American Literature: History of American Literature - Chapter 4: The Romantic Period, 1820

The Romance

Women Writers and Reformers

Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily

Dickinson, and the Transcendentalists represent the first great literary generation

produced in the United States. In the case of the novelists, the Romantic vision tended to express

itself in the form Hawthorne called the “Romance,” a heightened, emotional, and symbolic form of

the novel. Romances were not love stories, but serious novels that used special techniques to

communicate complex and subtle meanings.

Instead of carefully defining realistic characters through a wealth of detail, as most English or

continental novelists did, Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe shaped heroic figures larger than life,

burning with mythic significance. The typical protagonists of the American Romance are haunted,

alienated individuals. Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale or Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter,

Melville’s Ahab in Moby-Dick, and the many isolated and obsessed characters of Poe’s tales are

lonely protagonists pitted against unknowable, dark fates that, in some mysterious way, grow out

of their deepest unconscious selves. The symbolic plots reveal hidden actions of the anguished

spirit.

One reason for this fictional exploration into the hidden recesses of the soul is the absence of

settled, traditional community life in America. English novelists—Jane Austen, Charles Dickens

(the great favorite), Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, William Thackeray—lived in a complex, well-articulated, traditional society and shared with their readers attitudes that informed their realistic

fiction. American novelists were faced with a history of strife and revolution, a geography of vast

wilderness, and a fluid and relatively classless democratic society. American novels frequently

reveal a revolutionary absence of tradition. Many English novels show a poor main character rising

on the economic and social ladder, perhaps because of a good marriage or the discovery of a hidden

aristocratic past. However, this buried plot does not challenge the aristocratic social structure of

England. On the contrary, it confirms it. The rise of the main character satisfies the wish fulfillment

of the mainly middle-class readers.

In contrast, the American novelist had to depend on his or her own devices. America was, in

part, an undefined, constantly moving frontier populated by immigrants speaking foreign

languages and following strange and crude ways of life. Thus, the main character in American

literature might find himself alone among cannibal tribes, as in Melville’s Typee, or exploring a

wilderness like James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking, or witnessing lonely visions from the

grave, like Poe’s solitary individuals, or meeting the devil walking in the forest, like Hawthorne’s

Young Goodman Brown. Virtually all the great American protagonists have been “loners.” The

democratic American individual had, as it were, to invent himself.

The serious American novelist had to invent new forms as well, hence the sprawling,

idiosyncratic shape of Melville’s novel Moby-Dick and Poe’s dreamlike, wandering Narrative of

Arthur Gordon Pym. Few American novels achieve formal perfection, even today. Instead of

borrowing tested literary methods, Americans tend to invent new creative techniques. In America,

it is not enough to be a traditional and definable social unit, for the old and traditional gets left

behind; the new, innovative force is the center of attention.

1. How is the romance novel of the mid-1860s different from a contemporary romantic novel?

2. Compare American and English fiction writing during the mid-1860s. How were they

different and why?

THE ROMANCE

The Romance form is dark and forbidding, indicating how difficult it is to create an identity

without a stable society. Most of the Romantic heroes die in the end; all the sailors except

Ishmael are drowned in Moby-Dick, and the sensitive but sinful minister Arthur Dimmesdale dies

at the end of The Scarlet Letter. The self-divided, tragic note in American literature becomes

dominant in the novels, even before the Civil War of the 1860s manifested the greater social tragedy

of a society at war with itself.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, a fifth-generation American of English descent, was born in Salem,

Massachusetts, a wealthy seaport north of Boston that specialized in East India trade. One of his

ancestors had been a judge in an earlier century, during trials in Salem of women accused of being

witches. Hawthorne used the idea of a curse on the family of an evil judge in his novel The House

of the Seven Gables.

Many of Hawthorne’s stories are set in

Puritan New England. His greatest novel, The

Scarlet Letter (1850), has become the classic

portrayal of Puritan America. It tells of the

passionate, forbidden love affair linking a

sensitive, religious young man, the Reverend

Arthur Dimmesdale, and the sensuous,

beautiful townsperson, Hester Prynne. Set in

Boston around 1650 during early Puritan

colonization, the novel highlights the

Calvinistic obsession with morality, sexual

repression, guilt and confession, and spiritual

salvation.

For its time, The Scarlet Letter was a daring

and even subversive book. Hawthorne’s gentle

style, remote historical setting, and ambiguity

softened his grim themes and contented the

general public, but sophisticated writers such

as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville

recognized the book’s “hellish” power. It treated

issues that were usually suppressed in 19thcentury

America, such as the impact of the new,

liberating democratic experience on individual

behavior, especially on sexual and religious

freedom.

The book is superbly organized and beautifully written. Appropriately, it uses allegory, a

technique the early Puritan colonists themselves practiced.

Hawthorne’s reputation rests on his other novels and tales as well. In The House of the Seven

Gables (1851), he again returns to New England’s history. The crumbling of the “house” refers to a

family in Salem as well as to the actual structure. The theme concerns an inherited curse and its

resolution through love. As one critic has noted, the idealistic protagonist Holgrave voices

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne’s own democratic distrust of old aristocratic families: “The truth is, that once in every

half-century, at least, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and

forget about its ancestors.”

Hawthorne’s last two novels were less successful. Both use modern settings, which hamper the

magic of romance. The Blithedale Romance (1852) is interesting for its portrait of the socialist,

utopian Brook Farm community. In the book, Hawthorne criticizes egotistical, power-hungry social

reformers whose deepest instincts are not genuinely democratic. The Marble Faun (1860), though

set in Rome, dwells on the Puritan themes of sin, isolation, expiation, and salvation.

These themes, and his characteristic settings in Puritan colonial New England, are trademarks

of many of Hawthorne’s best-known shorter stories: “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “Young Goodman

Brown,” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” In the last of these, a naive young man from the

country comes to the city—a common route in urbanizing 19th-century America—to seek help from

his powerful relative, whom he has never met. Robin has great difficulty finding the major, and

finally joins in a strange night riot in which a man who seems to be a disgraced criminal is comically

and cruelly driven out of town. Robin laughs loudest of all until he realizes that this “criminal” is

none other than the man he sought—a representative of the British who has just been overthrown

by a revolutionary American mob. The story confirms the bond of sin and suffering shared by all

humanity. It also stresses the theme of the self-made man: Robin must learn, like every democratic

American, to prosper from his own hard work, not from special favors from wealthy relatives.

“My Kinsman, Major Molineux” casts light on one of the most striking elements in Hawthorne’s

fiction: the lack of functioning families. Although Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales manage to

introduce families into the least likely wilderness places, Hawthorne’s stories and novels repeatedly

show broken, cursed, or artificial families and the sufferings of the isolated individual.

The ideology of revolution, too, may have played a part in glorifying a sense of proud yet

alienated freedom. The American Revolution, from a psycho-historical viewpoint, parallels an

adolescent rebellion away from the parent-figure of England and the larger family of the British

Empire. Americans won their independence and were then faced with the bewildering dilemma of

discovering their identity apart from old authorities. This scenario was played out countless times

on the frontier to the extent that, in fiction, isolation often seems the basic American condition of

life. Puritanism and its Protestant offshoots may have further weakened the family by preaching

that the individual’s first responsibility was to save his or her own soul.

Herman Melville (1819–1891)

Herman Melville, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a descendant of an old, wealthy family that

fell abruptly into poverty upon the death of the father. Despite his patrician upbringing, proud

family traditions, and hard work, Melville found himself in poverty with no college education. At

nineteen, he went to sea. His interest in sailors’ lives grew naturally out of his own experiences, and

most of his early novels grew out of his voyages. In these we see the young Melville’s wide,

democratic experience and hatred of tyranny and injustice. His first book, Typee, was based on his

time spent among the supposedly cannibalistic but hospitable tribe of the Taipis in the Marquesas

Islands of the South Pacific. The book praises the islanders and their natural, harmonious life, and

criticizes the Christian missionaries, whom Melville found less genuinely civilized than the people

they came to convert.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Melville’s masterpiece, is the epic story of the whaling ship Pequod

and its “ungodly, god-like man,” Captain Ahab, whose obsessive quest for the white whale Moby-

Dick leads the ship and its men to destruction. This work, a realistic adventure novel, contains a

series of meditations on the human condition. Whaling, throughout the book, is a grand metaphor

for the pursuit of knowledge. Realistic catalogues and descriptions of whales and the whaling

industry punctuate the book, but these carry symbolic connotations. In chapter 15, “The Right

Whale’s Head,” the narrator says that the Right Whale is a Stoic and the Sperm Whale is a

Platonian, referring to two classical schools of philosophy.

Although Melville’s novel is philosophical, it is also tragic. Despite his heroism, Ahab is doomed

and perhaps damned in the end. Nature, however beautiful, remains alien and potentially deadly.

In Moby-Dick, Melville challenges Emerson’s optimistic idea that humans can understand nature.

Moby-Dick, the great white whale, is an inscrutable, cosmic existence that dominates the novel, just

as he obsesses Ahab. Facts about the whale and whaling cannot explain Moby-Dick; on the contrary,

the facts themselves tend to become symbols, and every fact is obscurely related in a cosmic web to

every other fact. This idea of correspondence (as Melville calls it in the “Sphinx” chapter) does not,

however, mean that humans can “read” truth in nature, as it does in Emerson.

Behind Melville’s accumulation of facts is a mystic vision—but whether this

vision is evil or good, human or inhuman, is never explained.

The novel is modern in its tendency to be self-referential, or

reflexive. In other words, the novel often is about itself. Melville

frequently comments on mental processes such as writing, reading,

and understanding. One chapter, for instance, is an exhaustive

survey in which the narrator attempts a classification but finally

gives up, saying that nothing great can ever be finished (“God

keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a

draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. O Time, Strength,

Cash and Patience”). Melville’s notion of the literary text as an

imperfect version or an abandoned draft is quite contemporary.

Ahab insists on imaging a heroic, timeless world of absolutes in

which he can stand above his men. Unwisely, he demands a finished

text, an answer. But the novel shows that just as there are no finished

texts, there are no final answers except, perhaps, death.

Certain literary references resonate throughout the novel. Ahab, named for an Old Testament

king, desires a total, Faustian, god-like knowledge. Like Oedipus in Sophocles’ play, who pays

tragically for wrongful knowledge, Ahab is struck blind before he is wounded in the leg and finally

killed. Moby-Dick ends with the word “orphan.” Ishmael, the narrator, is an orphan-like wanderer.

The name, Ishmael, emanates from the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament—he was the son of

Abraham and Hagar (servant to Abraham’s wife, Sarah). Ishmael and Hagar were cast into the

wilderness by Abraham.

Other examples exist. Rachel (one of the patriarch Jacob’s wives) is the name of the boat that

rescues Ishmael at book’s end. Finally, the metaphysical whale reminds Jewish and Christian

readers of the biblical story of Jonah, who was tossed overboard by fellow sailors who considered

him an object of ill fortune. Swallowed by a “big fish,” according to the biblical text, he lived for a

time in its belly before being returned to dry land through God’s intervention. Seeking to flee from

punishment, he only brought more suffering upon himself.

Historical references also enrich the novel. The ship Pequod is named for an extinct New

England Native American tribe; thus, the name suggests that the boat is doomed to destruction.

Herman Melville

Whaling was in fact a major industry, especially in New England. It supplied oil as an energy

source, especially for lamps; thus, the whale does literally “shed light” on the universe. Whaling

was also inherently expansionist and linked with the idea of “manifest destiny,” since it required

Americans to sail around the world in search of whales (in fact, the present state of Hawaii came

under American domination because it was used as the major refueling base for American whaling

ships). The Pequod¸ crew members represent all races and various religions, suggesting the idea

of America as a universal state of mind as well as a melting pot. Finally, Ahab embodies the tragic

version of democratic American individualism. He asserts his dignity as an individual and dares to

oppose the inexorable external forces of the universe.

The novel’s epilogue tempers the tragic destruction of the ship. Throughout, Melville stresses

the importance of friendship and the multicultural human community. After the ship sinks,

Ishmael is saved by the engraved coffin made by his close friend, the heroic tattooed harpooner and

Polynesian prince, Queequeg. The coffin’s primitive, mythological designs incorporate the history of

the cosmos. Ishmael is rescued from death by an object of death. From death, life emerges in the

end.

Moby-Dick has been called a “natural epic”—a magnificent dramatization of the human spirit

set in primitive nature—because of its hunter myth, its initiation theme, its Edenic island

symbolism, its positive treatment of pre-technological peoples, and its quest for rebirth. In setting

humanity alone in nature, it is eminently American. The French writer and politician Alexis de

Tocqueville had predicted, in the 1835 work Democracy in America, that this theme would arise in

America as a result of its democracy:

The destinies of mankind, man himself taken aloof from his country and his age and standing

in the presence of Nature and God, with his passions, his doubts, his rare propensities and

inconceivable wretchedness, will become the chief, if not the sole, theme of (American) poetry.

Tocqueville reasons that, in a democracy, literature would dwell on “the hidden depths of the

immaterial nature of man” rather than on mere appearances or superficial distinctions such as

class and status. Certainly both Moby-Dick and Typee, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and

Walden, fit this description. They are celebrations of nature and pastoral subversions of classoriented,

urban civilization.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

Edgar Allan Poe, a southerner, shares with Herman Melville a darkly metaphysical vision

mixed with elements of realism, parody, and burlesque. He refined the short story genre and

invented detective fiction. Many of his stories prefigure the genres of science fiction, horror, and

fantasy so popular today.

Poe’s short and tragic life was plagued with insecurity. Like so many other major 19th-century

American writers, Poe was orphaned at an early age. Poe’s strange marriage in 1835 to his first

cousin, Virginia Clemm, who was not yet fourteen years old, has been interpreted as an attempt to

find the stable family life he lacked.

Poe believed that strangeness was an essential ingredient of beauty, and his writing is often

exotic. His stories and poems are populated with doomed, introspective aristocrats. (Poe, like many

other southerners, cherished an aristocratic ideal.) These gloomy characters never seem to work or

socialize; instead they bury themselves in dark, moldering castles symbolically decorated with

bizarre rugs and draperies that hide the real world of sun, windows, walls, and floors. The hidden

rooms reveal ancient libraries, strange art works, and eclectic oriental objects. The aristocrats play

musical instruments or read ancient books while they brood on tragedies, often the deaths of loved

ones. Themes of death-in-life, especially being buried alive or returning like a vampire from the

grave, appear in many of his works, including “The Premature Burial,” “Ligeia,” “The Cask of

Amontillado,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Poe’s twilight realm between life and death and

his gaudy, Gothic settings are not merely decorative. They reflect the over-civilized yet deathly

interior of his characters’ disturbed psyches. They are symbolic expressions of the unconscious, and

thus are central to his art.

Poe’s verse, like that of many southerners, was very musical and strictly metrical. His bestknown

poem, in his own lifetime and today, is “The Raven” (1845). In this eerie poem, the haunted,

sleepless narrator, who has been reading and mourning the death of his “lost Lenore” at midnight,

is visited by a raven (a bird that eats dead flesh, hence a symbol of death), who perches above his

door and ominously repeats the poem’s famous refrain, “nevermore.” The poem ends in a frozen

scene of death-in-life:

And the Raven, never flitting, still

is sitting, still is sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas just

above my chamber door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of

a demon’s that is dreaming,

And the lamp-light o’er him

streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

And my soul from out that shadow

that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted—nevermore!

Poe’s stories—such as those cited above—

have been described as tales of horror. Stories

like “The Gold Bug” and “The Purloined Letter”

are more tales of ratiocination, or reasoning.

The horror tales prefigure works by such

American authors of horror fantasy as H.P.

Lovecraft and Stephen King, while the tales of

ratiocination are harbingers of the detective

fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond

Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and John D.

MacDonald. There is a hint, too, of what was to

follow as science fiction. All of these stories

reveal Poe’s fascination with the mind and the

unsettling scientific knowledge that was

radically secularizing the 19th-century world

view.

In every genre, Poe explores the psyche.

Profound psychological insights glint

throughout the stories. In “The Black Cat,” we

read, “Who has not, a hundred times, found

himself committing a vile or silly action, for no

other reason than because he knows he should

Edgar Allan Poe

not?” To explore the exotic and strange aspect of psychological processes, Poe delved into accounts

of madness and extreme emotion. The painfully deliberate style and elaborate explanation in the

stories heighten the sense of the horrible by making the events seem vivid and plausible.

Poe’s combination of decadence and romantic primitivism appealed enormously to Europeans,

particularly to the French poets Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Valéry, and Arthur

Rimbaud. However, Poe is not un-American, despite his aristocratic disgust with democracy,

preference for the exotic, and themes of dehumanization. On the contrary, he is almost a textbook

example of Tocqueville’s prediction that American democracy would produce works that lay bare the

deepest hidden parts of the psyche. Deep anxiety and psychic insecurity seem to have occurred

earlier in America than in Europe, for Europeans at least had a firm, complex social structure that

gave them psychological security. In America, there was no compensating security; it was every

man for himself. Poe accurately described the underside of the American dream of the self-made

man and showed the price of materialism and excessive competition—loneliness, alienation, and

images of death-in-life.

Poe’s “decadence” also reflects the devaluation of symbols that occurred in the 19th century—

the tendency to mix art objects promiscuously from many eras and places, in the process stripping

them of their identity and reducing them to merely decorative items in a collection. The resulting

chaos of styles was particularly noticeable in the United States, which often lacked traditional

styles of its own. The jumble reflects the loss of coherent systems of thought as immigration,

urbanization, and industrialization uprooted families and traditional ways. In art, this confusion of

symbols fueled the grotesque, an idea that Poe explicitly made his theme in his classic collection of

stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).

1. Why was Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter a daring book for its time?

2. Identify and describe two prominent themes and/or characteristics that are trademarks of

Hawthorne’s writing.

3. What political and historical influences caused the theme of individual isolation to be

common in literature during this time period?

4. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is an epic story, literally about whaling, but metaphorically

about

a. writing a novel.

b. the human condition.

c. the pursuit of knowledge.

d. good versus evil.

5. In Moby-Dick, how is nature regarded? Explain Melville’s feelings.

6. Moby-Dick is full of biblical references. Identify and explain two of them.

7. In what way was whaling as an industry linked to the idea of “manifest destiny”?

8. Explain why Moby-Dick is known as a “natural epic.”

9. Edgar Allen Poe’s stories prefigure the genre of

a. mystery novels.

b. realistic fiction.

c. adventure stories.

d. historical fiction.

10. Explain the overall mood of Poe’s works. What was a predominant underlying theme?

11. Which word(s) from below is the closet synonym for the word ratiocination?

a. mathematical function

b. methodical reasoning

c. psychiatric science

d. secularization

12. In what way was Poe’s work unquestionably representative of American sentiment during his

time? Why?

WOMEN WRITERS AND REFORMERS

american women endured many inequalities in the 19th century: They were denied the vote,

barred from professional schools and most higher education, forbidden either to speak in

public or even to attend public conventions, and unable to own property. Despite these obstacles, a

strong women’s network sprang up. Through letters, personal friendships, formal meetings,

women’s newspapers, and books, women furthered social change. Intellectual women drew

parallels between themselves and slaves. They courageously demanded fundamental reforms, such

as the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage, despite social ostracism and sometimes financial

ruin. Their works were the vanguard of intellectual expression of a larger women’s literary

tradition that included the sentimental novel. Women’s sentimental novels, such as Harriet

Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, were enormously popular. They appealed to the emotions and

often dramatized contentious social issues, particularly those touching the family and women’s

roles and responsibilities.

Abolitionist Lydia Child (1802–1880), who greatly influenced Margaret Fuller, was a leader of

this network. Her successful 1824 novel, Hobomok, shows the need for racial and religious

toleration. Its setting—Puritan Salem, Massachusetts—anticipated Nathaniel Hawthorne. An

activist, Child founded a private girls’ school, founded and edited the first journal for children in

the United States, and published the first anti-slavery tract, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of

Americans Called Africans, in 1833. This daring work made her notorious and ruined her

financially. Her History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations (1855) argues for

women’s equality by pointing to their historical achievements.

Angelina Grimké (1805–1879) and Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) were born into a large family of

wealthy slave owners in elegant Charleston, South Carolina. These sisters moved to the North to

defend the rights of blacks and women. As speakers for the New York Anti-Slavery Society, they

were the first women to publicly lecture to audiences, including men. In letters, essays, and studies,

they drew parallels between racism and sexism.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), abolitionist and women’s rights activist, lived for a time

in Boston, where she befriended Lydia Child. With Lucretia Mott, she organized the 1848 Seneca

Falls Convention for women’s rights; she also drafted its Declaration of Sentiments. Her “Woman’s

Declaration of Independence” begins “men and women are created equal” and includes a resolution

to give women the right to vote. With Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton campaigned for

suffrage in the 1860s and 1870s, formed the anti-slavery Women’s Loyal National League and the

National Woman Suffrage Association, and co-edited the weekly newspaper Revolution. President

of the Woman Suffrage Association for 21 years, she led the struggle for women’s rights. She gave

public lectures in several states, partly to support the education of her seven children.

After her husband died, Cady Stanton deepened her analysis of inequality between the sexes.

Her book, The Woman’s Bible (1895), discerns a deep-seated anti-female bias in Judaeo-Christian

tradition. She lectured on such subjects as divorce, women’s rights, and religion until her death at

the age of eighty-six, just after writing a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt supporting the

women’s vote. Her numerous works—at first pseudonymous, but later under her own name—

include three co-authored volumes of History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1886) and a candid,

humorous autobiography.

Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883) epitomized the endurance and charisma of this extraordinary

group of women. Born a slave in New York, she grew up speaking Dutch. She escaped from slavery

in 1827, settling with a son and daughter in the supportive Dutch-American Van Wagener family,

for whom she worked as a servant. They helped her win a legal battle for her son’s freedom, and

she took their name. Striking out on her own, she worked with a preacher to convert prostitutes to

Christianity and lived in a progressive communal home. She was christened “Sojourner Truth” for

the mystical voices and visions she began to experience. To spread the truth of these visionary

teachings, she sojourned alone, lecturing, singing gospel songs, and preaching abolitionism through

many states over three decades. Encouraged by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she advocated women’s

suffrage.

Her life is told in the Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850), an autobiographical account

transcribed and edited by Olive Gilbert. Illiterate her whole life, she spoke Dutch-accented English.

Sojourner Truth is said to have bared her breast at a women’s rights convention when she was

accused of really being a man. Her answer to a man who said that women were the weaker sex has

become legendary:

I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into bars, and no man could head me! And ain’t I

a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear

the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all

sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And

ain’t I a woman?

This humorous and irreverent orator has been compared to the great blues singers. Harriet

Beecher Stowe and many others found wisdom in this visionary black woman, who could declare,

“Lord, Lord, I can love even de white folk!”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly was the most

popular American book of the 19th century. First published serially in National Era magazine

(1851–1852), it was an immediate success. Forty different publishers printed it in England alone,

and it was quickly translated into twenty

languages, receiving the praise of such authors as

George Sand in France, Heinrich Heine in

Germany, and Ivan Turgenev in Russia. Its

passionate appeal for an end to slavery in the

United States inflamed the debate that, within a

decade, led to the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865).

Reasons for the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin

are obvious. It reflected the idea that slavery in the

United States—the nation that purportedly

embodied democracy and equality for all—was an

injustice of colossal proportions.

Stowe herself was a perfect representative of old

New England Puritan stock. Her father, brother,

and husband all were well-known, learned

Protestant clergymen and reformers. Stowe

conceived the idea of the novel—in a vision of an

old, ragged slave being beaten—as she participated

in a church service. Later, she said that the novel

was inspired and “written by God.” Her motive was

the religious passion to reform life by making it

Harriet Beecher Stowe

more godly. The Romantic period had ushered in an era of feeling; the virtues of family and love

reigned supreme. Stowe’s novel attacked slavery precisely because it violated domestic values.

Uncle Tom, the slave and central character, is a true Christian martyr who labors to convert his

kind master, St. Clare, prays for St. Clare’s soul as he dies, and is killed defending slave women.

Slavery is depicted as evil not for political or philosophical reasons but mainly because it divides

families, destroys normal parental love, and is inherently un-Christian. The most touching scenes

show an agonized slave mother unable to help her screaming child and a father sold away from his

family. These were crimes against the sanctity of domestic love.

Stowe’s novel was not originally intended as an attack on the south; in fact, Stowe had visited

the south, liked southerners, and portrayed them kindly. In the book, southern slave owners are

good masters and treat Tom well. St. Clare personally abhors slavery and intends to free all of his

slaves. The evil master, Simon Legree, on the other hand, is a northerner and the villain. Ironically,

the novel was meant to reconcile the north and south, which were drifting toward the Civil War,

then a decade away. Ultimately, though, the book was used by abolitionists and others as a polemic

against the south.

Harriet Jacobs (1818–1896)

Born a slave in North Carolina, Harriet Jacobs was taught to read and write by her mistress.

On her mistress’s death, Jacobs was sold to a white master who tried to force her to have sexual

relations. She resisted him, finding another white lover by whom she had two children, who went to

live with her grandmother. “It seems less degrading to give one’s self than to submit to compulsion,”

she candidly wrote. She escaped from her owner and started a rumor that she had fled north.

Terrified of being caught and sent back to slavery and punishment, she spent almost seven years

hidden in her master’s town, in the tiny dark attic of her grandmother’s house. She was sustained

by glimpses of her beloved children through holes that she drilled through the ceiling. She finally

escaped to the north, settling in Rochester, New York, where Frederick Douglass was publishing the

anti-slavery newspaper North Star and near which (in Seneca Falls) a women’s rights convention

had recently met. There, Jacobs became friends with Amy Post, a Quaker feminist abolitionist, who

encouraged her to write her autobiography. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published under the

pseudonym “Linda Brent” in 1861, was edited by Lydia Child. It outspokenly condemned the sexual

exploitation of black slave women. Jacobs’s book, like Douglass’s, is part of the slave narrative genre

extending back to Olaudah Equiano in colonial times.

Harriet Wilson (c. 1807–1870)

Harriet Wilson was the first African American to publish a novel in the United States—Our

Nig: or, Sketches from the life of a Free Black, in a two-storey white house, North. showing that

Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There (1859). The novel realistically dramatizes the marriage between

a white woman and a black man, and also depicts the difficult life of a black servant in a wealthy

Christian household. Formerly thought to be autobiographical, it is now understood to be a work of

fiction.

Like Jacobs, Wilson did not publish under her own name (Our Nig was ironic), and her work

was overlooked until recently. The same can be said of the work of most of the women writers of the

era. Noted African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr.—in his role of spearheading the black

fiction project—reissued Our Nig in 1983.

Frederick Douglass (1817–1895)

The most famous black American anti-slavery leader and orator of the era, Frederick Douglass

was born a slave on a Maryland plantation. It was his good fortune to be sent to relatively liberal

Baltimore as a young man, where he learned to read and write. Escaping to Massachusetts in 1838,

at the age of twenty-one, Douglass was helped by abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison and

began to lecture for anti-slavery societies.

In 1845, he published his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave

(second version 1855, revised in 1892), the best and most popular of many “slave narratives.” Often

dictated by illiterate blacks to white abolitionists and used as propaganda, these slave narratives

were well-known in the years just before the Civil War. Douglass’s narrative is vivid and highly

literate, and it gives unique insights into the mentality of slavery and the agony that this

institution caused among blacks.

The slave narrative was the first black literary prose genre in the United States. It helped

blacks in the difficult task of establishing an African-American identity in white America, and it

has continued to exert an important influence on black fictional techniques and themes throughout

the 21st century. The search for identity, anger against discrimination, and sense of living an

invisible, hunted, underground life unacknowledged by the white majority recurred in the works of

such 20th-century black American authors as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and

Toni Morrison.

1. One of the inequalities endured by women in the 19th century was being denied the right to

a. speak to men.

b. own property.

c. worship at a church of choice.

d. a grammar school education.

2. The leader of the women’s network for social change was

a. Harriet Beecher Stowe.

b. Lydia Child.

c. Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

d. Harriet Tubman.

3. Angelina and Sarah Grimké were the first women to

a. speak publicly to audiences.

b. wear trousers instead of dresses.

c. write articles for money.

d. open a school for only girls.

4. Summarize the work and vision of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. About which issue was she most

vocal?

5. Explain Sojourner Truth and her role in the women’s network. How did she get her

interesting name? For what was she best known?

6. Identify and describe Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous book. Why was it such an influential

work? How was it different from other books of the time about slavery?

7. Harriet Jacobs’ book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, spoke to the issue of the

a. immorality of slavery.

b. fundamental sin of slave ownership.

c. sexual exploitation of black women.

d. inequality between the treatment of male and female slaves.

8. The first African-American woman to publish a novel in the United States was

a. Sojourner Truth.

b. Harriet Beecher Stowe.

c. Toni Morrison.

d. Harriet Wilson.

9. Frederick Douglass published his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American

Slave, the best and most popular of the genre that came to be known as “slave narratives.”

What was so powerful about the works of this genre? What did their existence do for the

African-American cause?

American Literature

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

History of American Literature - Chapter 4: The Romantic Period, 1820–1860: Fiction

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