The American Renaissance: Key Figures and Literary Movements
An American Renaissance
In the 1830s and 1840s, the frontier of American society was quickly moving westward. Following in the path of Brackenridge and Cooper, writers were beginning to look at the western frontier for ideas for a literature about American life. The feeling was that the cultures of Massachusetts and Virginia ought to be the models of national culture. At this time, Boston and its neighboring towns and villages were filled with intellectual excitement and activity.
The Transcendentalists
Among the younger people, there was much talk about the “new spiritual era”. They wanted to explore the inner life. In the center of this activity were the Transcendentalists. They formed a movement of feelings and beliefs who rejected both the conservative Puritanism of their ancestors and the newer, liberal faith of Unitarianism. They tried to find the truth through feeling and intuition rather than through logic. The Transcendentalists found God everywhere, in man and in nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson founded the “Transcendental Club”. Its magazine, The Dial, was the true voice of their thoughts and feelings. For a time, the movement had an experimental community, the Brook Farm Institute. But this came to an end when the Transcendentalists divided into two groups: those interested in social reform, and those (like Emerson and Thoreau) who were more interested in the individual. Emerson published Nature, the clearest statement of Transcendentalist ideas. In it, he stated that man should not see nature merely as something to be used; that man’s relationship with nature transcends the idea of usefulness. He saw an important difference between understanding (judging only according to the senses) and reason. He began his career as a Unitarian minister and after he left, turned away from Christianity, he remained a kind of “preacher”: he was an enormously popular lecturer. First, he would “deposit” ideas in his journal and then he developed his lectures from the notes in his journal. Next, he rewrote them into essays. Self-Reliance is one of the most famous of these lecture/essays and is filled with memorable lines, familiar to most Americans. Equally important is Emerson’s essay The Over-Soul. The Over-Soul is “that unity…within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all things.” In his essay The Poet, Emerson describes the poet as the “complete man”. The poet frees us from old thoughts. Emerson felt that the form of a poem grows out of its thought. As much as Walt Whitman, Emerson helped open American poetry to new possibilities. His poetry is often criticized as being awkward and unmusical. He also introduced the nation to entirely new poetic material, such as the Hindu idea that we are always reborn into this world each time we die. This is the theme of his Brahma.
Henry David Thoreau
Another literary giant was Henry David Thoreau. He had been deeply influenced by reading Nature and he remained a pure Transcendentalist all his life. Emerson often remarked that the younger man’s ideas seemed like continuations of his own. Like Emerson, Thoreau created his lectures and books from notes in his carefully kept journal. But it was written in a far more lively style than Emerson’s. Emerson wrote about nature in the abstract. Thoreau’s works, however, are filled with details about plants, rivers and wildlife. He wrote about his experience in jail in his essay Civil Disobedience. The theme of this work is “that we should be men first and subjects afterward”. It is probably the best-known American essay outside the United States. In 1854, Thoreau wrote his world-famous Walden, about his stay in the pondside hut. On the surface, it speaks only of the practical side of living alone in the woods, of the plants, animals and insects one finds there, and of the changing seasons. But in fact, it is a completely Transcendentalist work. He rejects the things ordinary people desire in life. Instead, he emphasizes the search for true wisdom. Walden is a hopeful book, encouraging people to lead sincere, joyous lives. Thoreau’s poetry is far less important than Emerson’s. Around 1850, Thoreau became deeply interested in the abolitionist movement. He was an active member of a group which helped slaves escape to freedom.
Other Transcendentalists
There were other, less important Transcendentalist poets and writers. One of these was Amos Bronson Alcott, an important pioneer in American education and the author of Conversations with Children on the Gospels. His greatest success was with his own daughter, Louisa May Alcott, writer of Little Women. Margaret Fuller, editor of the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial, her Woman in the Nineteenth Century was a powerful call for equal rights for women. William Ellery Channing, his Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist is a masterpiece of American biography. George Ripley and Theodore Parker were Transcendentalist writers who tried to lead the movement toward social reform.
Beyond Transcendentalism: Critiques and Alternatives
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne also attacked the Transcendentalists for ignoring those doubts which “darken o’er the world”. His Celestial Railroad is an ironic short story about Christian. In his tale, Christian’s journey to the Celestial City (Heaven) is far simpler: the railroad takes him straight there. The railroad symbolizes the Transcendentalists’ failure to deal with such difficulties as doubt and sin in human life. Hawthorne’s stories usually have a strong allegorical quality.
Hawthorne always writes about man in society, rather than simply about man in nature. His characters are troubled by pride, envy, or the desire for revenge. This interest in the dark part of the human mind causes Hawthorne to create tales similar to those of the Gothic novelists. Loneliness and waste are the themes of his first novel, Fanshawe. With the publication of Twice-Told Tales, he showed his mastery of the short story. The Minister’s Black Veil contains themes of alienation and evil which run through his whole work. Mosses from an Old Manse, in which The Celestial Railroad appears, contains some of Hawthorne’s best and best-known tales. The Birthmark & Rappaccini’s Daughter are early examples of the ‘mad scientist‘ story in American fiction. Both tell of intellectual men who are ruined when they interfere with the sacred mysteries of life. Hawthorne’s best work usually has a strong feeling for the Puritan past of 17th century New England. This is the setting of The Scarlet Letter, considered his masterpiece. It is the study of the effects of the adultery of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, a Puritan minister. The theme of the novel is that it is useless to hide guilt in order to avoid punishment. Hester’s “A” seems to symbolize the sinfulness of all people. The Blithedale Romance is a criticism of the Transcendentalists’ Brook Farm community. While The House of the Seven Gables attacks the failure to correct past evils, this book attacks the mistakes of modern reformers.
Herman Melville
In his famous review of Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, Herman Melville wrote that man lives in a world divided into two warring parts: good against evil, God against Satan, the “head” against the “heart”. Melville has a tragic view of life: he seems to feel that the universe itself is working against human happiness and peace of mind. Melville’s stories are always more than simple sea adventures. In a sense, the voyages of his heroes are always searches for the truth. His first novel, Typee, was quite popular because of its realistic detail. Mardi was too abstract and difficult to be popular. In this novel, the sea voyage is no longer real, but allegorical.
Next, Melville wrote Redburn, about a young man’s first experiences as a sailor. Its theme, how people are drawn into evil, is a major theme in American literature. It is a deeply humanitarian novel, emphasizing that people do not belong to just one nation, but to all of humanity. In White-Jacket, Melville moves from allegory to symbolism. Writing these novels helped prepare Melville for Moby-Dick, perhaps the greatest novel of American literature. It is also clear that Moby-Dick, the great white whale, represents God or fate, although Melville gives the reader a great deal of factual information about whale-hunting in order to make the world of Moby-Dick seem real. Captain Ahab is torn between his humanity and his desire to destroy the white whale. These two sides, the light and the dark, fight each other in Ahab. The dark side wins. To Ahab, Moby-Dick is part of a “universal mystery” which he hates, because he cannot understand it. Unfortunately, the public didn’t like Moby-Dick. Melville’s next book, Pierre, was also not popular. After the failure of Pierre, Melville’s themes became more ambitious. His style became more humorous and conversational. But as we see in his short story, Bartleby the Scrivener, his philosophy never changed. In Billy Budd, Melville seems to be saying that the world has no place for pure goodness or pure evil.
Richard Henry Dana
Another novelist who wrote about the sea was Richard Henry Dana. His Two Years Before the Mast was written to show the public the hardships of the common sailor. Filled with humor, factual details and strong, fresh descriptions, it was a big influence on Melville when he wrote Redburn. He was also an active abolitionist.
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was yet another writer interested in psychology and the darker side of human nature. It is far more romantic in language and imagery. His MS. Found in a Bottle, shows how quickly Poe had mastered the art of the short story. The theme of this strange sea story was used in many later Poe stories: a lonely adventurer meets with physical and psychological horrors. Poe made important contributions to American literature in 3 areas: the short story, literary criticism, and poetry. His method was to put his characters into unusual situations. Next, he would carefully describe their feelings of terror or guilt. The greatest examples of this kind of story are The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat. The reader must use his imagination. The Fall of the House of Usher is the best known of Poe’s tales. It is a successful example of his theory that in short stories, ‘unity of effect is everything‘. The story’s setting and its symbols reveal the character of a hero. A crack in the house symbolizes the relationship between the adult twins, Roderick and Madeline Usher. Poe was also one of the creators of the modern detective story. Instead of examining characters and feelings these stories examine mysteries or problems. Examples include The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, The Purloined Letter and The Gold Bug. Except for the last of these, each of the stories has the same hero, the brilliant French detective Monsieur Dupin. This character is one of Poe’s finest creations. Poe’s stories are written in a simple, realistic style. Perhaps this is why they were more popular during his lifetime than his tales of horror. The interest of Poe’s poetry is in its sound, rather than its content. He constantly experimented with ways to make it musical, and defined poetry as “rhythmic creation of beauty.” Poe felt that the real goal of poetry is “pleasure, not truth”. But for him, “pleasure” did not mean happiness. Rather, a good poem creates in the reader a feeling of gentle sadness. In Ulalume, Poe mixes sadness with horror. Again, the sound is more important than the theme (conflict between physical and spiritual love). Poe’s literary criticism is also important. He wanted to help develop a national literature for the young country and felt that intelligent criticism was the key. He hated bad books and bad writing. His criticisms were usually accurate.