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T-46. LA CONFIGURACIÓN HISTÓRICA DE LOS EEUU DE
AMÉRICA: DE LA INDEPENDENCIA A LA GUERRA DE SECESIÓN.
NOVELAS DE REFERENCIA: THE SCARLET LETTER, THE RED
BADGE OF COURAGE.
0. INTRODUCTION
1. THE CONFIGURATION OF THE USA:
1.1 The Independence War or American Revolution(1775-1783)
1.2 The Civil War (1861-1865)
2. REFERENCE NOVELS
2.1 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE & THE SCARLET LETTER
2.2 STEPHEN CRANE & THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
3. CONCLUSION
4. BIBLIOGRAPHY

0. INTRODUCTION
The 18th century is the era of the Enlightenment. This new trend
means an evolution of ideas. Philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu
and Rousseau defended the separation of powers, the equality of all men,
and the representatives chosen by popular election.
These principles stated by French and English philosophers were
influential and incorporated in the attitudes of the Colonial intellectual life.
In this topic we are going to study the configuration of the United
States of America, from the independence war to the secession and civil
war. We will study the history of the united states at this time as well as the
two main reference novels of that time, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet letter and
Stephen Crane’s The red badge of courage.

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1. THE CONFIGURATION OF THE USA
1.1 The Independence War or The American Revolution (1775-1783)
It’s been called American Revolution the conflict between Britain and
thirteen of its colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America. During the
course of the American Revolution, the thirteen colonies declared their
independence from the mother country and concluded an alliance with
France.
The desires of Americans to be independent from Britain arose out of a
long series of disagreements about money and political control.
From 1651, Britain passed a series of laws called Navigation Acts,
which said that the colonists should trade only with Britain. Taxes imposed
in the 18th C increased ill feeling towards Britain. In 1765 the Stamp Act
put a tax on newspapers and official documents. Opposition to this was
strong and the following year Parliament had to remove the tax. By then,
people in both America and Britain were arguing about who had the power
to tax the colonies.
Some colonists, called patriots, began tow ant independence from
Britain. They expressed their feelings in the slogan “no taxation without
representation”.
In 1767 the Townsend Acts put taxes on certain products including tea.
The assemblies of the colonies refused to help collect the money and
Parliament responded by closing them down. All this caused many more
people to want independence. The Tea Act 1773 gave a British company
the right to sell tea to the colonists. American merchants feared this could
be extended to other products. Their response was an open rebellion: the
Boston Tea Party. When ships arrived in Boston Harbour carrying the tea,
a group of patriots dressed up as Native Americans went onto the ships and
threw the tea into the water. After this event, Britain passed the Intolerable

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Acts, laws to increase the control over the colonies. And then, more
Americans began to support the revolution.
On the Fourth of July of 1776 Thomas Jefferson proclaimed “The
declaration of Independence”. The declaration combined an attack on the
abuses of recent British rule with a statement of the rights of man and the
principles of government; in these ideas Jefferson was inspired on the ideas
of the Enlightenment. Since the British king George III refused to accept
this, America had the right, and duty, to form their own government.
There were victories and defeats on both sided during 7 years.
Finally, with the help of France, the Americans won a victory at Saratoga,
New York. After this, Britain recognised the Independence of the US in
1783. They signed the Treaty of Paris (Versailles) by which the
Independence was recognized legally.
Consequently, in 1787 the American statesmen met in Philadelphia
and proclaimed the establishment of a Presidential Federal Republic, later
on, in the same year, the federal Constitution was established.

1.2 The Civil War (1861-1865)

There was a contradiction in the new Nation: the Declaration of
Independence established that “all men are created equal…”, but a sixth of
American population was kept in slavery. It was the case of the black
population.
Thomas Jefferson ventured that freeing slaves was the next logical
step, but industrial technology, in which a cotton engine was introduced,
demanded more specialised unpaid workers and, as a direct consequence,
slavery was reinvigorated.
Due to economical reasons, Southern States maintained that
Southern slaves held the prosperity of both North and South, but
circumstances were different in Northern States. Black slavery gradually

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died out in the North during and after the Revolutionary war. The main
reason was that slavery had become unprofitable.
Legal importations of African slaves into America ended in 1808,
when Thomas Jefferson abolished foreign slave trade, but internal trade
of slaves was still legal.
Abolitionists emerged in the South and helped to make slavery a
political issue, which meant taking steps toward its extinction. By this time
Abraham Lincoln, a republican and anti-slavery politician was elected
president. He won political support in the Northern States because of his
speeches against slavery, but his made him unpopular in the Southern
States. In the South, this was taken as a signal for secession so some
Southern states began to withdraw from the Union and established the
Confederate States of America. Lincoln didn’t recognized that the Union
could be divided and the war started.
This raised a wave of violence and it led to the Civil War (1861-
1865), which was won by the North, and as a result of this victory, slavery
was abolished. The killing of President Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre in
Washington just after the end of the war showed how bitter many people
felt. The South had been beaten, but its people had not changed their
opinions about slavery or about states’ rights. During the war, the
differences between the North and the South had become even greater. The
North had become richer and in the South, cities had been destroyed and
the economy ruined.
The social fight between the Northerners, who tried to avoid the
expansion of slavery, and the Southerners, who held on the Constitutional
right of property, was illustrated by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her book
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book showed the injustice of slavery, and
according to Lincoln it helped to start the war and win it.

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2 REFERENCE NOVELS
2.1 NATHANIEL HAWTHORN (1809-1864)
American novelist and short story writer who was a master of the
allegorical and symbolic tale. He belongs to the group of “scholarly
writers” who wrote before the Civil War.
He was the first American writer to produce a fiction clearly
reflecting American experience particularly that of the 17 th century, New
England.
He was born in Salem (Massachusetts). He grew up in a post-puritan
atmosphere, and one of his ancestors, his great-grand father was one of the
three judges at the witchcraft trials, a fact that is going to condition
Hawthorne’s mood of sin and guilt.
He first signed book was Twice-Told tales, two volumes of short
stories (1837,1842). He married and moved to a village (Concord), which
was the centre of the philosophy of Transcendentalism (a movement led by
Emerson in the 19th which emphasized intuition as a means to knowledge
or the importance of the search for the divine), although it touched him
only lightly.
A growing family and debts make him return to Salem where he
produced his masterpiece the Scarlet Letter. Later on he wrote two more
novels, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance,
although they didn’t produce the income expected.
Later on, he was rewarded with the consulship in Liverpool, but from
a creative point of view he wasn’t able to write any new work of fiction in
the following years. His last drafts and unfinished works were incoherent.
Some years before his death he began to age very suddenly. He died in
1864
The Scarlet Letter (1850)

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This novel is considered a masterpiece. This book is extremely
complex due to the symbols that Hawthorne uses to describe reality.
Nothing is what seems at first. So the Scarlet Letter can’t be interpreted
literally. Hawthorne wants readers to become cooperators. Everything
around the novel has a meaning. Everything has to be decoded by the
reader. So it is like a jeroglific and we readers are asked to make some
sense about this by going beyond the surface and the appearances.
The story is about Puritans in 17th New England. It deals with a
young married woman called Hester, who has borne an illegitimate child,
little Pearls, while his husband is away. So, she is found to be guilty of
adultery and is made to wear a scarlet (=red) letter “A” on her dress.
Then, her husband, Roger Chillingworth, arrives in New England
and becomes obsessed with finding the identity of his wife’s former lover,
who is a young priest called Arthur Dimmesdale.
Hester is never repentant for the act of adultery, she feels that their
act was consecrated by their deep love for each other.
In the end, Chillingworth is morally degraded by his pursuit of
revenge, and so is Dimmesdale due to his sense of guilt, who confesses his
adultery before dying in Hester’s arms.
Only Hester can fact the future optimistically, as she plans to secure
the future of her little girl by taking her to Europe.
A reversal of conventional values in the moral is evident, the
adulterers are treated sympathetically and the husband and the puritan
society become the villain.
To Hawthorne, the unpardonable sin is the invasion of privacy,
treating people as specimens, not as individuals.
There have been 3 film versions, including one in 1995 with Demi
Moore as Hester.

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The main themes of this work are: the consequence of pride and
secret guilt and the importance of puritan past for present. The paradox of
pride in the book comes from the puritan necessity to be good. On the one
hand, human beings have to be as good as possible in order to purify the
Earth for the second coming of Christ, and on the other, the need to be
good is also bad because it means trying to be in the same level of God.
The ideas of puritan morality and individualism also appear in the
novel. These ideas reflect the contradictions at that post-puritan period in
which the author lived. The hostility between the individual and the society
throughout this romantic literature is a repeating theme. Society as a burden
oppressing the individual. On the one hand, Calvinism was still present in
society and it limited to a great extent the freedom of the individual with
regards to desires and feelings; and on the other, The Declaration of
Independence ( July, 4th, 1776) had established that the freedom of the
individual had to be respected.
Specially, women had very few rights as individuals in puritan
communities, as it is showed in the novel. The Scarlet Letter presents a
strong and determined woman who lives in a society in which there is a
total lack of rights for women. In this sense, we can say that feminism is
present in the novel.
With regards to symbolism, it is crucial in the novel. There are many
symbols in the novel:
- The contrast between light and dark
- The letter A, which stands for the violation of social law, is
converted into a thing of beauty.
- Hester and Dimmesdale meet in the forest: this place is a source of
temptation for Calvinism.
- Dimmesdale’s death on scaffold parallels Christ’s acceptance of his
doom and the blessing to his persecutors.

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2.2 STEPHEN CRANE (1871-1900). The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
Besides of writing novels, Stephen Crane also worked as a reporter,
what led him to cover the Greco-Turkish war and the Spanish-American
war. Furthermore, his ancestors were soldiers and this influenced his work.
His best-known novels are Maggie: a Girl of the Streets (1893) and
The Red Badge of Courage (1895), which he described as “a psychological
study of fear”.
Stephen Crane belongs to the new generation of writers who
published their works after the American Civil War, and he is thought to be
the founder of the laconic school of Hemingway (it is said that A Farewell
to arms was very much influenced by Crane) and the war writers. Crane
didn’t treat the subject romantically or sentimentally, but it is an attempt to
achieve with words what the Impressionists achieved with painting: to
capture reality just as it is.
The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
It is considered the first non-romantic novel of the Civil War and it
has been praised by its psychological impressionism. This influence of
impressionism is present in the novel through the use of colours which
always appear in Crane’s descriptions.
The novel for the most part concerns two days in the life of Henry
Fleming, who is a boy when the novel begins and a man when it ends. He
enlisted in a Regiment of New York volunteers. The first day, when he has
to confront the enemy in the idle of the battle, he throws down his rifle and
flees, feeling fear and panic and becoming gradually ashamed of himself.
He wants a wound, a “red badge· to prove that he isn’t a deserter. His
desire is granted when by chance another deserter strikes on him on the
head with a rifle. A soldier finds him and brings him back to his camp
thinking that he has been wounded in the battle. The next day he appears to
be a new man, and an aggressive soldier. His wound has made him adopt a

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masculine aggressiveness and a degree of anger which he has now
cultivated against the enemy. He returns to the front, he distinguishes
himself in the eyes of the other soldiers, and he is proclaimed a hero.
With regards to the themes, The Red Badge of Courage treats
traditional themes in American culture from an original point of view:
- It is a war story with an original focus: a soldier’s state of mind.
- There is a defence of Americanism, but not of war.
- The war is described as a big show.
As a result of the psychological insight of man’s behaviour in war, it is
also a personal story:
- It presents a mental report about the chaos of war.
- It is described what is happening in the protagonist’s mind, not in
the battlefield.
- The interest is in man, not in war: there is no political information.
The novel ends on the somewhat unconvincing idea that though war
is dreadful, the young man has finally overcome his fears. This is a
conventionally happy ending. However, the general sense of his brilliant
book is that the world is a chaos whose only consolidation lies in the
tenuous fellowship between man and man.
3. CONCLUSION
The importance of the 1770’s and 1870’s was the emergence of the
United States of America in a form that we can recognise today.
It’s important to develop our student’s interest in American literature
and history in order to understand the social characteristics, religious
beliefs and political evolution of this country, the United States, with such
a huge influence in our culture nowadays.

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4. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berryman, J. 1950. Stephen Crane. Methuen, London
Cunliffe, Marcus, 1970. The Literature of the United States. Penguin
Encyclopædia Britannica
Guide to British and American Culture. Oxford, 1999
James, H. 1956. Hawthorne. Ithaca.
Ousby, Ian. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English.CUP
The Norton Anthology of American Literature

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