American literature How literature is affected and connected to circumstances.
Bayan M. AL Momani.
How can literature reflect reality or imagination, one keeps on hearing that it is a mirror of the writer's inner feelings. Literature is more than that; it represents the nature of the writer's cultural background and how it is shaped socially, economically, politically and religiously. Eventually literature gives a clear clue about the writer's country combined with all kinds of feelings whether happiness, agony, sorrows and even the darkness of unpleasant events. Literature is shaped by the history of nations, writers simply tell the story of this history. To go back in history to trace roots of the literature of a country is one of the best ways to learn how it evolved and developed. American history evolved over time writers became like literary historians drawing connections to circumstances or factors, one major factor is place. American literature is dated to the colonial period mostly, but American literature goes way back to home land, England. Before going back to that period of time, the writings of Captain John Smith which reveal him as incurable romantic, to him American literature owe the famous story of Pocahontas. The story recounts how Pocahontas the daughter of the Chief Powhatan saved Captain Smith's life when he was prisoner of the chief. Her gentleness, intelligence, and beauty impressed the English and she married John Rolfe, an English gentleman. This Marriage initiated an eight-year peace treaty between the Indians and the colonists that ensured the survival of the new colony, James Town.1 Many read this romantic story and watched the animated movie and loved it whether the story was for real or fiction. But there is another side of the story that shatters the romantic part and disrupts its beauty. Captain John Smith writes the reason for marrying Pocahontas is religious, though its john Rolfe whom she really married. Reading a history book about religion in America and one comes across the fact that he wanted salvation for pagan Pocahontas by making her Christian. The magic romantic part was gone and the religious factor rises in this well-known story. This is one example that literature resembles the cultural background of the writer, besides the myths, legends, tales, and lyrics of Indian cultures.
1 outline of American literature
The 17th century and the center of it lies the Puritan revolution in England. It was the main event of the century. During the reign of Elizabeth, there were disputes over the government of the church, disputes over foreign policy, disputes over monopolies and special forms of economic privilege, disputes over parliamentary rights and immunities. The peaceful accession of James didn't serve to mollify these quarrels, they festered throughout his reign and grew inflamed under the autocratic rule of his son Charles I. when Charles II was recalled from exile (1660) and put back on his father's powers, it became clear that England was bound to have, in religion and politics, some sort of organization looser than anyone had anticipated, looser than anyone wanted.2 When Charles's brother and successor, James II, was ejected from the throne and sent into exile, solid settlement between parties was reached, 1688. The country's social problems compromised, and settled down to a long constitutional nap under a series of monarchs who made little trouble for their parliaments and therefore had little trouble with their thrones. The crisis was over.3 Under Elizabeth Tudor the court was the undisputed center of national authority, influence, power, reward, and intellectual inspiration. London was the center of the kingdom, and the court was the unchallenged center of London. Particularly was this true in matters of the intellect, of literature and the arts. The characteristics forms of literature under Elizabeth were courtly. Courtiers patronized the theatre by attending plays and by lending the prestige of their names to different acting companies, like the sonnet sequence (Sidney's Arcadia)4. Art and literature lived by patronage, because one reads that patronage flowed and it was almost the only way for a man to live by his writings. Ben Jonson channeled almost all his energies into writing for court and courtiers. A man like George Herbert was much remarked because he could have been a courtier and chose not to be. Because court circles were narrow, a poet did not have to wait for publication in order to be widely known among his fellow poets. Furthermore one encounters examples literature written within this framework. All examples implied a belief in hierarchical order within a strict framework of uniformity, involving obedience to the national church, loyalty to the national monarch. After 1660, the pattern of values was quite different. For one thing, the court was no longer an unchallenged center of intellectual and literary influence. It did not have the power, social and financial, to be anything of the sort.5 The established church, which had once claimed to be the sole guardian of men's spiritual welfare and their worldly behavior, became after 1660 simply one of 2The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Ada s Do aldso ,‌‌ vol, 1, fourth edition. P. 1049-50. 3The Norton Anthology of English Literature, p. 1050. 4 Same source, p. 1050-51. 5 same source. 1051.
many possible religious communities. The Puritan sects had been freed to multiply and develop their independence, after the restoration they could not be got back into the English (Anglican) church by force or persuasion. When several sects exist side by side in open competition, they are all voluntary. Each sect follows its code and agrees in not trying to persecute one another.6 Although it is 1660, reading history brings attention to this century 21st. sects create problems of discipline, just like what is happening nowadays 21st, if a member does not like the social code of his sect, he transfers to a more understanding sect, or out of them all. The 21 st century is chaos because of losing the concept of understanding such behavior. Many early puritans looked with misgivings on the secular imagination. They mistrusted literature on the same principle that they mistrusted statues, church music, and elaborate religious rituals. Metaphysical poets who followed Donne were trying to draw out the traditional lyric of love and devotion by stretching it under deliberate mental pressure, to encompass new unities from which a sense of strain and violent effort was rarely absent. In the opposite direction, Jonson and the Cavalier poets tried to compress and limit their poems, giving them a high finish and a strong sense of domination at the expense of their explicit intellectual content. The broad contrast of Cavalier and metaphysical does describe two major poetic alternatives of the century. During the twenty years of puritan rule at mid-century, most of the theaters were closed and hardly anything was written for the stage. The coming of a secular, materialist world was in the air: even before the puritans were forced to give up their dream of a community of saints.7 The stress and strain of a revolutionary age can be read at large in the century's literature, from the somber, sluggish melancholy of the early decades, through the hoarse, incoherent warfare of the middle years, to the slow firming up of new standards of decorum and correctness after 1660. Sonnets largely faded from the poetic repertory. Blighted by the killing frosts of puritanism, the masque and madrigal both perished. The one was a courtly, the other a popular, form; but both suspect as vain, sensual, and worldly. Satire grew subtler and more various. A whole new tone of gentlemanly discourse grew up after the Restoration. After the unrelieved earnestness of the puritans, derision and buffoonery became the order of the day. Henry fielding was to define in memorable words as "a comic epic in prose" one reason why he felt that way was undoubtedly that he began his literary career as a writer of stage burlesque.8 The seventeenth century changed not only the tone of literature, but also the very definition of what literature could be. In the seamless web of history one can hardly fail to notice new colors and textures which, over the course of the 17 th 6 Same source 1052. 7 Same source, p. 1054-55. 8 same source. P. 1055, 56, 57.
century, enter into the warp and woof of the nation literary as of its social life, to make it look and feel like a whole new piece of cloth.9
Puritans addressed themselves not to the hopelessly unregenerate but to the indifferent, and they addressed the heart the heart more than the mind, always distinguishing between "historical" or rational understanding and heartfelt "saving faith." Their lives were hard. Anne Bradstreet's father told people in England to come over and join them if their lives were "endued with grace." puritans believed that God's hand was present in every human event and that He rewarded good and punished bad. If God looked favorably upon a nation, His approval could be evidence in its success. In writing about Anne Bradstreet, Adrienne Rich observes that seventeenth century puritan life was perhaps "the most self-conscious ever lived". Puritans saw all of human time as a progression toward the fulfillment of God's design on earth.10 The greatest of all the puritan historians was Cotton Mather, and in his Magnolia Christi Americana 1702 the myth of a chosen people took on its fullest resonance of meaning. Mather saw himself as the last defender of the "old New England way," and all the churches were under attack from new forces of secularism. Mather solved the problem by writing "saints' lives" each of which could serve as an example of the progress of the Christian soul. Under Mather artistry, Winthrop's vision of a community of saints living in mutual concern and sympathy became an ideal rather a historical reality. John Winthrop described his "model" for a Christian community, at all times, he said, "some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity," others low and "in subjection."11 No other colonists in the history of the world were as intellectual as the puritans. The self-made and often self-educated puritans were notable exception. They wanted education to understand and execute God's will as they established their colonies throughout New England. The puritan definition of good writing was that which brought home a full awareness of the importance of worshipping God and the spiritual dangers that the soul faced on Earth. 12 Scholars have long pointed
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9 p. 1058 10 the Norton Anthology of American literature, Gottesman, Holla d‌‌, vol,1. P. 3-5. 11 The Norton Anthology of American literature, p.3,8. 12 outline of American Literature, p4.
out the link between puritanism and capitalism: both rest on ambition, hard work, and intense striving for success. William Bradford was the first historian of Plymouth colony, he was elected governor. Bradford recorded the first document of colonial self-governance in the English New World, "the Mayflower Compact." The compact was a harbinger of the Declaration of Independence to come a century and a half later. One finds that reading or writing "light" books was disapproved by puritans; they consider this thing secular amusement. The first published book of poems by an American was also the first American book published by a woman, Anne Bradstreet. The book was published in England. She emigrated when she was 18; she preferred her long, religious poems on conventional subjects such as the seasons, readers enjoyed the witty poems on subjects from daily life. She was inspired by the English metaphysical poetry, and in her book The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America 1650, shows the influence of Edmund Spencer, Philip Sidney. 13 All 17th-century American writings were in the manner of British writings of the same period. John smith wrote in the tradition of geographic literature, Bradford echoed cadences of King James Bible, while Mathers and roger Williams wrote bejeweled prose typical of the day. Tyler was in the tradition of such metaphysical poets as George Herbert and john Donne. Both the content and form of literature of this century were markedly English.14 For nearly two hundred years after the English settlements in America, the majority of the works read there were written by English authors. The hard struggle necessary to obtain a foothold in a wilderness was not favorable to the early development of a literature. Those who remained in England could not clear away the forest, till the soil, and contend with Indians, but they could write the books and send them across the ocean. The early settlers were for the most part content to allow English authors to do this. For these reasons it is unsurprising that early American literature does not match in quality that produced in England during the same period. When Americans began writing in larger numbers there was at first close adherence to English models. For a while it seemed as if American literature would be only a feeble imitation of these models. Beginning in the eighteenth century, that started to change and some colonial writing was considered to have merit in its own right.15 The literature of England gained something from America as well. Some of the reasons why American literature developed along original lines and thus conveyed a message of its own to the world are to be found in the changed 13 outline of American Literature, chapter 1, early American and colonial period to 1776. 14 American literature, Britannica online encyclopedia. 15 American literature/colonial period (1620s-1776) wikibooks.
environment and the varying problems and ideals of American life. More important were the struggles leading to the Revolutionary War, the formation and guidance of the Republic, and the Civil War. All these combined to give individuality to American thought and literature.16
Puritans were called so because they wished to purify the Church of England from what seemed to them great abuses. These puritans had been more than one century in the making. Henry VIII formed the Church of England in 1534. Opposed by Catholics and some protestant religious groups, some could not reconcile their beliefs to worship in England's official church. For these dissenting Protestants, their religion was a constant command to put the unseen above the seen, to satisfy the aspiration of the spirit. John cotton pastor of the church of Boston, England, was told that if he had been guilty only of an infraction of certain of the Ten Commandments, he might have been pardoned, but since his crime was Puritanism, he must suffer. Puritan colonization of New England took place in a comparatively brief space of time, during the twenty years from 1620 to 1640. The leading men in the colonization of Virginia and New England were born in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; the Elizabethans were imaginative and resourceful. It is instructive to follow the lives of Elizabethans as different as Sir Philp Sidney, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Captain John Smith, and John Winthrop, and note the varied experiences of each.17 The Elizabethans were democratic, different classes mingled together in a marked degree. The chance for varied experience with all sorts and conditions of men enabled Shakespeare to speak to all humanity. He represented England in his plays. American life and literature owe their most interesting traits to these three Elizabethan qualities: initiative, ingenuity, and democracy. Captain John smith was a man of Elizabethan stamp: active, ingenious, craving new experiences. He became the president of the Jamestown colony and labored for its preservation. The first product of his pen in America was A True Relation of Virginia, written in1608. In his writings he described the Indians in way that shoed his capacity for quickly noting their traits:
16 colonial period. 17 American literature, colonial period.
They are inconstant in everything, but what fear constraineth them to keep. Crafty, timorous, quick of apprehension and very ingenious. Some are of disposition fearful, some bold, most cautious, all savage.18
Smith has often been accused of boasting, and sometimes guilty of great exaggeration, but it is certain that he repeatedly braved hardships, extreme dangers, and captivity among Indians to provide food for the colony and to survey Virginia.
Smith gave the Indian to literature, which is considered the greatest achievement in literary history. Who has not heard of Pocahontas, how he was captured by Indians, and of his rescue from death and torture, by Pocahontas the beautiful Indian maiden. It would be difficult to say how many tales of Indian adventure this romantic story has suggested. It has the honor of being the first of its kind written in the English tongue. Did Pocahontas actually rescue Captain Smith? When Pocahontas visited London, there was no evidence that she denied it. Professor Edwin Arber says, "To deny the truth about Pocahontas incident is to create more difficulties than are involved in its acceptance." But literature does not need to ask whether the story of hamlet or Pocahontas is true. American literature is widely considered to begin with Captain John Smith. Another Englishman started writing in the colonies in the early seventeenth century. William Strachey, a contemporary of Shakespeare and secretary of the Virginian colony, wrote at Jamestown many manuscripts and sent them to London. A True Repertory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, kt., Upon and from Islands of the Bermudas, is one of them, the book is memorable for the description of a storm at the sea. It is compared to Shakespeare's The Tempest, it is interesting to compare the manuscript with what was produced in Shakespeare's mind. Strachey tells how "the sea swelled above the clouds and gave battle unto heaven, an apparition of a little round light, like a faint star, trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze, half the height upon the main mast, and shooting sometimes from shroud to shroud." Ariel says to prospero: "I boarded the king's ship; now on the beak, Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
18 Same source.
I flam'd amazement: sometimes I'ld divide, And burn in many places; on the topmast, The yards, and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly, Then meet and join."19 It is possible that Shakespeare turned his attention to the incidents arising out of Virginian colonization and gave him suggestion for one of his great plays.
Virginia and Massachusetts produced the bulk of American literature. The early government of Virginia was largely aristocratic; that of Massachusetts, theocratic. Virginia persecuted the puritans. The important colony of New Netherlands (New York) was settled by the Dutch early in the seventeenth century. The student of literature is specially interested this colony because Washington Irving has invested it with a halo of romance. He shows the sturdy Knickerbockers, the Van Cortlands, the Van Dycks, and the other chivalrous Dutch burghers, sitting in perfect silence, puffing their pipes, and thinking of nothing for hours together in those "days of simplicity and sunshine." For literary reasons it is well it was not made an English colony until the Duke of York took possession of it in 1664. Up to 1700 the history of the thirteen colonies is practically of a separate unit. Almost all the colonies had trouble with Indians and royal governors. Pirates, rapacious politicians, religious matters, or witchcraft were sometimes sources of disturbance. England had a wonderful literature before her colonies came to America, before 1607 Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare had written, and before 1620 the King James Version of the Bible had been produced. The American colonies were the heirs of all that the English race had previously accomplished. The chief early writers of Virginia are captain john smith, who described the country and the Indians, and gave to literature the story of Pocahontas disclosing a new world to the imagination of writers20; one can classify it within the category of escape literature. William Strachey, who outranks contemporary writers in describing the wrath of the sea, and who may have furnished a suggestion to Shakespeare for The Tempest, as for poets George Sandys translated part of Ovid, and the unknown author of the elegy on Nathaniel Bacon, and more other writers that provided literary manuscript that fit within the category of interpretive literature that would broaden and deepen and sharpen our awareness of life. Escape literature takes us away from real world
19 Colonial period/ American literature. 20 Same source.
whereas interpretive literature takes us, through imagination, deeper into the real world: it enables us to understand our troubles.21
Between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War, America was wholly transformed. Before the civil war, America had been essentially a rural, agrarian, isolated republic whose idealistic, confident, and self-reliant inhabitants for the most part believed in God; by the time the united states entered world war I as a world power, it was an industrialized, urbanized, continental nation whose people had been forced to come to terms with the implications of Darwin's theory of evolution as well as with profound changes in its own social institutions and cultures values. As industry flourished, America's cities grew. By the end of the first war one half of the American population was concentrated in a dozen or so cities; the vast majority of all wage earners were employed by corporations and large enterprises, 8.5 million as factory workers. Millions of people participated in the prosperity that accompanied this explosive industrial expansion.22 The transformation of an entire continent was not accomplished without incalculable suffering. In the countryside increasing numbers of farmers, dependent for transportation of their crops on the monopolistic railroads, were squeezed off by what novelist Frank Norris characterized as the giant "octopus" that crisscrossed the continent. For many, the great cities were also, as the radical novelist Upton Sinclair sensed, jungles where only the strongest, the most ruthless, and the luckiest survived. Early attempts by labor to organize were crude and often violent, and such groups as the notorious "Molly Maguires," which performed acts of terrorism in Pennsylvania, seemed to confirm the sense of the public and of courts that labor organizations were "illegal conspiracies" and thus public enemies. This rapid transcontinental settlement and these new urban industrial circumstances were accompanied by the development of a national literature of great abundance and variety. New themes, new forms, new subjects, new regions, new authors, new audiences all emerged literature. 23 At the onset of World War I the spirit and substance of American literature had evolved remarkably. No longer was it produced, at least in its popular forms, typically moralistic men from new England and the old south; no longer were polite, well-dressed, grammatically correct, middle-class young people the only central characters in its narratives; no longer were these narratives to be set in exotic places and remote times; no longer were fiction, poetry, drama, and formal history the 21 literature, structure, sound, and sense. Laurence Perrine. Fourth edition . p. 4. 22 The Norton Anthology of American literature, Gottesman, Holland, Kalsto e‌ Vol, 2. P. 1-2. 23 The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol.2, p. 3.
chief acceptable forms of literary expression; no longer was literature read primarily by young, middle-class women. At the same time, these years saw the emergence of what critic Warner Berthoff aptly designates "the literature of argument," powerful works in sociology, philosophy, psychology, many of them compelled by the spirit of exposure and reform. American literature established itself as a producer of major works.24 In its new security America welcomed, in translation, the leading European figures of the time often in the columns of Henry James and William Dean Howells who reviewed their works. American writers in this period wrote to earn money, fame and change the world. They expressed themselves in a permanent form. The three figures who dominated prose fiction in the last quarter of the 19 th century were Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James. Twain was without doubt the most popular of three, because of his unusual gift as a humorous public speaker. Twain's art was in essence the art of the performer; he had the ability to convert the humor of stage performance into written language. He was incapable of writing a dull sentence, he was a master of style, there is no dispute about his ability to capture the enduring, archetypal, mythic images of America before the writer and the country came of age. Obliged to confront the moral, mental, and material squalor of postwar industrialized America, twain's work became more cerebral, contrived, and embittered. 25 Howells was unquestionably the most influential American writer in the last quarter of the century. Howells was no mere acquisitive hack. He wrote always with a sense of his genteel, largely female audience; but he generally observed the proprieties, he often took real risks and opened new territories for fiction. In The Rise of Silas Lapham 1885, Howells addressed with deepening seriousness the relationship between the economic transformation of America and its moral condition. Howells had called for a literary realism that would treat commonplace Americans truthfully; "this truth given, the book cannot be wicked and cannot be weak; and without it all graces of style and feats of invention and cunning of construction are so many superfluities of naughtiness," he observed in "The Editor's Study" of Harper's Monthly for April, 1887. Howells is considered as "an urbane and highly respectable old gentleman, a sitter on committees, an intimate of professors‌, and a placid conformist." Twain, James, and Howells together brought to fulfillment native trends in the realistic portrayal of the landscape and social surfaces, brought to perfection the vernacular style, and explored and exploited the literary possibilities of interior life.26
24 25 26
the Norton Anthology of American literature, p.3. same source, p. 4 Same source, p.4, 5, 6.
One of the most far-reaching intellectual events of the last half of the 19th century was the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's The Origins of Species. One response was to accept the more negative implications of evolutionary theory and use it to account for the behavior of characters in literary works. Many American writers adopted a pessimistic form of realism, this so called "naturalistic" view of man, into his or her work in highly individual ways.27 There is another way of writing related to or another expression of realistic impulse and that is regional writing. Regional writing resulted from the desire to preserve distinctive ways of life before industrialization dispersed or homogenized them. Much of the writing was a response to the opportunities presented by the rapid growth of magazines, which created a new market for short fiction. During these fifty years a vast body of nonfictional prose was devoted to the description, analysis, and critique of social, economic, and political institutions and to the unsolved social problems that were one consequence of the rapid growth and change of time. Women's right, political corruption, economic inequity, business deceptions, the exploitation of labor, these became the subjects of articles and books by the long list of journalists, historians, social critics, and economists. 28 The more enduring fictional and nonfictional prose forms of the era, come to terms imaginatively with the individual and collective dislocations and discontinuities associated with the closing out of the frontier, urbanization, intensified secularism, unprecedented immigration, the surge of national wealth unequally distributed, revised conceptions of human nature and destiny, the reordering of family and civil life, and the pervasive spread of mechanical and organizational technologies. 29 For Americans, like any other nation, there is a critical understanding on the part of their writers which is considered a legacy to be drawn on. There is more than one outline to draw in order to narrate the story of American literature, literary movements, historical movements, and multiculturalism. Here is just an attempt to say history shapes a nation and how it is told depends on the nation's poets, novelists, prose writers, and historian. The story of your nation forces you, while turning your understanding into a written manuscript, to draw connections to events and circumstances.
27
same source, p. 7 Same source, p.8, 9, 10. 29 same source, p. 10. 28
References:
Abrams, Donaldson, Smith, Monk, Lipking, Ford, Daiches. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol, 1. W.W. Norton & company, New York, London. Gottesman, Holland, Kalstone, Murphy, Parker, Pritchard. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol, 1. W.W. Norton &company, New York, London. Gottesman, Holland, Kalstone, Murphy, Parker, Pritchard. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol, 2. W.W. Norton &company, New York, London. Perrine, Laurence. Literature structure, sound, and sense. Fourth edition. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers. American literature/colonial period (1620s-1776) wikibooks. American literature- Britannica Online Encyclopedia. USIA- Outline of American Literature- Chapter 1: Early American and Colonial period to 1776.