Week 9 Flashcards
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) Biography
1804 Born July 4 in Salem, Massachusetts.
1808 Death of Hawthorne’s father, a sea captain, in Dutch Guiana.
1821-25 Attends Bowdoin College with Longfellow and Franklin Pierce.
1828 Publishes his first novel, Fanshawe: A Tale, anonymously and at his own expense, and then completely dissociates himself from the book.
1830-37 Publishes over forty tales and sketches anonymously or pseudonymously in newspapers, magazines, and annuals.
1837 Publishes Twice-Told Tales.
1841 Lives for about eight months in the Utopian community of Brook Farm, hoping to provide a home there for Sophia Peabody.
1842 Publishes an enlarged edition of Twice-Told Tales as well as Biographical Stories; on July 9 marries Sophia Peabody.
1846 Publishes Mosses from an Old Manse.
1850 Publishes The Scarlet Letter, is immediately celebrated as America’s leading literary genius, and enters his most productive years; moves to Lenox, where he and Melville become friends.
1851 Publishes The House of the Seven Gables, The Snow- Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales, and True Stories form History and Biography.
1852 Publishes The Blithedale Romance, A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, and the campaign biography of Pierce.
1860 Publishes The Marble Faun (Transformation is the English title); attempts unsuccessfully to write others – Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret, The Ancestral Footstep, Septimius Felton, and The Dolliver Romance; returns to the Wayside in Concord.
1864 Dies on May 11 while on a tour of New Hampshire for his health; buried on May 23 in Sleepy Hollow, Concord.
Current-Garcia/Walton on Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hawthorne’s tales:
generally unfold against a New England background (H. himself is the typical offspring of a deep-rooted New England Puritan heritage)
are often symbolical/allegorical
always stress a moral theme
distrust the claims of science.
Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Birth- mark” (1843 in Pioneer)
“The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” are among Hawthorne’s most challenging stories which both present obsessed and cold-hearted men who destroy the innocent women who love and trust them.
According to Person (56-7), the husband conducts experiments on his wife and should thus be read as a sadistic male-female relationship that recalls Poe’s “Ligeia”.
Another obvious parallel between the two short stories is: the “most beautiful topic in the world”, i.e. the death of a beautiful woman
Discussion:
Structure: in medias res, suspension, one plot – no subplots Narrator: a neutral voice? Omniscient? Central symbol: birthmark meaning? Protagonists: Aylmer: 120 Aminadab: bad anima 122, 127, 130 Georgiana: how is she described?
Questions:
Georgiana’s birthmark is an obvious symbol. What does it stand for, and why does Aylmer want to eradicate it?
What fundamental lesson concerning nature and human relationships does Aylmer ignore? Does Georgiana share his guilt?
The outcome of Aylmer’s experiment is meant to dramatize a basic moral truth. What is it? Can you restate it in your own terms?
If we believe Aylmer to be “a type of the romantic artist”, what does this imply?
Compare and discuss the opening paragraphs in “The Birth-mark” and “Ligeia.” Are there any differences/similarities in the narrative style and technique?
Does “Hawthorne’s inveterate love of allegory” enhance or lessen the effectiveness of his story “The Birth-mark”? Would it be an equally good story if its allegorical implications were omitted?
Voices of Critics
In her famous book The Resisting Reader. A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington and London, 1978), Judith Fetterly has argued that the story is about “the pervasive sexism of [American] culture”, it is “a story of misguided idealism”, a man’s “worthy passion for perfecting and transcending nature” (22); additionally, it is a “brilliant analysis of the sexual politic of idealization.” Georgiana epitomizes “woman as beautiful object, reduced to and defined by her body,” and the story demonstrates that the “idealization of women has its source in a profound hostility toward women.” (22-23, 24) “Hawthorne is writing a story about the sickness of men” (p. 27), “[t]he implicit feminism in ‘The Birthmark’ is considerable. … Hawthorne dramatizes the fact that woman’s identity is a product of men’s responses to her” (31).
Voices of Critics
Apart from the feminist reading of Hawthorne’s story as a clever study of misogyny, Leland S. Person has suggested a second reading that highlights the topic of racism: “’The Birth-mark’ lends itself, like Poe’s ‘Ligeia,’ to a radicalized reading––illustrating a fixation in the white imagination on ensuring the purity of color and eradicating any hint of amalgamation.” (57)
Mary E Rucker (“Science and Art in Hawthorne’s ‘The Birth-mark’”, in; Nineteenth Century Literature, 41, 1986-87, 445-461) claims that Aylmer is “a type of the romantic artist” (445). “Hawthorne had had a great deal of exposure to the doctrines of the New England transcendentalists, who may have been responsible for Aylmer’s metaphysical dualism, and more particularly, his radical idealism.” (447)
Voices of Critics
Jules Zanger (“Speaking of the Unspeakable: Hawthorne’s ‘The Birthmark’”, in: Modern Philology, 80, 1982-83, 364-371) contents that the story testifies to “Hawthorne’s own skeptical perception of America’s faith in technology and industrialization and especially in the machine as an instrument of transcendence.” (367) According to Zanger there is a rather conventional Freudian interpretation of the flush of blood in Georgiana’s cheeks which identifies the birthmark with Georgiana’s sexuality: “the particularizing of Georgiana’s ‘imperfection’ by the image of a crimson ‘stain’ is linked to Hawthorne’s response to the menstrual aspect of woman’s biological life.” (369)
Periods of American Literature: Realism
1865–1914: End of Civil War and Reconstruction to beginning of World War I
1865–1900: the Realistic Period
Mark Twain
William Dean Howells
Henry James (turned to inner/psychological realism)
Edith Wharton
Charles W. Chesnutt (African-American writer)
Stephen Crane
As the level of literacy was improving, literature was becoming more popular and no longer restricted to the elite.
Realist writers addressed social problems and chose urban settings, although the so-called “regional” or “local color” fiction highlighted regional features of landscapes and mentalities, in short a regional milieu. Realist writers include:
Mark Twain’s novels on the Mississippi River region
Bret Harte in California 1836-1902
Sarah Orne Jewett in Maine 1849-1909
Mary Wilkins Freeman in Massachusetts 1852-1930
George W. Cable in Louisiana 1844-1925
Kate Chopin in Louisiana 1851-1904 the setting of The Awakening is New Orleans
In the decades after the traumatic events of the Civil War (1861-65), America faced some sweeping political, social, economic and cultural change.
By the 1890s: USA = urban nation, whose use of new technologies of industrialism, immense new business and commercial prowess were manifested in the new iron and steel skyscrapers in the cities of New York and Chicago. Huge corporations enabled individuals to accumulate gigantic fortunes, but the downside of this extreme form of capitalism was the rapidly increasing child labor, poverty, prostitution, violence and disease.
new waves of mass immigration, labor unrest and protest by black leaders and other ethnic groups.
Mark Twain (1835-1916): ‘the Gilded Age’ – when the creed of monopoly capitalism resulted in unrestrained speculation, large-scale corruption and political scandals.
In this cultural and political climate American women began to assert their independence by questioning the traditional domestic and maternal ideals of Victorian womanhood. Women’s role as refined, passive ladies and ‘angels in the house’ gave way to the ideal of the ‘new woman’ who was visible in the public world and fought for women’s rights, higher education and franchise.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was one of many suffrage advocates and speakers for women’s rights, whose novels and short stories are permeated with her wish to reform society and propagate the economically and socially emancipated outspoken new woman.
William Dean Howells first defined the aims of Realism: to describe the ordinary lives of ordinary people with honesty and sincerity.
The truthful depiction of the commonplace and the everyday: illness, gender roles, poverty, etc.
Which realist features have you spotted in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper”?
Born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1860
Grew up in difficult circumstances (without a father, who had deserted the family shortly after Charlotte’s birth and with an embittered mother).
At the age of twenty-four she married Charles Walter Stetson, a painter.
Shortly after the wedding, Gilman began to suffer from depressions, which increased a year later, after the birth of her daughter.
The neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, who specialized in women’s nervous disorders, prescribed bed-rest and isolation.
Writing and painting were forbidden and reading was to be limited to a maximum of two hours daily.
Once Gilman decided not to continue following Mitchell’s instructions and to leave her husband, she began to recover.
She was an eminent economist and sociologist who earned her money as a journalist, lecturer and writer.
Her best-known writings include:
Women and Economics (1898)
The Man-Made World (1911)
Herland (1915)
With Her in Ourland (1916)
Gilman was a committed feminist (but called herself a humanist) whose works, scholarly and literary, dealt almost exclusively with women’s issues.
When in 1935 she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Gilman committed suicide.
Gilman “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892; repr. 1973)
“The Yellow Wallpaper” was published in 1892 in The New England Magazine.
Topic: a young doctor’s wife, who after the birth of her daughter suffers from nervous exhaustion, which results in psychotic delusions and schizophrenia.
Aim: The protagonist’s obsessive reading of the orange and yellow patterned wallpaper of her sickroom not only serves to describe the interior of the room but also the protagonist’s state of mental health: since the wallpaper becomes a projection, the protagonist’s reading of the wallpaper may be considered the “transcription” of her psychological state and the history of this reading becomes the history of her illness.
The reception the text met with upon publication varied. The story was rejected by many because its theme was so clearly sexual politics: the frank treatment of the middle-class wife and her prescribed submissive role which leads to self-destruction (cf. Gilman’s heroine); in a 19-c. context, the connection between madness and the protagonist’s gender role constituted a scandal. Keeping this harsh social criticism in mind, it is not too surprising that Gilman faced problems when trying to publish her story: She sent it first to William Dean Howells who recommended it to Horace Scudder, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, then the most prestigious magazine in the United States. Scudder rejected the story, according to Gilman’s account in her autobiography, with a curt note:
Dear Madam,
Mr. Howells has handed me this story. I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself! Sincerely yours, H. E. Scudder [1]
“In the 1890s editors, and especially Scudder, still officially adhered to a canon of ‘moral uplift’ in literature, and Gilman’s story, with its heroine reduced at the end to the level of a groveling animal, scarcely fitted the prescribed formula.” [2]
Some praised “The Yellow Wallpaper” for its precise medical description of the onset of mental illness or as an exciting ghost and horror story in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe: the locale is “a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house” (9), which is reminiscent of English country estates and which exudes a certain “ghostliness” (11).
Which other Gothic features have you found?
Which other Gothic features have you found?
distraught heroine, melancholia
repressive male antagonist, repressive surrounding (sister-in-law)
confinement, enclosure
“irrational” fear, forbidden desire (not love, but writing)
Since its rediscovery 35 years ago, “The Yellow Wallpaper” has essentially been read from a feminist-social critical and psycho-pathological perspective (story of a mental breakdown) and the wallpaper has consequently been interpreted as representing woman’s morbid social position in the nineteenth century.[1]
GR’s thesis: “The Yellow Wallpaper” goes beyond social criticism and is more than a precise account of illness.
This is indicated by the many instances of duplication in the process of reading and writing.
First, Gilman duplicates her own situation in her protagonist’s though this does not involve an autobiographical “I.”
The writing process which the protagonist is excluded from in the text results in the next duplication of the process of reading and writing: She begins her intensive ongoing reading of the wallpaper, which she records on “dead paper,” as she calls her diary (10) thus making the wallpaper a “living text.”
By composing the secret diary, however, the protagonist is also writing “The Yellow Wallpaper”, which, as it were, represents the protagonist’s psycho-text.
structure
1st person narrator unfolds a diary written by a woman (name?) obviously undergoing a 3-month “rest cure” for postpartum depression; prescribed by her husband; gradually she “descends” into madness (schizophrenia)
Poesque introduction, sense of something is going to happen…
narrative focus moves inward / into the psyche of the heroine reflected through use of “I”, sentences become even shorter, frequent use of exclamation marks
syntax is intact and correct
Development of the heroine
beginning
“What is one to do?”
clear perception of her own situation, limited freedom, expects to be laughed at in marriage
frustration, sarcasm
no social contact, not allowed to writewrites although it is forbidden (makes her feel better)
feelings of guilt
feelings of anger towards her husband (“unreasonably”)
contrast of reason (her husband) – imagination (herself)
still believes in good intentions of husband and sister-in-law
perception of wallpaper: “horrid paper”, “repellent color”
then
relief of writing is eliminated by effort to keep it secret
appearance of woman behind the pattern frightens her, tries to talk to her husband who advises her to not let “false and foolish fancies” enter her mind
transition––stops writing, turns to “reading” the wallpaper
mistrusts her husband and sister-in-law
gets excitement from watching the wallpaper (“developments”)
“yellow smell”- hypersensitivity
“funny mark”
sleeps during day, watches the paper at night
woman her “double”?
sees that woman creeping outside during daytime
last night
frees the woman, both together strip off most of the paper
identifies with women that come out of the wallpaper
enjoys to creep in the room along the mark on the wall “not to loose the way” (what kind of freedom is that?)
she feels that she will be put back behind the pattern at night
husband faints (“that man”)
who is “Jane”?
defeat or triumph?
towards interpretation
wallpaper-patterns and their description have a long history, especially in Romanticism
“arabesque” – “romanesque” – “grotesque” are all terms important in romantic poetics
unity and reason (classical ideal) were abandoned for diverse expressions of fantasy and imagination.
Gilman’s “debased romanesques” = “debased fictions”, produced by a morbid and abnormal imagination
possible interpretations
a feminist text? women’s efforts to free themselves from domestic, social and psychological repressions; (only escape madness?)
a case-study (autobiographical) of a mental breakdown? Wallpaper then a kind of “Rorschachtest” of the heroine psyche?
description of a situation of a woman writer? problem of female authorship?
possible interpretations
“self-reflexivity”/“meta-textuality”; presenting two models of aesthetics (classical/realistic v. romantic) and two modes of reading:
husband: rational, reason, “misreading” his wife
wife: romantic aesthetics, reads the “arabesque” wallpaper, becomes her own ‘psycho-text’; borderlines between reader/text, object/subject (animate/inanimate) no longer exist; in the beginning the heroine is highly ambiguous toward the pattern of the wallpaper (her own emerging self) and aware of the ‘rational’ attitude of her husband.
horror-story in the tradition of Poe?
The intricate duplications of the processes of reading and writing point to the self-reflexivity of the text and provide a rationale for my reading of the story as a meta-text, which allows to discuss general characteristics of literary texts such as their openness to different readings.
The protagonist and her husband represent two diametrically opposed poetological agendas:
the poetological agenda of rational-realistic aesthetics represented by the doctor-husband is contrasted with
the romantic, a-mimetic and anti-mimetic aesthetics represented by the protagonist’s reading but rejected by her personally
opposing configurations:
arabesque/romanticism v. rational realism
female madness v. masculine reason,
fantasy v. reality
visibility v. invisibility.
doctor/husband: clear language, economy and lucidity; empirical facts; a tendency toward hermeneutic standardization and fixation:
“John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.” (Gilman, 9) “He laughs at me so about this wall-paper! ... John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies.” (Gilman, 15f)
Female protagonist: endless reading of the wallpaper, investing it with ever new meaning
“I start, we’ll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion.” (Gilman, 19)
phantasmagorical reading; poly-semantic meaning
“I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide––plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.” (13)
What are the connotations of the term “yellow”?
According to color tests, yellow symbolizes psychoses, and thus inner conflict and duality.
An interesting interpretation is provided by Susan S. Lanser: According to her, the yellow color of Gilman’s wallpaper points to the ‘yellow peril’ (remember: in 1882 the Chinese were excluded from immigrating) and thus to the many Asian immigrants in the USA at the turn of the century
It hence connotes inferiority, foreignness, cowardice, dirt, uselessness and illness, and expresses the collective angst of white Americans around 1900.
“I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else I ever heard of.
It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise.
Looked at it in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes––a kind of ‘debased Romanesque’ with delirium tremens ––go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.
But on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase.
The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that direction.
They have used a horizontal breadth for the frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion.
There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,––the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction.” (Gilman 20).
As the illness progresses, the gap between the text/wallpaper and its reader is eliminated: The protagonist believes in the hideous influence of the evil wallpaper, which mocks her by doing backwards somersaults to withdraw from her.
“This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vivious influence it had! There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and these absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.” (Gilman 16)
The wallpaper is turned into a palimpsest: another pattern is discovered by the protagonist underneath the “crazy and obtrusive” outer wallpaper pattern: “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure.”
“This wallpaper has a kind of subpattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so––I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about that silly and conspicuous front design.” (Gilman 18) “And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind the pattern.” (Gilman 22) “I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim subpattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is puzzling.” (Gilman 26)
In a final reading, which involves all of her senses, the protagonist sees the wallpaper shake, hears it scream, is dirtied by it, smells its yellow smell and tears it off the wall.
“The front pattern does move––and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it.” (Gilman 30) “But there is something else about the paper––the smell.” (28) “Peculiar odor” (29) “In this damp weather it is awful...” (29) “A yellow smell.” (29) “All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!” (34)
The protagonist has now solved the riddle of the wallpaper: It consists of women who are locked up and emerge from the wallpaper by day to crawl around in the garden.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” ends with complete identification between the protagonist and her doubles: she herself has emerged from the wallpaper.
This is indicated by a shift in the personal pronoun “I” in the text: “I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?…I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!” (Gilman 35).
She now uses her body to “write” the arabesque wallpaper pattern on the floor of the room, getting down on all fours and following imaginary lines (she herself has become the wallpaper text).
