31.10.12
Classics of American Literature
Lecture 24-28
Discuss Whitman as democratic poet, in terms of both poetic practice and moral vision.
Whitman's early and late works are viewed together, the word "democracy" winds up naming a number of different and even contradictory ideas. It is all material and at the same time all spiritual. Democracy is the warrant nature gives for human freedom as well as the protocol it establishes for disciplined living. It both describes the universe as it actually is and prescribes the process that can make it so. Democracy is the very way we imagine our relations to one another and to the material and spiritual world in which we live. It is not a single aspect of a larger organic vision: it is the organism itself and the quality of relations that binds it together. 9 But in a sense, the two lines of argumentation converge on this point, for in the final analysis, the substance of Whitman's vision and the processes by which it develops are inextricable. I argue that the vision that finally crystallizes by the time he writes Democratic Vistas (1871) is more complex and dynamic than its original counterpart because it is grounded in a necessity to reconcile the tensions it incorporates. If on one level democracy implies antithetical ideas (say, an individual's complete freedom to think and decide for oneself and the right of the community to bind that individual to majoritarian will), then on a deeper level democracy must mean the process by which its many contradictions are adjudicated. The notion that democracy is more than a political process, that it is a social and cultural process as well, is an idea often associated with American pragmatic thinkers .
Still, for both Whitman and American political thought generally, the ideological elements of development are essentially the same: faith in radical, individualist freedom and belief in the possibilities of active, centralized governance.
Whitman was all too modern in 1855. Explain how modern he is today.
Walt Whitman is one of America's most celebrated poets. It has been well over one hundred years since his death, and yet his poems remain as intrusive, heart-felt, and provocative as they were when they first published over a century ago. While Whitman was in New Orleans, he witnessed the foul conditions of slavery. This experience would prove to be life changing for Whitman, for he began to write about the horrors and neglect of that human condition. At the same time, the Mexican War intruded upon Whitman's conscience. Oppression, dishonor, and compassion for the poor, and downtrodden were the backdrops which would become the central themes of Whitman's poetry. Whitman set out to write a collection of poetry that would express his interpretations; based on his experiences, opinions, and points of view of American democratic idealism.
In 1855 Whitman had the first edition published privately, for no respectable publisher would consider the work. The boldness of The Leaves of Grass, with it's hints of homosexuality, respect for prostitutes, opposition to the draft, compassion for slaves, and the religious references to Adam and Eve as being myths, were too much for the 19th century Americans to take seriously. Unfortunately, in our time we have this everything.
American Passages Unit 5
Comprehension Questions
Why did thousands of people go to California in the 1840s and 1850s?
During the 1840s and 1850s people read newspaper stories about a wonderful land in the Northwest called Oregon. Oregon was supposed to have mild weather and rich soil. Missionaries that had visited Oregon to bring Christianity to the Indians praised Oregon in letters they sent back east. Publications that painted enticing pictures of lush, available western lands put thousands on the trail. Overcrowded cities in the East caused others to flee westward.
The California Trail carried over 250,000 gold-seekers and farmers to the gold fields and rich farmlands of the Golden State during the 1840s and 1850s, the greatest mass migration in American history. The general route began at various jumping off points along the Missouri River and stretched to various points in California, Oregon, and the Sierra Nevada. The specific route that emigrants and forty-niners used depended on their starting point in Missouri, their final destination in California, the condition of their wagons and livestock, and yearly changes in water and forage along the different routes. The trail passes through the states of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Oregon, and California.
What different groups inhabited the American West in the nineteenth century?
The 19th century in America was a time of change, of development, and of war. There were many immigrants, and tension between the Northern and Southern states about many issues, one of them being slavery. There were also many different people groups inhabiting the country, among them the Native Americans, the African American slaves, the ‘White Americans’ and the immigrants, mainly Irish at that time.
What is “Manifest Destiny”? Who was excluded from the America that nineteenth-century proponents of Manifest Destiny envisioned?
Manifest Destiny was the belief widely held by Americans in the 19th century that the United States was destined to expand across the continent. The concept, born out of "a sense of mission to redeem the Old World", was enabled by "the potentialities of a new earth for building a new heaven".The phrase itself meant many different things to many different people.
Manifest destiny provided the dogma and tone for the largest acquisition of U.S. territory. It was used by Democrats in the 1840s to justify the war with Mexico and it was also used to acquire portions of Oregon from the British Empire. But Manifest Destiny always limped along because of its internal limitations and the issue of slavery, says Merk, and never became a national priority. By 1843 John Quincy Adams, a major supporter, had changed his mind and repudiated Manifest Destiny because it meant the expansion of slavery in Texas.
The legacy is a complex one. The belief in an American mission to promote and defend democracy throughout the world, as expounded by Abraham Lincoln and later by Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush, continues to have an influence on American political ideology.
Historian William E. Weeks has noted that three key themes were usually touched upon by advocates of Manifest Destiny: the virtue of the American people and their institutions; the mission to spread these institutions, thereby redeeming and remaking the world in the image of the United States.; and the destiny under God to do this work.
Context Questions
What was the difference between Ridge’s and Whitman’s views of the railroad and the people who worked on it? What role did the railroad play in American expansion?
In the United States, as in England, the first railroads, employing horse-drawn wagons, were used to haul minerals. The earliest such railroad, built from Quincy, Mass. to the Neponset River dates from 1826, and in the next year another was built in Pennsylvania from the coal mines in Carbon County to the Lehigh River.
In the United States a turnpike era and then a canal era had immediately preceded the coming of the railroads, which proved to be fast, direct, and reliable in all weather. After 1830 the railroads grew so quickly that within a decade their mileage surpassed that of the canals. While the stagecoach type of railroad car was giving way to the square type in the 1830s, many short-run railroads began to appear throughout the United States. The big cities on the Atlantic Coast became the nerve centers, while inland points were readily connected with one another.
Walter "Walt" Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. In February 1868 Poems of Walt Whitman was published in England thanks to the influence of William Michael Rossetti,[84] with minor changes that Whitman reluctantly approved.[85] The edition became popular in England, especially with endorsements from the highly respected writer Anne Gilchrist.[86] Another edition of Leaves of Grass was issued in 1871, the same year it was mistakenly reported that its author died in a railroad accident.[87] As Whitman's international fame increased, he remained at the attorney general's office until January 1872.
Burton, Clappe, and Ridge all write eloquently about the enormous economic and cultural changes shaping California at the end of the nineteenth century. Because they write from very different points of view--Ruiz de Burton as a Latina woman interested in the plight of displaced Latinos, Clappe as a white woman living in a Gold Rush boomtown, and Ridge as a Cherokee èmigrè to California who identifies with embattled Latinos--they supplement each other to create a rich picture of the diverse culture of California during the Gold Rush and railroad booms. Ridge's masculinist depiction of Joaquin Murieta as an outlaw hero makes an interesting contrast to Ruiz de Burton's explorations of powerful female characters and to Clappe's depiction of her own position as a woman in an environment dominated by male miners.
Why did Cooper use female body imagery to describe the American landscape? What role did women play in American expansion? How did this role conform to and deviate from nineteenth-century ideals of femininity and domesticity?
Of great thematic importance for Cooper is the contrast between the steep, forested eastern shore of the lake and its more gently sloped, settled western counterpart. This dichotomy is utilized consistently in all three novels to provide the viewer with access to experiences both picturesque and sublime. Cooper describes this contrast in vivid terms in The Pioneers; "There (eastern shore) the largest vessels could have lain, with their yards interlocked with the pines; while here (western shore) a scanty growth of rushes lifted their tops above the lake."
Other characteristics of the lake became sources of artistic inspiration for Cooper's imagination, including its propensity for becoming completely still and mirror-like (the inspiration for the name "Glimmerglass"), its alarmingly fast changes of wind and weather, and its ability to carry sound in the form of echoes rippling along the mountains to all corners of the lake.
“The Pioneers” he drew on his experience growing up in the frontier village of Cooperstown to investigate what it meant to inherit the American history of conflict over possession of the landscape, setting the claims of Native Americans, British Loyalists, American Patriots, roaming hunters, and forest-clearing farmers against each other. If the novel wistfully resolves all these conflicts in the marriage of the children of all the contending parties, it nevertheless succeeds brilliantly as a thoroughly American fiction, not least in its invention of the Leatherstocking, Natty Bumppo, Cooper's essential American hero.
He was the first important American writer to draw on the subjects and landscape of his native land in order to create a vivid myth of frontier life.
What is the relationship between Joaquin Murieta, the outlaw hero, and Natty Bumppo, the woodsman who lives on the border between Native American and white culture? How do these characters challenge the societies they live in? How are they implicated in the very systems they oppose?
Nearly two hundred years after James Fenimore Cooper published The Pioneers, the challenge of placing Cooper's central character in a historical context remains paramount. Described in The Pioneers as being "six feet tall in his moccasins, thin and wiry, with grey eyes, sandy hair, a large mouth and rather heavy eyebrows," Natty appears physically as a cross between his best friend, the Indian Chingachgook, and his nemesis, Judge Temple. This juxtaposition is well-intentioned; critique James Wallace writes that Cooper wanted Natty "to combine a popular tradition of the eloquence of Indian oratory with the garrulity of a frontier character." He dislikes the French, the Iroquis, and Catholics, and shows disdain for miscegenation. Nonetheless, Natty holds his own apart from his creator. Filled with contradictions, Natty combines "the soul of a poet with the nature of a redneck." He craves companionship yet trusts no one, is used by all yet owes nothing to anyone, and craves traditional society while fearing and despising civilization. In the words of literary critique Duncan Heyward, Natty is "a noble shoot from the stock of human nature, which never could attain its proper elevation and importance, for no other reason than because it grew in the forest"
On May 11, 1853, California Governor John Bigler signed a legislative act authorizing the organization of a band of California Rangers under the command of Captain Harry Love. Their purpose, to capture or kill a "party or gang of robbers commanded by the five Joaquins", specified as Joaquin Botellier, Joaquin Carrillo, Joaquin Murieta, Joaquin Ocomorenia, and Joaquin Valenzuela. These men were believed to be responsible for the majority of all cattle rustling, robberies, and murders perpetrated in the Mother Lode region since 1850.
In July of 1853, a group of Love's rangers came across a group of Mexican men near Panoche Pass in San Benito County. (This pass lies some 50 miles from Monterey, in the Costal Mountains--over 100 miles from the Mother Lode region.) A confrontation occurred, and two of the Mexicans were killed. The rangers cut off the hand of one and the head of the other, and later placed them in jars of alcohol to preserve them. They claimed the badly mutilated hand to be that of the notorious "Three-fingered Jack", and the head to be that of Joaquin Murieta.
The alleged head of Joaquin began a tour of California, being displayed at only the finest establishments specializing in the showing of dismembered limbs.
Exploratory Questions
How did Cooper bring American history into his works? What events did he see as appropriate for his historical novels? How did his use of American history affect subsequent American literature?
America's interest in history and in historical writing came alive between the turn of the eighteenth century and the Civil War. In 1800 only five historical societies existed in the United States, and the eldest of those, the Massachusetts Historical Society, was only nine years old.
Cooper, of course, lived his entire adult life during that burst of historical activity. Moreover, his family and close friends brought him into direct contact with major figures and important events from his country's formative years. Judge William Cooper introduced his son to such men as Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, and the novelist maintained ties with the Jay family throughout his life. As a young man Cooper almost certainly heard these men discuss such historical movements as the American Revolution and such political achievements as the framing of the Constitution. When he married Susan De Lancey in 1811, Cooper became fascinated with the distinguished role the De Lanceys had played on the losing side in the Revolution. While living in Europe between 1826 and 1833, he further bound himself to memories of the struggle for independence by developing a close friendship with Lafayette. Similarly, his long association with William Branford Shubrick kept the novelist in contact with the United States Navy during a time when the nation was becoming a major maritime power.
The subjects of his histories invited obvious personal interest from Cooper, but he usually tempered that emotional involvement with a formal, intellectual objectivity. Cooper approached the writing of history as a process of amassing, classifying, and logically analyzing statistical data and physical fact.
Cooper's major interest in history was, of course, his own nation's development. Not only do the volumes of historical non-fiction all treat American history, but twenty of the works of historical fiction also deal with America. Even the three European novels of the 1830's, The Bravo, The Heidenmauer, and The Headsman, picture America as a hazy but ever-present alternative to Europe as the next stage in the progress of western civilization.
How did Ridge critique U.S. policy in California in his novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta? How did his creation of a bandit hero affect American mythology and the development of later American literary heroes?
The title page to John Rollin Ridge's 1854 novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit introduces two stories. The novel's title indicates the novel's focus, Ridge's telling of Joaquín Murieta's (c. 1829850) exploits as a legendary bandit in southern California. The second story, evoked in the byline, "by Yellow Bird," concerns Ridge's Cherokee heritage. A mixed-blood Cherokee, Ridge (1827867) registers as author his tribal name instead of his anglicized name. The byline draws attention to Ridge's Cherokee ancestry, a turbulent history that includes the Cherokee Nation's removal from Georgia and the deaths of over eight thousand people on the forced march west that came to be known as the Trail of Tears. At first glance, the stories of Murieta and Ridge appear unrelated: Murieta's crime stories, set during California's booming gold rush, seem a long way from Ridge's Cherokee past. Yet when read side by side, compelling parallels evolve that not only link the two stories but also help explain Ridge's somewhat sympathetic depiction of Murieta's criminal life.
Ridge's Murieta is inescapably transformed by violence. Murieta, a dignified citizen, becomes corrupt because he is a victim of racially motivated violence, an aggression stemming from cultural conditions shaping a newly annexed California. Consequently, Ridge's narrative regards Murieta's crimes not as innate but as a response to violence, a reaction motivated by revenge. Ridge himself understood this vengeance. The son of Cherokee leaders, Ridge watched family elders suffer through events akin to the violent assaults he describes as being committed against Murieta. Themes of violence and vengeance shape both stories, and the similarities have likewise influenced much of the scholarship examining the first Native Americanuthored novel. Scholars have concentrated largely on two threads: much scholarship reads The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, first, as a reflection of the author's own violent Cherokee past and, second, as a story exploring how the violent conditions surrounding the California gold rush shaped Murieta's life for the worse and simultaneously gave birth to an exclusive national identity.
How did Walt Whitman’s ideals of inclusiveness shape American literature and American poetry?
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist.
Owing to the large immigration to Boston in the 1630s, the high articulation of Puritan cultural ideals, and the early establishment of a college and a printing press in Cambridge, the New England colonies have often been regarded as the center of early American literature.
Back then, some of the American literature were pamphlets and writings extolling the benefits of the colonies to both a European and colonist audience.
A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality. Whitman's work breaks the boundaries of poetic form and is generally prose-like.He also used unusual images and symbols in his poetry, including rotting leaves, tufts of straw, and debris. He also openly wrote about death and sexuality, including prostitution.He is often labeled as the father of free verse, though he did not invent it.
Walt Whitman has been claimed as America's first "poet of democracy", a title meant to reflect his ability to write in a singularly American character.
Whitman's sexuality is often discussed alongside his poetry. Though biographers continue to debate his sexuality, he is usually described as either homosexual or bisexual in his feelings and attractions. However, there is disagreement among biographers as to whether Whitman had actual sexual experiences with men. Whitman was concerned with politics throughout his life. He supported the Wilmot Proviso and opposed the extension of slavery generally. His poetry presented an egalitarian view of the races, and at one point he called for the abolition of slavery, but later he saw the abolitionist movement as a threat to democracy.