Evolution of American Literature: Themes and Movements
Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
The Corrupting Nature of Slavery: You must explain the bidirectional nature of the damage. The system physically destroys the enslaved person but morally corrupts and dehumanizes the white oppressor, stripping them of religion and empathy.
Bodily Autonomy and Motherhood: Jacobs exposes the specific suffering of the enslaved woman, including sexual abuse, the impossibility of protecting her children, and the clash with Victorian values of purity.
Literacy as Resistance: Mastering reading and writing is presented as a political act of rebellion to reclaim stolen identity and dignity.
Mary Rowlandson: The Narrative of Captivity
The Didactic Voice: Rowlandson writes to deliver a spiritual and theological lesson to her Puritan community, not for mere venting.
Providential View of Suffering: Captivity is a trial sent by God. Native Americans are depicted as “God’s scourge” to punish the colonists’ sins and force repentance.
Ambiguity: There is a tension between her horror toward the indigenous people and the necessity to cooperate with them (sewing, trading) to survive.
The Evolution of Female Non-Conformity
- Anne Bradstreet (17th Century): Represents the traditional foundation of colonial literature. She confines herself to the socially acceptable domestic sphere: love for her husband, caring for her children, and total submission to divine will.
- Margaret Fuller (19th Century): Intellectual awakening. She challenges restrictive patriarchal roles by demanding higher education as the tool for women to achieve freedom and spiritual self-reliance.
- Harriet Jacobs (19th Century): The fight for basic human rights. She exposes that enslaved women face a triple oppression of race, class, and gender, lacking protection for their motherhood or family structure.
- Gilman & Chopin (19th/20th Century): Radical break from the Victorian ideal of the “Angel in the House.” They question whether marriage and motherhood are compatible with a woman’s mental health and intellectual freedom.
Literary Movements: Realism and Modernism
Lost Generation (1920s): Expatriate intellectuals in Paris, broken by World War I. It deals with the existential emptiness of the wealthy and the collapse of values amidst lavish parties.
Dirty Realism (1980s): The ordinary working class in crisis. Extreme minimalism: sharp, direct, and unadorned prose. The narrator is cold and non-judgmental, focusing on characters surviving amidst alcoholism and isolation.
Confessional Poetry
During the 1950s and 1960s, a movement led by Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath broke away from Modernist impersonality by placing the autobiographical “I” at the center. It shatters taboos by openly discussing mental illness, trauma, and suicidal ideation.
Ezra Pound and Washington Irving
Ezra Pound (Canto XLV): An attack on usury (financial capitalism), labeling it as a crime contra naturam. It argues that artificial commercialization destroys pure art and the natural fertility of the earth.
Washington Irving (Rip Van Winkle): Uses folklore to create a satire of the American Revolution. Irving questions the Enlightenment’s “myth of progress” and defends the individual’s desire to reject civic obligations and restrictive marriage to seek personal freedom.
John Cheever: The Swimmer
The protagonist, Neddy Merrill, uses the act of swimming through his suburban neighborhood’s pools as a psychological coping mechanism. This journey represents the absolute collapse of his social status and the painful disconnection between his alienated mind and the harsh reality of the bourgeois American Dream.
Edwards vs. Franklin: Faith and Reason
Jonathan Edwards (The Great Awakening): Defends strict, orthodox Calvinist Puritanism. His core thesis is that humanity is inherently corrupted by original sin and salvation depends entirely on the providential grace of an angry God.
Benjamin Franklin (The Enlightenment): Personifies the secular shift. He argues that human beings are capable of achieving moral perfection through self-discipline, education, and reason, establishing the pillars of the secular American Dream.
Williams vs. Miller: Psychological and Social Drama
Tennessee Williams: Focuses on emotional realism and the decline of the Old Southern aristocracy. His characters are fragile, neurotic individuals trapped in internal conflicts driven by repressed desire and past trauma.
Arthur Miller: Focuses on social realism. Through the tragedy of Willy Loman, Miller demonstrates the social collapse of the ordinary individual when trying to measure human worth exclusively through money and consumerism.