English 211: Fiction
Lecture 4: Early American Novels
The novel came later to the United States than it did to Europe. The new country was busy establishing itself, and most of what was written in its early days was religious, political, or journalistic in nature. The first novel published in the New World was Pamela, by Samuel Richardson; it was printed in 1744 by Ben Franklin, who correctly figured it could make him some money. The Power of Sympathy (1789), by William Hill Brown, was the first American novel written by an American author and published in the United States. But although a number of other novels were published in the next two decades, no novels of distinction appeared until 1821, when James Fenimore Cooper wrote The Spy. It was a novel about the American Revolution, in which the heroes are the colonists, but the British antagonists are fully drawn and sometimes sympathetic characters. Cooper did his best work in the Leatherstocking tales, the first of which was The Pioneers (1823); the series featured an explorer and adventurer named Natty Bumppo, also called Leatherstocking or Hawkeye, and his Indian companion, Chingachgook. Others in the series were The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Deerslayer (1840), and The Pathfinder (1841).
The writers of the late 1700s and the early 1800s in the new United States were acutely aware that they were establishing a new American voice and identity, and most of them were consciously trying the shape that voice in their works. These early writers were strongly influenced by the Romantic tradition of European--especially English--literature, which included writers such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and John Keats. Romanticism was based on the idea that art should derive from the inner world of the individual writer. Thus, the focus of interest in Romantic poetry is often on the mind, spirit and feelings of the poet. The Romantics saw themselves as revolutionary, rejecting the old methods and ideas for new techniques and subjects. Along with this, there was the sense that human beings were inherently good and that their potential was limitless. The Romantics' interest was in the human psyche rather than social mores, and they tended to feel that literature should serve beauty as well than truth--that is, poetry should be beautiful and should reveal emotional and spiritual truths, rather than teach a social or moral lesson.
The English Romantic poets often focus on nature as a subject. "Nature," however, usually serves as a metaphor or a catalyst for an emotional state, problem, or issue. Landscape, thus, is given human qualities. For example, in "I wandered lonely as a cloud," Wordsworth writes,
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
The English Romantic poets believe that Nature gives human beings direct access to God; thus, Nature replaces organized religion as the route to Truth. For this reason, symbolism, both in nature and in Romantic poetry, plays a large role. "A puddle," says Hazlitt, "is filled with preternatural faces" ("On Mr. Wordsworth's Excursion"). The Romantic poets preferred to use symbolism rather than exposition, since they felt that implication and deduction were more effective than overt preaching.
In keeping with the democratization of the political world, Romanticism glorifies the common. Blake, for example, writes about chimney sweeps; Keats finds universal truths in an ordinary Grecian urn.
Many of the Romantics were fascinated with magic and the supernatural, especially Coleridge, Blake, Byron, and Shelley.
Individualism and nonconformity are prized; a common subject is the outcast.
The ideas of the European Romantics were appealing to many American writers at the time, with their emphasis on revolutionary change, the goodness of human nature, and unlimited human potential. The vastness of the physical landscape, with so much left to explore, gave a peculiarly American twist to the Romantic ideas on nature and her role.
Not all American writers felt the same way, of course. Many believed that, given the size of the country and its diversity, an "American" literature was impossible; they attempted only regional literature. But others--Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville among them--wanted to create a unified vision of the new country. They knew that they could not avoid being influenced by their European roots, but they wanted to be more than "Europe West"; they wanted to shape an identity and tradition that was unique.
Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804. His ancestors had been prominent Puritans. One of these was William Hathorne, a colonial magistrate who was known for his persecution of the Quakers. William's son, John Hathorne, was one of the judges who presided over the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692.
Hawthorne's father, a ship captain, died in Surinam when Hawthorne was 4 years old. His family went to live with his mother's relatives, who recognized his literary talent when he was very young and sent him to private school, and then on to Bowdoin College, in Maine. There, among his classmates were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future president of the U.S., Franklin Pierce.
In 1825, after his graduation, Hawthorne went home to live with his mother's family, retreated to an attic room, and wrote for the next 12 years.
In 1836, he moved to Boston and edited The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, at a salary of $500 per year. The following year, 1837, the publication of Twice-Told Tales established his literary reputation (Poe's review of this book was glowing), but didn't make him a wealthy man.
In 1839, he began a political appointment as an officer in the Boston Custom House. The same year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He lived at the Brook Farm commune for seven months, but left there: the communal life did not suit his personality, and there was too much manual labor and not enough time to write.
In 1842, he married Sophia and they settled in the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, where among his friend and neighbors were Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. There, he wrote Mosses From an Old Manse (1846). But he still needed a stable income, so he took another government position as surveyor in the Salem Custom House. When the new Whig Administration took over, he was fired, along with a number of other Democrats.
Unemployed and with a family to support, he began work on his next novel, The Scarlet Letter. It was published in 1850, and his literary reputation was instantly secured. The popularity of the book made his financial position more stable, as well, and he moved his family to Lenox, Massachusetts, where his new neighbor and friend was Herman Melville, who was just finishing his own masterpiece, Moby-Dick (1851).
In 1851, Hawthorne published another novel, The House of the Seven Gables, and a volume of short stories, The Snow-Image. In 1852, he published The Blithedale Romance, several children's books, and The Life of Franklin Pierce, a campaign biography for his old friend, who was running for president.
When Pierce was elected, he repaid his old friend by making him U.S. Consul to Liverpool, England. Hawthorne served in this post from 1853-1857. He peformed his duties conscientously and competently, but didn't particularly enjoy them. When that job ended, he travelled to Italy, where he and his wife and 3 children lived for the next two years. There, he became friends with Robert Browning, the poet, and began writing his last novel, The Marble Faun.
Hawthorne returned to the United States on June 27, 1860, and settled in Concord. While on a journey to the White Mountains with Franklin Pierce, he died in Plymouth, New Hampshire on May 19, 1864. He was buried on May 23, 1864, in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.
Certain themes recur in most of Hawthorne's work. One of these is a concern with the American past as it still affected his own generation (he was the one who added the "w" to "Hathorne"). Like the Transcendentalists, he affirmed the value of imagination and emotions and emphasized the perils of the intellect; yet he was not a Transcendentalist. He saw a narrow separation between good and evil, and was not at all certain that human nature was good. He writes over and over in his stories of hidden or visible "stains" which reveal an inner corruption. He hated the hypocrisy of hidden sin, but believed that every human heart held such secrets.
The Scarlet Letter measures the historical, religious, literary, and emotional distance between Puritan New England and Transcendentalist New England. It is the first American psychological novel, with its exploration of the conscience, guilt, awareness of sin, and the contradictory impulses of the heart. Its preface, "The Custom-House," introduces the themes of separation and contradiction: in it, we are given a narrator who is drawn to a belief in Transcendental goodness and hope, but is still caught in Puritan guilt and original sin. He struggles to balance his subjective imagination with the needs of the community and the "real" world.
The novel itself is filled with symbolism, but it is not allegorical or simple: the symbols allow for many interpretations.
Of the novel, Henry James wrote, "The publication of The Scarlet Letter was in the Unietd States a literary event of the first importance. The book was the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country. There was a consciousness of this in the welcome that was given it--a satisfaction in the idea of America having produced a novel that belonged to literature, and to the forefront of it...The best of it was that the thing was absolutely American; it belonged to the soil, to the air; it came out of the very heart of New England."
Melville
Herman Melville wrote one of the most important American novels, Moby-Dick, but at his death he was almost forgotten. The novel was rediscovered in the 1920s and began to gain more respect. After that, people began reading his other work with a more appreciative eye.
Herman Melville was born in New York in 1819, the third child of Allan Melville, a dealer in imported fabrics and perfumes. His mother, Marie Gansevoort, was the daughter of a prominent New York family. Melville's paternal grandfather, Thomas Melvill, took part in the Boston Tea Party. His maternal grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort, was the hero of the Saratoga campaign; his portrait was painted by Gilbert Stuart.
Melville's childhood was happy and secure. But in 1830, his father's business failed and the family moved to Albany. Unable to cope with his failure, Allan Melville broke down mentally and physically. He died in 1832, leaving his family in genteel poverty, dependent on Marie's family for financial support. Melville attended Albany Academy until 1834, when his family could no longer pay the bills. At age 12, he left school and went to work as a bank clerk. The work was boring and repetitive, and certainly influenced "Bartleby the Scrivener," which he wrote many years later. He later worked as a clerk in the family business, and then as a farm worker.
Bored and dissatisfied, he shipped out to Liverpool as a seaman on a merchant ship. When he returned 6 months later, he taught school for 3 years. But such a life was not for him: in 1841, he signed on for a 3-year whaling voyage on the Acushnet. He and a friend jumped ship in the Marquesas (now French Polynesia) and, while exploring the island, were taken prisoner by cannibals. They were rescued after several months and boarded an Australian whaler to Tahiti, then another whaler, Leviathan, to Honolulu. Melville enlisted in the Navy there and served on the frigate United States until he was mustered out of the Navy in 1844.
He went back home to his family in New York, where he began writing. His experiences provided the material for several novels and stories, among them Typee, Omoo, Mardi, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, and Billy Budd. His first two novels, Typee and Omoo, were critical and commercial successes. In 1847, he married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, of Boston, and they moved to New York, where he made his living as a writer. In 1849, he published Mardi and Redburn, and then travelled to London to arrange for the publication of White-Jacket.
In 1850, he moved his family to a farm outside Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where his neighbor was Nathaniel Hawthorne. His friendship with Hawthorne was inspirational to him as he was writing Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick was at first intended to be simply another seafaing tale, but as Melville wrote, it became much more: darker, more symbolic, more complex. Melville exhausted himself writing it, working day and night, not eating until 5 or 6 in the afternoon. But when he was finished, he was ebullient: he knew it was a masterpiece.
The critics and the public disagreed. It was published in 1851, and the reviews were at best lukewarm. Few copies were sold. Almost no one understood what he was trying to do.
This was discouraging, but he went on to write his next novel, Pierre; or the Ambiguities. This was an even more dismal failure than Moby-Dick had been. It was disheartening, but also financially a disaster. For the next three years, Melville kept money coming in by writing short stories and essays, but it wasn't enough to support the family, and he had to ask his father-in-law for help.
During this time, Melville wrote "Bartleby the Scrivener." It was published anonymously in two installments in 1853 in Putnam's Monthly Magazine and later collected in Piazza Tales (1856).
Melville's next novel, Israel Potter was not even reviewed in the United States. The Confidence Man (1857) earned almost nothing. From 1857-1860, Melville supported his family mostly on fees he made from lecturing. In 1863, he moved his family back to New York, and in 1866, he took a job as District Inspector of Customs. He was almost completely forgotten in literary circles by now. During the next 25 years, he published only a few poems.
In 1885, he and his wife came into inheritances, and he retired from his Customs job and began again to write. Five months before his death, on September 18, 1891, he completed Billy Budd. It wasn't published until 1924.
Billy Budd is a complex novel, and critics have spent reams of paper arguing over its interpretation. Throughout his career, Melville was fascinated by the presence of both good and evil in human beings, and in Billy Budd, he again creates characters that will explore this issue. "Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other?" Billy obviously represents goodness, and Claggart obviously represents evil. But Claggart is not one-dimensional; his evil has, as Joel Porte puts it, "a pathetic, even humanly poignant side." And Captain Vere is far more complicated than either of them, caught between good and evil.
If you'd like more information on any of the topics covered in this lecture, go to the Links page. Enjoy!
Some of the information in this lecture derives from:
1. Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury. From Puritanism to Postmodernism.
2. Kathryn Harrison, "Introduction to the Scarlet Letter" in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.Modern Library Classics, 2000.
3. Ed. Leland S. Person. The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. Norton Critical Edition.
4. Brenda Wineapple. Hawthorne: A Life.
5. John F. Gallagher, "Introduction" to The Short Novels of Herman Melville.
6. Andreas Teuber, "Herman Melville," http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/melvillebio.html
7. Andrew Delbanco. Herman Melville: His World and Work.
8. Daniel Hoffman, Form and Fable in American Fiction.
9. Ed. Richard Foster, Six American Novelists of the Nineteenth Century.
10. William C. Spengemann, The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 1789-1900.
11. Joel Porte, The Romance in America.
12. Henri Petter, The Early American Novel.
13. Carl Van Doren, The American Novel.
