America, America.

What is an American? How does literature create conceptions of the American experience and American identity? I'm taking a course in American Literature right now, and this question keeps surfacing, popping up out of the textbooks and in our class discussion forums and in our videos and assigned reading. What is America? What do you think of when you think of that word? On the face of it, an American is just a citizen of the United States, but when we say that something is "American" we usually mean something different. 

• Apple pie and baseball
• That star spangled banner
• Democracy 
• Capitalism
• Technology 
• Freedom
• Individuality
• Warfare
• Opportunities
• Melting pot
• Pioneer spirit
• Self-made man

Do any other words or phrases come to your mind? If you're thinking what I'm thinking, then it seems as if "America" is more of an ideal than a geographical location. After all, how many times have you heard something or someone who is certainly from America called "un-American?"

Literature has provided us with many ideas of what “American” means. It has preserved the oral traditions of the most ancient Native Americans, conveyed the revolutionary ideals of the United States’ founding fathers, and provided a vehicle for political, religious, and personal narratives that have both harmed and benefited the nation.Over the centuries literature has contributed to the concept of the "American" with cultural characters both fictional (e.g. Jay Gatsby and Tom Sawyer), and historical (e.g. Benjamin Franklin and the Puritans). These characters have come to stand for the best and worst of America, representing both heroes and villains. 

My Prayer For Old People

I visited a friend at a nursing home today, and cried all the way home. It wasn't that my friend was suffering so badly—she is in pain and discomfort but has a beautiful spirit about it all—it was because of the other people I saw in there, the people with nothing but their own souls.

Their minds are gone.

Their bodies are deteriorating.

They have lost the things that we think make us human: beauty, talent, promise, wit, creativity, future. 

And what remains? Their heart and soul, quietly beating while the rest of us bustle around and try to care for them, wondering what on earth we'll do with them until they finally give up and die. And the truly frightening thing? Many of us—perhaps most of us—will be there too, one day. I might be one of those women in a sanitized hallway, crouched in my wheelchair, gray hair thin and wispy, draped in smelly old clothes, eyes glazed, drooping lips and toothless gums smacking together in horrible incoherence.

Being True, Part 5: Hawthorne--The Author

This is the last segment of my essay about sin, hypocrisy, and guilt in Nathaniel Hawthorne's writings. Enjoy!

Hawthorne’s personal attitude toward sin and sinners is somewhat ambiguous, despite the existence of a deliberately intrusive narrator in nearly every one of his tales. Some call this issue the “Hawthorne Question”; literary critics want to know what the author of such darkly tragic tales could have thought about the worlds he was creating, but Hawthorne remains a riddle. Did the author sympathize with Hester Prynne? Was his moralizing narration meant to be genuine, or derisively ironic? Was he a Puritan at heart, or did he in fact despise the Puritans? Views on his moral and aesthetic beliefs often contradict one another. One author writes that “many of the central tenets of Transcendentalism (awareness of the creative and imaginative power of nature, the breaking away from form and tradition, and the emphasis on individual experience) can be seen in stories like “Young Goodman Brown” and novels such as The Scarlet Letter” (Felton), while another says “transcendentalism as such touched him not at all” (Canby 231). Advocates of Traditional Historicism, a school of literary criticism that takes social contexts and authorial intent into consideration, would search for answers among Hawthorne’s personal letters, in the politics of his day, and in the friends he made. Supporters of New Criticism would be more likely to take an intrinsic approach and search only between the two covers of an individual tale.

Being True, Part 4: The Architecture of Guilt

The fourth part of my essay on sin, guilt, and hypocrisy in Nathaniel Hawthorne's writings. It's more interesting than it sounds ;)

To say that Hawthorne’s writing shows a preoccupation with guilt would be an understatement. Most of Hawthorne’s most famous works are permeated with the tragedy of guilt, with a form of the word “guilt” appearing 35 times in The Scarlet Letter, 4 times in “Young Goodman Brown,” and as many as 12 times even in a novel with an uncharacteristically happy ending, The House of the Seven Gables. While some of Hawthorne’s characters choose to embrace sin and others hypocritically deny it, there is a third response: the sensation of guilt or responsibility for sin.

6233 House of Seven Gables - Salem, MA, a photo by lcm1863 on Flickr.

The plot of The House of the Seven Gables focuses on the issue of guilt in both the past and the present. The novel begins with a history of the old Pyncheon family, a clan that is stained with the innocent blood of a man named Matthew Maule, who was executed in the Salem Witch Trials. The family patriarch, Colonel Pyncheon, had zealously cried out for Maule’s condemnation, and in a parallel to the biblical story of Naboth’s vineyard, Maule was killed on false charges and his beautiful piece of property snatched up by that same Colonel Pyncheon. The old Puritan did not have much opportunity to enjoy his ill-gotten gain, however, for Maule had cursed his accuser with the words “God will give him blood to drink,” and Colonel Pyncheon died a mysterious death in his newly built seven-gabled mansion.

Being True, Part 3: Whited Sepulchers--Hypocrisy

The third part of my essay on sin, guilt, and hypocrisy in Nathaniel Hawthorne's writings...enjoy!

Hawthorne’s writing consistently lifts a light to illuminate our souls, and in several of his stories we are forced to come face to face with hypocrisy—the false pretense of goodness which disguises inner evil. From the religious excesses of the Puritans to the blind optimism of the Transcendentalists, Hawthorne saw hypocrisy all around him. The result of his observations is one of Hawthorne’s darkest and most disturbing tales.

In his short story “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne introduces the reader to the title character, a seemingly harmless young man, and his pretty little wife, Faith, who seems to be an allegory for all that is pure and good. One evening Goodman Brown hurries away to the forest on a mysterious errand, against Faith’s wishes, and we soon learn that he is going to a “Black Mass” in the forest. He has the best of intentions for the future, determining that “after this one night” he would return to Faith and “cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven” (9), but as the night progresses he realizes that evil is more powerful than he had  imagined. As he travels along the forest road he discovers that “everyone he has ever respected is actually a vile creature in the service of Hell” (Rogers 4); he even hears the voice of Faith among the sinners, and realizes that virtue is but a dream and “evil is the nature of mankind” (Hawthorne, “Young Goodman” 31). After this terrifying revelation, Goodman Brown and Faith are about to be baptized by the devil when Brown suddenly finds himself alone in the forest in the morning. It is possible that the entire episode was a dream, but Brown’s faith in humanity has been permanently scarred and forever afterward he shrinks away from the hypocrisy of his neighbors. “Young Goodman Brown” could be seen as Hawthorne’s indictment of Puritanical hypocrisy; on the other hand, it might be seen as “everyman’s response to the darkness that lives in every human” (Howard).

gavel , a photo by s_falkow on Flickr.

Two hypocrites figure prominently in Hawthorne’s fiction.

Being True, Part 2: The Puritan Plague--Sin

The second part of my essay on sin, guilt, and hypocrisy in Nathaniel Hawthorne's writings...enjoy!

When reading Hawthorne’s work it is impossible to miss the influence of the Puritans’ perspective on sin; it permeates both the settings of his stories and their worldview. These early American Christians whom the author once described as “stern, severe,” and “intolerant” (Bloom Nathaniel Hawthorne 162) had a “comprehension of the evil in humanity (that) was second only to their condemnation of it” (Howard). Milk for Babes, a catechism written by prominent Puritan John Cotton, states that “Sin is the transgression of the Law,” “I was conceived in sin and born in iniquity….My  corrupt nature is empty of Grace, bent unto sin, and onely unto sin, and that continually” (Cotton qtd. in Bloom, Young Goodman Brown 72). Ralph Venning, a 17^th century minister, wrote a work titled Sin: The Plague of Plagues, in which he explained the pervading religious views of his times concerning evil and rebellion, “All God's works were good exceedingly, beautiful in admiration; but the works of sin are deformed and monstrous ugly, for it works disorder, confusion, and everything that is abominable” (32). Hawthorne’s most well-read texts all dwell upon the problem of sin, its nature and its penalties, and all of them reflect to a certain extent this Puritanical perspective.

Hawthorne’s personal attitude  toward sin is hotly contested among literary scholars, but a few points are clear. Hawthorne faulted the Puritans for their brutal suppression of dissenters and sinners by his portrayal of Puritan characters in his writings. Many are shown as cruel, self-righteous hypocrites, as in his short story “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” where they are “killjoys, at best, and ‘dismal wretches’ at worst” (Rogers 4). At the same time, Hawthorne was certainly influenced by the theology of his Puritan ancestors, and his fiction often goes into great detail concerning the darkness of sin within the soul, confirming the Puritanical doctrine of human depravity. In the introductory story to his novel The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne lets his readers eavesdrop on an imagined conversation between his Puritan forefathers, “‘What is he?...A writer of story books! What kind of business in life,—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation,—may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!’

Being True, Part 1: Hawthorne--The Man

I just finished semester 2 out of 4 at Thomas Edison State College! I spent a ton of time writing a final paper for my American Literature I course (it got a grade of 100%!), and thought that I would share it with you lovely readers :) 

Perhaps you love Nathaniel Hawthorne, perhaps you loathe him, perhaps you've never heard of him. He was a fascinating man, a great author, and I'm an ardent admirer of his work (read: "big fan"). This paper is rather long, so I'm posting it in several parts. Hopefully you'll read it and gain a new appreciation for the mystery, beauty, and depth of Hawthorne's classic literature!

Being True: Sin, Guilt, and Hypocrisy in Hawthorne’s Writings

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American author who could be described as a dark romantic, an examiner of the human soul, a master of Gothic literature, or simply a pessimist. At a time in history when American writers were discovering their own potential, finding God in nature, extolling the pioneer spirit, and anticipating a golden age for the United States, Hawthorne was a voice calling out in the wilderness, reminding the world of the darker elements beneath it. In his classic novel The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne states  that the “founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison” (Scarlet Letter 20). Hawthorne seemed to be reminding Americans of something they would like to forget: sin, like death, is an inevitable part of the human experience. Hawthorne wrote more than 80 novels and short stories, and many analyze the legacy of America’s Puritan fathers and delve deeply into Hawthorne’s own beliefs about sin, hypocrisy, guilt and the truth. Two of his novels, The Scarlet Letter, and The House of the Seven Gables, as well as the short story “Young Goodman Brown” deal with these key issues, and by studying the author and sociohistorical context  of these works, as well as their major themes and intimate details, one gains a unique perspective on the subjects which weighed upon Hawthorne’s mind. His consciousness of sin and the need for truth became a major element of American Gothic literature, and continues to influence authors and readers today.