside. The fact that the narrator may occasionally decide
to stay outside and pretend to guess about the mental state or inner life of the character
that functions as "the centre of consciousness" is part of this technique.
- Intrusive narrators enter their own stories usually for the purpose of giving subjective
comments. Check if there are examples of narratorial intrusion in the first chapter.
- How are the four main narrative modes articulated? When you analyze speech, pay
particular attention to the range of voices that are heard throughout the first chapter and
comment on the comic effect or the clash of speaking styles.
- Realist writers make their readers aware of the fact that reality is perceived from
different, partial perspectives. James was concerned with presenting information from a
variety of points of views, each of them somehow limited. How do Winterbourne,
Randolph and Daisy perceive each other and themselves? Although the idea of the
supreme importance of point of view has come to be closely linked to James's
influential theory of fiction, his tenets on perception were not as rigorous.
- James was very interested both in the literary treatment of the psychological traits of
individuals and in the representation of different kinds of behavior exemplified by such
individuals. As he realized that human behavior is partially determined by the
environment of each country, he became concerned with the definition of national
identity, with special emphasis on "the American character" being tested by cultural
displacement. The conflict presented in the fist chapter is the result of the confrontation
between two Americans and one Europeanised American, not a typical European.

- The narrator has no access to Daisy's consciousness, and thus observes her externally.
Why do you think that the author did not use her as "the centre of consciousness" in
spite of the fact that she was supposed to be the protagonist of the story? Later on, he
developed his simple generic Daisy Miller type into the complex Isabel Archer (The
Portrait of a Lady).
- Family relations, the raising of children and the vicissitudes of courtship are three
themes with which James was deeply concerned about when he cultivated social realism
in his fiction.
- The diction in DM exemplifies James's verbal dexterity at the age of 35.

- James, who was devoted to the highest sense of the aesthetic, wrote essays defending
the proposition that fiction was art, as aesthetically significant as poetry.
- What had always been called Daisy Miller A Study, became simply Daisy Miller in
the text of the New York Edition and in its preface the author claimed that he no longer
remembered the reasons that had led him to call it A Study.
- Some issues concerning human relations and gender politics remain highly important
topical questions, such as sexism, stereotyping, the pressure of conforming to certain
social conventions, the failure of understanding in human communication, and the
unknowable nature of human character.
From A Study Guide: Writing about point of view
Point of view in literary criticism may simultaneously refer to 1) the narrative
perspective (the angle of vision, or vantage point) from which a story is told, and 2) the
narrative voice with which the story is told. According to Genette, in the analysis of
narrative fiction it is necessary to distinguish between two questions: who sees? who
tells? The former question is related to narrative perspective, whereas the latter is
connected with narrative voice. Some narratologists avoid the term point of view, and
employ focalization, which evokes the idea of getting things in focus when looking
through some device. Focalization is not restricted to the visual perspective but
comprises the narrative voice too.

The attitude we develop toward a story may be shaped by 1) the nature of the
storyteller, a character whose personality affects our understanding of the events and
characters of the story, 2) the language of narration, its tone. We must never confuse the
author of the story (a real person) with the narrator in the story (a persona created by the
author), just as in poetry we must distinguish between the pot and the speaker.
If you are asked about the point of view of a narrative, you will be expected to answer
the following questions: Who is observing the events and the characters as well as
telling the story? It is an all-knowing narrator? Are the narrative perspective and voice
those of a single character throughout the whole story, or do several characters have a
share or take turns in the seeing and the telling?
You should take into account the difference between: 1) first-person point of view, if a
first-person narrator tells the story suing the pronoun I, and 2) third-person point of
view, if the voice of a narrator standing outside the story is used, so that the narrative
seems to be told from an external source.
In first-person point of view, the narrator may participate in the story in varying
degrees, and is called 1) observant, when merely reporting, or 2) participant if the
function of telling the story is combined with that of a major or minor character actively
engaged in the plot.
Third-person point of view may be either omniscient or limited:
1. Third-person omniscient point of view uses an omniscient or all-knowing narrator,
one who knows the inner thoughts and feelings of all characters involved in the
narrative.
2. Third-person limited point of view implies that a story is told through the
consciousness of a single character whose thoughts and feelings are known by the
narrator, whereas all the other characters are only observed from the outside.
The main difference between the first-person narrator and third-person narration is that
the former seems more subjective, whereas the latter helps the author maintain a
position of apparent objectivity. In both cases the point of view may be equally partial,
incomplete or biased. In the two kinds of narration, the author filters information and
therefore may affect our understanding of the story. The omniscient narrator can go
back in time, look into the future, and in theory possesses unrestricted knowledge about
all the characters, but does not really share all theses abilities with the readers of the
story. Although third-person narration may work from inside the consciousness of
characters by letting everyone know what they feel and think, the majority of so-called
omniscient narrators are in fact detached observers who rarely see into the characters'
hidden motives and feelings, but just overhear conversations and recount certain actions
while standing on the fringe of events.
Henry James thought that the most interesting element of a story may lie not in the tale
but in the teller. The narrator's intrusive presence is underscored (subrayar) by the
distinctly personal inflections in the first paragraph's use of "particularly comfortable"
and "remarkably blue", and by the fact that the pronoun "I" appears four times in the
second paragraph.
James felt a growing discomfort with the prerogatives of narrative authority, especially
those associated with the handling of point of view in realist texts. He was aware that
revealing "the truth" was an impossible goal of realist fiction, and in his later novels he
called into question the authority of this kind of discourse. To what extent do the
limitations in the narrator's point of view enhance the deliberate ambiguity of this story?
James claimed that good works of fiction should achieve economy of form by having
only a single "center of consciousness", and he made Winterbourne the center of
consciousness or point-of-view character of DM. The reader senses that the narrator
knows most of what is going on in Winterbourne's mind, but not everything.

The story is told from the highly subjective point of view of the narrator. To what extent
does the narrator's voice compare with and differ from Winterbourne's? Note that the
narrator often penetrates the deepest recesses of consciousness in Winterbourne and
reports to the reader what his character is thinking and feeling at a given moment. James
creates a significant distance between the telling voice and the character of
Winterbourne when he makes the narrator say "I hardly know whether it was the
analogies or the differences that were uppermost in the mind of a young American".
Note that the narrator allows us insight into some of Winterbourne's most intimate
thoughts and feelings, but we get no inside view of the other characters, since we have
no access to their consciousness.
To what extent does the ironical and sophisticated tone of the narrative voice affect your
interpretation of events?
“Désirée’s Baby” [1892]
cd
-She was praised for her aesthetic achievement. She was
immediately condemned on moral grounds for writing a story
about the artistic and sexual awakening of a young woman
dissatisfied with her conventional role as wife and mother.
-Her Louisan stories accurately depicted the everyday life of
ordinary people in an area that seemed particularly exotic to the
rest of America.
-She was concerned with psychological realism.
-In her stories, Chopin’s heroines were gradually becoming less
submissive and more independent. From the beginning of her
career she had presented female characters forced to endure
oppressive to unattractive men.
“Désirée’s Baby”
*Main themes: Marriage and motherhood are explored here
through a submissive female protagonist who is far from being
like the emancipated heroines that people in Chopin’s later
fiction. Miscegenation.
->Désirée: Her depiction can be interpreted as an indictment of
the patriarchal system so abhorred by the writer.
*Simple language and precise vocabulary.
*Mood: Lazy in the first half of the story (static verbs: lying,
stood, sat) and (adverbs) that anchor the actions in a long space
of time (slowly, narrowly, searchingly). ->Also words used to
disrupt the peaceful atmosphere.
*Contrast: Good/Evil, happiness/sadness, black/white, light/dark
(one term depreciates the other).
-Désirée is always linked to light and whiteness while Armand is
associated with darkness and blackness. She is nameless
whereas Armand bears one of the “oldest and proudest” names
in Louisiana. ->She uses some fairytale conventions which are
incompatible with the typical features of a realist piece of fiction.
->In Chopin’s fiction, female dependence on male characters
generally leads to the heroine’s self destructive behavior.
-> Armand Aubigny: The stereotypical cruel slave owner in
former antislavery fiction like Simon Legree. Most characters in
Chopin’s fiction treat their wives as if they were possessions or
commodities although not all women submissively see
themselves as their husband’s property.
*Local – color elements include picturesque landscape,
vernacular speech and the singular manners that characterize a
particular region.
*This story illustrates the problems of miscegenation, a taboo
subject tht local colorist were loath to treat.
:
-Désirée’s “obscure origin”: Her ancestry included a black
African.
-“Something in the air”: Désirée detects a change for the
worse in the atmosphere at L’Abri when her child is three
months old, although she cannot explain what she feels.
:
-Irony: It occurs most notably at the end, when Armand
discovers that it is the who is of mixed racial ancestry.
-Alliteration.
-Metaphor: Comparison of the atmosphere in Désirée’s
room to a mist and comparison of her voice to a knife.
-Simile: Comparison of the bed to a throne, of blood to
ice, of Désirée to a statue.
:
-Pillar in front of the Valmondé Home -> Strength and
protection.
-L’Abri -> Armand’s dark moods.
-Bonfire -> Destruction of her memory and the baby.
October sunset -> Ending of her marriage to Armand.
*Désirée’s baby is a short story centering on human
relationships in the southern US before the Civil War.
:
-The action takes place in the United States in the mid-
th
19 century on two Louisiana plantations, one called
Valmondé, a family name, and the other called L’Abri.
:
-Désirée’s: Young woman described as beautiful and
gentle, affectionate and sincere. Abandoned in front of a
plantation home when she was a child. Adopted.
-Armand Aubigny: Inherited his father’s plantation.
Married Désirée and they lived at L’Abri.
-The Baby: Their boy. Person of a mixed racial ancestry.
-Monsieur and Madame Valmondé: Childless couple who
found her, adopted her and raised her.
-La Blanche: Female slave of mixed ancestry.
-Zandrine: Female slave who helps her care for her child.
-Negrillon: Male slave. Pretends to have suffered a leg
burn to be excused from work.
-Deceased parents or Armand. Lived in Paris until his
mom died. He was 8 y/o.
-The Baby is represented in omniscient 3rd person.
 UNIT 23
KATE CHOPIN
"Désirée's Baby"

From A Study Guide: regionalist or local-color fiction is a genre which emerged after
the Civil War satisfying new curiosity about different regions in their reunited nation;
the historical reception of Chopin's writings shift from early success, followed by a long
period of obscurity, rediscovery by feminist scholarship, until the present controversy of
her treatment of gender, race and class issues; Chopin's Louisiana short stories are
examples of realism and naturalism, considering that she used the conventions of local-
color fiction to undermine and dismantle the conservative ideology which this popular
genre nostalgically helped to support; the reception of The Awakening was polemic
since this complex narrative conveyed the theme of woman's growth from husband's
possession to achieving self-ownership; "Désirée's Baby" subverts the idyllic images of
the Old South offered by the plantation novels.
Although in her own time Chopin was praised for her aesthetic achievement, she later
was condemned on moral grounds for writing The Awakening, a story about the artistic
and sexual awakening of a young woman dissatisfied with her conventional role as wife
and mother. Feminist criticism has aroused a great deal of interest and encouraged
analyses from other theoretical perspectives also.
In the 20th century Seyersted edited her Complete Works and the first critical
biography, because the only texts in print were short stories illustrative examples of
regionalist or local color fiction which reduced her status to that of a marginalized
"local colorist". They have been reinterpreted as subversive pieces that use the
convention of the genre in order to undermine and dismantle the conservative ideology
it helped to support. Chopin's Louisiana stories accurately depicted the everyday life of
ordinary people of that area.
Life: She is the first major writer in American literature formed outside the Protestant
Anglo-Saxon mainstream. Raised by her mother, her maternal grandmother and her
great grandmother, Chopin's personality was shaped while growing up in a matriarchal
household ruled by strong independent-minded widows. After marrying Oscar Chopin,
who had been born in Louisiana, the couple went to live in New Orleans (Louisiana),
where a French atmosphere prevailed at the time.
Work: She considered herself a dedicated professional writer and a serious artist as
well. She started with a poem and tried Missouri local color with some short stories set
in St. Louis. But she soon realized that would really sell was farther south, in Louisiana.
At 18 spent three weeks in New Orleans and had been impressed by the sensuous life of
its bourgeois Creole population. She became fascinated by the sophisticated and refined
Creole culture, observing the exclusive milieu of this artistically sensitive elite as an
outsider made up of descendants of the early French and Spanish settlers. She also came
into contact with the Cajun culture, the descendants of the French-speaking Protestant.
Chopin's Louisiana stories belong to one of these two groups, but as she was concerned
with psychological realism, she tried to show how these people dealt with universal
issues according to the specific values prevalent in their environment.
Her Louisiana short stories represented one part of her literary production, since she
wrote more than a hundred short stories, sketches, poems, essays, reviews, a one-act
play and three novels. The reviewers praised her style in the first of her novels, At
Fault, but objected to her portrayal of an alcoholic wife and to her treatment of the
theme of divorce. She wrote Young Dr. Gosse and Theo but destroyed the manuscript.
Before The Awakening, her reputation rested on the short narratives printed in Bayou
Folk, a collection of 23 stories and sketches of rural life in Louisiana, which won great
number of reviews and press notices. A Night in Acadie is her second collection of 21
stories.
Several editors asked her to rewrite the stories they considered too indelicate or
immoral and she reacted to censure in various ways. Sometimes she altered what she
had submitted for publication, and developed and ability to hide encoded meanings that
can only be uncovered by a close reading. She resisted pressure and suffered the
consequences of dealing with subject matter that was deemed provocative. She never
attempted to find a publisher for "The Storm", the joyful sexual fantasy of an
unpunished happy adultery. "The Story of an Hour" was refused by the editor, since
Chopin's heroines were becoming less submissive and more independent: she presented
female characters forced to endure oppressive attachments to unattractive men
imagining discontented women rebelling against their situation. Chopin also wrote
about sexuality in the lives of men and women with a frankness rarely seen in the work
of 19th c. female writers.
The Awakening: It is a complex narrative about Edna Pontellier's growth from being her
husband's possession to achieving self-ownership. She is a discontented wife and
mother who experienced an awakening or process of self-discovery that makes her
yearn for sexual freedom and artistic fulfillment. Although many reviewers recognized
the aesthetic merit, most of them disapproved her handling of adultery which led to
publishers cancelling Chopin's contract for a third collection. Its publication damaged
Chopin's literary reputation, but the main reason why she wrote few stories afterwards
was her failing health.
Style and attitude towards slavery: The apparently clear and direct style of her
brilliantly compressed prose had been revised in search of subtle ironies. Her chosen
symbolism is now considered not merely decorative, but an essential artistic component
of her technique. She has been called a psychological symbolist because she used
symbols to project the psyche of her characters.
Her narratives, set in the postbellum period, embodied a vision of society deeply
concerned not with slavery itself but with its legacy. The few stories she set before the
American Civil War, such as "Désirée's Baby", had tragic endings that subverted the
idyllic images offered by the plantation novels evoked by Chopin in the deliberately
deceptive beginnings of her narratives.
"Désirée's Baby": It was published in the fashion magazine Vogue, being an immediate
success, also included in the collection Bayou Folk. Her main themes -marriage and
motherhood- are explored through a submissive female protagonist who is far from
being like the emancipated heroin that people Chopin's later fiction. This is why the
piece was not considered particularly threatening. The depiction of Désirée can be
interpreted as an indictment of the patriarchal system so abhorred by the writer. It deals
with miscegenation, a theme which most local colorist were reluctant to treat that
Chopin managed to get through by encoding her profound meanings beneath the surface
of her text. The story is told in Standard English but includes glimpses of French,
spoken in the historical context where the plot takes place.
Exploratory Questions
- Chopin's language is generally simple and her vocabulary very precise. There is a
preponderance of concrete nouns in DB, could it express the author's concern with
material details that help to create a believable physical world? There is a
preponderance of concrete nouns vs. the scarcity of abstract nouns. Chopin used the
concrete words to evoke emotions and to foreshadow of what was going to happen or
just the actual reality. Race and slavery appear at the end because is when we see the
real meaning of the story.
- Chopin's diction conveys the lazy mood with the use of static verbs that do not
represent an action and adverbs that anchor the actions in a long space of time.
- Analyze the eight similes paying attention to what some of the have in common: "as if
struck by a pistol shot", "like an avalanche", "like a cowl", "like a sumptuous throne",
"like ice". Are they merely decorative, or do they perform a function in the sinister
development of the story? Do they emphasize the important of color in the story?
- The juxtaposition of disparate or opposed images and ideas is a common literary
technique in Kate Chopin's fiction (contrast). The binary logic that opposes such
mutually exclusive pairs always privileges or values the term that is considered positive
or superior and depreciates the other one as being negative or inferior. She also
undermines any confidence in knowing where each character really stands within a
firmly established hierarchical system, which is not as stable and "segregated" as one
might think. "Désirée's Baby" cannot be interpreted only as a Manichean allegory as it
is also a critic to the unfair situation lived by Désirée, who had it all and loses it for the
accusation of being descendent of black people. From the beginning, we have clues of
Armand's darkness and Désirée's goodness.
- Chopin uses some fairytale convention which are incompatible with the typical
features of a realist piece of fiction. There is tension or conflict caused by the
juxtaposition of the two frames of reference -the old fairy tale framework and the
modern realist short story framework, consider whether the author's subversive
appropriation of traditional forms provides any new insight.
- Chopin described southern life in a detached manner, with the objectivity that marks
realist writers. The narrator explains the facts but not what the characters are thinking.
She tells the story in a detached way but show her preference towards Désirée as it is
patent when he she says about Armand "if he was human".
- Analyze how the notion of "arbitrary justice" pervades DB, bearing in mind that the
story exemplifies female dependence on male characters generally leads to the heroine's
self-destructive behavior. Note that naturalistic writers often emphasize the extreme
vulnerability and absolute powerlessness of their characters, faced with strong social
and natural forces. Désirée's innocence is foreshadowed by linking her to white colors.
- Armand could be viewed as part of the tradition of the "tragic octoroon" is linked to
the stereotypical cruel slave-owner (Simon Legree in Uncle Tom's Cabin), find the
devices used to present him as the villain. Most male characters in Chopin's fiction, and
not only a brutal slave-owner such as Armand, treat their wives as if they were
possessions or commodities, although not all women submissively see themselves as
their husband's property. The theme of male possessiveness links DB to some of
Chopin's most mature works labeled "proto-feminist" partly because their heroines
envisage "self-ownership". Armand is presented as the villain, linking him to black
colors and rude behavior towards his slaves.
- Chopin provides many small clues, being foreshadowing a device to create
expectation or to set up an explanation of later developments: "Oh, mamma, I'm so
happy; it frightens me".
- Chopin was ahead of her time in her way of addressing race and gender issues. To
what extent is "DB" a story about the disastrous consequences of institutionalized
racism and sexism upon people's lives? It offers a critique with emphasis on the evils of
patriarchy and the slave system.

- Reilly commented that Chopin's gift are in DB: directness of approach, sureness of
touch, the swift strokes which give the setting and introduce and realize the characters,
the amazing economy of words. Reilly, like most early critics, focused on Chopin's
"charming" style while ignoring her social criticism. Local-color elements include
picturesque landscape, vernacular speech, and the singular manners that characterize a
particular region. French proper names appear in the story to the interspersed use of
French, as the only phrase uttered by Zandrine is in French. The author chooses not to
use dialect so she reduces the description of landscapes and other regional aspects to a
minimum. To what extent does she appropriate the profoundly conservative local-color
discourse in order to question or challenge it? Note that this short story directly and
explicitly illustrates the problem of miscegenation, a taboo subject at the time.
- Désirée's remark that Armand can hear the baby from La Blanche's cabin can suggest
that he is the father of one of her children.
- His marriage to Désirée could have been part of a plan to have legitimate children that
would pass for white, and if they had a dark complexion he could always blame
Désirée's "obscure origin" without endangering his own statues as a master, which
depended on "racial purity" under the "one-drop rule" system.
- As a "creative reader", do you enjoy Chopin's multilayered fiction? Chopin was
reluctant to give any interpretation of her work which might be taken as definitive.
From A Study Guide: Analyzing binary oppositions
The purpose is to analyze how one term in each opposition is privileged, and how the
contrast between the terms is reinforced or undermined. The binary oppositions to be
found within "Désirée's Baby" are:
- feminine vs. masculine
- black vs. white
- good vs. evil
Combine or superimpose the oppositions, and carefully examine the resulting pattern of
the terms which are favored. Note that binary oppositions should be tested for
contradictions and inconsistencies.
Look at the binary opposition feminine vs. masculine, and explain how the author
represents social inequality between the sexes and constructs oppositions of gender.
What gender issues are featured in this story?
Look at the binary opposition black vs. white, and explain how the author represents
social inequality between the races. What racial conflicts are emphasized in this story?
Look at the binary opposition good vs. evil, and accept or reject the interpretation of
"Désirée's Baby" as a Manichean allegory (bearing in mind how the concept is defined
in the Glossary at the end of this Guide).
 cd
“The Open Boat” [1897]
Brief career, he died at the age of 28.
“The Open Boat”
-It’s one of his main contributions to the American literary
canon, which exemplifies the author’s nature art.
-When he wrote it, he had already published newspapers reports
of shipwrecks whose imagery clearly prefigures that of his
famous short story.
-His principal source was his own experience of being drift in the
ocean: After sinking of the steamer, Stephen Crane
(correspondent) Edward Murphy (the Captain) Charles
Montgomery (Steward) and William Higgins (oiler) remained for
27 hours rowing and drifting.
*The short story opens with four men, stranded in the ocean in a
small boat and limits itself to their ordeal for there is not a single
reference to any of the circumstances leading to the sinking to
Cuba or to the filibustering expedition.
*Unlike the newspaper report, which is written in 1st person, The
Open Boat is written from the 3rd person point of view, although
the narrator concentrates on the correspondent’s consciousness
and expresses a privileged knowledge of his thoughts and
feelings.
*The other three characters reveal themselves through their
words and actions.
* of work: Short story
* : Takes place between January 2nd and January 4th 1897
off the eastern coast of Florida, near Mosquito Inlet (now known
as the Ponce de León Inlet) about twelve miles south of the
present-day Daytona Beach.
: Centers on four men in a lifeboat who had
abandoned a sinking steamship off the coast of Florida. They are
attempting to reach shore against an ocean that becomes
increasingly violent whenever they row toward land.
*
rd
: 3 person through a narrator who occasionally
reveals the thoughts of the men in the boat.
Impressionism: Aesthetic movement. Attempt to accurately and
objectively record visual reality. Effects of light and color.
Proto-existentialist -> Fiction. Focuses on the nature of humans
in the universe. Realism predominates in the story.
* :
-Captain-> Levelheaded, trustworthy commander of the
55 Commodore, the ship that sank. He is a rudder who
guides and heartens the other men in the boat.
-Correspondent-> A newspaper reporter who shares
rowing duties with the steamer’s oiler. He represents the
author, who was a survivor
-The oiler-> Reliable, hard-working, crewman who
performs his duties without complain. Dies.
-The cook-> Rotund crewman who bails water from the
lifeboat. Modeled after the real-life Commodore
steward, Charles B. Montgomery.
-People on the beach.
*Life as a struggle against nature’s Indifference
*Brotherhood
*Courage
*Alliteration
*Metaphor (Comparison of the boat to a colt)
*Onomatopoeia
*Oxymoron (terrible grace, sinister hospitality)
*Simile (Comparison of sea foam to snow)
*Black, white, gray: World of the mean in boat takes on
cheerless hues. Sense of foreboding.
*Fate
*Drowning. Refrain that suggests that the men’s fear of
death is exacerbated by the unconcern of nature.
*Waves: Ceaseless presence. Forces of nature and
uncontrollability of life.
*Boat -> Human life among the universe’s uncertainties.
*Oiler’s death -> Indifference of nature.
*Poem -> Correspondent’s understanding of his plight.
*Cigars -> 4 wet cigars and 4 dry. Complex symbol of
hope for spiritual salvation.
 UNIT 24
STEPHEN CRANE
"The Open Boat"

From A Study Guide: Crane was a brilliantly imaginative poet and fiction writer whose
works elude simple classification since they reflect the various artistic trends of the end
of 19th c and also anticipate expressionism and existentialism of the 20th c; his
bohemian lifestyle together with his experiences as a war correspondent shaped his
literary career; the poem "War Is Kind" is a satirical antiwar piece included in the two
volumes which earned him a position as a "minor poet" (he stands mainly as a fiction
writer); The Red Badge of Courage is an innovative novel hailed as a masterpiece which
brought its author international literary fame; "The Open Boat" is a short story inspired
by its author's experience in a shipwreck which illustrates impressionism, realism
naturalism and symbolism.

In only 8 years (he died at 28) he managed to bring out two volumes of poetry, five
novels and over 300 short stories, sketches and articles which supported the idea that he
wrote fiction drawing on the events he witnessed and reported for the newspapers as a
prolific journalist. His obsessive search for intense experiences was the result of his
artistic concerns and the stimulus for his creative achievements.
The preacher's unruly son rejected Christianity and lived in scandal with his common-
law wife, the ex-owner of a brothel. As there is much in his best writings that is original
and remains unexplained as his personality, likewise many of his works elude simple
definition or classification, for they reflect the various artistic trends of the end of 19th
c, especially naturalism, impressionism and symbolism. Furthermore, some critics have
seen Crane as a forerunner of the 20th c. movements of expressionism and
existentialism.

Life: Son of a Methodist clergy and a pious mother who wrote for religious journals, he
soon rebelled the discipline of his childhood.
Work: In New York he supported himself as a freelance newspaperman and completed
his first novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. He was obsessed with learning more about
the actual existence of the people he wrote about, he decided to study urban vice in one
of the worst slums of New York. His journalistic activities allowed him to observe at
close hand the shabby tenement districts and the city's police court. Maggie is one of the
earliest examples of literary determinism in American fiction for it tries to show that
environment frequently shapes lives. Rejected by a number of publishers, this novel was
privately printed under a pseudonym but American public did not welcome this grim
exponent of social realism that so authentically recreated sordid slum life.
The Black Riders is his first book of poetry, 68 short poems in free verse in which the
author expressed his bleak worldview and which foreshadowed innovative techniques
that would be developed in the 20th c., but which his contemporaries found them too
cryptic, too unconventional and too somber in tone. War Is Kind is his second collection
of poetry which reiterated the attitudes in his previous volume and included the author's
most explicit social poems. These two collections have earned him a position as a
"minor poet" in the canon of American literature, where he stands mainly as a fiction
writer.
The publication of The Red Badge of Courage brought Crane the international literary
fame, and one of the more innovative features of this work is the presentation of the
protagonist's personal identity through the development of techniques which are
consistent with Crane's devotion to psychological verisimilitude. Another modern
aspect is that it parodies historical novels about the American Civil War (Crane does not
mention the name of the campaign or a battle).
Crane had developed an obsession with participating in a war thus he was
commissioned to cover the Cuban Revolution as a correspondent, sailing aboard the
Commodore with a large party of Cuban insurrectionists and a cargo of ten thousand
dollars worth of arms and ammunition for the Cuban rebels. The steamer sank and the
writer and three other men remained at sea for the next 27 hours in a dinghy because the
rough surf did not allow them to go ashore. Crane first published newspaper report of
the event, and then wrote a short story: "Flanagan and His Short Filibustering
Adventure". This experience also became the factual framework for one of his best and
most often discussed pieces of fiction, "The Open Boat".
"The Open Boat": Its principal source was Crane's own experience of being adrift in the
ocean. After the sinking of the steamer, Stephen Crane (correspondent), Edward
Murphy (the captain), Charles Montgomery (steward), and William Higgins (oiler)
certainly remained at sea for 27 hours rowing and drifting. Higgins and Crane took
turns rowing and just before they landed in the morning, the oiler was drowned in the
surf.
Crane published his newspaper account headlined "Crane's Own Story" in which he
gave little information about what had happened during the hours that the four men
were floating adrift but included the drowning of seven men, none of whom found room
in the lifeboats of the survivors. The horrible scene was omitted from "The Open Boat",
except for an allusion to the seven upturned faces that haunt the memory of the young
captain in the dinghy.

There is no overlapping between "The Open Boat" and "Crane's Own Story" because
the former begins where the latter ends. Almost all the newspaper accounts is taken up
with the departure, voyage and sinking of the Commodore.
The newspaper report is written in the first person, "The Open Boat" is written from the
third person point of view, although the narrator concentrates on the correspondent's
consciousness and expresses a privileged knowledge of his thoughts and feelings. The
other three characters reveal themselves though their words and actions.
"TOB" was initially published in Scribner's Magazine and reprinted the following year
in a volume of short fiction dedicated by Crane to the three men in the dinghy.
Exploratory Questions
- How are the four main narrative modes articulated throughout "TOB"? Critics
remarked Crane's unusual use of shifting point of view. The story is told alternatively
from the perspective of each of the members, as well as from the vantage point of an
objective observer. It is suggested that their reactions are archetypal and universal since
anyone would respond in the same way to what they are going through. The
correspondent is the only character whose inner thoughts are clearly identified.
Some critics have viewed Crane's shifting perspectives as a flaw, because it hinders
independent character development. Arguably, the story does not need its characters to
develop as much as to experience the same fear and anger. Crane captures the sights,
sounds and emotions of a near-death experience. Only at the end they can begin to
"interpret" the experience. The shifting point of view appears to emphasize the failure
of interpretation by all of the characters, rather than the knowledge that each has gained.
- Similes and metaphors can be arranged to suggest a theme, for instance, much of the
sea voyage is depicted in terms of land (ocean is likened to "slate" and the waves to
"rocks"). Comment on significant metaphors, such as the one linking the men in the
boat to "ants". Man's conflict with an indifferent, disordered nature is not concerned
with the quality of his actions, and men are like "ants" small and fragile before nature.
The sea reminds the forces of nature which can cut lives at any moment, affecting men
in the sense that it would be unjust to be drowned after all their best efforts to save
themselves. The seagulls are a significant symbol for they appear to be "somehow
gruesome and ominous" thus representing human frailty and nature's indifference to it.
The attempt of the bird to land on the captain's head demonstrates that men are subject
to nature's whim and can exert little control over their situation. Crane's story creates
hyper-realism, a vivid nightmare state in which waves resemble horses. He refuses to
romanticize the absurdity of experience, and the reader is constantly reminded that
experience, like perception, is betrayed by the language by which it is conceptualized.
- Comment on the symbolism of the short story. The boat, to which the men must cling
to survive the seas, symbolized human life. It is characterized as "open" which supports
the interpretation that it is unprotected and thus open to suffering the unexpected turns
of fortune that are unavoidable in life. Though the boat, Crane implies that life is not
something we can control, but rather life is what we must hang onto as we make our
way in the world. The sea serves as a reminder of the forces of nature, by which their
lives could be lost at any moment. The Oiler's death reinforces the randomness of
nature's whims and symbolizes the indifference of nature toward man. Nature is
arbitrary in how it chooses its victims.
- In "TOB" we find an omniscient narrator technique, thus the story is written from the
third person point of view, although the narrator concentrates on the correspondent's
consciousness and expresses a privileged knowledge of his thoughts and feelings.
Characters engage in interesting dialogues to fill the boredom but also to help explore
each character.
- The technique of repetition ("I am going to drown? Can it be possible? Can it be
possible? Can it be possible?) seems to lengthen the men's journey, providing the reader
with a more vivid impression of the despair and hopelessness they feel. In the
repetitions "If I am going to be drowned", the lines reinforces the character's sense of
danger and his fear of what might happen next. The entire passage discusses the
meaning of life, given the inevitability of death, as an existential situation.
- Crane was fascinated with danger, a subject that seems to have acted as an unusually
provocative stimulus for his imagination. The sea serves as a powerful reminder of the
forces of nature: the lives of the members in the dinghy could be lost at any moment.
The passage in which the correspondent asks himself if he is going to die suggests the
absurdity of an individual's sense of self-importance against the mindless power of
nature.
- Pay attention to the shifts of the dictions, noticing that the syntax of the first paragraph
is simple and its tone quite neutral, whereas the second takes the discourse to an abstract
level, resorts to irony and has something of the mock-heroic. This points to the
existence of two different tones in the voice of narrator. The third tone present in
"TOB" is that of the dialogue exchanged by the four characters, who speak in a
language that is direct, informal and often colloquial, in short sentences generally aimed
at immediate and practical action. The dialogues help to explore each individual
character.
- Bear in mind when analysing his handling of colour effects that Crane liked intense
verbal colorations and often tried to capture the impression of light at different moments
of the day. Note that the metaphorical use of colour may suggest emotional states.
Crane's impressionistic technique places the readers in the same frame of reference of
the characters. The story's first sentence "No one knew the color of the sky" thrusts
(forzar) into the position of his characters. Crane enriches his impressionistic technique
by juxtaposing close-up, sensory descriptions of the men's experiences in the dinghy
with the narrator's detached perspective.
- Many scholars have stressed Crane's use of painting devices, those of impressionism,
an aesthetic movement characterized by its attempt to accurately and objectively record
visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and colour. In this short story Crane's
visual imagery is characterized by a clear emphasis on seeing. The tall windmill on
shore with its back to the men is the personification of nature, which is indifferent to
men's struggle to survive.
- Throughout his career Crane was concerned with the indifference of the natural
universe to the plight of human beings, carefully developing this naturalistic theme in
"TOB".
- The death theme is treated especially in the ending of the story, and the Oiler's death
pose the existential affirmation of the absurdity of life, since he was the fittest man in
the crew and his death denies the Darwinian doctrine of the survival of the fittest.
- The role of the narrator is similar to that of war correspondents for at a time journalists
included personal comment in their reporting of events and there is no lack of emotion
in Crane's fiction, but rather a great emotional power that stems from his visual prose
rather from an overt expression of personal feelings. The character of the correspondent
is autobiographical in nature and he is the only character in the story whose thoughts are
given direct access to the reader.
- Although "TOB" is generally labelled as a naturalistic story, it has also been argued
that it can be interpreted as a piece of proto-existentialist fiction because it focuses on
the problematic nature of human existence in the universe. From this 20th c
philosophical perspective, Crane's story is a study in uncertainty that emphasizes the
difficulty of knowing the significance of events. One of the main concerns of the
Naturalists involved the dilemma of whether human beings could exercise control over
their fate or whether their fate was predetermined by their environment; whether
humans possess a free will or are powerless to shape external events. The current
suddenly frees the correspondent and he is washed ashore by a giant wave, thus Crane
attributes the correspondent's survival more to uncontrollable forces than to his own
efforts.
- Some critics have argued that, in spite of having traits pertaining to several other
aesthetics schools, realism predominates "TOB". Its realistic features would include the
use of an omniscient but not intrusive narrator who provides a considerable amount of
factually grounded detail, the employment of multiple perspectives that sometimes
commit and correct perceptual error, the presentation of plausible physical experiences
and the account of credible events. Many critics have contended that other features
remove this story from the category of realist fiction.

From A Study Guide: Writing about symbolism

It implies much more than simply identifying the symbols in any given text, because it
also involves explaining how such symbols function within a symbolist aesthetic. To
write about symbolism you have to bear in mind the following basic theoretical
principles:
- Symbol can be defined as something that stands for something other than itself,
especially an object that is used to represent something abstract and evokes a range of
additional meanings. For instance, national flags are public symbols that stand for the
countries. Apart from objects, symbols maybe actions, gestures, events, people,
animals, plants, colours, sounds... Spring generally symbolizes new life, while a heart
ordinarily stands for love.

- Symbolism is a widespread phenomenon that is found not only in texts, but also in
social life: for example, rituals and ceremonies.
- Symbols do not have a simple one-to-one relationship with what they stand for, and
they cannot be restricted to a single meaning. For instance, a rose may symbolize love
and beauty, but it may also suggest the transient nature of human life.
- There are tow main kinds of symbols: a) Conventional symbols are based upon shared
assumptions within a community and have a relatively stable meaning that is widely
recognized: for death are night, sleep, sunset, crossing the river, and resting. b)
Contextual symbols acquire their meanings within the particular context in which they
appear (the white whale in Moby-Dick, where whiteness is associated with "the visible
absence of colour" and basically stands for indefiniteness).

- Literary authors incorporate both conventional and contextual symbols in their works,
being symbols economic devices to facilitate the expression of complex ideas without
having to resort to long explanations. For example, writers may emphasize either the
spring or the winter settings in their works depending on whether they want to evoke
images of youth or of cold age. Conversely, certain conventional symbols may have
their fixed meanings deepened and extended by famous literary works. Author
sometimes manipulate old conventional symbols and turn them into new contextual
symbols in order to challenge their reader's assumptions.
- Symbolism nowadays has come to represent the rhetorical opposite of allegory,
although not all literary scholars agree when comparing these phenomena in their
extensive critical debates. One of the basic difference between the two is that
symbolism allows for multiple possibilities of meaning whereas allegory demands a
strict correspondence between the concrete reality and the abstract idea it represents.
Within romantic theory, the symbol was widely praised as the proper vehicle for
individual literary genius, and highly regarded for its expressive qualities, in contrast to
allegory, which was seen as a form of moralizing.
Writer often use lexical repetitions to alert readers to details that carry more than literal
meanings, and frequently incorporate their central symbols in the titles of their works.
When you write about symbolism, to avoid the repetition of the verb "symbolize", you
can use the following: represent, stand for, suggest, evoke, point to, echo, and express.
Keep in mind that the symbolic mode is a style of writing, and that some authors are
particularly skilled in weaving symbols into the fabric of their works. They rely on
symbols to convey intended meanings that go far beyond the incidents included in their
plots. Their interpretation requires a high degree of bridging inferences analysing the
function of each symbol within the larger symbolic structure.

Stephen Crane's poetry and fiction are heavily marked with symbols. In order to
understand "The Open Boat" you should be aware of the fact that the way the sea is
presented makes it a symbol of the terrible destructiveness which Crane believes is at
the heart of nature.
Consider how the boat is described, bearing in mind that it is also called "ship", "vessel"
and "dingey" in his story. Focus on the metaphors and similes concerning the boat.
Explain how it functions on both the literal and the figurative levels paying attention to
any details related to it that may have significant symbolic value (e.g. "the thin little
oar"). What do the four men in the boat represent? What does "the plight of the ants"
refer to? To what extent do these men illustrate the theme of human weakness and
isolation in nature?
Note the recurrence of words that connote colour, and that there is a reference to colour
in "the hue of slate". Compare and contrast the firs sentence of the story, "None of them
knew the color of the sky", with one that closely follows it, "all of the men knew the
colors of the sea".
What might the waves stand for? Note that they are also called "rollers" in this story.
Why is it important that the story begins and ends at night? Explain how Crane draws
attention to the symbolism of day/night and that of light/darkness by making clear
associations between the events that happen in different time settings.
What changes does the sky undergo throughout the story? What connotations do such
changes evoke? What might the symbolic function of "the tall wind-tower" be? What
are the symbolic actions like steering, taking the oars, failing into the water, drowning
and escaping death from drowning?
Examine the symbolism in the character of the man who helps the crewmen when they
reach the shore, and the reference to "a halo was about his head, and he shone like a
saint".
How does Crane create atmosphere by using the symbolic imagery of the natural world?
Remember the distinction between image and symbol: images usually evoke the
concrete qualities of something other than themselves, whereas symbols bring to mind
the abstract qualities of what is associated with them. Note that the wind-tower acquires
meaning only within the world of Crane's story.