Instituto Superior del Profesorado “Dr. Joaquín V.

Gonzalez”
Literatura Norteamericana – 4º B y D – Prof. Mariano H. Quinterno

PART B
CHARACTERISTIC TRAITS OF AMERICAN
LITERATURE2

1. Most of this literature is informed by the myth known as The American Dream.

2. American culture is essentially the expression of radical oppositions. American fiction

is a world of radical even irreconcilable contradictions. Synthesis is impossible. There
are polarities everywhere. The American dialectic does not lead to reconciliation: it is a
perpetual argument of persistently antithetical positions. This is due to the fact that for
the Puritans there was no middle ground where differences might be harmonized. The
Puritans were committed both to the practical / materialistic and to the idealistic /
transcendent. Their Manichean vision made them interested in the struggle between
good and evil.

3. Emerson writes in “Self-Reliance”: “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power
ceases in the instance of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a
new state.” Power is neither in the past nor in the new state: it is in the moment of
transition. Quests inform the most characteristic works.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

4. Reality is inadequate to the hope of the “new individual.” There is uneasiness with the
merely real, due – partly – to the persistent American conviction that what is given is not
good enough. American literature seems to be defined more by escape than return, by
rebellion more than by a constructive building of new alternatives. American fiction is
not socially indifferent or anarchic in politics but committed to the notion of an ideal
community. While commenting on society, American fiction has attempted to suggest
the outlines of a better one.

2 Adapted from a handout originally compiled by Prof. Delia Malamud

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 Instituto Superior del Profesorado “Dr. Joaquín V. Gonzalez”
Literatura Norteamericana – 4º B y D – Prof. Mariano H. Quinterno

5. Novel versus Romance. In American tradition, romance does NOT refer to works which
are the tag-end of a European tradition that begins in the Middle Ages. The word
romance begins to take on its current meaning in the writing of Hawthorne.

Let us explore two texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne:

TEXT 1

THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES

PREFACE

WHEN A WRITER calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to
claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt
himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a novel. The latter form of
composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but
to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former--while, as a work of
art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may
swerve aside from the truth of the human heart--has fairly a right to present that truth
under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation. If he
think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the
lights, and deepen and enrich the shadows, of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to
make a very moderate use of the privileges here stated, and, especially, to mingle the
marvellous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor, than as any portion of the
actual substance of the dish offered to the public. He can hardly be said, however, to
commit a literary crime, even if he disregard this caution.
In the present work the author has proposed to himself--but with what success,
fortunately, it is not for him to judge--to keep undeviatingly within his immunities. The
point of view in which this tale comes under the romantic definition lies in the attempt to
connect a by-gone time with the very present that is flitting away from us. It is a legend,
prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into our own broad day-
light, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist, which the reader, according
to his pleasure, may either disregard, or allow it to float almost imperceptibly about the
characters and events for the sake of a picturesque effect. The narrative, it may be, is
woven of so humble a texture as to require this advantage, and, at the same time, to
render it the more difficult of attainment.
Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they
profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided
himself with a moral;--the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into
the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure
and uncontrollable mischief;--and he would feel it a singular gratification, if this romance
might effectually convince mankind--or, indeed, any one man--of the folly of tumbling
down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate
posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be
scattered abroad in its original atoms. In good faith, however, he is not sufficiently
imaginative to flatter himself with the slightest hope of this kind. When romances do
really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more
subtile process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his
while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral, as with an iron rod,--or,
rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly,--thus at once depriving it of life, and
causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A high truth, indeed, fairly,
finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final
development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and
seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.
The reader may perhaps choose to assign an actual locality to the imaginary events of
this narrative. If permitted by the historical connection,--which, though slight, was
essential to his plan,--the author would very willingly have avoided anything of this
nature. Not to speak of other objections, it exposes the romance to an inflexible and
exceedingly dangerous species of criticism, by bringing his fancy-pictures almost into
positive contact with the realities of the moment. It has been no part of his object,

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 Instituto Superior del Profesorado “Dr. Joaquín V. Gonzalez”
Literatura Norteamericana – 4º B y D – Prof. Mariano H. Quinterno

however, to describe local manners, nor in any way to meddle with the characteristics of
a community for whom he cherishes a proper respect and a natural regard. He trusts not
to be considered as unpardonably offending, by laying out a street that infringes upon
nobody's private rights, and appropriating a lot of land which had no visible owner, and
building a house, of materials long in use for constructing castles in the air. The
personages of the tale--though they give themselves out to be of ancient stability and
considerable prominence--are really of the author's own making, or, at all events, of his
own mixing; their virtues can shed no lustre, nor their defects redound, in the remotest
degree, to the discredit of the venerable town of which they profess to be inhabitants. He
would be glad, therefore, if--especially in the quarter to which he alludes--the book may
be read strictly as a romance, having a great deal more to do with the clouds overhead
than with any portion of the actual soil of the County of Essex.
LENOX, January 27, 1851.

TEXT 2

THE CUSTOM HOUSE

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SCARLET LETTER (1850)
It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam claimed as his
share of my daily life, that this wretched numbness held possession of me. It went with
me on my sea-shore walks and rambles into the country, whenever—which was seldom
and reluctantly—I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating charm of Nature, which used
to give me such freshness and activity of thought, the moment that I stepped across the
threshold of the Old Manse. The same torpor, as regarded the capacity for intellectual
effort, accompanied me home, and weighed upon me, in the chamber which I most
absurdly termed my study. Nor did it quit me when, late at night, I sat in the deserted
parlour, lighted only by the glimmering coal-fire and the moon, striving to picture forth
imaginary scenes, which, the next day, might flow out on the brightening page in many-
hued description.

If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might well be deemed a
hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and
showing all its figures so distinctly,—making every object so minutely visible, yet so
unlike a morning or noontide visibility,—is a medium the most suitable for a romance-
writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of
the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate individuality; the centre-
table, sustaining a work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the
book-case; the picture on the wall;—all these details, so completely seen, are so
spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and
become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change,
and acquire dignity thereby. A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage;
the hobby-horse;—whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is
now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly
present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a
neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and
the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might
enter here, without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene to
excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form, beloved, but gone hence,
now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make
us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.

Ever since Hawthorne used this word to describe his fiction, it has appropriately
signified the penchant for the marvelous and the sensational which one associates with
so much of the best of American writing. In Hawthorne and later romancers the field is
conceived not so much as a place as a state of mind – the borderland of the human mind
where the actual and the imaginary intermingle. Romance does not plant itself, like the
novel, solidly in the midst of the actual. Nor when it is memorable does it escape into the

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 Instituto Superior del Profesorado “Dr. Joaquín V. Gonzalez”
Literatura Norteamericana – 4º B y D – Prof. Mariano H. Quinterno

purely imaginary. In saying that, no matter what its extravagances, romance must not
“swerve aside from the truth of the human heart.” Hawthorne was in effect announcing
the definitive adoption of romance to America. In romance, astonishing events may
occur which are likely to have a symbolic or ideological, rather than realistic, plausibility.
Being less committed to the immediate rendition of reality than the novel, the romance
will more freely veer toward mythic, allegorical or symbolist forms. Instead of writing the
novel of social verisimilitude, American writers have fashioned their own kind of
Manichean, all questioning fable or romance in which they carry us beyond ordinary
social experience and into the realm of abstract morality. No doubt it is partly from
Puritanism that American literature has derived its characteristic interest in ethical
problems and the habit of formulating the answer to them in an abstract and often
preachy manner.

6. The American hero has no parents, no past, no patrimony, no siblings, no family – and
no life-circle, because he never marries or has children. He seldom dies. The typical self-
discovery of the American character has been conceived as an immersion in experience.
It is as though the more realities one’s experiences could encompass or be touched by,
the nearer one could come to self-definition. Consequently, the metamorphic pattern of
American life and of the American hero’s career sets its exemplars in linear motion
through as many conditions of reality as possible. R.W.B. Lewis states in The American
Adam that the American hero must “fall,” must be initiated into the full complexity of
experience (including his own capacity for evil) if he is to attain significant value.

The Adamic fable can be found in much of American narrative: the individual going forth
toward experience, the inventor of his own character, creator of his personal history; the
self-moving individual who is made to confront the “other” – the world or society, the
element which provides experience, the simple genuine self against the whole world. In
American fiction, the valid rite of initiation for the individual is not an initiation INTO
society but, given the character of society, an initiation AWAY FROM it; what R.W.B.
Lewis calls deinitiation. The characteristic gesture of the American hero is to begin by
achieving independence, to rebel against the given contexts. The end of innocence via
ocular initiation is bafflement and nausea: beyond the cry of the kid at the window, it is
hard to imagine a real acceptance of adult life and sexuality, hard to conceive of anything
but continuing flight or self-destruction. American heroes and heroines tend to express
the natural self rather than merely to represent, in speech and manner, some preordained
social type.

7. It is maturity above all things that the American hero fears, and marriage seems to him
its essential sign. Marriage stands traditionally not only for reconciliation with the
divided self, a truce between head and heart, but also for a compromise with society, an
acceptance of responsibility and drudgery and dullness. Significant relationships
between male characters, frequently of different races, replace the heterosexual
relationships that usually occupy European novels. In American mythology the holy
marriage of males, the tie between male and male, is not only considered innocent: it is
taken for the very symbol of innocence itself. This holy marriage takes on, by virtue of
crossing conventional color lines and becoming inter-racial as well as home-erotic, a
sociological significance. It comes to stand for the healing of social conflicts that most
disturbs America. Yet, these unions disconcertingly suggest a general superiority of the
love of man for man over the ignorable love of man for woman. The hero’s companion is
an alter-ego, some version of himself, or a “protective figure,” sometimes superficially
characterized, like a God-given aid, to educate the hero, to make available some
priceless wisdom of tolerance and dignity. We are in the presence not so much of a
human being as of an agent that is to provide aid in the midst of difficulty. The
companion sometimes remains a strictly symbolic projection of the hero, a metaphor of
some buried psychic force or the large unknown itself – elsewhere imaged as sea or
forest – the new “context” in which the isolated hero defines only himself. A possible
consequence is being reborn as Indian or Negro, becoming the other.

8. The machine is set in opposition to the tranquility and order in the landscape. The
machine is an emblem of the artificial, of the unfeeling utilitarian spirit, of the

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 Instituto Superior del Profesorado “Dr. Joaquín V. Gonzalez”
Literatura Norteamericana – 4º B y D – Prof. Mariano H. Quinterno

fragmentary modern style of life. The machine is the prototype and agent of an
irreversible process: not alone technological change, but the implacable advance of
history.

Throughout American literature the machine is to the ideal society what a hideous noise
is to a delicate sonata. If the new technology does not literally smash the symbol of
Utopian aspiration, it invariably threatens it. Auditory imagery is particularly effective in
suggesting the extension of a mechanized society’s power into the realm of mind itself.
Just as the harsh noise penetrates the inner recesses of consciousness, so the external
arrangements of life threaten, much more than before, to dominate the inner being. Noise
is an agent of alienation. The ties that bind society and nature are represented by a
harmonious blend of sounds; the onrush of the machine, also evoked by sound, shatters
the image of wholeness.

Alienation

9. American literature offers one of the most persistent examples of a recurrent

compulsion to the possibilities of a new style. American writers feel that with each new
work they must invent again the complete world of literary form.

From Theories of American Literature: The Critical Perspective

& TO KEEP ON READING…

• Kartiganer, Donald & Malcolm Griffith (1972). Theories of American Literature:

The Critical Perspective. New York: The Macmillan Company.
• Karl, Frederick (1985). American Fictions 1940/1980: A Comprehensive History
and Critical Evaluation. New York: Harper and Row.

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