Chapter Five: Two Giants in Novel-writing

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Chapter Five Two Giants in Novel-writing
The Romantic Period

• Hawthorne and Melville

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Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864)

• I. Literary Status
• Greatest Romance-writer
• Pioneering psychological novelist
• Moral novelist
• II. Life
• 1804, July 4, in Salem, Massachusetts, a Puritan
  family
• Ancestors role in the Salem Witchcraft Trial in
  1692
• Bowdoin College read widely writing tales and
  novels

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Salem Custom-House where Hawthorne worked
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Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864)

• III. Major Works
• Short story collection
• Twice-Told Tales (1837)
• Moses from an Old Manse (1846)
• Romances
• The Scarlet Letter (1850)
• The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
• The Blithedale Romance (1852)
• The Marble Faun (1860)

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Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864)

• IV. Hawthornes Black Vision of Life
• All his life, Hawthorne seems to be haunted by
  his sense of sin and evil in life. Most of his
  works deal with evil one way or another.
• A. Evil exists in the human heart (Earthy
  Holocaust)
• B. Everyone possesses some evil secret (Young
  Goodman Brown)
• C. Everyone seems to cover up his innermost evil
  (The Ministers Black Veil)
• D. Evil seems to be mans birthmark.
• E. Evil comes out of evil though it may take many
  generations
• F. One source of evil is overweening intellect.
  (The tension between the head and the heart)
  Hawthornes intellectual characters are usually
  villains, dreadful because devoid of fellow
  feelings.
• (Hollingsworth, Chillingworth, Dr. Rappaccini
  Hawthornes negative attitude toward science is
  reflected in his writings and characterizations).

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Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864)

• V. Hawthorne and his romance
• Romance is in Hawthornes mind the predestined
  form of American narrative.
• VI. The analysis of his masterpiece The Scarlet
  Letter
• 1. Story and Plot an aging English scholar
  Chillingworth his young beautiful wife Hester
  Prynne young and promising priest Arthur
  Dimmesdale Pearl
• 2. Theme
• A. Romantic or Puritan? A story of love or sin? a
  moral or immoral story?
• B. the adaptation of American Romanticism to
  American Puritan moralism the load of
  didacticism the desire to elevate
• C. What Hawthorne was predominantly concerned
  with was the moral, emotional, and psychological
  effect of the sin on the people in general

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Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864)

• 3. The analysis of the characters
• A. Hester Prynne This book is not a praise of
  Hester Prynne sinning, but a hymn on the moral
  growth of the woman when sinned against.
• Hesters life eventually acquires a real
  significance when she reestablishes a meaningful
  relationship with her fellowmen.
• Symbolic of her moral development is the
  gradual, imperceptible change which the scarlet
  letter undergoes in meaning. A Adultery
  Able, Angel (Adamic the original sin or
  America)
• B. Arthur Dimmesdale banishes himself from the
  society. Deeply concerned with himself, he lives
  a stranger among his admirers. He undergoes the
  tragic expericence of physical and spiritual
  disintergration.
• C. Roger Chillingworth, the real villain of the
  story, embodies pure intellect, who commits the
  unpardonable sin (the violation of heart)

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Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864)

• 4. Structural features
• The 24 chapters of The Scarlet Letter are
  closely knitted together by means of the scaffold
  scenes which appear 3 times, almost
  symmetrically, in the beginning, in the middle,
  and the end of the book, each time bringing the
  four major characters (Hester, Dimmesdale,
  Chillingworth, and Pearl) together. Chapters
  I-II, XII and XVIII serve as the props holding up
  the frame of the novel.
• 5. Psychological complexities
• All the major characters have complex
  psychologies there is a semblance of interior
  monologues which reveal their states of mind.
• 6. Ambiguity
• One salient feature of Hawthornes art is his
  ambiguity, of which the technique of multiple
  view employed in the book.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864)

• VII. Hawthornes Symbolism
• (The Scarlet Letter) the names of the characters,
  Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, little Pearl, the
  flower at the prison door, etc.
• (The House of the Seven Gables) the house, the
  rise and fall of the family fortune, the chickens
  dwindling in size, the love between the two young
  people
• (The Young Goodman Brown) nightly journey the
  inner urge of the young to grow up and get
  initiated into the adult world the murkiness of
  night engenders a sense of uncertainty and fear
  the grown-up situation Faith young Goodman
  Brown (Everyman)
• VIII. Hawthornes influence
• Herman Melville Henry James Hemingway
  William Faulkner ...

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Statue in Salem,Massechussetts
Sleepy Hollow Cemetry in Concord, Massechussetts
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Herman Melville (1819-1891)

• I. Literary Status
• sea novelists, cannibal novels, etc.
• II. Life and Career
• Little education began to work early
• bank clerk, salesman, a farm-hand, school
  teacher
• A. Going out to sea
• B. his marriage
• C. friendship with Hawthorne (1850)
• III. His View of the World
• Tragic humanism

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Herman Melville (1819-1891)

• IV. His major works
• His novels
• Typee (1846) Omoo (1847)
• Mardi (1849) Redburn (1849)
• White Jacket (1850)
• Moby Dick (1851)
• Pierre (1852) Confidence Man (1857)
• Billy Budd (unfinished)
• His poetic work Clarel
• His short stories
• Bartleby, Benito Cereno

Typee
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Herman Melville (1819-1891)

• V. His masterpiece Moby Dick
• 1. Essence
• a. Herman Melvilles masterpiece is Moby Dick,
  one of the worlds greatest masterpieces.
• b. To get to know the 19th century American mind
  and America itself, one has to read this book.
• c. It is an encyclopedia of everything, history,
  philosophy, religion, etc. in addition to a
  detailed account of the operations of the whaling
  industry.
• d. But it is first a Shakespeare tragedy of man
  fighting against overwhelming odds in an
  indifferent and even hostile universe.
• 2. Content
• Ishmael, Pequod, Ahab, Moby Dick

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Herman Melville (1819-1891)

• 3. Idea his bleak view of the world
• The world is at once Godless and purposeless.
• Man in this universe lives a meaningless and
  futile life, meaningless because futile.
• Man can observe and manipulate nature in a
  prudent way, and he must ultimately place himself
  at the mercy of nature.
• Man cannot influence and overcome nature at its
  source. Once he attempts to seek power over
  nature, he is doomed.
• The idea that man can make the world for himself
  is nothing but a transcendentalist folly.
• Melville never seems able to say an affirmative
  yes to life his is the attitude of Everlasting
  Nay .
• The loss of faith and the sense of futility and
  meaninglessness were expressed in Melvilles
  works.

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Herman Melville (1819-1891)

• 4. Themes and subjects
• A. Alienation he found existing on different
  levels, between man and man, man and society, and
  man and nature. (e.g. Ahab)
• B. criticism against Emersonian self-reliant
  individual
• Ahab is too much of a self-reliant individual
  to be a good human being. He stands alone on his
  own one leg among the millions of the peopled
  earth. For him the only law is his own will. To
  him the world exists for his own sake. His
  selfhood must be asserted at the expense of all
  else.
• C. Rejection and Quest
• Ishmael resembles his namesake in the Bible in
  that he is a wanderer. Tired with and rejecting
  his early lifestyle, he tried to seek for a happy
  and ideal life. He gradually comes to see the
  folly of Ahab seeking to conquer nature and
  begins to feel the significance of love and
  fraternity among mortal beings. Voyaging for
  Ishmael has become a journey in quest of
  knowledge and values.

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Herman Melville (1819-1891)

• 5. Symbolism in the novel Moby Dick
• A. the voyage itself is a metaphor for search
  and discovery, the search for the ultimate truth
  of experience.
• B. the Pequod is the ship of the American soul
  and consciousness.
• C. Moby Dick is a symbol of evil to some, of
  goodness to others, and of both to still others.
• D. The whiteness of Moby Dick is a paradoxical
  color, signifying death and corruption as well as
  purity, innocence and youth it represents the
  final mystery of the universe.
• 6. The multiple view of point
• Chapter 36, award of a doublon and different
  responses of different men Tashtego (the
  American Indian), Daggoo (the African American
  giant), Queequeg (the Polynesian) -- Starbuck

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Herman Melville (1819-1891)

• 7. The revival of Melville
• A dedicated artist
• There was, to be sure, a great deal of Ahab in
  him.
• I have written a wicked book
• Born in the 19th century, Melville did not
  receive recognition until the 20th century.
• In the 1920s, a Columbia scholar, G. M. Weaver,
  did solid work in reviving him.