21.11.12

Classics of American Literature

Lecture 37-41

Topics for Further Consideration:

1. Contrast Twain's representation of boyhood in Tom Sawyer with that of Huckleberry Finn.

Mark Twain is considered to be one of America’s greatest humorists and writers. He is perhaps best known for his novels about boyhood life on the Mississippi River in the mid-19th Century: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, considered to be Twain's greatest contribution to American literature, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, both of which were based in part on his adventures as a child along the banks of the Mississippi. Young Twain reveled in life along the Mississippi, a river busy with steamboat activity, and he often traveled in makeshift rafts or cavorted in various swimming holes. Nearby woods and a cave afforded him still further opportunity for exploration and adventure. But Twain's childhood was not entirely one of carefree play. His father, a lawyer, faltered with various business speculations, and when he died in 1847, Twain - then only twelve years old - was compelled to cease formal study and begin apprenticing as a typesetter for local newspapers. He eventually came to work for his brother, Orion Clemens, who owned several newspapers. And on a different level, the silliness, pure joy, and naiveté of childhood give Huckleberry Finn a sense of fun and humor. Huck’s youth is an important factor in his moral education over the course of the novel, for we sense that only a child is open-minded enough to undergo the kind of development that Huck does. Since Huck and Tom are young, their age lends a sense of play to their actions, which excuses them in certain ways and also deepens the novel’s commentary on slavery and society. Ironically, Huck often knows better than the adults around him, even though he has lacked the guidance that a proper family and community should have offered him.

2. Using Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson as your texts, discuss Twain's views on the formation of identity.

While the nation’s government attempted to give blacks a purely American identity, extreme members of society were there to protect the racial divide. Blacks tried to advance themselves in this country, but they were forced back into place, as second-class citizens. Twain found himself, in the last decades of his life, in a confusing time in American history. That confusion is echoed in Pudd’nhead Wilson, as the author questions the logic of racial oppression and weaves a virtuous mess of a tale. Through exploring the lives of Tom Driscoll and Chambers, the slave, Twain examines the nature of racial identity. To make their story believable, however, the author must initially characterize the boys through a filter of race. Twain further complicates the race versus environment issue with his description of Tom's childhood. On one hand, it seems as if the author were racist, supporting the myth that blacks are inferior to whites. Despite Tom's opportunities and his reception of "all the petting", he remains a lesser boy than Chambers. That could be read as a white man rising above his black peer, against the odds. As a First Family Virginian, he has been pampered and coddled—reduced to his childhood state of defenselessness. If the switch had not occurred, Driscoll's biological son would have adopted Tom’s role. In that sense, race is only an indirect aid to the formation of identity. A man’s surroundings are more accountable for who he becomes. Race has only placed Tom and Chambers in their surroundings. As the novel moves from the boys' childhood to their lives as adults, a noticeable and troubling shift occurs. Chambers is no longer portrayed as a bright, admirable personality. He is genuinely afraid of Tom, who beats him repeatedly.

American Passages Unit 7

Comprehension Questions

1. How does Frederick Douglass learn to read? Why does literacy become so important to him?

Douglass became convinced that literacy provided an important key to achieving his freedom and secretly began learning to read on his own. Fredrick was living at a plantation in Maryland with the owner named Hugh Auld. Sophia Auld treated Fredrick as one of her own children so she began teaching him the alphabet and three to four letter words. Sophia was so proud of Fredrick that she went to her husband, Hugh, and expressed her excitement Hugh immediately scolded Sophia say that once a black man learned to read the bible, "It would forever make him unfit for the duties of a slave". Sophia stopped teaching Fredrick and became mean and short tempered with him, snatching books when Fredrick was caught reading. Fredrick didn't give up so he befriended Sophia's sons, bargaining that if he gave them food they would teach him to read. This plan was successful so later Fredrick worked on the streets for money and when he had enough he would buy books to learn from.

2. What kinds of racial stereotypes does Stowe employ in developing the characters of Uncle Tom’s Cabin?

Controversial from the start, Uncle Tom’s Cabin relies on racial stereotypes to get Stowe’s point across. But Stowe's novel had a profound effect on the American public by exacerbating the tensions between the North and South that led to the Civil War. Stowe uses many 19th century racial stereotypes. Black characters are depicted in racist terms as childlike, attracted to gaudy ornamentation, and inherently emotional. The novel invokes and reinforces racial stereotypes – such as the "Uncle Tom," the "Mammy," and the "pickaninny" – so heavily that it reinforced them in American culture for decades to come. Stowe explicitly states that she believes the "Anglo-Saxon" and African races have different characters and different destinies. With actors in blackface and simplified plots, racial stereotypes were highlighted.

3. What is “sentimentality”? To what kind of audience was sentimental rhetoric designed to appeal?

Sentimental literature was characterised by an interest in feelings and emotional states. Much of this literature is devoted to stories of woe and moments of distress, and the quintessential sentimental moment is when one or more of the characters begin to weep. Sentimentality originally indicated the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but current usage defines it as an appeal to shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason. The strategies they used are here called sentimental rhetoric, or the rhetoric of sensibility, and it is the purpose of this book to show how that rhetoric worked in the debate over the slave trade. Separate spheres and discourses of nurturance and care often overlap with sentimental rhetoric that invokes the authority of human emotion and the body. Sentimentality is neither inherently pernicious nor empowering for women or other socially marginalized groups. It is crucial for women writers and feminist critics to challenge the patriarchal notion of sentimentality as pejorative. Main argument is that sentimental rhetoric is problematic because of its role in the commercialization of American culture and its dangerous anti-intellectualism.

Context Questions

1. Why do you think Harriet Jacobs published under a pseudonym? What kinds of anxieties did she feel about making her story public? How did her narrative engage with nineteenth-century ideas about womanhood?

Whatever her moral failings, Jacobs claims in recounting her sexual affairs as a slave woman, the traditional ideals of the nineteenth-century "cult of true womanhood" could not adequately address them. Writing an unprecedented mixture of confession, self-justification, and societal expose, Harriet Jacobs turned her autobiography into a unique analysis of the myths and the realities that defined the situation of the African American woman and her relationship to nineteenth-century standards of womanhood. As a result, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl occupies a crucial place in the history of American women's literature in general and African American women's literature in particular. In Rochester Jacobs met and began to confide in Amy Post, an abolitionist and pioneering feminist who gently urged the fugitive slave mother to consider making her story public. After the tumultuous response to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Jacobs thought of enlisting the aid of the novel's author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, in getting her own story published. But Stowe had little interest in any sort of creative partnership with Jacobs.

2. How do slave narratives recast the American ideal of the “self-made man” to fit African Americans? How does Frederick Douglass, for example, build on and transform the legacy of Benjamin Franklin?

Autobiographies by former slaves, polemical speeches and editorials, and sentimental novels confronted their audiences with powerful narratives of the cruelty and destructiveness of slavery. These anti-slavery texts had overt designs upon their readers, using emotional rhetoric and didacticism to call the American populace to action in the interests of social reform. Anti-slavery literature also had the important effect of exposing the arbitrary nature of racial distinctions, thus challenging prejudices that had long been used to justify discrimination and inequality. Frederick Douglass's autobiography chronicles his early experiences of oppression, his rebellion, and his eventual heroic achievement of a fully liberated sense of self and identity. Emphasizing the importance of literacy and active resistance, he recasts the American myth of the "self-made man" to include African Americans.

3. What is the relationship between Jacobs’s account of her slavery and escape and Douglass’s account of his? How does she borrow and modify some of the conventions Douglass pioneered in his autobiography? Do you think they wrote for the same kind of audience? How are her concerns different from his?

A comparison of the narratives of Douglass and Jacobs demonstrates the full range of demands and situations that slaves could experience. Some of the similarities in the two accounts are a result of the prescribed formats that governed the publication of their narratives. The fugitive or freed or “ex” slave narrators were expected to give accurate details of their experiences within bondage, emphasizing their sufferings under cruel masters and the strength of their will to free themselves. One of the most important elements that developed within the narratives was a “literacy” scene in which the narrator explained how he or she came to be able to do something that proslavery writers often declared was impossible: to read and write. Authenticity was paramount, but readers also looked for excitement, usually provided through dramatic details of how the slave managed to escape from his/her owners. Slave narrators also needed to present their credentials as good Christians while testifying to the hypocrisy of their supposedly pious owners. Both Douglass and Jacobs included some version of all these required elements yet also injected personalized nuances that transformed the formulas for their own purposes. Some of the differences in the readership and reception of Jacobs’s narrative and Douglass’s first, autobiography reflect simply the differing literary and political circumstances that prevailed at the time of their construction and publication.

Exploratory Questions

1. How do the writers featured in the video use formulas and conventions to tell their stories, yet still manage to speak in their own authentic voices?

Conventions are usual indicators such as phrases, themes, quotations, or explanations that we expect to find in a certain genre. They could be considered "stereotypes" of that genre. White abolitionists urged slave writers to follow well-defined conventions and formulas to produce what they saw as one of the most potent propaganda weapons in their arsenal. They also insisted on adding their own authenticating endorsements to the slaves’ narrations through prefaces and introductions. Yet for the writers themselves, the opportunity to tell their stories constituted something more personal: a means to write an identity within a country that legally denied their right to exist as human beings. Working cautiously within the genre expectations developed by and for their white audiences, highly articulate African American writers such as Douglass and Jacobs found ways to individualize their narratives and to speak in their own voices in a quest for selfhood that had to be balanced against the aims and values of their audiences.

2. How do you think abolitionist rhetoric might have influenced the civil rights movement in the 1960s? How do you think it influenced subsequent treatments of race in American literature?

American abolitionists were able to reverse public opinion in the North on the question of slavery. Despite the dramatic political shift, the emergent hostility to “slave power” did not lead to an embrace of racial equality. Abolitionists, in the face of America's long history of racism, sought to link opposition to slavery with a call for civil rights. For black abolitionists, this was not only a strategic problem, it was a matter of self-definition. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the meanings of liberty, labor, and independence were the basis of contentious republican politics. Black abolitionists used this rhetorical raw material to fashion “fighting words” with which to generate solidarity and deliver their moral claims to the nation. Although the discourse of black abolitionism is a social critique, it also contains a positive assertion of what free blacks would become. As important as the theme of “slavery” was to the discourse, so too were “colored” and “brotherhood.”

3. How do slave narratives draw on the seventeenth-century tradition of captivity narratives? How did slave narratives influence the work of later African American authors (Charles W. Chesnutt, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, or Toni Morrison, for example)?

A genre of African-American literature that developed in the middle of the 19th century is the slave narrative, accounts written by fugitive slaves about their lives in the South and, often, after escaping to freedom. They wanted to describe the cruelties of life under slavery, as well as the persistent humanity of the slaves as persons. At the time, the controversy over slavery led to impassioned literature on both sides of the issue, with novels such as Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe's representing the abolitionist view of the evils of slavery. James Baldwin’s work addressed issues of race and sexuality. Baldwin, who is best known for his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, wrote deeply personal stories and essays while examining what it was like to be both Black and homosexual at a time when neither of these identities was accepted by American culture. The other great novelist of this period is Ralph Ellison, best known for his novel Invisible Man. Even though Ellison did not complete another novel during his lifetime, Invisible Man was so influential that it secured his place in literary history