Balmus Stefana-Raluca Grupa L132 Romana Engleza Anul III

Issues of identity in 19th century American literature

Like other national literatures, American literature was shaped by the history of the country that produced it. For almost a century and a half, America was merely a group of colonies scattered along the eastern seaboard of the North American continent. After the American Revolution, and increasingly after the War of 1812, American writers were exhorted to produce a literature that was truly native. A number of writers tried to capture this struggle among which we can find Herman Melville, Sarah Orne Jervett , Stephen Crane or Nathaniel Hawthorne. Herman Melville wrote realistically for his readers. His stories were descriptive and full of life and depth. He was not an ordinary poet. But he wrote about what he knew with wonderful reality. Bartleby the Scrivener is one of the first great stories of corporate discontent. The description of the office is incredibly bleak, and the landscape of Wall Street is completely unnatural. The work environment is sterile and cheerless. Yet most adapt to it, with varying degrees of success. Though the narrator is a successful man, he is a victim, in some ways, of progress. He has lost the post he occupied during the central events of the story, as the position was deemed redundant and eliminated. We learn later that Bartleby may have lost a job due to similar bureaucratic change. The modern economy includes constant and unfeeling change, which comes at a cost. While Rip Van Winkle succeeds to connect with the people around himthrough storytelling, Bartleby dies facing a wall, which is symbolic for hisinability to escape the world he lived in. Bartlebys story is one of death andisolation of all those who resist and refuse to fit into the rules of the modernsociety. Mortality plays a role in "Bartleby," but not in the usual sense. Death pervades the story, not as the event in time that finishes a life, but as a kind of poison permeating every aspect of the world we live in. The act of living is the real death. Living is a tiring and arduous process, full of numbing compromises and submission to meaningless tasks. Our mortality is unavoidable, and our best

intentions are often futile. The final image of the story is the Dead Letter Office, where the last undelivered communications to the dead are burned without ever having been read. A White Heron by Sarah Orne Jervett talks about a type of identity search, an emotional identity. Sarah Orne Jervett tells the story of a girl who is seeking this type of identity. Sylvia in A White Heron has come from the town but is easily subsumed in to country life. She finds herself between two worlds, civilization and nature, and the turning point in her decision is her climb up the tree wherethe nest of the white heron is. When she sees the rare bird her communion with nature makes her remain true to her own values and thus be a part of nature. In contrast the hunter remains the outsider as his ways of appreciating nature are to capture and destroy it. The hunter assumes that the offer of money will make the girl give up the secret of the herons nest. He does not appreciate that she is bound closer to the birds than him, and he is not part of her world. Each of the stories is told by an omniscient narrator, which gives the impression that they are presented as illustrative anecdotes to deliver a moral or social message. A White Heron reminds the reader of the value of nature and its fragility, at a time when conservation to protect endangered species was not featuring large on the social agenda. The Gray Man reminds us of the close proximity of Death, and the gentler benefits of this usually black figure. Farmer Finch encourages us to think beyond gender stereotypes in to the scope of the individual, and Marsh Rosemary warns of the effects of trusting a shiftless individual and giving them ones heart. The Dulham Ladies show us the dangers of looking back instead of forward and A Business Man illustrates the need to value more than just money. Finally, Mary and Martha show that family rifts however ancient can be healed, and kindness is often to everyones advantage. "None of them knew the color of the sky."- this is the famous opening line of The Open Boat. With this simple statement, Crane successfully depicts the survivors' disorientation and their insignificance in nature. Although these four men are at open sea, with nothing sheltering them from the sky, they do not know its color. This demonstrates their preoccupation not only with the serious predicament at hand, but also with their own mortality. In addition, this brief sentence underscores a larger theme in this short story: nature's indifference to man. Repetition plays a key role in The Open Boat . This technique seems to lengthen the mens journey, providing the reader with a more vivid impression of the despair and hopelessness they feel.

The descriptions of the sky and the ocean in The Open Boat emphasize the isolation of the shipwreck survivors. Furthermore, the correspondent, as he mans the boat through the night, ponders his potential fate of death. He marvels at mans inconsequential existence in the face of natures vastness. He assumes all of his companions are asleep, particularly that no one else is awake to see the shark circling the boat. Later, he learns that the captain of the boat was in fact awake, but this does not change the fact that they are all isolated together in the sea. The Blue Hotel first appeared in 1898 in a collection of Cranes short stories entitled, The Monster and Other Stories. It is perhaps the most widely-read of all the tales in the collection and while it may seem, on the surface, to be a rather straightforward story about a man who gets in trouble after a stay at the Palace Hotel, there are several complex themes that drive the work and in some ways, define many of the overarching themes in novels like Maggie, A Girl of the Streets and more generally, of Cranes entire body of work. Crane is the author of novels but is best known for short stories such as The Blue Hotel. In The Blue Hotel, the Swede perceives the West to feature the above tropes, too, but those who actually live in the West (the Scullys, the cowboy) reject this notion and find the Swede out of place. Ironically, the Swede does become a victim of the violence he fears, while Scratchy, who really has a couple of guns, easily abandons his aggression. My Kinsman, Major Molineux is a short story set in colonial America. Its genre is romanticism with Gothic overtones. .The action takes place on a moonlit evening in Boston, circa 1730, when the city was part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. At that time, anti-British sentiment was prevalent in the colony. The sight of Major Molineux as a victim of tarring and feathering shocks Robin. Molineux is the man who had pledged to help Robin make his way in the world, a man the youth thought had been held in high esteem. And it is not enough that the townspeople are subjecting him to a painful physical ordeal; with their ridicule and wild laughter, they are also subjecting him to the psychological trauma of utter humiliation. To show the people that he objects to their barbarous punishment of the major, Robin could display a stone face of disapproval. Instead he laughs. Here is the narrator's account of the moment: .......Therefore, being shrewd, Robin realizes that failure to laugh at Molineux will brand him as a

sympathizer of the major and render him vulnerable to the wrath of the townspeople. In their frenzied state, they could decide to tar and feather him too. So he laughs. His instinct for survival supersedes any loyalty to, or pity for, Molineux. It also supersedes his desire for Molineux's promised money and assistance. By laughing, Robin severs ties with the reviled major; by laughing, he becomes a patriot instead of a British sympathizer. He even (shrewdly) refers to the townspeople as "friends" near the end of the story, when he is speaking with the gentleman next to him. .......Having thus saved himself from possible harm, Robin is ready to return home, noting that the major "will scarce desire to see my face again" . But the gentlemanbeing a shrewd fellow in his own rightcorrectly points out to Robin that his decision to laugh at the crucial moment was also a personal declaration of independence. It made him a man, a man who is capable of surviving on his own. "As you are a shrewd youth," the gentleman says, "you may rise in the world without the help of your kinsman, Major Molineux" Taking into consideration all the aspects about these short stories we can say that the struggle of finding ones identity has been an importanttheme for the 19he century American writers because of the period thecountry of America was going through. It is known that at that time the country was in search of morality and was trying to create a new world that could be free and independent. Thus the characters we have analyzedwere also in search for a place to be a part of, be it the new civilized world orthe wilderness that was before the Revolutionary War. Morality was a question of social or emotional identification that depended on ones beliefsand concepts about life.