Roadside haiku! Putting a fresh twist on an old tradition, John Morse uses poetry as social commentary. For more on roadside haiku, check out Morse's web page here. Read more!

Summertime and the livin’ is easy. Bye everyone! I leave you with this year’s Grizzly@Adams Super Summer Classic: George and Ira Gershwin’s lullaby “Summertime,” from Porgy and Bess. To hear Billie Holiday sing this standard, click here. Ella Fitzgerald also has a fine version of the song. Amy Winehouse’s version is not quite in the same league, but still worth a listen. For an acid-rock version, try this one from Jim Morrison and the Doors. And for the 1959 film version, click here.

“Your daddy’s rich and your ma is good lookin.’” Now that’s poetry.

Previous Super Summer Classics include “Summersong” by the Decemberists and “Hot Fun in the Summertime” by Sly and the Family Stone. Read more!

American Lit II: As promised, here are your final exam questions. Remember, the exam is 1-2:50 p.m. Tuesday, May 5. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about the questions.

Kenneth Babcock: You have observed that “[o]ne of the main differences between The Age of Innocence and O Pioneers! is the difference in how the authors give women power. In O Pioneers!, Cather gives Alexandra power by making her a strong and smart individual…. [I]n The Age of Innocence, Wharton’s female character is powerful by deceit. May is subtle and very smart about getting the things that she wants. She plays Newland Archer for a fool. She even has May sarcastically tell Newland, “It did go off beautifully, didn’t it?”

Please continue what you’ve started here by comparing and contrasting May Archer and Alexandra Bergson in more detail, paying particular attention to how they do or do not exercise power. Then do the same for May Archer and Ellen Olenska. Finally, let us know what, if anything, you conclude from these comparisons.

Melissa Slemp: After pointing out that O Pioneers! and The Age of Innocence are both “stories of families who are struggling” and that both “involve romance on some level,” you claim that “The Age of Innocence is a better novel simply because it captures the conflict between men and women. It really shows the games that we play with one another and the lengths we will go to to find and receive love.”

I think you’re right that O Pioneers! does not turn on a “conflict between men and women.” But what is the central conflict driving Cather’s novel? And why is the conflict between men and women so special that you would cite it as the key to the superiority of The Age of Innocence?

Night Hawk: In one of your comments you wrote that you “like The Age of Innocence because it relates a little more to what I have seen in lives of people today. Many people today put on acts to please other people even though it isn’t really who they are. In O Pioneers! people are struggling to get what they want and to improve their lives, which is also what people do these days, but I haven’t noticed it as much as people putting on acts to please other people.”

Your comment got me thinking about the idea of authenticity. Consider Henry James’s characters Frederick Winterbourne (who seems to be one of those who “put on acts to please other people even though it isn’t really who they are”) and Daisy Miller, who is always just herself. It seems to me that Daisy Miller, at least in this one respect, is like Alexandra Bergson. Then there’s Alice Walker’s character Dee Johnson, aka Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo, from “Everyday Use,” who seems about as fake as they come. And then there’s the (authentic) Gracie Mae Still and the (inauthentic) Traynor or “1955.”

Given the frequency of this type of character pairing — authentic vs. inauthentic — in American literature, and given the current popularity of expressions like “Keep it real,” I’m thinking maybe Americans are obsessed with authenticity. But is authenticity even possible in America today? Is anyone truly authentic any more? What is authenticity, anyway?

Jerry Montoya: You wrote that “[o]verall Wharton's novel is not as great as O Pioneers!” Fair enough. You go on to note that Newland Archer and Alexandra Bergson “both seem to be thrust into a life that they didn't choose for themselves.” But hey, aren’t we all? You add, “the main characters share a longing they have to be more intimate with the people they truly love.” Again, don’t we all?

It’s the first of these two ideas — the idea that we find ourselves thrown into circumstances we didn’t choose — that I want you to explore in your answer. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger uses the term thrownness to describe something like what you’re talking about. Read up a bit on “thrownness,” explain the concept to the class, and then let us know how you think it might help us understand some of the more memorable characters we’ve encountered this semester.

Lifeguard: You’ve written that Roxana of Pudd’nhead Wilson “is truly an interesting character. She seems so real…. I really felt for her. I [was] always wondering what and how she will come back into each setting.” I think you’re onto something important here — namely, the way our personal investment in Roxana carries us through the story. We don’t care all that much whether Tom is brought to justice for his crimes. We don’t much care what becomes of the Italians or whether the townspeople ever understand the true intelligence ov Dave Wilson. We care about what happens to Roxana. Without her, Pudd’nhead Wilson is just a clever satire. Whatever power the novel has is almost all due to her.

Would you agree? If so, do you think the novel is weakened by the fact that the ending has so little to do with Roxana? Explain.

Jonathan Andujar: I liked your observation that, despite their many differences, Beyonce and Roxanna have at least one thing in common, namely the way they both wind up “commanding the attention of the white men in the audience.” There is, of course, a long and tortured history of, shall we say, problematic relations between white men and black women. What is suggested about that history and those relations by some of the other works we’ve read this semester?

Erin Throckmorton: In one comment you wrote that Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Roxana is “the best part of the book. Very strong and you have to admire her indeed!” I would say much the same about Aunt Rachel in “A True Story.” Please compare and contrast these two memorable characters, and let us know what, if anything, you conclude from these comparisons.

Diedre Mark: In a comment about Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California,” you wrote that “Ginsberg is asking America where she is going and asking Whitman what he thinks of it all.” Okay, but why Whitman? What’s the significance of the fact that Ginsberg appeals to Walt Whitman in this poem rather than, say, Henry David Thoreau or Benjamin Franklin?

James Williams: In your essay on James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” you noted one critic’s claim that the story is a “cautionary tale about the dangers of ‘hip culture’ and addiction.” In response you compare Sonny’s heroin addiction to “a Cuban refugee making a raft out of empty soda cans and attempting to make it to Florida.” I understood you to be saying not that using heroin is good, but that Sonny’s heroin use tells us something good about him. It signifies the fierceness of his desire for something better than the ghetto offers him. As you put it, “It’s about paying whatever price is necessary to create light in a dark place.”

Yes: to create light in a dark place. Baldwin of course uses light and dark metaphorically throughout the story, right on up to the final paragraph, where we read that the nightclub patrons sit “[i]n the dark,” that Sonny sits “in the indigo light” of the stage, and that the drink the narrator has bought for his brother “glowed and shook above [Sonny’s] head.” What do you suppose Baldwin is trying to accomplish with this light/dark imagery? Read more!

American Lit II: In class today I argued that Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Jeremiah Wright’s “God damn America” sermon are jeremiads that can be understood as part of a literary-religious-cultural tradition extending back to ancient Israelite prophets like Hosea, Isaiah, and the Rev. Wright’s namesake, Jeremiah. The jeremiad, in the words of Mike Abrams, “attributed the calamities of Israel to its abandonment of the covenant with Jehovah and return to pagan idolatry” and “denounced with lurid and gloomy eloquence its religious and moral iniquities.” And isn’t that more or less what Ginsberg and Wright are doing — luridly denouncing their nation for its iniquities?

Here’s a sample of some biblical prophecy that doesn’t seem all that different from “Howl.” It’s from the Book of Hosea (4:11-14, from a Christian translation titled The Message):

Wine and whiskey leave my people in a stupor....

Drunk on sex, they can’t find their way home.*

They’ve replaced their God with their genitals....

Before you know it, your daughters are whores and the wives of your sons are sleeping around.

But I’m not going after your whoring daughters or the adulterous wives of your sons.

It’s the men who pick up the whores that I’m after, the men who worship at the holy whorehouses — a stupid people, ruined by whores!

Is Allen Ginsberg a 20th-century prophet? Is “Howl” a jeremiad?

*Bonus points if you recognized this line as similar in sentiment and effect to Steve Winwood’s line, “I’m wasted and I can’t find my way home,” from the song, “Can’t Find My Way Home.” Maybe Winwood is also a prophet. You can listen to him and Eric Clapton performing a version of this song here. And for a YouTube video of Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” which I believe shares some of the themes of “Howl,” click here. Read more!

American Lit II: Think for a moment about what’s been happening during the years marked out by the composition of “Circumstance” (1860), “A White Heron” (1886), “South of the Slot” (1909), and “The Bloody Sire” (1941). Think of Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. Think of the record-breaking, industrial-scale lethality of the Civil War. Think of the decline (though not the disappearance) of romanticism and the rise of literary realism and naturalism, and then of modernism, with its fixation on human alienation from nature and the “natural” self. Think of the German philosopher Nietzche’s pronouncement that God is dead. Think of the devastating Belgian “rape of the Congo” and of World War I, the “war to end all wars” that made the American Civil War look like a game of checkers.

In this time period science not only challenged traditional understandings of religion, it also made it possible for nature to bear completely new meanings and be put to completely new literary and ideological uses. History, meanwhile, in its stubborn, plodding way, continued to pose new and increasingly vexatious questions about human nature and human potential. And through it all, writers like Spofford, Bierce, Jewett, London, and Jeffers continued to do their writerly duty and try to make art out of it all, and maybe even help us readers make sense of it all.

In “Circumstance” and “A White Heron,” Harriet Spofford and Sarah Orne Jewett rewrite the biblical story of the Fall, each in their own way and each toward radically different ends. Sylvia, the poor little country child in “A White Heron,” resists the temptation of the satanic hunter and does not seem to fall at all, though the story ends with the brooding sense that her innocence and her oneness with nature cannot last forever — a sad thought, beautifully expressed in Jewett’s marvelous prose, but hardly earth-shattering news. In Spofford’s story, the man with the gun is not the Satan but Adam. He seems to be a “type” or forerunner of the Christ who will later save all humanity, just as in the story he saves his wife.

Different as these two stories are, they both understand the violence that an expanding nation inevitably does to nature. They are both in some way informed by the romantic conception of nature as a site of redemption and a source of value. And both stories hint at the conflict that results when a nation physically destroys the very thing — wild nature — from which it draws so much symbolic value. And, finally, they both attempt to do so while remaining within a traditional Christian imaginative framework, which is not the same thing as remaining “Christian” in a doctrinal sense.

Jack London and Robinson Jeffers have said goodbye to all that. Like Jewett, London continues to use nature — the “wild” nature of Buck in Call of the Wild and of Big Bill Totts in “South of the Slot” — to represent an essential self. By this time, however, that self can be reimagined in Darwinian terms as the gift of our evolutionary history, even as it remains a self from which we are alienated by civilized life. With London, as opposed to Spofford and Jewett, that alienation is no longer to be understood in the Christian framework as a “fall” from grace, reversible by the mysteriously transformative powers of the blood of the lamb. Now it’s merely a historical and sociological fact of modern life: civilization is alienating. If you don’t like being alienated, then do like Buck and Big Bill Totts and ditch civilization.

For Jeffers, the Darwinian understanding of nature likewise provides not only a scientific explanation of the origin of species but also a philosophical source and literary symbol of ultimate value. In “The Bloody Sire” Jeffers does not see the outbreak of World War II as a sign of fallen humanity’s sinfulness and depravity (much less as a sign of the approaching End Times). For Jeffers, war is a reminder that humankind remains immersed not in sin but in nature. We are not alienated from “nature” at all, says Jeffers. We remain as completely a part of it as always. We are as much bound up as ever in the violent processes of Darwinian natural selection that produced us as a species in the first place.

At first glance, Jeffers and Spofford would seem to be as different as Johnny Rotten and Jars of Clay. Then again, maybe not. I think it’s possible to read “Circumstance” as the story of a young woman who only thinks she is part of the grand unfolding of some divine plan — of a cosmic plan that conveniently enough seems to center upon her own nation and her own family and her own self. She might think this, but her “circumstances” remind us all too vividly of what she really is: just part of the food chain, a bit of fresh meat that can fuel the metabolism of a big cat, just another animal, albeit an animal that has evolved enough self-awareness to be able to regret the fact that it is about to die. In biological terms, our heroine is reminded that perhaps she is just a bit player in the ongoing and utterly aimless and amoral drama of the survival of the fittest. In political terms, she is reminded that she is merely a cog in a vast (and utterly immoral) imperial machine that lets neither cougars nor Indians stand in its way.

In other words, maybe “Circumstance” is as bleakly Darwinian as “The Bloody Sire.” If we pay attention once again to the story’s religious symbolism and see the young pioneers as Adam and Eve, we can ask ourselves, Who is the little “babe” the man carries in his arms? We all know the answer: “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain.” In the Book of Genesis, it is Adam and Eve, those gentle vegetarians, who have “all the world before them” as they leave Eden and initiate the Bible’s mythic human history.

In Spofford’s Americanized revision of that story, it is not just Adam and Eve, but Adam and Eve and Cain, the first murderer, baptized in the violence of an already-fallen world, who have all the New World before them, and who initiate a mythic American history. The baby symbolizes the American future, and because the baby is Cain, it looks like that future is going to be murder. And the murderers are not mountain lions and Indians (who of course are engaged not in murder but in self-preservation and homeland security, respectively). The murderers, the American pioneers, are the progeny not of Seth but of Cain.

At the end of Spofford’s story the mountain lion is dead, but the violent American future symbolized by the baby survives, the world all before it, where to choose. I’m not suggesting Spofford foresaw the specifics of that future. Writing in 1860, she might not have foreseen the final Native American body count, nor the millions of that child’s descendants would kill in the Philippines and Central America and Vietnam and Cambodia and Iraq, but somewhere in the back of her mind, lurking behind the frontier mythology, she seems to have divined the truth of her nation’s general modus operandi.

This is not to say Spofford was not sincerely religious. Far from it. The archetypal pattern is right there in her Bible: after Adam and Eve comes Cain, who unwittingly arouses God’s ire by killing his own brother, and a millennium or so after Cain comes Joshua, who quite knowingly earns God’s praise by slaughtering the Canaanites — by ethnically cleansing the Promised Land to receive God’s Own Nation. Like most other Americans, on some deep level Spofford understood the pattern inherent in both her religion and her national experience, and (perhaps on an even more deeply repressed level) she understood the terrible implications of that pattern and wrote them into the fabric of her story. In doing so she produced something that expressed far more truth than she consciously intended. Art can be like that.

Now let’s contrast Spofford to Jeffers. We’ve already seen how they might be read as similarly bleak in their casual acceptance of violence. But how, in terms of theme and worldview, do they differ? In “Circumstance,” the evil aspect of nature is represented by the mountain lion and the evil aspect of humankind by Native Americans. Both cougars and Indians, in turn, are seen as manifestations of Satan: the cougar is repeatedly called an “Indian Devil,” and the Indian raiding party leaves behind it the “work of their accomplished hatred and one subtle footprint in the snow.” (For nineteenth-century American readers familiar with Milton’s Paradise Lost, both the hatred and the subtlety would conjure up an image of Satan.)

By attributing both natural violence and human violence to the devil, Spofford places both natural history and human history on an equal plane and folds them both into the cosmic history of Christianity. Jeffers, by contrast, having traded the Christian worldview for a Darwinian one, does not put them on the same plane. For him, human history is just a subset of natural history. He thus folds human history (wars and the like) into natural history (ongoing evolution-by-natural-selection) and leaves it at that. Beyond nature, there is nothing. But that’s okay, Jeffers seems to say, because nature itself is a wonderful source of values.

After all, it created us. Didn’t it? Read more!

American Lit II: I would argue that Cheyenne Autumn’s final paragraph draws on a conceit that has been quietly building throughout the story: that Little Wolf is a Cheyenne Moses, leading his people out of bondage to their Promised Land. Consider this passage from the Book of Deuteronomy, in which Moses, having led the Israelites out of Egypt, is permitted to look across the Jordan River and see the Promised Land — but not to enter it:

Then Moses climbed Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab to the top of Pisgah, across from Jericho. There the Lord showed him the whole land...all the land of Judah as far as the western sea, the Negev and the whole region from the Valley of Jericho, the City of Palms, as far as Zoar. Then the Lord said to him, “This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you will not cross over into it.” And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in Moab.... The Israelites grieved for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days, until the time of weeping and mourning was over. Now Joshua son of Nun was filled with the spirit of wisdom because Moses had laid his hands on him. So the Israelites listened to him and did what the Lord had commanded Moses. Since then, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, who did all those miraculous signs and wonders the Lord sent him to do in Egypt — to Pharaoh and to all his officials and to his whole land. For no one has ever shown the mighty power or performed the awesome deeds that Moses did in the sight of all Israel. (Deuteronomy 34:1-12, NIV)

Compare the above to the closing words of Cheyenne Autumn:

For twenty-five years Little Wolf lived so, the humblest of a reservation people. When he died in 1904, there were some who still remembered and still loved him. They propped his body up tall on a hill and piled stones around him, drawing them up by travois [a two-poled vehicle for dragging heavy loads] until he was covered in a great heap. There Little Wolf stood on a high place, his face turned to look over the homes of his followers and beyond them, down the Rosebud that flowed northward to the Yellowstone. (272)

Sandoz’s use of this Promised Land conceit strikes me as pointedly ironic, given that it was also used by American imperialism to justify the Cheyenne’s dispossession. She’s basically casting the Cheyenne as the Israelites and the Americans as the Egyptians.

Anyway, now that we’re done with Cheyenne Autumn, what are your thoughts? I’m especially interested in what you think about the book as “witness literature” and as a counterpoint to O Pioneers! Does Cheyenne Autumn succeed in fulfilling the moral obligation that we never forget what happened to the Cheyenne people? Does it help correct Cather’s romanticized and “white”-washed version of the frontier? Or what? Discuss. Read more!

American Lit II: Mari Sandoz’s Cheyenne Autumn can be read and evaluated as an example of the “literature of witness,” as a work whose primary purpose is to bear witness to an epochal tragedy. The usual example of such an event is the Shoah or Jewish Holocaust, though there are many others, including Native American genocide.*

The basic idea is that something important happened here, something so important it behooves us never to forget. The event simply must be recorded — and, unavoidably, interpreted. In this conception, a work qualifies as witness literature if it is a particular author’s attempt to give permanent shape to their own conception of the event and its meaning.

The psychology of thus bearing witness is complex. Part of it is the sense that to forget the tragedy is somehow to compound it, and thus that one has a strong ethical obligation to ensure its remembrance. Not just anyone, of course, but certainly anyone who knows of the event and has felt its power, who has the first-hand experience or archival access necessary to relate it accurately, who has the literary skill to do it justice, and who is otherwise is in a good position to bear witness to it.

One can easily imagine Mari Sandoz feeling herself in such a position and thus more or less obligated to tell the story of the Northern Cheyenne.

Sandoz, of course, is an individual. What about nations? Does a nation like the United States — created in large part through conquest — have a moral duty to support the witness of its own atrocities? (Anyone looking for an essay topic might consider comparing and contrasting the American cultural treatment of Native American conquest to the German handling of the Holocaust.)

* Whether this nation’s treatment of Native Americans should be considered “genocide” is a controversial question. I believe it should; others disagree. Some, for example, claim the label “genocide” is inaccurate because the nation’s intent was not generally to kill Indians simply because they were Indians. Compare to the Nazis, who killed Jews for no other reason than that they were Jews. America’s killing of Indians, while certainly immoral, was incidental to other aims and thus cannot be considered true genocide. I think this conception is too narrow. I argue that the term “genocide” should apply to any unjustified state action pursued in the full knowledge that it will lead to the widespread death of a particular group, even if the killing is not the primary aim. Read more!

American Lit II: Ambrose Bierce, aka “Bitter Bierce” and “The Wickedest Man in San Francisco,” was born in 1842 in Ohio, the son of poor farmers. When the Civil War began he enlisted in the Ninth Regiment of the Indiana Infantry, mapping out battlefields as a topographical engineer. He fought at Shiloh, rescued a wounded soldier in the Battle of Rich Mountain, and was wounded in the head during the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. In her headnote to the Ambrose Bierce selections in the Heath Anthology of American Literature, Cathy N. Davidson notes that the soldier Bierce rescued died later of his wounds, giving Bierce “his first taste of ambivalent heroism.”

In 1875 Bierce settled in San Francisco and began writing regularly for the San Francisco Examiner (one of the William Randolph Hearst papers). In both his journalism and his short stories he evinced the no-holds-barred social criticism that earned him the nickname “Bitter Bierce.” His cynicism and his economy of style are best expressed in the definitions that make up his satirical Devil’s Dictionary, which first appeared in 1906. Some samples:

Christian—One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.

Corporation—An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

Pray—To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Vote—The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

In 1913 Bierce went to Mexico, hoping to meet Pancho Villa and gain some insight into the Mexican Civil War. His last known letter is dated the day after Christmas in 1913; after that he was never heard from again. His only peer in American journalism was the equally cynical and even more brilliant H.L. Mencken (popularized as the character Hornbeck in the film Inherit the Wind).

Now for Twain. In “The Mark Twain They Didn’t Teach Us about in School” (International Socialist Review 10 [Winter 2000]: 61-65), Helen Scott reminds us that Twain was “one of the most forthright critics of American ruling-class ideology at the turn of the twentieth century,” a man whose “unpublished writings and speeches are overwhelmingly antiracist, anti-imperialist and revolutionary.” Wrote Twain:

I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.

Scott goes on to describe many of the other aspects of the Twain they don’t teach in school — Twain the union organizer and champion, the religious skeptic, the critic (and victim) of police harassment, the militia deserter, author of books now considered classics but once thought to be “only suitable for the slums,” and vigorous opponent of the Spanish-American War.

Here is Twain himself on his anti-imperialism:

[I used to be] a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ...Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves.

But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris [which ended the Spanish-American War], and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.

Twain wrote any number of sarcastic critiques of American and European militarism and imperialism (e.g., “The War Prayer”).

Scott does point out that Twain was not too much of a revolutionary to marry into money and invest in schemes he hoped would make him rich. We should consider whether Twain’s “reliance on such wealthy sponsors undermined his independence and compromised his social criticism.” But she concludes that Twain’s is nonetheless

a voice that should be remembered and celebrated: anti-imperialist and revolutionary — this is the Twain of our tradition. If Twain were alive today [Scott is writing in 2000], he would denounce the imperialists carving up Kosovo and killing Iraqis and Serbs in the name of freedom. He would say of Bill Clinton, “When his time comes, I’ll buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake!”

The literary establishment — the modern equivalent of those who scorned Twain — has claimed him for their own. It is up to us to keep alive the other Twain and to fight for the world he wanted. As Twain proposed in 1902, “Let us abolish policemen who carry clubs and revolvers, and put in a squad of poets armed to the teeth with poems on Spring and Love.”

Does America have anything like a Mark Twain or an Ambrose Bierce today? Do we need one? Read more!

American Lit II: Early in The Age of Innocence Ellen Olenska says, “I want to forget everything else, to become a complete American again” (41). Part of the irony here is that her New York social circle seems to consist of “complete Americans” only in the sense that they were all born in America. They don’t strike us as “American” in any more fundamental sense. If anything they venerate Europe so much they seem more European than the Europeans. They’re aristocratic instead of democratic. Rather than making their own way in the world (like, say, that ur-American, Benjamin Franklin) they live off of inherited wealth. They even go to the opera, for crissakes.

Deepening the irony is Newland Archer’s claim that as Ellen’s lawyer “his business would be to make her see Beaufort as he really was, with all he represented — and abhor it” (49). But wait. What if Beaufort — with his willingness to take risks, his rejection of petty social morés, and his bold marriage to the lower-caste Fanny Ring — in fact represents all the can-do independence, forthrightness, and freedom we typically think of as American? Then what Archer is vowing to do is to teach Ellen to abhor America itself.

What other ironies do you see in this novel? What would you say are its plot and theme? Read more!

American Lit II: Talk about family values — here’s Edith Wharton, in The Age of Innocence, on the farewell dinner Newland and May host for Ellen Olenska: “There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.” At this point, Newland doesn’t know the half of it.

But as the evening wears on he’s sure going to find out! Chapter 33 is dedicated to his gradual awakening to a number of unpleasant facts, among them just how completely he has underestimated his wife. And the reader, perhaps, begins to understand just how hard society makes it for one to be a truly free individual, even if one does happen to be a wealthy white male aristocrat living in the Sweet Land of Liberty.

By chapter’s end Newland will know that his family, conspiring to save May’s marriage by exiling that troublemaking countess, Ellen, has played him like a chump. The final image, before the novel fast-forwards 26 years, is of Newland looking up at May “with a sick stare” of realization while May looks down at him with “blue eyes wet with victory.”

Game over. Society 1, Individual 0.

As Newland sits down to dinner that evening he is aware that he is engaged in a “deadly silent game,” but at first he believes “the trumps were still in his hands.” What a dope! Why would he think such a thing? Because he’s the man of the house? You can easily imagine Wharton at her typewriter, tapping out this chapter and snickering about the way men think they’re in charge.

A few pages later, Wharton allows the light to begin to dawn over the benighted landscape of Newland’s understanding:

As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May’s canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators…. He guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears; he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything…. Archer felt like a prisoner in the centre of an armed camp.

Newland winds up disillusioned, trapped, forever dispossessed of his One True Love, and with his “inner devils” laughing at him. As May says, “It did go off beautifully, didn’t it?” Wharton’s humor is subtle, but it’s wicked.

Your assignment today is to compare and contrast The Age of Innocence and O Pioneers! Let’s see how many similarities we can find, and how many differences. (Don’t neglect the obvious — e.g., they’re both novels.) Bonus points if you indicate which novel you think is better and explain why.

P.S. The scene in Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of The Age of Innocence where May triumphs over Newland is so nice we had to watch it twice. If you’d like to watch it a third time, you’ll find it here. Read more!

American Lit II: O Pioneers! was published in 1913, back in the days when Sigmund Freud was all the rage among intellectuals like Willa Cather. What I’d like you to do today is to closely analyze the following passage, which closes Part III of the novel and sets the stage for the climactic events of Part IV:

She [Alexandra] had never been in love, she had never indulged in sentimental reveries. Even as a girl she had looked upon men as work-fellows. She had grown up in serious times.

There was one fancy indeed, which persisted through her girlhood. It most often came to her on Sunday mornings, the one day in the week when she lay late abed listening to the familiar morning sounds; the windmill singing in the brisk breeze, Emil whistling as he blacked his boots down by the kitchen door. Sometimes, as she lay thus luxuriously idle, her eyes closed, she used to have an illusion of being lifted up bodily and carried lightly by some one very strong. It was a man, certainly, who carried her, but he was like no man she knew; he was much larger and stronger and swifter, and he carried her as easily as if she were a sheaf of wheat. She never saw him, but, with eyes closed, she could feel that he was yellow like the sunlight, and there was the smell of ripe cornfields about him. She could feel him approach, bend over her and lift her, and then she could feel herself being carried swiftly off across the fields. After such a reverie she would rise hastily, angry with herself, and go down to the bath-house that was partitioned off the kitchen shed. There she would stand in a tin tub and prosecute her bath with vigor, finishing it by pouring buckets of cold well-water over her gleaming white body which no man on the Divide could have carried very far.

As she grew older, this fancy more often came to her when she was tired than when she was fresh and strong. Sometimes, after she had been in the open all day, overseeing the branding of the cattle or the loading of the pigs, she would come in chilled, take a concoction of spices and warm home-made wine, and go to bed with her body actually aching with fatigue. Then, just before she went to sleep, she had the old sensation of being lifted and carried by a strong being who took from her all her bodily weariness.

So, what’s up with that? Is Cather getting all Freudian on us here? All religious? Or what? Read more!

American Lit II: The first half of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! is set around 1883 and the second half around 1900. Because the novel thus spans the closing of the frontier in 1890, it’s hard to resist reading it through the lens provided by Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Here’s Turner on the impact of the frontier on the American character:

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance.... [T]o the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom — these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.

It was the frontier, Turner said, that more than anything else made America so democratic and its citizens so independent and so capable of self-government. It was the frontier that transformed the servile, dependent European personality into a new kind of self-sufficient, freedom-loving citizen that we recognize as specifically American. Which is all well and good, even if it is myth rather than history. What I want to know is this: Is Cather peddling essentially the same myth in O Pioneers?

P.S. Wondering where the novel’s title come from? Walt Whitman’s poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” from Leaves of Grass:

Pioneers! O Pioneers!

Come my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Colorado men are we,
From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,
From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental
blood intervein’d,
All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O resistless restless race!
O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all!
O I mourn and yet exult, I am rapt with love for all,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Raise the mighty mother mistress,
Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress,
(bend your heads all,)
Raise the fang’d and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon’d mistress,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

See my children, resolute children,
By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter,
Ages back in ghostly millions frowning there behind us urging,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

On and on the compact ranks,
With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill’d,
Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O to die advancing on!
Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come?
Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill’d.
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the pulses of the world,
Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat,
Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Life's involv’d and varied pageants,
All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work,
All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with their slaves,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the hapless silent lovers,
All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,
All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

I too with my soul and body,
We, a curious trio, picking, wandering on our way,
Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Lo, the darting bowling orb!
Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets,
All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

These are of us, they are with us,
All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind,
We to-day’s procession heading, we the route for travel clearing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you daughters of the West!
O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives!
Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Minstrels latent on the prairies!
(Shrouded bards of other lands, you may rest, you have done your work,)
Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Not for delectations sweet,
Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious,
Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Do the feasters gluttonous feast?
Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock’d and bolted doors?
Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Has the night descended?
Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged nodding
on our way?
Yet a passing hour I yield you in your tracks to pause oblivious,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Till with sound of trumpet,
Far, far off the daybreak call—hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind,
Swift! to the head of the army!—swift! spring to your places,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Read more!

American Lit II: I read Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” as a story of a young black woman’s attempt to find authenticity in the black separatism of the late 60s. In doing so she alienates herself from her “backward” Southern mother and sister, who, the story suggests, are more authentically black than Dee. This alienation is conveyed by Dee’s desire for her mother’s handcrafted items, such as a butter churn, dasher, and, above all, a pair of quilts. When Mama tells Dee the quilts have been promised to Maggie, Dee “gasped like a bee had stung her. ‘Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!’ she said. ‘She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use’” (2110).

Dee insists that she would hang the quilts on the wall. Instead of being genuinely authentic parts of an organic and deeply rooted black culture, they would be mere signifiers of authenticity to be seen by Dee’s faux-African acquaintances. A student at a prestigious northern university, Dee has reached a point where she doesn’t even recognize authenticity when she sees it. She prefers authenticity’s signifiers to authenticity itself.

The story thus raises a number of questions posed by modern and postmodern conceptions of authenticity and identity. Is there really such a thing as a truly “authentic” cultural authenticity? Or are there only signifiers of authenticity? Has identity become wholly a matter of signification (or “fashion”)? Has identity always been wholly a matter of signification? Has identity been commodified, that is, has it become a matter of signifiers that can be bought and sold in the marketplace?

In general, can we ever get past the signifiers to the reality they signify? Or is it signifiers “all the way down”?

More narrowly, how are we to understand the discourse of black authenticity? Was the black separatist movement a failure?

As for “1955,” Walker’s story of white America’s appropriation of black culture, I will simply refer you to the brilliant Gil Scott-Heron’s musical commentary, “Ain’t No New Thing.” (Scott-Heron’s most famous works are probably “Lady Day and John Coltrane” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”) Read more!

American Literature II. In “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin gives us a moving story that is at once a sketch of 1940s Harlem and a gospel, a retelling of the old story of human suffering and redemption. Why a “gospel”? Well, its antagonist is named “Sonny” (get it?) and its narrator-protagonist, with his tragic family history and his neglect of his suffering brother, is overwhelmed by sadness and guilt. That Baldwin has set out to use these materials to retell the core Christian story becomes more and more obvious as Sonny’s combo performs its rendition of “Am I Blue” in a seedy nightclub:

Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.

What makes the performance a kind of gospel, of course, is Baldwin’s description of the blues as “the tale of…how we may triumph,” a tale that is “the only light we’ve got in all this darkness,” that is, the only redemption from universal human misery. Though this tale is as old as humankind, it becomes in Baldwin’s hands a living gospel, one that takes on “another aspect in every country, and a new depth in every generation.”

Sonny is a Christ figure, and his suffering, transformed into musical expression, “filled the air with life, his life.” The narrator has presumably been exposed to the Sunday-school version of the Gospel, but he does not seem to truly understand it until he encounters it in Sonny’s musical version, that is, in a form organic to African American experience and expressed in a black idiom. Only then does the narrator say of Sonny, in language clearly meant to have a universal meaning, that “I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did” (1554).

“He could help us to be free if we would listen” — I get what that’s about, and I’m not even a Christian. It’s true that Baldwin’s Christ figure is a bit heretical. Many orthodox Christians would probably balk at the idea of a Christ who can “never be free” until humanity is free, and the more priggish among them would object to Baldwin’s portraying Christ as a nightclub performer and former heroin addict.

“Sonny’s Blues” can of course be read not only as I have done here but in many other ways as well — as a culturally and historically specific account of African American experience, as an account of the transmutation of suffering into art, as a critique of masculinity, even as an extended commentary on the old story of Cain and Abel, as Baldwin’s answer to the famous question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

It can also be read as part of a larger tradition. If you think of it as part of the African American literary tradition, you might want to compare it to “The Goophered Grapevine,” Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, “Heritage,” or (if you’ve read them already), Alice Walker’s “1955” and “Everyday Use.” If you think of it as part of the broader tradition of America literature, you might want to compare it to the works we’ve read by Twain or Ginsberg. If you think of it as part of the Christian literary tradition, or of the literary tradition as a whole, you could compare its treatment of suffering and redemption to that in any number of other works. If you’re into the Bible you might want to take a look at the Cain and Abel story and tell us how you think Baldwin used it as a basis for “Sonny’s Blues.”

Feel free to respond with your own interpretation or evaluation. Read more!

American Lit II: Today I’d like to ask you to focus on Chapter XVIII of Pudd’nhead Wilson. In this chapter the novel’s light tone turns deadly serious, as Roxana tells Tom of the abuse she suffers “down the river” (and reminds us that slavery is no laughing matter). There’s much to marvel at here, including Roxana’s incredible resourcefulness and courage, Tom’s utter depravity, and Twain’s skillful development of these two characters through the use of plotting and dialect.

For now I’d like you to reduce this chapter to three of its key structural elements — White Man, Black Woman, and Mississippi River — and then analyze this video of Beyonce performing John Fogerty’s brilliant song Proud Mary. Your job is to compare and contrast the video to Chapter XVIII of Pudd’nhead Wilson. (If you wish you may wait until after Friday’s class to respond.)
Read more!

American Lit II: Mark Twain has given us any number of memorable characters. One of my favorites is Roxana, who strikes me as by far the strongest personality in Puddn’head Wilson. She begins the book as a light-skinned slave woman (she is “1/16 black”) owned by Percy Northumberland Driscoll, who sets her free in 1845, just before he dies. After being freed Roxana leaves Dawson’s Landing to work as a chambermaid on a steamship, the Grand Mogul. While working on the steamboat she saves up $400, which she loses in a bank crash.

What do you think about Roxana so far? How do the details mentioned above (her working on a steamship and losing her life savings in a bank crash) shape our understanding of her? How else does Twain construct her as a character? (Ditto, if you wish, for the other characters.) Read more!

American Lit II: Here it is the second day of class and already we’re behind! My apologies for not getting to “A Supermarket in California” on Monday. I’ve reproduced the poem below. Feel free to comment on any aspect of it you wish. Allow me just to point out that this poem was published 101 years after Walt Whitman’s revolutionary and incredibly influential Leaves of Grass (1855), that it is saturated with Ginsberg’s gay sensibility, and that its ending evokes a sense of American decline. But what say you?

A Supermarket in California
By Allen Ginsberg (1956)

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! — and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?

(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)

Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Read more!