THE AGE OF TRANSCENDENTALISM

LECTURE 16

(1836 – 1876)

16.1. Особенности развития страны в первой половине XIX века. Формирование американских ценностей. Творчество Ральфа У. Эмерсона и идеи движения «трансцендентализма». Творческий путь Генри Д. Торо.

16.1.1.In its most specific usage, transcendentalism refers to a literary and philosophical movement that developed in the U.S. in the first half of the 19th century. While the movement was, in part, a reaction to certain 18th-century rationalist doctrines, it was strongly influenced by Deism. Transcendentalism also involved a rejection of the strict Puritan religious attitudes that were the heritage of New England, where the movement originated. The basic idea is the belief in a higher reality than that found in sense experience or in a higher kind of knowledge than that achieved by human reason. Nearly all transcendentalist doctrines stem from the division of reality into a realm of spirit and a realm of matter.

More important, the transcendentalists were influenced by romanticism, especially such aspects as self-examination, the celebration of individualism, and the extolling of the beauties of nature and humankind. Consequently, transcendentalist writers expressed semi-religious feelings toward nature, as well as the creative process, and saw a direct connection, or correspondence, between the universe (macrocosm) and the individual soul (microcosm). In this view, divinity permeated all objects, animate or inanimate, and the purpose of human life was union with the so-called Over-Soul. Intuition, rather than reason, was regarded as the highest human faculty. Fulfillment of human potential could be accomplished through mysticism or through an acute awareness of the beauty and truth of the surrounding natural world.

Transcendentalism in the USA began with the formation (1836) of the Transcendental Club in Boston. Among the leaders of the movement were the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, the feminist and social reformer Margaret Fuller, the preacher Theodore Parker, the educator Bronson Alcott, the philosopher William Ellery Channing, and the author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau.

 

16.1.2.The leader of the philosophical movement of transcendentalism wasRalph Waldo Emerson(1803-1882), American essayist and poet. Influenced by such schools of thought as English Romanticism, Neoplatonism, and Hindu philosophy, Emerson is noted for his skill in presenting his ideas eloquently and in poetic language.

Seven of Emerson's ancestors were ministers, and his father was minister of the First Church (Unitarian) of Boston. Emerson graduated from Harvard University at the age of 18 and for the next three years taught school in Boston. At 26 he became minister of the Second Church (Unitarian) of Boston. Three years later Emerson resigned from his pastoral appointment because of personal doubts about administering the sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

After nearly a year in Europe, Emerson returned to the United States. In 1834 he moved to Concord, Massachusetts, and became active as a lecturer in Boston. His addresses were based on material in his Journals, a collection of observations and notes that he had begun while a student at Harvard. His most detailed statement of belief was reserved for his first published book, Nature (1836), which appeared anonymously but was soon correctly attributed to him. The volume has come to be regarded as Emerson's most original and significant work, offering the essence of his philosophy of transcendentalism. Emerson applied these ideas to cultural and intellectual problems in his lecture The American Scholar, which he delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard a year later. In it he called for American intellectual independence.

The first volume of Emerson's Essays includes some of his most popular works. It contains “History,” ”Self-Reliance,” ”Compensation,” ”Love,” ”Friendship,” ”Prudence,” ”Heroism,” ”The Oversoul,” ”Circles,” ”Intellect,” and “Art.” The second series of Essays includes “The Poet,” ”Manners,” and “Character.” In it Emerson tempered the optimism of the first volume of essays, placing less emphasis on the self and acknowledging the limitations of real life. In the interval between the publication of these two volumes, Emerson wrote for The Dial, the journal of New England transcendentalism.

 

"To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood – His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says,—he is my creature, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period so ever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth."

 

Later in life, Emerson again went abroad and lectured in England. While visiting abroad, Emerson also gathered impressions that were later published a study of English society. His Journals give evidence of his growing interest in national issues, and on his return to America he became active in the abolitionist cause, delivering many antislavery speeches. The Conduct of Life was the first of his books to enjoy immediate popularity. After 1867 Emerson did little writing and his mental powers declined, although his reputation as a writer spread.

16.1.3. Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862) is an American writer, philosopher, and naturalist, whose work demonstrates how the abstract ideals of libertarianism and individualism can be effectively instilled in a person's life. Thoreau was educated at Harvard University. As a young man he taught school and tutored in Concord and New York. For some time Thoreau lived in the home of American essayist and transcendental philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1845 Thoreau moved to a crude hut on the shores of Walden Pond, a small body of water on the outskirts of Concord. He lived there for almost two years. During his residence at Walden Pond and elsewhere in Concord, Thoreau supported himself by doing odd jobs, such as gardening, carpentry, and land surveying. The major portion of his time was devoted to the study of nature, to meditating on philosophical problems, to reading Greek, Latin, French, and English literature, and to long conversations with his neighbors.

In 1846 Thoreau chose to go to jail rather than to support the Mexican War by paying his poll tax. He clarified his position in perhaps his most famous essay, Civil Disobedience”.In this essay Thoreau discussed passive resistance, a method of protest that later was adopted by Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi as a tactic against the British, and by civil rights activists fighting racial segregation in the United States.

Of the numerous volumes that make up the collected works of Thoreau, only two were published during his lifetime: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854). The material for most of the other volumes was edited posthumously by the author's friends from his journals, manuscripts, and letters. In Walden, his most enduring and popular work, Thoreau explains his motives for living apart from society and devoting himself to a simple lifestyle and to the observation of nature. His writing style seems at first plain and direct, but witty similes, etymological puns, and allusions and plays on conventional proverbs dislocate conventional meanings and force the reader into a mode of reconsideration and reevaluation.

 

16.2. Становление американского романа. Творчество Натаниэла Готорна («Алая буква»). Роль и критическая оценка романа Гарриет Бичер-Стоу «Хижина Дяди Тома».

16.2.1. Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864) is an American novelist, whose works are deeply concerned with the ethical problems of sin, punishment, and atonement. Hawthorne's exploration of these themes was related to the sense of guilt he felt about the roles of his ancestors in the 17th-century persecution of Quakers and in the 1692 witchcraft trials of Salem, Massachusetts.

Hawthorne was born there into an old Puritan family. After graduation from university, he returned to his Salem home, living in semi-seclusion and writing. His work received little public recognition, however, and Hawthorne attempted to destroy all copies of his first novel, Fanshawe, which he had published at his own expense. During this period he also contributed articles and short stories to periodicals. Several of the stories were published in Twice-Told Tales, which, although not a financial success, established Hawthorne as a leading writer. These early works are largely historical sketches and symbolic and allegorical tales dealing with moral conflicts and the effects of Puritanism on colonial New England.

Unable to earn a living by literary work, Hawthorne took a job in the Boston, Massachusetts, customhouse. Two years later he returned to writing and produced a series of sketches of New England history for children. He also joined the communal society at Brook Farm near Boston, hoping to be able to live in such comfort that he could marry and still have time to devote to his writing. The demands of the farm were too great, however; Hawthorne was unable to continue his writing while doing farm chores, and after less than a year he withdrew from the community.

To survive, Hawthorne returned to government service as surveyor of the Salem customhouse. By then he had already begun writing The Scarlet Letter (1850), a novel about the adulterous Puritan Hester Prynne, who loyally refuses to reveal the name of her partner. Regarded as his masterpiece and as one of the classics of American literature, The Scarlet Letter reveals both Hawthorne's superb craftsmanship and the powerful psychological insight with which he probed guilt and anxiety in the human soul.

 

To Hester's eye, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale exhibited no symptom of positive and vivacious suffering, except that, as little Pearl had remarked, he kept his hand over his heart.

Slowly as the minister walked, he had almost gone by before Hester Prynne could gather voice enough to attract his observation. At length, she succeeded.

"Arthur Dimmesdale!" she said, faintly at first; then louder, but hoarsely. "Arthur Dimmesdale!"

"Who speaks?" answered the minister.

Gathering himself quickly up, he stood more erect, like a man taken by surprise in a mood to which he was reluctant to have witnesses. Throwing his eyes anxiously in the direction of the voice, he indistinctly beheld a form under the trees, clad in garments so sombre, and so little relieved from the gray twilight into which the clouded sky and the heavy foliage had darkened the noontide, that he knew not whether it were a woman or a shadow. It may be that his pathway through life was haunted thus, by a spectre that had stolen out from among his thoughts.

He made a step higher, and discovered the scarlet letter.

"Hester! Hester Prynne!" said he. "Is it thou? Art thou in life?"

"Even so!" she answered. "In such life as has been mine these seven years past! And thou, Arthur Dimmesdaie, dost thou yet live?"

It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual and bodily existence, and even doubled of their own. So strangely did they meet in the dim wood, that it was like the first encounter, in the world beyond the grave, of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering, in mutual dread, as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost!

With modern psychological insight Hawthorne probed the secret motivations in human behavior and the guilt and anxiety that he believed resulted from all sins against humanity, especially those of pride. In his preoccupation with sin he followed the tradition of his Puritan ancestors, but in his concept of the consequences of sin — as either punishment due to lack of humility and overwhelming pride, or regeneration by love and atonement — he deviated radically from the idea of predestination held by his forebears. Hawthorne characterized most of his books as romances, a category of literature not as strictly bound to realistic detail as novels. This freed him to manipulate the atmospheres of his scenes and the actions of his characters in order to represent symbolically the passions, emotions, and anxieties of his characters and to expose “the truth of the human heart” that he believed lies hidden beneath mundane daily life.

16.2.2. Harriet Beecher Stowe(1811-1896) is an American writer and abolitionist, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), a forceful indictment of slavery and one of the most powerful novels of its kind in American literature. The success of the book, however, was unprecedented; 500,000 copies were sold in the United States alone within five years, and it was translated into more than 20 foreign languages. It did much to crystallize militant antislavery sentiment in the North, and therefore was an important factor in precipitating the American Civil War. Uncle Tom's Cabin, like most of Stowe's novels, is rambling in structure, but rich in pathos and dramatic incident. It is one of the best examples of the so-called sentimental fiction that enjoyed popularity in the United States during the 1800s. Sentimental writers focused on domestic scenes, and their work evoked strong emotions. Like Stowe, many of these authors were social reformists, but they were criticized for creating overly idealized characters.

16.3. Эпические мотивы в творчестве Генри Мелвилла («Моби Дик»). Экзистенциальные и политические идеи в романе.

 

Herman Melville(1819-1891) is an American novelist. His works remained in obscurity until the 1920s, when his genius was finally recognized. His life was hard. At 20, he shipped to Liverpool, England, as a cabin boy. When he returned to the United States he taught school and then sailed for the South Seas on the whaler Acushnet. After an 18-month voyage Melville deserted the ship in the Marquesas Islands and with a companion lived for a month among the natives, who were cannibals. He escaped aboard an Australian trader, leaving it at Tahiti, where he was imprisoned temporarily. He worked as a field laborer and then shipped to Hawaii, where he enlisted as a seaman on the U.S. Navy frigate United States. After his discharge Melville began to write novels based on his experiences and to take part in the literary life of Boston and New York City.

Melville's first five novels all achieved quick popularity. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life and Omoo, a Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas were romances of the South Sea islands. Mardi was a complex allegorical fantasy. Redburn, His First Voyage, based on Melville's first trip to sea, and White-Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War, a fictionalization of his experiences in the navy, exposed the abuse of sailors that was prevalent in the U.S. Navy at that time.

In 1850 Melville moved to a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he became an intimate friend of the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom Melville dedicated his masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or The Whale (1851). The central theme of this novel is the conflict between Captain Ahab, master of the whaler Pequod, and Moby-Dick, a great white whale that once tore off one of Ahab's legs at the knee. Ahab is dedicated to revenge; he drives himself and his crew, which includes Ishmael, the narrator of the story, over the seas in a desperate search for his enemy. The body of the book is written in a wholly original, powerful narrative style, which, in certain sections of the work, Melville varied with great success. The most impressive of these sections include the rhetorically magnificent sermon delivered before sailing and the soliloquies of the mates; lengthy “flats,” passages conveying non-narrative material, usually of a technical nature, such as the chapter about whales; and the more purely ornamental passages. The work is invested with Ishmael's sense of profound wonder at his story, but it nonetheless conveys full awareness that Ahab's quest can have but one end. And so it proves to be: Moby-Dick destroys the Pequod and all its crew except Ishmael.

 

For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned. "The ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking look-outs on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lancepole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.

But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched; - at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

16.4. Американская поэзия: обновление традиций. Национальные и общечеловеческие мотивы в поэзии Генри Лонгфелло.Уолт Уитмен: история создания книги «Листья травы». Творчество Эмили Дикинсон как осознанно-экспериментальный подход к духовному опыту и языку.

16.4.1.One of the most celebrated poets of his time wasHenry Longfellow (1807-1882). After graduating from college in 1825 he traveled in Europe in preparation for a teaching career. He taught modern languages at Harvard University. At 47, he decided to retire and devoted himself exclusively to writing. Two years after his death a bust of Longfellow was placed in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in London; he was the first American to be thus honored.

Longfellow received wide public recognition with his initial volume of verse, Voices of the Night, which contained the poem “A Psalm of Life.” The poem earned enormous popularity due to its optimism and vigor.

 


Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream! –

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not the goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each tomorrow

Find us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums are beating

Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of Life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no future, howe’er pleasant!

Let the dead Past bury its dead!

Act, – act in the living present!

Heart within, and God’s o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.


His subsequent poetic works include three notable long narrative poems on American themes: Evangeline, about lovers separated during the French and Indian War; The Song of Hiawatha, addressing Native American themes; and The Courtship of Miles Standish, about a love triangle in colonial New England. Longfellow also made a verse translation of The Divine Comedy by Italian poet Dante Alighieri.

Longfellow's poetic work is characterized by familiar themes, easily grasped ideas, and clear, simple, melodious language. Most modern critics, however, are not in accord with the high opinion that was generally held of the author by his contemporaries, and his works are often criticized as sentimental. Nevertheless, Longfellow remains one of the most popular of American poets, primarily for his simplicity of style and theme and for his technical expertise, but also for his role in the creation of an American mythology. His verse was also instrumental in reestablishing a public audience for poetry in the United States.

 

16.4.2. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is the American poet, whose work boldly asserts the worth of the individual and the oneness of all humanity. Whitman’s defiant break with traditional poetic concerns and style exerted a major influence on American thought and literature.

As a young man, Whitman wrote poems and stories for popular magazines and made political speeches. In 1855 Whitman issued the first of many editions of Leaves of Grass, a volume of poetry in a new kind of versification, far different from his sentimental rhymed verse of the 1840s. Because he immodestly praised the human body and glorified the senses, Whitman was forced to publish the book at his own expense, setting some of the type himself. His name did not appear on the title page, but the engraved frontispiece portrait shows him posed, arms akimbo, in shirt sleeves, hat cocked at a rakish angle. In a long preface he announced a new democratic literature, “commensurate with a people,” simple and unconquerable, written by a new kind of poet who was affectionate, brawny, and heroic and who would lead by the force of his magnetic personality. Whitman spent the rest of his life striving to become that poet. The 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass contained 12 untitled poems, written in long cadenced lines that resemble the unrhymed verse of the King James Version of the Bible. The longest and generally considered the best, later entitled Song of Myself,” was a vision of a symbolic “I” enraptured by the senses, vicariously embracing all people and places from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans.

Stimulated by a letter of congratulations from the eminent New England essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman hastily put together another edition of Leaves of Grass, with revisions and additions; he would continue to revise the collection throughout his life. The most significant second-edition poem is Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in which the poet vicariously joins his readers and all past and future ferry passengers. In the third edition, Whitman began to give his poetry a more allegorical structure. In Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” a mockingbird (the voice of nature) teaches a little boy (the future poet) the meaning of death. His poem When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the great elegy for President Abraham Lincoln. One of Whitman’s most popular poems – “O Captain! My Captain!” – is dedicated to Lincoln.

Today, Whitman’s poetry has been translated into every major language. It is widely recognized as a formative influence on the work of many American writers. Allen Ginsberg in particular was inspired by Whitman’s treatment of sexuality. Many modern scholars have sought to assess Whitman’s life and literary career.

16.4.3. One of the foremost authors in American literature is Emily Elizabeth Dickinson(1830-1886), America’s best-known female poet. Dickinson’s simply constructed yet intensely felt, acutely intellectual writings take as their subject issues vital to humanity: the agonies and ecstasies of love, sexuality, the unfathomable nature of death, the horrors of war, God and religious belief, the importance of humor, and musings on the significance of literature, music, and art.

She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. With the exception of a trip to Washington, D.C., and a few trips to Boston for eye treatments, Dickinson remained in Amherst, living in the same house on Main Street from 1855 until her death. During her lifetime, she published only about 10 of her nearly 2,000 poems, in newspapers, Civil War journals, and a poetry anthology. The first volume of Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, was published after Dickinson’s death.

Dickinson’s short poetic lines, condensed by using intense metaphors and by extensive use of ellipsis (the omission of words understood to be there), contrasted sharply with the style of her contemporary Walt Whitman, who used long lines, little rhyme, and irregular rhythm in his poetry.

 


This is my letter to the World

That never wrote to Me –

The simple News that Nature told –

With tender Majesty

Her Message is committed

To Hands I cannot see –

For love of Her – Sweet – countrymen –

Judge tenderly – of Me

 

Her language is dazzling: she chooses most common words, there is nothing strange or 'poetic' about most of them, yet the unexpected juxtapositions of these words bring new meanings into the ordinary. She was far ahead of her time in the concentration and spareness of her verse. Like all great poetry hers helps to bridge a gap between the physical and the spiritual.

Curiously, Emily Dickinson, just like many great authors, never knew how to sort out the best of her stuff. Her first letter to the world came to light on April 15, 1862. A professional essayist and lecturer Thomas Higginson received a mere letter from a young woman named Emily Dickinson who enclosed four of her poems. She was writing to inquire whether her verses "breathed". But Higginson's problem was that he was literally unable to classify the poems. He said later that "the impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius" was distinct on his mind.

The poems by Dickinson are usually brief, many of them are based on a single image or symbol. But within her little lyrics she writes about some of the most important things in life: love and a lover, nature and immortality. She writes about success, which she thought she never achieved, and about failure which she considered her constant companion. Dickinson writes so brilliantly that she is indisputably ranked as one of America's greatest poets.