Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) lived her life as an American in Paris, as was constantly aware of the impact that perspective had on her ability to write about American (from Europe) or Europe (as an American). She was born to a German-Jewish immigrant family in Pennsylvania, but lived many places before settling in France in 1903. She graduated from Harvard in the 1890s and went on to John Hopkins University’s medical school, but she left there within one month of completing her M.D. Stein was very close to her brother Leo, and the two even lived together in France, but he didn’t respect her work and was basically replaced in her life when she met Alice B. Toklas. Toklas would become Stein’s lifelong lover, confidante, companion, editor, and muse. The two women were part of a wide and cosmopolitan social circle, from Picasso onwards. Stein wrote critical theory and philosophy, as well as experimental poetry and prose. She was a mentor to Hemingway and many other expat Americans of the modern age. Her writing is a testament to her lifelong effort to show how the human mind perceives, orders, and reflects on the interwoven world of the animate and the inanimate. Most importantly, however, was Stein’s clear concept of what it meant to be a female writer of such renown in the male-dominated field of literature. From the Heath Anthology, which puts it far more eloquently than could I: “The attention given to her experiments in form and language during Stein’s life have long obscured her major contribution to our understanding of domesticity, female culture, myths about women, the social world in which women function, and what it means in the twentieth century to intentionally create art that is not patriarchal.”

In fact, the most striking thing about Tender Buttons: Objects (1914) is the obvious way Stein avoids a “masculine” linearity of focus. A does not follow B, either from sentence to sentence or within a single thought. The language is flowing and circular. It is intentionally non-phallic, not following a specific linear determination but instead winding through life experience and feeling. It evokes emotion at every turn, and speaks to female experiences. Does a callous harden, she asks, or soften, when women are allowed to join the workforce? Her words are sensual and intentionally of the body; they are rooted in felt experiences. She allows her wordplay to centre on the female reality of the time — customs and conventions of laundering, for example, become a place to frame a discussion of customs and convention in larger society, all cloaked under a supposedly female thing. Indeed, the whole purpose of Tender Buttons is to redefine words within a largely feminine context. Stein believed that the meaning of words had become muddied over time (much like Pound’s “diction” precept), and in this poem (prose-poem? i have no idea) she redefines overused words in terms of their experiential reality. For example, “A Purse” becomes a real and tangible object, specific and detailed, rather than a vague definition stretched over too many objects.

How about a word or two on the modernist poets, first? Centre ourselves, shall we? Pound was considered the spokesman of the Modernist movement and the thrust towards experimentation, as noted by his famous phrase, “Make it New!” He demanded the use of large ideas and specific details to show fresh observation and fresh thought. Many critics considered this to be a kind of deliberate obtuseness, but for the Modernists their movement was a serious argument against many features of modern life. Pound objected to what he called the “Victorian Slither,” a tendency to allow one’s comfortable and preset attitudes to lead attention away from what is most pressing or illusive. These tendencies were thought to be caused by the routines brought about through industrialization and urbanization. The artist, then, was the be the “antenna of the race,” separated by mass society — as a result, much of the experimentation was linked to the experience of alienation, and the two states together formed the core of Modernism.

Modernism = experimentation + alienation — I like that! Cole’s Notes for Modernism!

Artists at the time argues that their mental and psychological states could not be recorded using traditional forms developed for “normal” writers. In fact, as a group Modernists opposed anything considered “the norm.” Some did this antisocially, like H.D. and e.e. cummings, and others were able to be literary modernists while retaining their social respectability, like William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. Society itself, for these artists, was the alienating structure, creating a pervasive and invisible unhappiness for everyone. The Modernists used irony as a device to unsettle the foundation of claim and statement, and to try and start a new perspective on the world they lived in.

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was born in Idaho and raised in Pennsylvania. He decided to be a poet at 15, and determined at that age that by 30 he would know more about poetry than any living man. He received his B.A. in 1905 and his M.A. in 1906, and then taught until 1908 when he was summarily fired from his college for harboring a “lady-gent impersonator” in his chambers. At this point, Pound fled for Europe, never to voluntarily return.

Pound became the central literary figure of London and sought to cause a renaissance of art in England and America. In 1913, he announced the Modernist manifesto — their poetics would emphasize precision, concision, and metrical freedom. WWI marked a turn away from his earlier aestheticism and Pound began to see an importance for “the poem including history.” Here we see a political Pound entering his poetry — this was the Pound who blamed war and malaise on bankers, munition makers, usury… and Jews. He kind of gets you going — Yeah! I’m mad at the bank!! Damn those gun manufacturers and their killing machines!!! Usury is really bad — just check out my student loans!!!! And the Je– wait, what?! So, yeah. Anti-semite. It’s not surprising, we all knew it about Pound, but it is unsettling to read. Anyway, Pound believed in a relationship between good government, good art, and good life, which is why (twisted as his values were) he fought for the political in his poetry. And in his life. From 1941 to 1943, Pound gave pro-fascist radio addresses from Italy to the English-speaking world. He was arrested for in in 1945 and incarcerated for six months in Pisa before being extradited to the US. In America, Pound was found mentally unfit to stand trial (possibly because had just spent six months in a wire cage) and found himself committed to a mental hospital for 12 years. (He was finally released due to the efforts of Frost and Hemmingway, among others.)

In 1949, in the midst of all the chaos, Pound was awarded the Bolingen Prize by the US Congress, thus beginning the neverending Pound debate: can you love the poetry and hate the politics, can you love the poetry and ignore the politics, or is it a package deal situation? Pound himself believed he was a package — he criticized the “mere aesthete” who didn’t understand his social/regenerative role in society (where does the Jew-hating come in? I’m confused) — it is this “aesthetic Pound,” however, who has survived, as people try to ignore the unsavoury in favour of his poetry. Studies today seem to split Pound in half: he is either a celebrated poet OR a condemned politician, and the two halves are very rarely woven together. Pound, though, was of America, and his fascist views were rooted in a kind of American idealism. The American Dream seems to be internalized in two ways: immigrants hear that anything is possible, look at their own lot, and determine that they have failed in some way; native-born Americans hear that anything is possible, look at their own lot, and determine that someone must be standing in their way. For Pound, it was Jews. For today’s bible-belt Christian, it’s atheists. For everyone else, it’s those immigrants who are blaming themselves.

(Neither group is realistic, obviously. Blogger disclaimer: I’m not even American, so if you hate me you at least can’t blame me for getting in the way of your dreams.)

On to the poetry.

In “Salutation the Second,” Pound shows his powers of encouragement to a new generation of poets of his new school, pushing them to challenge the literary establishment in all its guises (like John Strachey at “The Spectator,” for instance). The poem is an encouragement to confront people with the Modernist aesthetic — especially “practical people” — and “say that you do no work / and that you will live forever.” In short, shake up expectations and challenge people to think. Make it new. Likewise, in “A Pact,” we see Pound making an agreement with the image of Walt Whitman: it is an acceptance of the importance of history to poetry and an acknowledgment of Whitman’s role in founding an American poetic identity. Pound may not like his ethos, but he owes him for tilling the ground into which he plants his new ideas. Pound and Whitman share “sap” and “root,” and the poem ends with Pound saying that he will carve what Whitman has created.

“Retrospect” lays out the rules of Modernism that I mentioned earlier. They are threefold: (1) “direct treatment” of subject matter, (2) precise diction, and (3) not relying on traditional metre, but instead an internal musicality. The new method, Pound tells us, is not flawless, but instead represents a much-needed ploughing of the field. Whitman tilled the ground, a bunch of crappy poets planted junk, and the Modernists are here to plough everything under and Make It New. He cautions readers to take criticism as a point of departure, rather than a prescription of how to read a book. He explains what “imagism” is (sort of) by saying that an image presents an intellectual/emotional complex in an instant of time — it is better, then, to create one single image in a career than to produce voluminous works. He interestingly cautions that we should ignore critics who are not themselves great writers. Hear that? It’s the sound of dozens of you taking Pound’s advice and clicking over to YouTube to see a guy get kicked in the groin.

My favourite of Pound’s works is “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (Life and Contacts).” This was Pound’s farewell to his aesthete self and his movement towards the more politicized poet I was talking about earlier (who we see in the cantos). In Mauberly, he illustrates how the times have become faster and more material, but he is full of ambivalence about these changes. For example, in discussing freedom he points out how we are free of Pisistratus, who was a tyrant… but he was also an art-patron. So we are left with freedom at the expense of the arts, which Pound obviously values. He references the waste of WWI (and echos Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” quite beautifully) fought over “old men’s lies” and resulting in “wastage as never before,” all to prop up “a botched civilization.” He talks about being told to accept literature for what it is and his reforms falling on deaf ears. “Mauberly” becomes his farewell to that audience as he moved away to make the changes he so needed to see and to fight for his own twisted political ideals in the Cantos. “Mauberly,” like all of Pound, demands a literate and literary audience, and sometimes it feels more directly written for his own crowd than for an audience of outsiders as it requires such a massive knowledge of that circle in order to wade through it. In so doing, Pound forces the emergence of a community (those who get him) and an enemy (those who don’t), and the audience sort of self-defines whether they will move to the Cantos, or whether they are members of the deaf masses.

I’m at 1500 words with that alone, and would prefer to leave the Cantos for another day (another life?), but I will briefly discuss two of them. “Canto XLV” is where we get uber-political, blaming the difficulties of the world upon usury and detailing the woes caused by it and the artistry created where usury had been outlawed (ie. by the Catholic Church). He notes that usury is against nature, and causes death, and forces man to commit sin. (I feel a compelling urge to tack this Canto to the window of a Money Mart.) In later life, interestingly, Pound revised his thoughts on usury and blamed instead avarice. Interesting because “usury” blames the lender and the mechanism of the loan, but “avarice” could blame either side — the greedy interest-rate setter, or the borrower of an inessential loan. Just sayin’. “Canto XX” is most interesting to me because it stands at the end of the Cantos and seems to be an apology from Pound — is it for his politics, or his poetry, or both? He seems to come to an almost Emersonian conclusion, suggesting that his writing was futile in the face of nature’s brilliance — that trying to “write paradise” was futile, when he could have just “let the winds speak,” because “that is paradise.” He asks the Gods and his friends to forgive him for his efforts.

And with that, I ask your forgiveness for my futile efforts to unravel Pound.

Robert Frost (1874-1963) had a persona as a New England farmer-poet and a wise old man, but this was a deliberate construction; in reality, he was born in San Francisco, where he lived until he was 11 when he moved to industrial Massachusetts. He married sometime between 1892 and 1900, and during this time he bounced around a variety of careers (miller, teacher, student) before moving to a farm in New Hampshire purchased for him by his grandfather (who supported him financially by an annuity throughout his life). A part-time farmer, he taught from 1906-1912, eventually selling the farm in 1911. At this point he moved to England with his family and took up writing full-time. His focus and subject matter was already New England, but his first two books were published in London long before they appeared in America. Frost returned to America in 1915 and was hugely popular with the academy, at which point he started a career of lecturing and poet-in-residencing, winning the Pulitzer in 1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943. Many other honours followed — even a mountain! — and he presented himself as a stoic poet-patriarch. Biographers have since leveled that this covered a vain and cruel man whose ambitions caused much suffering. Frost also, it is said, battled depression and guilt over his sister’s mental illness, the deaths of his wife and daughter, and his son’s suicide.

Unlike his literary persona, Frost never suffered rural poverty (thanks, of course, to his grandfather), but he spent his career documenting his witnessing of it. He describes the rural culture as “a diminished thing,” but also recognized that isolation could be a positive thing, and as such he was ambivalent about advances like phones. Frost eschewed free verse, unlike his fellow modernists, and celebrated traditional rhymes and metres. He also enjoyed writing in the narrative form. Frost did, however, share the modernist respect for simple, unornate diction. The key achievement of his poetry was to combine colloquial speech with traditional verse. Frost was in may ways the intellectual heir to Emerson and Thoreau and assumed it was possible for one lone individual to question and work out a relationship to God and his existence in nature. However, his writing was not as romantic as Emerson’s nor as challenging to social norms as Thoreau’s. To Frost, the poet’s role is to provide a wisdom that might serve to stay confusion for a time.

In “Mending Wall,” the narrator, in a truly Thoreau-like manner, questions the need for walls — he notes that nature tries to break down the wall every spring. But he can’t shake the provincialism of his colleague in wall-mending, and the narrator questions the neighbour about the wall but never progresses. The neighbour is like a wall himself unwilling to be cracked by the narrator’s springlike new ideas. Formally I think the poem reflects its subject matter — the ideas don’t conform to the line breaks as in some of Frost’s poetry (like A Line-Storm Song), and the sentences seem to end more organically and less hemmed-in.

“The Fear” is particularly interesting because it is basically entirely in dialogue, which helps the suspense build through the narrative line of the poem. That we don’t have the help of a narrator to unravel the ending unsettles us, especially given the everyday nature of the scenario. The woman approaches the mysterious figure because of her fear, and so fear both drives her to confront what she dreads, but it also leads to her demise (if, at the end, what we witness is really a demise). Interesting.

Frost touches on the idea of the destructive nature of modernity in “The Oven-Bird.” He alludes to summer passing into fall, which he equates with “the” fall (as in the expulsion from the Garden of Eden). The suggestion is that this is the end of New England as Frost has known it. He refers to the “highway dust” that lies over what used to be green and lush is the summer that has just passed. The traditional ways of life have become “a diminished thing,” and the birds have given up singing as a result.

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is a classic, of course. The narrator uses the snowy woods as a metaphor for his own death. Though he think about the silence and peace of the end, he is tied to earth by the “promises” he has made and must keep and b the jingling of his horse. I have always loved the image of it not yet being time to sleep — there are things yet to be done, and they must be accomplished before we can seek that peace that seems so promising in our darkest moments.

Finally, in “Provide, Provide,” we have a poem that illustrates Frost’s disgust with celebrity (including his own, I wonder?) and shows how once beauty and youth are lost in an empty vessel, nothing remains. For those so empty, it becomes better to die young than to risk suffering the humiliation. Anything remaining, for such people, whether it be friends or companions or anything — it’s all been purchased. “Provide, Provide” becomes a caution against a material existence that seems to threatened mass society now. I also wonder if it doesn’t touch on much of Frost’s regrets regarding his own family and his own life in the spotlight.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was born and died in Concord, Massachusetts. Largely ignored by his own generation, he is now considered one of the most original thinkers and greatest prose writers of his period (a period he shared with other greats like Hawthorne and Emerson, who also laid some claim to Concord, Massachusetts — if Fredericton is Poet’s Corner of Canada, I think Concord should be Philosopher’s Corner of America). He went to Harvard and, in spite of financial difficulties, graduated in 1837. Harvard was where he honed his skills as a non-conformist, shirking honours and avoiding uninteresting subject matter while being disgusted by the fact of having to spend $5 for his diploma. As expected, he didn’t prepare for a profession, but dabbled in school teaching. In 1842 he was deeply affected by his brother’s death from lockjaw, followed by his father’s death from tuberculosis. In 1840 he decided to become a writer, but he intermittently supported himself through: lead pencil making, surveying, and gardening. (As a gardener, he worked for Emerson, and likely influenced Emerson’s views on the natural world.) He was a champion of the Abolitionist cause before it was politically popular, even in the North; as a result, he went to jail rather than paying the Poll Tax to a government which supported slavery. He was self-reliant and nonconformist, but accomplished this without being anti-social.

Walden (1854) emerged as the only book which garnered attention for Thoreau in his lifetime, and one of only two books he would ever see published. It details Thoreau’s 1845 experience of moving to Walden Pond, where he cultivated a small plot of land and built his own small home. His goal was to prove that a man doesn’t need to go beyond his own resources for sustenance and enjoyment. This became the best example of the American nature book.

The book starts with Thoreau outlining his project — a two year and two month stay at a rude cabin in the woods near Walden Pond). He explains the four necessities of human life, which he determines are food, shelter, clothing and fuel. The bulk of the text will discuss how he goes about providing himself with each item. He also discounts those luxuries that go beyond the four necessities and painstakingly records his expenditures (the cost of his entire sojourn coming to $25). While he celebrates living simply, he also criticizes those who believe that poverty equals moral superiority. The balance, for Thoreau, is not about level of wealth but rather self-sufficiency and independence and simply living.

Thoreau toys with the idea of buying a farm, but determines it to be better to not, because he moved to Walden specifically to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

In Walden, Thoreau discusses the importance of classic works of literature from antiquity and of reading them in their original languages. He believes that there is much to learn in all the literature of antiquity because it speaks fundamentally to the human condition. However, he isn’t elitist: he disregards formal education in favour of a community of learning, a kind of utopian future where everyone shares equally the responsible of educating himself and his fellow men. In imagining this future he bemoans the lack of sophistication in contemporary Concord, which is a judgement he bases on the popularity of light literature and travel novels — in short, he holds popular literature at fault. (So funny when you consider how much of popular fiction is now based on or refers to Thoreau — I mean, there’s a whole episode of Fraiser that riffs on Walden, for goodness sakes!) However, as important as the great books are, Thoreau cautions us against limiting ourselves by imagining that all the worthwhile knowledge of the world exists within books. Just as important as those works of antiquity are the lessons we can learn from listening to the natural world and taking in her teachings; Thoreau’s biggest lesson is perhaps the importance of balancing both sources of knowledge.

Thoreau has a complex relationship with his contemporary life. For example, he discusses the train as an image of cosmopolitanism, but also as an image of fear. He’s uncomfortable with the changes the train will bring to his quiet world and the way it contrasts with his desire to see people communing more thoughtfully with nature. It also contrasts with the importance to Thoreau of solitude. A man can find great companionship in the natural world and will find much there to occupy him, but he still stands apart from it because he has the capacity to find solitude in his work. True happiness comes from the company of enjoying the company of a solitary self. Solitude does not require a measure of space, incidentally, but it’s about access to the outside world; the student studying in the busy library is as solitary as the lone farmer, because he is solitary in his toil.

As important as solitude is to Thoreau’s experiment, he is not a hermit, and he entertains often. His means being small, however, he goes to great lengths to explain how not to feed your guests, asserting that it is up to us to change tradition to fit our own reality — just don’t mention food, and others will be too polite to ask. He justifies this somewhat selfish worldview buy asserting that “objects of charity aren’t guests.” He talks about a specific guest who he calls only “the Canadian,” a kind of other everyman who is spiritually dull and deaf to self-improvement, but Thoreau is attracted to him because he thinks for himself.

In an interesting side-observation, Thoreau notes that only children and women seem to like the woods; adult men, he says, claim to enjoy it but would always rather be somewhere else and can only comment on the length of time it takes them to get to Walden Pond.

He discusses his meager experiences as a farmer and outlines his balance sheet from time spent growing beans, which he suggests are not a particularly efficient crop. He believes that New England farmers blindly grow beans because they historically have and because they were taught to by the First Nations, not because it is the best crop. He tries to convince farmers of crop rotation and the importance of leaving food for the local animals so that they can help clean up the fields, but his suggestions fall upon deaf ears.

Thoreau outlines the most important aspects of village life for the people of Concord: the bar-room, the grocery, the post office, and the bank. He talks about gossip as the major pastime for the villagers and worries about its effect on people. He relates his experience, as I talked about in his biography, of being arrested for not paying his taxes as a protest to slavery. (He gets out after one night, incidentally.) This fight against supporting the mechanisms of slavery extends to his conversation with John Field, a poor Irish immigrant. John loves American because he has access to products like tea and coffee; Thoreau tries to explain that John should use none of these items because the taxes on them fund slavery. He tries to show John how to live simply and ethically, but John is too busy applying a failing Old World model to his New World reality. Thoreau is bothered by this kind of self-involvement and believes that Christians should govern themselves as instructs their faith and not be lazy in compliance; there are “heathens” around the world living with more principle than lazy Christians.

Thoreau spends a lot of time talking about the fact that he never needs to secure his home, because he possesses nothing worth stealing. He sees theft as being caused by luxury and suggests that if everyone lived simply as he does, there would be no property crimes. Instead of the material, Thoreau focuses on the natural world around him, especially Walden Pond and other local ponds. He bemoans the lack of appreciation we have for natural objects and points out that if something as beautiful as his beloved pond were solid and material, it would be stolen by slaves for royalty, but since it is liquid and of nature, we ignore it. He believes very strongly that all young men should learn to hunt because it’s only through close relation to the natural world than people learn to appreciate it.

Thoreau illustrates that he is never really alone in the woods by cataloguing the wide variety of animals, birds, and bugs with whom he shares space. Interestingly, he sees little difference between them and men, like when he witnesses the ants at war. He is amazed by how many animals feed in town yet man is blind to all of them — again, he begs us to be aware of the world around us. He likewise explores the winter companions at Walden Pond and their means of survival at length. He is proud of how tame the animals have become around him (for example, he views the sparrow landing on his shoulder as an epaulet). He is never romantic in his tales, however — the animals are not friends but always clearly potential food. The line is very present and stops these accounts from becoming twee.

In discussing readying his home for winter, Thoreau admits that his friends believed he would freeze to death in the woods. The story of fire-making is another means for Thoreau to explain to us about the importance of scavenging (this time for wood) and the waste of contemporary man in not making use of such goods. Like the animals, fire becomes his trusted companion; he bemoans the invention of the stove because it blocks his view to his friend and removes the friendliness from the home.

Outlining the identities of people who used to live around Walden Pond but do no longer, Thoreau wonders why this start at a hamlet failed while Concord has been thriving. He hopes that his home will be the first settlement of a new community, and comments that it is better to start fresh than to be as the world’s major cities and build your civilization upon bones (not a lot of realization of the fact that he’s not the first settler — uh, Native peoples, Thoreau?).

There’s even a mini-commentary on globalization in the text. Thoreau details those who come to Walden Pond to harvest ice — the ice that is used in India comes from the same spring as does his well water. He is awed by the shrinking globe. He also points out that a bucket of water turns putrid in a matter of hours, but a slab of ice stays sweet forever.

At the end of the text, Thoreau catalogues his experiences and looks fondly upon his first year. He feels great accomplishment at the state of his land, his home, and the tameness of the local animals. He feels accomplished. He leaves us with many thoughts, not the least of which is the importance of realizing the breadth of the world and the options available. He leaves Walden Pond after two years ostensibly to chase other opportunities (though he died of tuberculosis in Concord… so yeah), and worries that when the rest of us build walls and fences we cut ourselves off from those opportunities. He begs us to travel, both in the world and within ourselves, in order to broaden our scope. He asks us to live modestly and, most importantly, begs readers to not think less of themselves because they live now and in America. Not everyone can be a scholar of antiquity, he reminds us. It is better to be a living dog than a dead lion.

Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) was a memoirist who was born into slavery in North Carolina. Using the pseudonym Linda Brent, Jacobs published her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1865), an account of her time in slavery and her eventual escape. The purpose behind writing her memoir was to show the North what horrors it was complicit to with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. She wanted to make the reality of slavery clear to Northerners who were willing to return slaves to Southern slaveholders as though the slaves were property, not people. (The Fugitive Slave Act compelled Northerners to turn in escaped slaves so that they could be returned to their plantations in the South.) It was lost to history until 1987, when a new edition found interest in African-American and feminist communities: for both communities, the bold way that Jacobs discussed the sexual exploitation faced by all female slaves was of groundbreaking importance. The basic story of the narrative is that to escape the lechery and sexual threats of her white master, she slept with another white man and bore him two children. He bought the children and guaranteed their freedom, but eventually had his own white children and reneged on his promise of emancipation. In the meantime, her constant fear of her master and mistress (who blamed Harriet for her husband’s sexual desire for her) lead Harriet to go into hiding for 7 years — all the time able to see, but not speak to, her children. Eventually her daughter is gifted into her father’s family and Harriet escapes to the north to see her daughter and find freedom (in 1842). With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, she lives in fear for years and is hunted by her master’s family until she is finally purchased and set free by a friend and employer. The tale ends with us conscious of the irony of a woman being bought and sold in a so-called Free State (Massachusetts).

Jacobs’ intended audience for her story was white, middle-class, Christian women. She used her graphic depictions of sexual harassment and assault to touch on the very issues that would have inflamed a sense of morality in such an audience. Furthermore, I think Jacobs believed that if Northern women knew what slave women went through, they would mobilize to change the law. Unfortunately, this was a risky choice for Jacobs — newspapers serializing her story felt that their readers should not be exposed to such content, and as a result her serializations were cut short.

The book makes overt reference to what Jacobs felt was most injust about slavery. Predominantly, she draws attention to the fact that the condition of slavery is legislated to follow the line of the mother, not the father. This allowed slave owners to essentially create more and more slaves by raping their female subjects and forcing their own unrecognized children into slavery. This ensured that female slaves had no protection or safety from their masters sexual advances, nor did they have any protection from angry mistresses seeking revenge. It also guaranteed that children would not be able to claim freedom regardless of the lot of their parent, and it ensured that half-siblings would be slaves to half-siblings based exclusively on skin colour. Jacobs is sickened by this, as the audience cannot help but be.

As readers, we are not shocked by the violence — this is common in slave narratives, and on a sick level it becomes the expected norm. But reading it from a woman’s point of view and being aware of a even deeper level of powerlessness and fear is startling and unsettling. This is what makes Jacobs’ narrative so compelling and unique amongst the available slave narratives.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born and died in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she spent the majority of her life. She was the daughter of a congressman and an educated but reclusive mother, from who she inherited a tendency towards introversion. Because of her mother’s reclusiveness, Dickinson inherited a considerable domestic responsibility from a very young age, and wrote that she often felt she did not have a mother. She was allowed the privacy to write and read by her family, but was not supported by them — her father, for example, would buy her books and then beg her not to fill her head with them. She was not religious and resisted the evangelical fervour of her time, believing instead in a heaven-on-earth found through communing with nature. Her refusal to profess a sense of sin got her kicked out of Mount Hollyoake College, but Dickinson felt she had a direct route to the infinite and traditional faith didn’t express her awe for nature.

Dickinson had difficulty with the gendered expectations of her, and she found much of polite society hollow. For this reason, she opted not to travel with her father. Women of her time were expected to devote themselves to family or church and not thought or art — it was against this description of womanhood that Dickinson felt compelled to rebel. She left her home very little, but was not disconnected from the world — she was a cosmopolitan and eclectic reader of news, periodicals, fiction, and poetry, and was especially enamoured with women writers of her own time.

She was devoted to her friendships and part of her anger with a Christian God came from her inability to swallow the idea that her pain of losing a friend was in some way part of God’s “plan.” Dickinson’s closest friend in life was her sister-in-law, Sarah, who received more of her writing than anyone else. Their relationship was, as near as scholarship can ascertain, not strictly platonic. Dickinson’s family went to great lengths to hide any evidence of her homosexual love for Susan (which seems, in some of the poems anyway, to have been reciprocated). The poetry that has survived is evidence of the love and passion between the two women, and Susan was the only person from whom Dickinson would accept creative advice.

Dickinson did not seek — and in fact, actively avoided, publication in her own lifetime. She requested that he papers be destroyed at her death, but her poems were found (over 1000 of them) and published in various editions to great acclaim. (I don’t know how I feel about this, incidentally. I’d hate to think of my final wishes being ignored.) Content-wise, her poetry was satiric and scornful of religion, but she aligns herself with Christ or a co-creative God. She disagreed with the idea of pain being earned (ie. from original sin) or something to be denied (ie. transcendentalism). She writes of pain unflinchingly as a means of contrasting the opinions of her time. Formally, she was interested in playing with and breaking standard conventions of grammar and poetic form. For instance, she was attracted to the dash, and used it heavily because she saw it as less final than the period. She experimented with form to develop a condensed and terse style that was both intimate and stark. She ignored conventions of word order, punctuation, and rhyme scheme because she wanted to open up language to be more indicative of a life in motion — to Dickinson, life didn’t rhyme, though it often came tantalizingly, painfully close.

In poem 14, we see a declaration of a sisterly love for Susan that was stifled by Austin Dickinson (Emily’s brother and Susan’s husband). 446 shows the depth of her sadness at her unfulfilled relationship with Susan. Likewise, in 518, Dickinson weeps for her “bride” who has returned to “him,” which seems to allude to Susan and Austin. 640 (as well as many other poems) highlights the pain and grief she felt at not being with the woman she loved. In 249, it’s clear that Dickinson seems to be seeking love (she is tossed upon a stormy night and wishes for the shelter of a lover who could shield her from the storm). In 288, we see some solace for Dickinson in friendship, and the importance of those relationships in protecting her anonymity in a frighteningly busy world becomes clear. (This nervousness about the world becomes clear in 441, where she describes her poems as a “letter to the world” — a world she was quite timid of in her life — as she asks people the “judge tenderly.” Likewise, in 299 Dickinson eschews material wealth.) I also kind of think that 1072 is about how she feels misaligned in heterosexual society, but I’m not certain. Most tragic of the love poems, though, is 1737, which really illustrates the pain caused to Dickinson by the closeting of her homosexuality. In it, she begs to be made a man and weeps over the date of Susan’s engagement to Austin. There is also a sense, in this poem, that there is some kind of reciprocity between them; interestingly, this was one of the many poems that Austin attempted to destroy after Emily’s death.

In 324, we see Dickinson’s love for the natural world. She celebrates the heavenly in nature, eschewing a Sunday in church to instead experience the birds of her orchard. She is listening directly to God and sees it as heaven on earth. 508 expresses her problems with baptism and the act of declaring a faith for a child (she asserts that she has “ceded” from it and seems to be newly baptized in nature). In 1461 we see her again questioning religion, asking why she should apologize to God for her sins when he made man and therefore gave man the capacity to sin — she calls this duplicitous, on God’s part. In 1545 she expresses a very modern point of view in suggesting that the condemnatory nature of the Christian bible diminishes its relevancy.

In 569, she writes of poets as capable of painting and understanding all, and in 593 she writes a kind of homage to Barrett Browning. It’s interesting to me that she places herself in the stable of great artists yet never sought publication in her own lifetime. I’ve read elsewhere that she had a great fear of rejection, but I guess there’s no way for us to know if that’s true. It’s clear from the poetry, though, that she saw herself as an artist and wished to be taken seriously. Her writing was important to her as an escape, as we see in 613 where she illustrates the strength of her imagination as an escape from her family’s lack of attention or understanding.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts to a prominent Puritan family (in fact, a member of his family had been a judge at the Salem Witch Trials). His father was a sea captain who died in 1808, leaving behind a widow who mourned in seclusion for the rest of her life. Under this dark influence, Hawthorne became somber and solitary seeking solace in literature. He graduated Bowdoin College in 1825, at which point he returned to Salem and began to write of the moral condition of New England. He published his first novel by vanity press in 1828, but attracted the attention of publisher S.G. Goodrich who went on to publish much of Hawthorne’s work in his magazine, The Token. Hawthorne was, throughout his career, preoccupied by the effects of Puritanism on the people and the psyche of New England — his perspective on this is generally pessimistic and negative. Despite it’s pious claims, he sees Puritanism as a decadent life that stood at the roots of the culture of his own time. Though his career also had stints of editorial work and biography writing, he is best known as the classic interpreter of the spiritual history of New England as well as a master of romantic fiction.

The Scarlet Letter (1850) is a novel about the tragic consequences of concealed guilt, set in Puritanical Boston in the mid-17th century. The story begins with a framing the explains that the author found a scarlet A and documents revealing the story — but it’s kind of a clumsy frame because it’s never recalled at the end and feels moderately unnecessary. Anyway, the story proper is about Hester Prynne, who is sent by her English scholar husband to head to Boston in advance of him and set up their home. She told him ahead of the marriage that she would marry him but did not love him, and he agreed to her condition. When he arrives in Boston two years later, he sees her being publicly shamed for having conceived and birthed a baby in the absence of her husband — and she will not name her lover. She is sentenced to wear a scarlet letter ‘A’ to signify that she is an adulteress and as a token of her sin, and as punishment for not naming the man. Her husband assumes the name of Robert Chillingworth and moves into the community, asking Hester to keep his identity secret and intending to find the identity of his wife’s paramour. He realizes that the father is the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, who has been secretly carving an A into his own chest as penance but incapable of confessing to his crimes. Through the novel, Hester grows to be a stronger woman, independent of the men who destroy themselves around her — Chillingworth is consumed by his desire for vengeance, and Dimmesdale by his concealed guilt. While Hester, the one the community has labelled a sinner, rises to become something more, the two respectable men of the community (a doctor and a reverend) fall apart as a result of their own sins of vengeance and omission (because Dimmesdale isn’t destroyed by the act of sleeping with Hester, but rather his inability to declare Pearl as his own child — he loves her and shows no regret for the action itself but rather for his own inability to overcome his pride and stand against the expectations of the community).

In the end, it isn’t sin that is at fault — it’s the internalizing of Puritanical values. That’s what Hawthorne is kicking against. He also seems to celebrate the movement away from these values amongst average Americans — the residents of Boston grow, over the years, to celebrate Hester for the strong woman she becomes, rather than seeing only the letter on her chest. That she survives the ordeal and that Pearl grows up to be an independent woman (and learns to love her mother in spite of her mother’s sin and fort he whole person that she is) is a hugely important message in the text and a testament to the fact that one shouldn’t be condemned for one’s sins, but rather judged for the person one becomes in the face of adversity. The community pillars of Chillingworth and Dimmesdale are both crushed under the pressure of puritanical expectation. Only Hester stands apart, on the edge of the community, and fosters an internal strength that carries the day.

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Mississippi and reared in St. Louis. He turned to writing as a child when a two-year paralysis left little else for him to turn his attention to. Williams began his career as a dramatist in 1939, at which point he moved to New Orleans and changed his name to Tennessee in honour of his abusive father’s home state. He was devoted to his sister, Rose, whose struggles with schizophrenia and failed lobotomy contributes to his troubles with alcoholism. He was also plagued by abuse and discrimination due to his somewhat overt life as a homosexual; his most important relationship was with Frank Merlo, from 1947 until Merlo’s death in 1963. Merlo tempered Williams’ depressions and helped him to live with the uncertainty of his own mental health in the wake of his sister. At the age of 71, Williams choked to death on a eye dropper lid, likely made possible by impaired gag function due to the amount of drugs and alcohol found in his hotel room. His brother maintained that he had been murdered.

His first success came with The Glass Menagerie in 1944. Williams’ plays are about the darkness of life and are truly Gothic in setting and situation, but the characters gain their strength from an ability to feel a full range of emotion in the face of such situations, rather than simply shrinking away from or denying such horrors. All of this, despite the violence that is a part of everyday life for all of Williams’ characters. This is true of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), a play set in a New Orleans slum. In Streetcar, Blanche Dubois comes to New Orleans to visit her sister, Stella Kowalski, and her brother-in-law, Stanley. Blanche has recently lost the family estate to bankruptcy and is troubled by the contrast between the life she and her sister shared in the past and the squalor she now sees. Over the play, we learn that Blanche’s prim ways are mere affectation; she had lost her school teacher’s job for having a sexual liaison with a seventeen-year-old boy, and had been bust around town before that. All of this is reactionary behaviour spurred on by Blanche’s heartbreak at the discovery of her husband’s homosexuality and his subsequent suicide. At the end of the play, Blanche is violently raped by Stanley while Stella is in the hospital giving birth; Stella’s choice not the believe her leads to Blanche’s commitment to a mental institution.

For me, what makes this play so disturbing is that none of the characters are capable of living in reality. Stella is beaten by Stanley and lives with his infidelities; like Eunice upstairs, it is better to be with a violent man than to be alone. Stella and Eunice both determine that Stella “can’t” believe Blanche — not that she doesn’t believe that Stanley raped Blanche, but that she must put such thoughts out of her mind and aside for the sake of her own survival. In so doing, Stella puts her own happiness — indeed, her own conception of reality — ahead of her sister’s. She must, then, believe that Blanche is unstable. Blanche is the most overt in her fantasy life, because she has built an elaborate web of lies to conceal her own tragic experiences. Like Stella, then, Blanche fantasizes out of self-preservation. The problem, though, is that because she has built so much upon lies, there is no chance of her being believed when she really needs it. The combination of her own delusions and those of her sister are what condemn her to her fate at the mental hospital.

But while all the criticism seems to focus on Stanley’s “realism,” he is as much consumed by the lying as everyone else. He has convinced himself that he lives in a happy home, that he provides for his wife and his child — in reality, he is abusive, and he is the wedge that has separated her from her sister. The ability to perpetrate a horrifically violent rape — and to pretend it never occurred — is indicative of his own ability to revise history as he sees fit. The sickness within this community is that revisionism, whether it’s Blanche rewriting the past, her husband trying to hide his homosexuality, or Stella believing she will live a happy life with Stanley. That, in the end, is the true tragedy of this play.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota before going on to Princeton in 1913, where he was a leader of theatrical and literary activities. He left due to academic problems and joined the army in 1917. He married Zelda in 1920, and their turbulent life together was a symbol of the jazz age, with the two becoming as large as the characters in his novels. He was popular in his day and his stories were in demand because they expressed the zeitgeist of the era. Under the surface, though, Zelda was struggling with what would eventually be diagnosed as schizophrenia (though it is perhaps thought that she was in reality suffering from mistreated obsessive-compulsive and bipolar disorders), and Scott with alcoholism. The combination led to financial difficulties and acute stress. Scott died of complications of alcoholism in 1940, and Zelda died in a fire in a mental institution 8 years later.

Tender in the Night (1934) draws heavily on the lives of the Fitzgeralds and the experiences of Zelda in the throws of her mental illness (Scott had been known to crib from her diaries uncredited… nice). The story revolves around a love triangle. Dick Diver is a psychiatrist who marries a beautiful and wealthy patient, Nicole. After about five years of marriage, the beautiful young actress Rosemary entered their lives. Dick’s increasing love for Rosemary clashes with his resentment at being both husband and caretaker, and he gives into his desire for Rosemary; Nicole, hurt and confused, returns the volley by taking up with a Frenchman. The two divorce, and at the end of the novel Dick fades off into obscurity. Much of the novel is semi-autobiographical. Dick is modeled after Scott himself (in fact, Hemingway famously critiqued Fitzgerald for creating a simple re-imagining of self), Nicole’s mental illness models Zelda’s, and Rosemary seems to reflect a beautiful young actress named Lois Moran who Scott took up with.

What troubles me about this novel is the way it paints Nicole’s illness as the impetus for Dick’s drinking and demise. Had Nicole only been healthy, the novel seems to say, they could have had a successful life. It denies the extent to which this was Dick’s choice; indeed, his own psychological desire to caretake is the impetus for this marriage. He desires Nicole only once he knows the horrors of her upbringing, her schizophrenic break having been caused by a rape perpetrated by her father. Interestingly, Dick seems to be attracted to women with inappropriate boundaries and incestuous parental relationships: Rosemary’s relationship with her mother could certainly never be describe as healthy. Though not sexual, it is emotionally incestuous, because Rosemary cannot bear the thought of loving anyone but her mother. Even by the end of the novel and after the passage of time, Rosemary claims to have only ever loved two people: Dick, and her mother. What attracts him to these women? I wonder to what extent his inability to pick “healthy” women is relevant to the state of the ex-patriot community as a whole?

I enjoyed this novel, but I feel like I don’t have a lot to say about it. I think perhaps my lack of background on Fitzgerald and the Jazz age may be a barrier to a deeper understanding of this text — but I can’t say 100% that that is true. This one needs a little more thinking.

I’ve already done a Melville bio, so I’m skipping it this time around. If you’re curious, you can check it out in this previous entry. However, some things are important In 1839, Melville took a job as a cabin boy for passage to Liverpool, which kindled a passion for the sea. In 1841, he sailed on a whaling ship called the Acushnet through the South Seas. This journey lasted 18 months and provided the (obnoxiously obsessive) details and factual basis for Moby Dick. (He eventually jumped ship, interestingly enough.)

In Moby Dick, we read the story of Ishmael, a disaffected youth who takes a job on a whaling ship in order to see the world and satisfy a need for adventure. He is hired upon the Pequod, captained by Captain Ahab, and he starts his world on the high seas. Once aboard, though, he and the other men discover that this isn’t an average whaling trip or an average whaling ship; they have all been hired not for a whale hunt, but for THE whale hunt — they will be hunting Moby Dick, the White Whale. Ahab is all-consumed by this quest, which is borne out of vengeance because Moby Dick had taken Ahab’s leg in their last encounter. The book is really about Ahab’s obsession and the way he neglects all other things; one man drowns, his favourite cabin boy is driven insane, he stops caring about the oil and other products salvaged from the whales, and when a vessel called the Rachel comes in search of aide (the Captain’s son is missing and requests the Pequod’s help in its quest), he rejects their appeal for assistance. In the end, they do find the whale, but the encounter with Moby Dick is too much for the Pequod and the ship is lost. Ishmael is the only survivor, and he is rescued (ironically enough) by the Rachel.

I find a couple of things interesting to note about the book, although on the whole I have to say that (a) I didn’t enjoy it and (b) I don’t think I really get it. With that out of the way, I can muse a little of some things of note. The first is the question of the overall message of the text; in my humble opinion, I believe the book to be about the danger of obsession and the ludicrousness of devoting yourself to only one single (potentially fleeting) thing. The question the reader is faced with while reading the crazy drive of Ahab is this: if he caught and killed Moby Dick, what would he do next? The unifocus leads him to risk the lives of, and eventually kill, his entire crew. There is no sense of admiration for the captain’s goal, but instead a fear of his madness. However, that there is fear for his obsession, and the negative light in which it is portrayed, is ironic to me given the obsessive quality of the novel’s narrative itself. Page after page of obsessive and minute detail is basically what this novel is made of; the plot is secondary to these details. So what is the purpose of that? I wonder if it doesn’t reinforce the notion of missing the forrest for the trees. The novel is so infuriating in its attention to detail. Are we meant to feel the frustration of the ship’s crew as our own frustration mounts as we read? Is this our own experience with the pain caused by obsession? That’s just one idea floating through my head, but here’s the thing — I need to have a reason for why this book is so goddamn painful, which suggests that I may be reaching too far. But it’s worth a wonder.

I also kind of think Moby Dick, in his horrific whiteness, makes reference perhaps to that horrible Puritan God of the earlier American literatures. Moby Dick’s ability to take lives and change futures, and the way in which the crew members’ fate is so wrapped up in the actions of him, point this out to me. Moreso, however, is the fact that Moby Dick remains unseen for so long, yet throughout it all he remains a terrifying force, again shaping the futures of everyone around him. Yet when Ahab asks the other ships, they either (a) deny knowledge, (b) suggest that Moby Dick does not exist, or (c) explain a fleeting vision of the whale. Ahab is the only one, it seems, able to tango with the whale. Does that place him as a Puritan follower, as the only real believer in Moby Dick? These are empty ramblings, in a way, but I think the impact of Melville’s colonial family history weighs on this story through the influence of Puritanism.

I also wonder how much the futile quest for Moby Dick is symbolic of the pointlessness of war. I only suggest this because this book was written in the immediately pre-Civil War era, and also the only crew member who vocally opposes the quest for Moby Dick is Starbuck, which we are told repeatedly through the text is a Quaker name (Quakers having been conscientious objectors throughout their history, and especially vocally in the lead-up to the Civil War).

Of course, all of this feels no little bit ludicrous given that Ishmael veritably begs us to not turn his story into a “hideous and intolerable allegory.” What is an English student to do when told not to read into something? Why, we dig harder and faster and deeper, of course. I kind of feel like Moby Dick is MY Moby Dick. I’ll never get to the bottom of it, and I’ll always wonder how much deeper I could have gotten into the guts of this text. But for now, I will accept that there is only so far I can get in my revising for a comprehensive exam, and put my experience with the white wale aside for now.

Call me Ishmael.