American Literature

1. American Literature Lecture Eight

2. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 - 1864)

3. Three important things in his life: • The study in Bowdoin College • The marriage with Sophia Peabody • The publication of The Scarlet Letter • His Works: • Four novels: • The Scarlet Letter (his masterpiece): highlights the Calvinistic obsession with morality, sexual repression, guilt and confession, and spiritual salvation. • The House of the Seven Gables: the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones and that evil will come out of evil though it may take many generations to happen. • The Blithedale Romance: experience of transcendentalists experiment. (criticism on egotistical, power-hungry social reformers) • The Marble Faun: evil educates. The achievement is possible only under the impact of and by engagement with evil. (the Puritan themes of sin , isolation, expiation, and salvation) • Two collections of short stories:

4. Twice-Told Tales • Mosses from an Old Manse • Evaluation to him: • He, the first great American novelist, is an extremely paradoxical figure. Except for Whitman he was the most democratic of all our great nineteenth century writers but he was also, in many of his views and his political affiliation, the most conservative. • In an age of ardent reformers he was certain that society could be changed only gradually. In a period of unbridled individualism he thought that the greatest threat to man’s happiness lay in his growing apart from his fellow men. In a time of increasing national power and prosperity, when both the small but important group of intellectuals and the great mass of practical men were altogether optimistic, he felt that somehow things were going wrong, that it was less and less possible for man to live throughout the whole range of his faculties and sensibilities. In his era not only the transcendentalists but even most conventional American Christians had virtually, if unconsciously, discarded the old Puritan belief in original sin and felt that man was perfectible.

5. Herman Melville (1819 - 1891)

6. Two Important Things in his life: • We should mention his marriage. In the history of American literature there were two authors had similar marriages. Melville and Scott Fitzgerald, both married above them and had to do hackwork（纯粹为糊口而写的东西，庸俗作品）for the money they needed to keep their wives in their extravagant style. • During the summer of 1890 Melville and Hawthorne met and became good friends. They shared similar ideas and opinions on most kinds of fields. • His Masterpiece: Moby Dick • It is an encyclopedia of everything, history, philosophy, religion, etc. • The main theme of it is about alienation between man and man, man and society, and man and nature. • This work also reveals the basic pattern of nineteenth century American life: loneliness and suicidal individualism in a self-styled democracy.

7. In this work Melville shows that Man in this universe lives a meaningless and futile life, meaningless because futile. Man can observe and even manipulate in a prudent way, but he cannot influence and overcome nature at its source. He must, ultimately, place himself at the mercy of nature. Once he attempts to seek power over it he is doomed. It show us the “the absurdity of man’s attempts to attribute meaning and value to a world in which these can have no ground or status.”（the main reason for Melville’s resurrection in the present century.） • Symbolism and ambiguity is the major characteristics of writing techniques. • Needless to speak, Melville has been on the pedestal ever since, because he spoke ahead of his time.