American Literature

Optional Course
5th year, long distance education
Felicia Burdescu
Professor, PhD
I. Introduction
General Background and Literary Figures
In 1640 appeared the first book printed in the colonies: The Massachussets Bay Psalm Book,
four years after the founding of Harvard University.
"The complexity in the literature, as well as the diversity of people, of the United States
testifies to the clashes and commingling of many cultures". (Emory Elliott, Columbia Literary History
of the United States, 1988, page xv)
With the struggle for independence Americans focused their attention in the 1800s on the
problems and challenges of a developing nation. One of the most obvious changes was the growth of
the country itself. In 1803 Thomas Jefferson persuaded the Congress to approve and support the
Louisiana Purchase, and this agreement the country had with France soon doubled the territory of the
United States. In the 1840s the United States gained new territory: in 1845 the Congress voted to
annex Texas to the Union and in 1846 Britain agreed to give the southern part of Oregon to the United
States.
Parallel to these events the social and cultural life flourished tremendously. The movement for
free education began, and in 1837 Massachussets established the first state board of education.
Moreover, the opposition to slavery intensified, and in this period the women's rights movement also
started its efforts to gain the rights for this part of this American population.
As for literature and arts this was the perfect time for startling adventures. The American
writers developed original styles of their own without imitating the European model and so by the
1855 a truly national literature had finally developed.
At the beginning of the 1800s in Europe began a movement called Romanticism as a reaction
to the Age of Reason. The Romantics believed that the emphasis should be on emotion and nature
rather than on reason and society. These principles were also adopted by the writers of the growing
country the themes being important for the American life.
The Transcendentalist writers were also a part of the Romantic tradition. The Transcendentalist
movement developed in the 1830s and stated that there are kinds of knowledge that transcend, or go
beyond reason or experience. People should trust more their "inner light". They turned to nature for
inspiration and at the same time they focused on the individual.
The only major national writer from the Old South was Edgar Allan Poe who was also marked
by the Romantic tradition. He is one of the most controversial figures of the American literature.
During his lifetime he achieved modest fame as a short story writer and as a poet. Still today we are in
better position to appreciate his achievements than most of his contemporaries. On the one hand he
was caricatured as a drunkard, a drug addict and an irresponsible misanthrope but on the other he was
seen as Baudelaire's "poete maudit", the archetypal alienated artist, struggling with a materialistic
world he despised and which was hostile towards him.
The year 1945 was Poe's "annus mirabilis" because The Raven and Other Poems caused a
popular sensation. The effect sought in The Raven was a sustained tone of melancholy beauty; and the
most "poetical" subject linking melancholy and beauty was the death of a beautiful woman. Among
the most significant aspects of "The Philosophy of Composition" is Poe's ability to put his general
ideas about poetry in the service of a specific strategy for the revelation of character. The lovernarrator enacts "that species of despair which delights in self-torture". He asks the bird questions that
will bring him the luxury of sorrow, through the anticipated answer 'Nevermore' ". An undercurrent of
meaning, suggesting the supernatural but not "overstepping the limits of the real", is designed to
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heighten the effect, so that the reader feels the scene as does the lover, even while maintaining
aesthetic distance from the lover's point of view. (Emory Elliott, Columbia Literary History of the
United States, 1988, page 272)
In a few of his early tales he experimented with supernatural horror albeit in a playful manner.
In three of Poe's most successful tales- William Wilson (1839), The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) and The
Black Cat (1843) his "perverseness" takes the form of a murder which also involves an implicit
motive of self-destruction within the murderer.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's art has been studied, often with keen insight, by many critics. For
Hawthorne as for the Puritans human life is essentially a moral story and so the great theme of the
author is that of the Puritans. The most illuminating example is also the greatest: The Scarlet Letter.
In this novel the story turns on the conflict between Puritan Boston's literal effort to subsume Hester's
Prynne's "individuality" under the symbol of the scarlet A and Hester's efforts to reconcile her
"individuality" with this imposed allegorical identity.
Another great voice of the American Renaissance was that of Herman Melville. He was a
timid boy socially, hiding his timidity behind stolidity. His father described him as "very backward in
speech and slow in comprehension, but you will find him as far as he understands men and things
solid and profound and of a docile and amiable disposition". As he grew up he became far from docile
and solid. The mind we meet in his books is nervous, irritable, volatile, intoxicated by rhetoric and
speculation.
His best known work is Moby Dick in which Melville overcame the absence of a native
tradition of heroic literature by infusing Old World models with New World colour and spirit. The
magnitude of the whale was a natural source of epic sublimity, but Melville also invoked both the
traditional heroic association of war, royalty, Scripture, and myth, and the emerging ones of American
amplitude and self-reliant individualism.
Another remarkable author in American history is Henry James who remains one of the most
fascinating cases in ever known in literature. He studied in schools \ from Geneva, London, and Paris
and so in 1875 he decided to settle initially in Paris and then permanently in London where he
remained until his move to Lamb House in Rye in 1898. There he wrote his last novels which were
profoundly influenced by his early attempt to write for stage.
In The American, for the first time James dramatizes his traditional and stereotyped contrast
between natural and artificial aristocracy in predominantly realistic terms and with an awareness of the
high comedy involved. In James's Portrait of a Lady the new woman-journalist, Henrietta Stackpole
is bumptious and crass while Isabel Archer, apparently a really formidable version of the new woman,
ultimately shows herself to be a traditionalist, not a new woman at all.
The Portrait of a Lady has been preceded by a short novel which superbly exemplifies
James's skill as a cultural equilibrist. The Europeans is a poetic dialogue between two modes of life
and two types of attitudes towards experience which, at the same time, because of James's introduction
of the international theme, becomes also a dialogue between America and Europe.
The socialist movement was represented by the most sensational protest novel of the decade .
John Steinback's The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The book condemned economic royalists rather than
capitalist exploiters, orchestrating much of the experience and many of the themes of the thirties. His
dialogue was sometimes stagy and narrative, but his theme - that Americans had to put away their
personal greed and cooperate to save the country and their souls- won a favorable response even from
readers out of sympathy with his recipe.
Robert Frost was a canny poet, given to self-parody and ironic implication, full of contempt
for most of his contemporaries, and quite willing to mislead sentimental readers into thinking that they
understood his poems. (Emory Elliott, Columbia Literary History of the United States, 1988, page
937) Frost's poetry stays in mind, providing comfort and consolation, as well as a coherent sense of the
world. Robert Frost was a complex, even difficult poet of extraordinary power and lasting importance,
although at first sight the readers may perceive him as a grandfatherly figure that only creates
moralistic poems to enthusiastic audiences all around the country.
Few writers differ more from Stein as F. Scott Fitzgerald does. Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The
Great Gatsby - a smaller financial success than his other works but a greater critical one- became a
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testimony of the seriousness of his writing and of his increased understanding of the directions that
modem fiction was taking. The novel was Fitzgerald's depiction of what was left of the American
dream and so he realized that the dream did not belong to the respectable, educated and the sensitive
Nick Carraway but rather to an outsider, a fugitive.

CHAPTER ONE
The Beginnings
(1600-1800)
When the English colonists arrived in 1607, a beautiful culture was flourishing on the
continent, that of the native tribes. Under the leadership of Captain John Smith, the colony of
Jamestown throve: though for a while the English and the Indians lived together peacefully and
provided each other with needed help and goods, soon these harmonious relationships ended in
conflicts. Unlike the settlers of Jamestown, the pilgrims that arrived later in 1620 were bound together
by their faith: Puritanism. ''The Puritans wanted to 'purify' the Church of England, which they thought
was too similar to the Roman Catholic Church. Their own religion was organised around three main
beliefs: they felt that the Bible was the sole source of God's law; they also felt that people were
basically sinful; finally, they felt that God decides in advance who will be 'saved' and who will not".
This early period in the history of American literature is dominated by the religious
writings; sermons played a threefold role: they offered new arguments in ongoing theological debates,
they were a part of the political process of the colonies ("Election Day Sermons"), and they played a
crucial role in attempts to frighten the congregation back into religious life ("jeremiads").' Apart from
these rhetorical discourses, a sense of what life in the 17 th century might have been is given by diaries
and, again, chronicles, no matter how biased they may be. However, all that was written then is
imbued with an awareness of their holy mission on this continent, rather than an awareness of the
literal truth.
The 17th century cannot be mentioned in connection with any novel due to the same opposition
of the Puritans to lay writings because of ideological reasons: that kind of literature might have
diverted people's attention from hard work and the Bible. But this is not equally true about poetry.
There are at least two poets who deserve more credit than expected for such an early period of
American literature: Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) and Edward Taylor (1645? -1729).
The beginning of the 18th century is marked by the publication of Cotton Mother's Magnalia
Christi Americana, a religious history of New England. The first half of the century begins and
ends with personalities that were both disturbing and elusive: Cotton Mather - Puritan bigot and hunter
of witches, and Benjamin Franklin - Enlightenment wise man and friend of mankind. The 17 th century
ended with the witchcraft trials in Salem (1692). and Mather lived in such a troubled epoch, being torn
between two antinomic directions: the old world of his forefathers, with their inflexible view of the
Word as written in the Bible and institutionalised in the Church, and the new world he witnessed, with
the penetration from abroad of the new rationalistic philosophies associated with the Enlightenment,
not to mention the royal decree which established that the New England territory belonged to the king,
and therefore the Puritans were denied the right to elect their own governors and be independent.
Magnalia Christi Americana (The Great Achievements of Christ in America, 1702) was a
collection of various stories, narratives, and testimonies intended to prove America's special place in
God's design. At the same time, Mather gave information on the biographies of outstanding citizens
as well as other historical data. He wrote in 1700 "It is no Little Blessing of God, that we are a part of
the English Nation. Our Dependence on, and Relation to, that brave Nation, that man deserves not the
name of an English man, who despises it". Portraying the Fathers as a chosen people, Mather stresses
the loyalty to the English church.

CHAPTER TWO
The 19th Century
(1800-1855)

At the beginning of the 1800s in Europe began a movement called Romanticism as a reaction
against the Age of Reason. The Romantics thought that the emphasis should be put on the emotion
rather than on reason, and on nature rather than on society. The value of the individual was celebrated,
and they proved an increasing interest in folk tales, legends, and the supernatural.
All these principles suited the young nation perfectly; a closeness to nature and the importance
of the common man were important themes of American life. The optimism of the Romantics also
seemed to parallel the enthusiasm of this growing country.
The Transcendentalist writers were also part of the Romantic tradition. The movement
developed in the 1830s in the Boston area, and it mainly stated that there are kinds of knowledge that
transcend, or go beyond, reason and experience. People should have faith in their "inner lights". Like
other Romantics, they turned to nature for inspiration, and at the same time focusing on the individual.
The Romantic tradition also marked writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and
Nathaniel Hawthorne, but unlike the early Romantics and the Transcendentalists, they did not express
a hopeful outlook. On the contrary, they probed the darker side of human nature.

II. American Writers

EDGAR ALLAN POE
(1809-1847)
a. Bibliographical Data

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809. the son of itinerant actors. Both his parents died
within two years of his birth. A Richmond Merchant, John Allan brought him up. though he was never
legally adopted. The relationship between Poe and his foster-father was tensed, and more strain was
added to it when Poe was forced to withdraw from the University of Virginia as a direct consequence
of John Allan's refusal to finance his studies.
b. Literary Works
Tamerlane and Other Poems, 1827
Al Araaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems, 1829
Poems, Second Edition, 1831
Manuscript Found in a Bottle, 1833
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1837,1838
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840
The Murders in the Rue Morgue, 1842
The Gold Bug, 1843
The Fall of the House of Usher, 1843
The Raven
The Philosophy of Composition
The Rationale of Verse
The Poetic Principle
c.
The Fall of the House of Usher. The description of that house is in fact a symbolic description
of the mysterious character that inhabits it. A descendent of an old family, Roderick Usher has become
intimately linked with the ancestral home until they cannot be told apart. The house is an exact
symbol, every detail - accurately rendered - is a carrier of a precious function, so that the image of the
house has nothing of the vagueness that the romantics loved so much. Taken into consideration within
the general context of the story, the hallucinating beauty of the building is also a witness for the
history of the Ushers, great lovers of art, with a passionate talent for labyrinth mysteries, rather than
for the orthodox and clear beauties of the musical science. The "minute fungi" that covers the house in
a "fine tangled web-work" is not a random detail, it implies an extreme delicacy, similar to the fungilike minuteness and finesse, and at the same time it implies caducity. The "still perfect adaptation of
parts" is combined with the "crumbling condition of the individual stones", translating perfectly
Usher's mental status, on the brink of his terrible disaggregation, on the threshold between the most
crystal-clear lucidity and insanity.
The suggestion of "old wood-work" kept isolated from the "breath of the external air" adds
more to the moral portrait of its owner, symbolising the total seclusion, the lack of any contact with
the external world, and the artificiality of the character's existence, together with the secret
process of internal decomposition that he lives. And finally, the "barely perceptible fissure, which,
extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction,
until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tar" alludes to the split personality that characterises
Usher, from the level of the intellect and the conscience to that of its more obscure fundaments, the
unconscious basis.20
Roderick Usher is one of the first types of characters that have a morbid hypersensitivity in
modern literature. Such a literary hero will enjoy a special popularity with the Symbolist and
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"decadent" prose in the second half of nineteenth century. It is essential to remember this because Poe
was for these European movements one of the great models, the idol of a whole generation, beginning
with Baudelaire and up to Paul Valery.

HERMAN MELVILLE
(1819-1891)
a. Biographical Data
Melville was descended from a distinguished New England family of a merchant, an
offspring of the Melvill and Gansevoort ancestors; the death of his wealthy father plunged him from a
truly patrician world into the precarious world of the sailors, clerks. farm labourers, and slaves, most
of them who will be later characters in his fiction. The bankruptcy of his father placed him at the
intersection of two opposing worlds, and the tension experienced in such a position was reflected in
his own perspective on his society of the time.
His brother's efforts to change back the family's fortune ended up in bankruptcy too, and
Melville was forced to abandon school for good. and then try to find a steady source of income
-working as a clerk in a bank, as a labourer on his uncle's farm, as a district school teacher in rural
Massachusetts. The same hope prompted him to study engineering at Lansingburgh Academy in order
to procure employment with the Erie Canal's engineering department. After having exhausted all other
possibilities, he went to sea in 1839 for a four-month voyage as a common sailor on the merchant ship
St. Lawrence; later, in 1841 he shipped on the whaler Acushnet for South Seas, and in 1842 he jumped
ships at Marquesas also visiting Tahiti and in 1943-1944 he returned from Honolulu to Boston on a
frigate United States.

b. Literary Works
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, 1846
Omoo, 1847
Mardi, 1849
Redburn: His First Voyage, 1849
White-Jacket: or the World in a Man-of War, 1850
Moby Dick, 1851
Pierre:or, The Ambiguities, 1852
Piazza Tales, 1856
c.
The inscrutable and uninscribed blank is to have its full representation in the White Whale, in
Moby-Dick (1851). In order to find the truth behind that shiny surface, behind the brightness of white,
the reader has to proceed in the manner of Roland Barthes when reading this novel: "like onions
whose body contains no heart, no kernel, no secret, no irreducible principle, nothing except the infinity
of their own envelopes - which develop nothing other than the unity of their own surfaces".
The White Whale is both whiteness and blackness, like the sea itself - both life and death are
given by the immense watery surface of the ocean. The meaning of whiteness is best put into words by
Melville in the novel: "in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour,
and at the same time the concrete of all colours: it is for these reasons that there is such a dumb
blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows a colourless, all-colour of atheism from
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which we shrink?"
This is what happens to all text readings, the meaning retreats within, making more difficult
the work of decoding them. As Harold Beaver concludes, "here it is an infinite regress of meaning
among circling signs of all semiological systems. Here we reach the very edge of the textual abyss, the
etymological vortex, to which the voyage of the Pequod (the name of an extinct tribe of Massachusetts
Indians) inevitably drives".
Ahab's obsession with the White Whale has brought him closer to it than he could admit, until
it reaches the dangerous point of being almost like it, only in the world of human beings. The portrait
of Ahab includes the famous ivory leg, just like the fangs of the whale, and the duel between them is
one of wills. But while the captain's determination is undermined by the thought of revenge, the whale
is beyond any human emotion, it is just like nature itself. Therefore, Ahab is doomed from the very
beginning and the sinking of the Pequod in the middle of a white whirlpool seals not a victory of
Moby Dick, but an ending just as it should have been.
The book is apparently Ishmael's, and the narrative is his quest for "the ungraspable phantom
of life"; but at the same time it can be read as the reader's quest for the meaning. It is then an initiation:
accompanied by Ishmael, the reader can safely unfold the strata of the text and go beneath the apparent
tragic vision and insanity. Ahab is obsessed with the Whale/Word, but his total focus on it erases
all life around him, and his madness can be compared to that of Don Quixote to an extent. His hunt
began in a recognisable world and slowly dissipated into the mysterious and terrifying.
Through Ishmael's eyes, the reader perceives certain aspects that function as clues in the
text; "having distanced himself from 'crazy Ahab' and his rage at Creation, Ishmael leads us back to a
wild but inescapable sympathy ('Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?'), as if our horror at the snow-fields
of universal emptiness found its vent in Ahab's delusion of an 'audacious, immitigable, and
supernatural revenge'".

MARK TWAIN
(1835-1910)
a. Biographical Data
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, best known as Mark Twain, is considered a classic American
writer, extremely popular nowadays. Born in Missouri, he grew up in the little town of Hannibal in the
proximity of the Mississippi River, the same town which appears as St. Petersburg in the well-known
novel Tom Sawyer and in the early pages of Huckleberry Finn. When he was eleven years old, his
after died. and he had to leave school and find work to support himself. Getting a position in a printing
shop, he seemed to be attracted to the possibility of writing and at the age of sixteen he published a
piece in a Boston magazine. There followed four years spent in travelling as a journey-man printer,
and in the end he decided to become a river-boat pilot, fascinated by the Mississippi and the people
living on it. All his exploits while learning how to be a pilot and then while piloting such a boat are
told in Life on the Mississippi, a beautiful novel about these youthful years.
But the outbreak of the Civil War put an end to these days, and he served for a short period of
time in an unorganised Confederate unit, then he went westward together with his brother who had
been appointed secretary for the Nevada Territory. The turmoil that was life in this area made him try
to strike gold but without ever succeeding. In order to make a living, he returned to writing and got a
job as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. This is crucial moment in his life when he
began to use the river leadsman's cry "Mark Twain" (two fathoms of water) as a pen name for his
humorous writings.

b. Literary Works
Life on the Mississipi
Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog, 1865
The Innocents Abroad, 1867
Roughing It
The Gilded Age, 1873
Tom Sawyer, 1876
Huckleberry Finn, 1885
c.
Only one year later, he listened to the story of a former slave's adventures directly from her.
The language and personality of that woman were beautifully captured in "Auntie Cord" in "A True
Story". This was an excellent opportunity to rehearse before undertaking the difficult task of writing
Tom Sawyer. The setting is placed on the banks of the Mississippi. in a small town dozing off in the
quiet atmosphere of the pre-Civil war South. Though it is apparently a children's book, and read
accordingly by most readers, the novel also betrays a critical view of the violence and self-deception
that lies in wait beneath the idyllic surface of St. Petersburg.
The point of view is that of an adult observing a boy, Tom is "very much the boy that Mark
Twain had been: he is remembered and described as he seemed to his elders, rather than created".
Tom has the imagination of a lively boy who has already read a lot of romantic fiction, and who might
one day become a writer himself - just as Mark Twain did, or he might become Mark Twain himself.
On the other hand, Tom is not exactly an orphan: he has an aunt, cousins, and quite a few friends with
whom he can form a secret band. He is not alone, like his friend Huck Finn.
However, his rich fantasy reminds the reader of the type of novels written by Sir Walter Scott,
so much detested by Mark Twain. He blamed Scott for having checked the "wave of progress" in the
South with is writings that celebrated the medieval romance; such novels set "the world in love with
dreams and phantoms; with decayed forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of
government; with the silliness and emptiness, sham grandeur, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a
brainless and worthless long-vanished society".
The satire is powerful and bitter when one of the adventures of Tom's gang is narrated: the
seizure of doughnuts and jam from "a Sunday school picnic, and only a primer class at that". which
Tom insists is a rich caravan. This is a cruel act, and no glamour can hide it; it is not Southern chivalry
at all. Richard P. Adams comments that "the actual behaviour of the slave-owning class, according to
Clemens's double-edged suggestion, is on the one hand as evil as that of a gang of thieves and
murderers, and on the other as silly as that of Tom's infatuated band".
The novel has a carefully balanced organic structure, organised around four lines of action,
all concerned with the boy's development toward manhood and moral maturity. "The love
story begins with Tom's childishly fickle desertion of his fiance, Amy Lawrence; the Potter narrative
with the superstitious trip to the graveyard; the Jackson's Island episode with the adolescent revolt of
the boy against Aunt Polly, and Tom's youthful ambition to be a pirate; the Injun Joe story with the
juvenile search for buried treasure". This symbolic pattern of Tom Sawyer (1876) was reused later, in
1885, when he wrote Huckleberry Finn.

ROBERT FROST
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(1874-1963)
a. Biographical Data
Superficially Frost can be seen as a poet of nature, especially of rural New England. The
reader might be tempted to compare him to Wordsworth, due to his concern to find truth and beauty in
nature; however. Frost lacks the latter's transcendentalism. On the on the hand, the American poet is
influenced by the literary movements of the early twentieth century; the symbolism that lies under
the surface description of his poetry is sophisticated and the tensions of thought and feeling are
maturely expressed.
b. Literary Works
A Boys Will, 1913
North to Boston, 1914
Mountain Interval, 1916
New Hampshire, 1923
West Running Brook, 1928
Selected Poems, 1936
Collected Poems, 1939
A Witness Tree, 1943
Steeple Bush, 1947
Complete Poems, 1949
In the Clearing, 1962
c.
In "Home Burial" we encounter a tense family scene as a husband and wife are locked in silent
battle after the death of an infant. Like black smoke, the question of who is to blame hangs in the air
they breathe, impregnating everything around them. The distraught wife pauses on the staircase,
looking out to her baby's grave, which her husband digs too vigorously for her grief to bear. He works
methodically. "Making the gravel leap and leap in air". In this harsh rural world, man and nature seem
to be bound together so subtly in order to bear whatever Fate ordained them. Acceptance is all, since
man has only a minimal control over what may happen.
Or the poem "Out, Out" - with its specific allusion to Shakespeare, more exactly to Macbeth's
famous soliloquy that follows his wife's suicide. Macbeh cannot understand the meaning of death or
that he was responsible for his wife's demise. Frost's boy in the poem "sees all", he understands that in
a rural world a boy without a hand will always depend on the others to make a living. Even if his life
was radically changed by the accident, he is more perceptive than Shakespeare's hero in a certain way.
Though apparently speaking from an "unsophisticated" point of view. Frost's text has emblems,
rural myths and dramas, all radiating meaning, turning the limitations of the poem to his advantage in
commenting of the human condition in general.

FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD

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(1896-1940)

a. Biographic Data
F. Scott Fitzgerald was a romantic and even tragic figure: he was a brilliant writer who
achieved success with his first novel (This Side of Paradise, 1920), participated in the glamorous
expatriate life in France during the 1920s, and then experienced a series of persona] and professional
blows during the 1930s. Assessing his career for his daughter Scottie. he wrote in 1939: "I am not a
great man. but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent, and the sacrifice of
it. in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur".
b. Literary Works
This Side of Paradise, 1920
The Beautiful and the Damned, 1922
The Great Gatsby, 1925
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
Flappers and Philosophers, 1922
Tales of the Jazz Age, 1926
All the Sad Young Men, 1926
Tender is the Night, 1934
The Last Tycoon, 1941
c.

Only three years later, in 1925. Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby. generally
regarded as his best novel. The story of Jay Gatsby. who as a poor young man has lost the rich girl he
loved to a man of her own class, has subsequently become rich himself, and has come to live in a
nearby mansion where he gives extravagant parties with the sole aim of impressing her. is a strangely
poignant one. And although the mysterious and glamorous facade of his life is to collapse, and his
dream is to be shattered, he is a romantic figure to the end. Not so the congenitally rich Tom
Buchanan. the man whom the girl Daisy has married: his unsought wealth has made him hard, self11

centred and purposeless.

Like Joseph Conrad in his Marlow stories. Fitzgerald uses Nick Carraway as the narrative
consciousness for Jay Gatsby 's story, and by doing this he gives the reader the contrasting
perspectives that call both Gatsby 's and Nick 's motivations into question.
T. S. Eliot called Gatsby "the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James".
Inheritor of an intense!} American disposition that is simultaneously a blessing and a burden. Gatsby
tries to impose his dream on the reality around him. and this is his downfall: "Can't repeat the past?",
he asks incredulously. "Why of course you can!" Time cannot repeat itself, and Gatsby remains
trapped in a past dream - this is partly the reason why he could never win.
The time theme encompasses the related themes of mutability and loss. In 1924 Fitzgerald
wrote while working at this novel: "That's the whole burden of this novel - the loss of those illusions
that give such colour to the world so that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they
partake of the magical glory". Ultimately the novel is about American history, compounding the time
theme and the aspiration theme. The Great Gatsby closes with Nick's eloquent brooding on the
unfulfilled potentialities of the new world - "for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held
his breath in the presence of this continent... face to face for the last time in history with something
commensurate to his capacity for wonder".
After Gatsby's dream world has been smashed. Nick identifies more closely with him because
he sympathises with the impulses that led him to construct it. His is the only version of Gatsby's inner
world in the moments before his death that the narrative offers. In a way Nick and Gatsby are dual
versions of the same experience. The polarities of the ecstatic vision and the nightmare view of life are
equally distorting ways of seeing reality. Gatsby will never acquire the necessary corrective vision.
and Nick is left a legacy he has to fulfil.
Gatsby's destiny is a dream within a dream: Jimmy Gatz became Jay Gatsby. but in the
process he did not change himself being trapped within that past summer. The changes referred to the
appearances: Gatsby turned himself into an elegantly clad young man, extremely rich and handsome,
yet never fully accepted in the high society of New York. The image of Daisy and her luxurious
lifestyle made him want to endow the world with beauty and grace. His mistake is that he believed that
dreams can offer the promise "that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing", as
Fitzgerald wrote in the novel.
Gatsby's love story is more than a simple story: it suggests the purity of childhood when fairies
and their wonderful deeds seemed possible. It also suggests a mythical past of human innocence. It is
"an almost elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words", something you can only understand instinctively
and not capture in words; or as Nick says. "what I almost remembered was incommunicable for ever".
Gatsby is an isolated figure. "Mr Nobody from Nowhere", too absorbed with himself to see
that he was chasing the impossible. That moment of revelation when he kissed Daisy in 1917 has
uniquely singled him from the mass of young men and gave birth to that fatal obsession. His vision is
totally egocentric. Daisy is the object of his worship, but she is allowed no warm humanity, no
autonomous life of her own as a woman. Gatsby is enclosed in a world invented by himself, and blind
to any other alterations that might have occurred in Daisy's life, or in the world around him for that
matter. The woman with the flower name is continually measured up to his vision of her; the
impossibility of his dream is once more marked drastically by the discrepancy between the illusion of
her and reality. Death is the only solution to this contradiction; once Gatsby glimpses the truth, he still
denies it but he cannot ignore it. and on the other hand he could not live with this new discovery. His
idol had to remain perfect, mainly because he cannot accept that he was wrong.
If Gatsby is both dreamer and corrupt. Nick Carraway sees himself as "a guide, a pathfinder,
an original settler". As the reader may have noticed. Nick is a possible Jay Gatsby. but wiser and better
prepared to face the society of their times. The narrative allows a reading that makes Nick a traveller,
following the path of a journey of discovery. Through Nick the reader knows Gatsby and his inner
universe, and thus Nick is both "within" the text and "without" it.
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The novel moves in circles, spiralling toward the core. and in the end Nick moves to the centre
of the narrative: "... it grew upon me that 1 was responsible, because no one else was interested interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some vague right at the
end". He rejects Gatsby's solipsism of the dream, but at the same time he cannot understand the
indifference of all the people involved now that Gatsby is dead. He has definitely relied on the
accepted notion that every individual has a meaning on earth, that every life has a value, even in death.
"It id Owl-eyes who blesses the dead man at Gatsby's lonely funeral, thereby expressing a synthesis of
his awareness of Gatsby's life and compassion for him that Nick is too bitter to feel then. Time. the
enemy of Gatsby's dream, is a necessary force in Nick's progress towards maturity and understanding".
Fitzgerald allows Nick to claim authorship of the novel. He retells even those events that have
taken place before Nick's arrival on the stage, and this makes Nick's mind and ethical crisis the focus
of the whole narrative. Ultimately, his synthesis of the wasteland and the dream ends the novel. As
Kathleen Parkinson concludes, "is role as narrator offers the real evidence - in the way he brilliantly
maintains the two in equilibrium: he has opted for the power of words to construct a world, not the
power of wealth". And this makes the difference between Gatsby and Nick. though they are so similar
in many respects.

WILLIAM FAULKNER
(1897-1962)
a. Biographical Data
Always protecting his private life. William Faulkner wrote about himself once with a
particular brevity that would honour any dictionary of writers" biographies: "Born (when and where).
(He) came to Oxford as a child. attended Oxford grammar school without graduating, and had one
year as a special student in modern languages in the University of Mississippi. Rest of education was
undirected and uncorrelated reading. If you mention military experience at all (which is nol necessary,
as I could have invented a few failed RAF airmen as easily as 1 did Confeds) say belonged to RAF
1918'. Then continue: Has lived in same section of Miss. since, worked at various odd jobs until he
got a job writing movies and was bale to make a living at writing".
His own account about his decision to start writing is somewhat strange and helps create
another myth. that of the incidental writer who began to write in the merry 1920s, in the middle of the
Prohibition epoch. He was allegedly earning his existence as a rum runner in new Orleans when he
met Sherwood Anderson and liked the latter' s way of living: writing in the morning, walking around
the town in the afternoon and drinking all night. But by that time Faulkner had already published some
poetry, and in a student annual he published some sketches accompanied by drawings by him showing
a clear influence of Beardsley and the art of the English Decadence.
b. Literary Works
Soldiers Pay, 1926
Mosquitoes, 1927
Sartoris, 1929
The Sound and the Fury, 1929
As I Lay Dying, 1930
Light in August, 1932
Absalom! Absalom!, 1936
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Go Down, Moses, 1942

The Hamlet, 1940
The Town, 1957
The Mansion, 1959
c.
In the same year Faulkner published his first masterpiece The Sound and the Fury. It is a
very difficult text. "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". 1 he first of the
four sections of the novel is literally told by an idiot. Benjy Compson. age thirty-three. The time
dimension is non-existent, with events that took place eighteen years ago standing side by side with
those occurring at the present moment. What is more, there are two characters named Quentin, thus
enlarging the confusion in the novel. Relationships and chronology appear clear only later in the book,
somehow guiding the reader in this misty world. Two persons appear clearly in Benjy's life: a girl
called Quentin who however serves to remind him of another girl named Candace or Caddy - the only
one who had responded to Benjy's need for affection, but who now is married and he has no longer
seen her.
The second section goes back in time. eighteen years earlier, and is told in the stream-ofconsciousness technique by the other Quentin, brother to Benjy and Caddy and uncle to the first
Quentin (the reader understands now that she is Caddy's daughter). He too is obsessed with Caddy; for
Benjy she was someone who could give him the love that his selfish father and the hypochondriac
mother had denied him. For Quentin she represents what remains of the family honour, and in order to
preserve this honour, he wishes the people to believe that he has committed incest with her, so that
everybody would withdraw in horror and leave them completely isolated. The climax of this section is
attained when Quentin commits suicide: it also represents that perverted idealism that animated him
before: by dying he prevents himself from bringing children into the world, and thus degrading the
Compson honour even further.
The third section is narrated by Jason. Caddy's older brother, and the only member of the
family who lives and acts on the plane of everyday normality. He is the one who saves the family from
ruin and who in this way allows the destiny of his family to continue its course. That is why the failure
of love shows more acutely in his case the lack that undermines the Compsons. Through his
straightforward narrative the reader understands the desperate rebellion of first Caddy and then her
daughter Quentin against a loveless environment.
Love cannot be found in the Compson family members, but Caddy and Quentin will
subsequently find it in the servant quarters. especially the ageing Dilsey. In the Negro servants" part of
the house there is even a quasi-religious flavour of redemption in the unfailing love with which Dilsey
embraces the whole fabric of the Compsons tragedy.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY
(1898-1961)

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a. Biographical Data
Born in Oak Park, a respectable Chicago suburb, Ernest Hemingway was the son of a doctor
who was also a keen sportsman. Before becoming a reported in 1917, he ran twice from home, thus
announcing a rebel spirit, a nonconformist. In 1918 he was a volunteer ambulance driver on the
Italian front; he was badly wounded, but he returned to serve the last few weeks of the war with the
Italian infantry. The First World War had a terrible effect on him, visible in the succession of
characters he was to create with both physical and psychological effects.
Hemingway had married in 1921 and set off again for Europe the same year, where he worked
as a roving reporter and met Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Ezra Pound. His life in the circle of
expatriates in Paris can be read and understood in his memoirs, published after his death. The
influence of this experience is obvious in some of his novels.
b. Literary Works
The Sun Also Rises, 1926
A Farewell to Arms, 1929
Death in the Afternoon, 1932
Green Hills of Africa, 1935
Have and Have Not, 1937
For Whom the Bells Toll, 1940
The Old Man and the Sea, 1952
c.
The next novel published by Hemingway was A Farewell to Arms (1929). the result of ten
years' digestion of his experiences in the first world war. The central character is Frederick Henry, a
young American who is in Italy when war breaks out and who enlists with the Italian ambulance unit.
He is wounded, and his convalescence coincides with a love affair between him and the British nurse.
Catherine Barclay. Henry returns to the front but he witnesses a chaotic retreat, and the insanity of
such a world makes him want to rejoin Catherine. He is obsessed by the feeling that everything worth
caring for is being destroyed and by the fear that the world will soon catch up with him and Catherine.
Although they seek refuge in the Swiss Alps. "the world" has the last word: both Catherine and the
child die. As Henry said once in the novel. "If people
bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them... It kills the very good
and the very gentle and the very brave impartially".
The keynote of this novel is not terror, but doom. This impartiality of death is cruel, for death
falls on earth like a steady rain. making place for other men and women to have dreams and hopes,
only to break them too in the end. Nature finds its final unity in decay.
But there is also the unity of love. Within the great circle of decay, the two lovers strive to
keep intact: "there's only us two and in the world there's all the rest of them. If anything comes
between us we're gone and then they have us". But soon this "two of us" becomes "one". because
Catherine simply melts away within Henry's personality, but not even this does not prevent the tragic
ending. The circle tightens, and love too finds too its unity in doom.
The two stories, one of love and one of war, are I fact realised after the model story within a
story. They are contrasted, though the love story unfolds within the bigger context of the war story.
A second contrast is that between time internal and time external. The book presents a year in
the life of Frederick Henry, beginning with the spring of 1917. Thus natural time is encompassing,
determining and double-faced. Its constant pressure is felt in the novel, not just in terms of days.
seasons and weather, but also as time over which human beings have no control.
The text presents two transformations that occur in Henry: one is due to the experience of war.
15

the terrible events he lived (his wound, the retreat, and the death of a friend. Aymo. and the executions
at the bridge). The other transformation is brought about by love. At the beginning of this love
story. Henry reveals himself as a self-centred person, incapable of commitment. Step by step he learns
to commit himself to Catherine, to care for her. The process is favoured by Catherine's attitude, she is
preoccupied with henry's interests and protects him. They complete each other, and this makes their
relationship work.
But the end of the novel brings another turn in Henry's inner development: after Catherine's
death, he regresses to a former self. indifferent to the fate of the ants he watched burning when he was
a child. His anger rends the fabric of the narrative and re-invokes a time that precedes his experience
of war and love.

JOHN STEINBECK
(1902-1968)
a. Biographical Data
The writer was deeply influenced by his birthplace, the beautiful Salinas Valley in California.
In his first novel, the historical romance Cup of Gold (1929), he tried, like the book's hero, the
buccaneer Henry Morgan, to transcend the limitations of the small world that he knew intimately.
However, for most of the succeeding quarter-century his writing was dominated by his experience of
his native region - the land with its beauty and fertility (which gave the recurring Eden image), its
human inhabitants, whom he had come to know very well by working with them in every conceivable
capacity from agricultural chemist to labourer in a road gang, and its animal life. His
representation of the life of "the long valley" is both religious and scientific, with archetypal scriptural
images embedded in an awareness of its biological patterns and relationships.
b. Literary Works
Cup of Gold, 1929
To a God Unknown, 1933
Pastures of Heaven, 1932
Tortilla Flat, 1935
Of Mice and Men, 1937
The Grapes of Wrath, 1939
The Pearl, 1947
The Wayward Bus, 1947
East of Eden, 1952
Winter of Our Discontent, 1961
c.
In 1937 appeared Of Mice and Men where the usual group consists of only two people:
Lennie, a physical giant with the mind of a child, and George his protector, shrewd and practical. In a
world consisting almost entirely of single men - the ranching country of the west, with its system of
casual labour - they cut an odd figure. Without the responsibility of caring for Lennie, who does not
know his own strength and is always getting into trouble. George would be free to enjoy himself on
his month's earnings like the others.
But the feeling of stability and security goes in both directions, that is George derives as much
stability from the relationship as does Lennie. In their plans to set up hose together and lead a settled
existence, they have a contentment and sense of purpose that is denied to the others. Despite
everything, "the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley": Lennie. himself something of a
16

mouse, id destined to wreck all around him and all their dreams by his fondness for playing with soft
things. At ihe beginning of the novel Lennie holds pathetically a mouse that he has crushed to deaih,
and at the end, when he has choked to death a girl who has lured him into fondling her, he himself
must be killed in order to be saved from an ignoble death: lynching.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
(1911-1983)
a. Biographical Data
One cannot say the same about another playwright, Tennessee Williams (1914-1983), who at
first glance resembles O'Neill more than his contemporaries, with his Southern rather than mainstream
outlook and setting; his interest in the personal realm and psychological themes; and his concern
with aberrant, neurotic personalities, who can trace their disturbance to a sexual origin. His plays are
filled with fascinating characters and compelling dialogue. They are illuminated, even gilded, by
verbal, visual and sound symbolism that is intended to convey meanings beyond those possible in
what Williams has termed "the exhausted theater of realism." He employs an array of expressionistic
literary and theatrical devices: special settings. musical themes, unusual sound and lighting effects - all
as a means of leading his audience to see thee truths lurk beneath life's surface.
b. Literary Works
The Glass Menagerie, 1945
Camino Real, 1951
Night of the Iguana, 1961
A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947
Cat on the Hot Tin Roof, 1955
c.

In The Glass Menagerie Williams presents the theme that was to occupy him for two decades:
that of reality versus illusion or fantasy. Mrs Wingfield and her daughter Laura both live in a fantasy
world: the former in an imaginary past of Southern social grandeur, populated by endless admirers,
which insulates her from the present impoverished loneliness; the latter in a brittle artificial world she
has created for herself with her menagerie of glass animals as an escape from a world that her crippled
leg and plain features inhibit her from entering. On the daughter is placed the burden of enacting her
mother's fantasies: and the centrepiece of the play is the visit of a "gentleman caller" (in fact a friend
of her brother Tom) who, out of genuine if mild compassion and the lack of anything better to do, pays
court to Laura. He makes her dance and gives her confidence: symbolically they bump against the
17

table with the animals and break the horn off a unicorn, with whose fragility she has identified
herself.''^8 But with his interest waning (he is in fact already committed elsewhere) he cannot follow
up his rescue act; the play ends with Laura's further retreat into fantasy, which is set against her
brother's success in making his own dream - of running away to sea - come true.

III. GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Burdescu , Felicia . Masters of American Literature, Editura Universitaria, Craiova 2003
2. Chevalier, Juan; Gheerbrant, Alain. Dictionar de simboluri, Vol. I, II si III, Editura Artemis,
Bucuresti, 1995
3. Gray, Richard. The Penguin History of Literature, London, Marcus Cunliffe, 1993
4. High, Peter B. An Outline of American Literature, New York, Longman, 1999
5. Sanders, Andrew. The Short History of English Literature, Oxford, Claredon Press, 1996

IV.
The assignment will be a four pages essay (computer typed). It should present one writers main work.
It should have a suggestive title. Three items of critical bibliography are compulsory.

18