Nathaniel Hawthorne Outline

The American Renaissance

1. In 1850, there was a party in Stockbridge, Massachusetts that both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville attended.
a. They asked the question: Would there ever be an American writer as great as England’s William Shakespeare?
i. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville both agreed that there would be.
2. Hawthorne and Melville: Opposites Attract
a. Herman Melville wrote Typee in 1846 and his masterpiece was Moby-Dick
b. Nathaniel Hawthorn published The Scarlet Letter in 1850
c. Nathaniel Hawthorn and Herman Melville developed a friendship despite their differences as they both saw a dark side to human existence, and they sought to record this aspect of human nature in their works.
d. Melville was exposed
to the “power of blackness” in Hawthorne’s writing
3. First Flowering: A Declaration of Literary Independence
a. Melville’s meeting with Hawthorne resulted in a magazine essay where Melville strongly defends American literature.
i. In a burst of literary patriotism, Melville said that America was close to having its own Shakespeare in Hawthorne
b. Melville’s essay coincided with a time when the American landscape and American culture would finally find their place in a literature distinct from European models.
i. Writers were aware of this time and referred to it as the renaissance, which means “rebirth”, as a description for the burst of American literary genius ii. Could also be called “coming of age”
c. From 1849-1855, American writers produced enough masterpieces for a national literature.
4. Intellectual and Social Life in New England
a. This burst of American literature can be brought back to the intellectual and social ferment in New England
i. New England has always been known for its interest in self-improvement and intellectual inquiry. ii. This interest found expression in the Lyceum movement, which began in 1826, in Millbury, Massachusetts iii. Lyceum organizations had goals of educating adults, training teachers, establishing museums, and instituting social reforms iv. A Lyceum program included a course of lectures in winter. They were very popular in New England and the Midwest One of the most popular speakers was Ralph Waldo Emerson who was a primary force behind the flowering of American culture
b. New England was a center of many reform movements
i. Horace Mann dedicated his life to improving public education ii. Dorothea Dix wanted to relieve the horrible conditions in mental hospitals iii. Several different utopian groups drew up comprehensive plans for a better society
5. The Transcendentalist: True Reality is Spiritual
a.
Emerson’s utopian group became knows as “The Transcendental Club”
i. The term transcendental come from the eighteenth-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant ii. The word refers to the idea that in determining the ultimate reality of God, the universe, the self, and other important matters, one must go beyond everyday human experience in the physical world
b. For Emerson, Transcendentalism was not a new philosophy, but the “very oldest of thoughts cast into the mold of these new times”
i. “Oldest of thoughts” was idealism, which had already been articulated by the Greek philosopher, Plato.
c. Idealists said that true reality involved ideas rather than the world as perceived by the senses
i. Idealists sought the permanent reality that underlay physical appearances ii. Transcendentalists were idealists, but in a broader, more practical sense. They believed in human perfectibility and they worked to achieve this goal
6. A Transcendentalist’s View of the World:
• Everything in the world, including human beings, is a reflection of the Divine Soul
• The physical facts of the natural world are a doorway to the spiritual or ideal world
• People can use their intuition to behold God’s spirit revealed in nature or in their own
souls.
• Self-reliance and individualism must outweigh external authority and blind conformity to custom and tradition
• Spontaneous feelings and intuition are superior to deliberate intellectualism and rationality
7. Emerson and Transcendentalism: The American Roots
a. As developed by Emerson, Transcendentalism grafted ideas from Europe and Asia onto a homegrown American philosophical stem
i.
Its American roots included Puritan thought, the beliefs of the eighteenth-century religious revivalist Jonathan Edwards, and the Romantic tradition exemplified by William Cullen Bryan
b. This native mysticism – also typical of Romanticism -- reappears in Emerson’s though
i. “Every natural fact,” he wrote, “is a symbol of some spiritual fact
8. Emerson’s Optimistic Outlook
a. Emerson’s mystical view of the world came from intuition rather than logic.
i. Intuition is out capacity to know things spontaneously and immediately through out emotions rather than through out reasoning abilities
b. Emerson was very optimistic, a product of his belief that we can find God directly in nature.
i. His optimism and hope appealed to audiences who were facing tough times because of the economy, regional arguments, etc.
9. Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe: A Challenge to the Transcendentalists
a. Some think of the above authors as anti-Transcendentalists because their view of the world seems so very opposed to the optimistic view of Emerson.
i. These authors were known as Dark Romantics and actually had much in common with the Transcendentalists ii. Dark Romantics used symbolism to great effect in their
works iii. The Dark Romantics did not disagree with Emerson’s belief that the spiritual facts lie behind the appearances of nature; they disagreed with the idea that those facts are good or harmless iv. The Dark Romantics saw blankness and the horror of evil, and from this they shaped a uniquely American literature