THE ERA OF EXPANSION (1831-1870): American Romanticism

During the mid-1800s, the United States gained control of Texas, California,
Oregon, and other Western lands. By the 1850s, the nation stretched from coast
to coast. Americans moved westward by the thousands. The Native Americans
who occupied many of these lands were forced to surrender their claims and to
resettle on reservations. During this period, many American writers glorified the
frontier or praised the beauty of nature. Much American literature reflected the
optimism of a rapidly growing nation. But other American literature focused on the
country's problems, including slavery.
(check out folk songs from the period, Old Chisholm Trail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnS9_-FFsRc , Sweet Betsy from Pike
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr03En-8fH8)
Following the patterns of European cultural evolution, romanticism was an
inevitable outcome of American bourgeois revolution and Enlightenment. The core
of the romantic ideology is the conflict between the dream and the reality. The
romantics strived to ignore the material world and opposed it with an abstract
ideal. The essence of the Romantic method is creation extraordinary characters in
extraordinary situations; the Romantic writers tend to write symbolically and
allegorically and often spare the concrete details for the sake of the enigmatic and
the fantastic. Though this literature was not realistic, realism is not the only aim of
fiction. Romantic works discovered the inner world of man and brought forward
their spiritual life in other than religious sense.
New themes demanded new forms, new poetic perception of the world and
the new character. Two main forms of fiction were practiced by American writers
in the mid-1800s: (1) the sentimental novel and (2) the romance. Other important
literary forms included nonfiction prose and poetry. Most people use the term
‘novel’ to refer to any long fictional story in prose. Critics of the 1800s, however,
distinguished a novel from a romance. A romance is a long work of fiction that is
less realistic than a novel. Instead of everyday events, a romance describes
exciting adventures or strange events. Writers often use the romance to explore
dark passions or to examine the problem of evil. The core of romantic works forms
around a dramatic conflict, often based upon a fatal accident, the plot of such
works is complex and adventurist and dynamic with a sudden ending, though
predictable due to the “doom” of the characters. The American hero typically faced
risk, or even inevitable destruction in pursuit of the metaphysical self-identity.
Further, Romanticism brought forward the concept of national identity and
introduced folklore to literature. Romantic ideas centred around art as inspiration,
the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth.
Art, rather than science, Romantics argued, could best express universal truth.
The Romantics underscored the importance of expressive art for the individual
and society. In his essay “The Poet” (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the
most influential writer of the Romantic era, asserts:
“For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in
avarice, in politics, in labour, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The
man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.“
The development of self became a major
theme; self-awareness, a primary method. If,
according to Romantic theory, self and
nature were one, self-awareness was not a
selfish deadend, but a mode of knowledge
opening up the universe. If one’s self were
one with all humanity then the individual had
a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering. The idea of
self – which suggested selfishness to earlier generations – was redefined. New
compound words with positive meanings emerged: self-realization, self-
expression, self-reliance.
As the unique, subjective self
became important, so did the realm of
psychology. Exceptional artistic effects
and techniques were developed to evoke
heightened psychological states. The
“sublime” – an effect of beauty in grandeur
(for example, a view from a mountaintop)
– produced feelings of awe, reverence,
vastness, and a power beyond human
comprehension.
Romanticism was affirmative and
appropriate for most American poets and
creative essayists. America’s vast
mountains, deserts and tropics embodied
the sublime. The Romantic spirit seemed
particularly suited to American
C.D.Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog 1817
democracy: it stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person,
and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values.
But one cannot generalize too much about Romanticism in America,
because American romantic writers, like their European counterparts, blazed the
new trails alone. For the Romantic writer nothing was a given and literary
conventions were dangerous. And they faced the challenge of convention
undaunted. The idea of Romanticism united only one group of writers – the New
England transcendentalists.
TRANSCENDENTALISM
During the 1830s and 1840s, a literary and philosophical movement called
transcendentalism developed in New England. Concord, Massachusetts, a village
not far from Cambridge, was the home of leaders of this important New England
group. The way for this group had been prepared by the rise of a theological
system, Unitarianism, which early in the 19th century had replaced Calvinism as
the faith of a large share of the New Englanders.
The movement was a reaction against the 18th century rationalism and a
manifestation of the general humanitarian trend in the 19th century thought. The
movement was based on a fundamental belief in the unity of the world and God.
The soul of each individual was thought to be identical with the world – a
microcosm of the world itself. The doctrine of self-reliance and individualism
developed through the belief in the identification of the individual soul with God.
The transcendentalists believed that God was present in nature. They also
believed that human beings intuitively know what is true, and so they stressed
self-reliance and individuality.
Transcendentalism was intimately
connected with Concord, a small New
England village 32 kilometers west of
Boston, the first rural artistic colony. It
was the first original settlement in
Massachusetts. Surrounded by forest, it
was and remains a peaceful town close
enough to Boston lectures, bookstores
and colleges to be intensively cultured,
but far enough away to be serene.
The transcendentalists included
R. W. Emerson; H. D. Thoreau; G. Ripley; M. Fuller; and Br. Alcott, Louisa
May Alcott's father.

They published a quarterly magazine, The Dial which lasted 4 years. Unlike many
European groups they never issued a manifesto. They insisted on individual
differences – on the unique viewpoint of the individual. American Transcendental
Romantics pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American writers saw
themselves as lonely explorers outside society and convention.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most famous of the Concord philosophers, was
the leader of the movement. He started as a Unitarian minister but found even that
liberal doctrine too confining for his broad beliefs. He became a Transcendentalist
who, like other ancient and modern Platonists, trusted to insights transcending
logic and experience for revelations of the deepest truths. He preached one
message – that the individual human being, because he is God's creature, has a
spark of divinity in him which gives him great power. His scheme of things ranged
from the lowest objects and most practical chores to soaring flights of imagination
and inspired beliefs.
It is true that his philosophy lacks consistency, but Emerson purposefully
avoided building a rational system that would contradict his belief in intuitive
knowledge. He said that “A foolish consistency is a hobgoblin of little minds”.
Yet he is consistent in his call for the birth of American individualism inspired
by nature. Most of his major ideas – the need for a new national vision, the use of
personal experience, the notion of the cosmic over-soul and the doctrine of
compensation – are suggested in his first publication, Nature (1836). This essay
opens:
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes
biographies, histories, criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature
face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original
relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry of insight and not of
tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs.
Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and
through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to
nature, why should we grope among the dead bones of the past…? The sun
shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands,
new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
His Essays (1841-44), Representative Men (1850), and English Traits
(1856) were thoughtful and poetic explanations of his beliefs; and his rough-hewn
lyrics, packed with thought and feeling, were close to the 17th-century
Metaphysical poems. He kept a journal in which he recorded incidents, ideas, and
reactions to his wide reading. Emerson drew on his journal in such essays as
Nature (1836) and "Self-Reliance" (1841), achieving a prose style that was
personal and conversational. "Trust thyself," Emerson said in his essay 'Self-
Reliance'. He believed it made no difference what one's work is or where one
lives. Emerson himself lived in the village of Concord. There, as oracle and as
prophet, he wrote the stirring prose that inspired an entire nation.
Spiritual vision and practical, aphoristic expression make Emerson
exhilarating; one of the Concord Transcendentalists compared listening to him
with going to heaven in a swing. Much of his spiritual insight comes from his
readings in Eastern religion, especially Hinduism, Confucianism and Islamic
Sufism. For example, his poem “Brahma” relies on Hindu sources to assert a
cosmic order beyond the limited perception of mortals:
If the red slayer think he slay
Or the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near

Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode

And pine in vain the sacred Seven,
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
This poem, published in the first number of the Atlantic Monthly (1857)
confused the readers unfamiliar with Brahma, the highest Hindu god, the eternal
and infinite soul of the universe. Emerson gave the editor this advice for his
readers: “Tell them Jehovah instead of Brahma”.
Emerson caught the mood of Americans at the time, a buoyant optimism
and sense that the United States was an exciting new beginning in human history.
He urged Americans to be independent thinkers and to study life directly.
Emerson declared that individuals had access to the eternal and ideal truths of
nature. He therefore urged Americans to trust their own creative instincts and not
look to Europe for models. A great prose-poet, Emerson influenced a long line of
American poets, including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, as well
as philosophers Nietzsche and Santayana.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Society and Solitude, Civilization”
 If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better
mouse-trap than his neighbour, tho' he build his house in the woods, the world will
make a beaten path to his door.
Attributed remark

There is properly no history; only biography.

Essays, `History”
One person who took Emerson's teaching to heart and
lived by it was his Concord neighbor Henry David
Thoreau (1817−1862). He was of French and Scottish
descent, was born in Concord and made it his permanent
home. From a poor family, like Emerson, he worked his
way through Harvard. Throughout his life he reduced his
needs to the simplest level and managed to live on very
little money, thus maintaining his independence. In
essence he made living his career. A non-conformist, he
attempted to live his life at all times according to his
rigorous principles. This attempt was subject of many of
his writings.

Thoreau lived a life of

independence. He was a
student of wildlife and the
great outdoors. He was also
a student of literature, who
himself wrote fresh,
vigorous prose. His masterpiece is 'Walden, or Life in the Woods' (1854), an
account of his two-year two-month and two-day (from 1845 to 1847) sojourn at
Walden Pond in a cabin built on the land owned by Emerson, and his experiences
and ponderings during the time he lived there. The book is a defense of his belief
that modern man should simplify his demands if need be to decide what is
important in life and then to pursue it. “Walden” starts:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the
essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not,
when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what is not
life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite
necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so
sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath
and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if
it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and
publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience,
and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
Thoreau read, entertained visitors, worked the land for his food, and
recorded his observations in journals. Thoreau's style shows his sensitive
response to the root meanings, sounds, images, and nuances of words. The book
is consciously written so that it compresses the experiences within the timespan of
one year. It is organized so that the simplest earthly concerns come first (in the
section “Economy” he describes the expenses for building a cabin) to meditations
on stars.
In Walden, Thoreau, a lover of travel books and the author of several, gives
us an anti-travel book that paradoxically opens the inner frontier of self-discovery
as no American book had up to that time. Throreau writes: “I am afraid to travel
much or to famous places, lest it might completely dissipate the mind”.
As deceptively modest as Thoreau’s ascetic life, it is no less than a guide to
living the classical ideal of the good life. Both poetry and philosophy, this long
essay challenges the reader to examine his or her life and live it authentically. The
building of the cabin, a great detail, is a metaphor for the careful building of a soul.
In Walden Thoreau reenacts the collective American experience of living on
the frontier. Thoreau felt that his contribution would be to renew a sense of the
wilderness in language. We read in his journal of 1851:
English literature from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, Chaucer,
Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton included, breathes no quite fresh and in this
sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting
Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green-wood, her wildman a Robin Hood.
there is plenty of genial love of nature in her poets, but not so much of nature
herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wildman in
her, became extinct. There was need of America.
The simplicity of Thoreau's life makes a strong appeal to modern readers.
They are impressed too by his essay 'Civil Disobedience' (1849), which
converted Emersonian self-reliance into a workable formula for opposing the
power of government. Thoreau expounded his anarchistic views of government,
insisting that if an injustice of government is "of such a nature that it requires
injustice to another [you should] break the law [and] let your life be a counter
friction to stop the machine." He advocated passive resistance, including, if
necessary, going to jail, as he himself did. Mahatma Gandhi, who was jailed so
many times in his fight to free India from British rule, was strongly influenced by
the ideas contained in this essay of Thoreau's.
An associate of Emerson with a salty personality of his own and an
individual way of thinking, Henry David Thoreau, was more of a humorist − a dry
Yankee commentator with a flair for paradoxical phrases and sentences. Finally,
he was a learned man, widely read in Western classics and books of the Orient.
These qualities gave distinction to A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers (1849) and to Walden (1854).
Thoreau seems to be the most attractive of the Transcendentalists today
because of his ecological consciousness, do-it-yourself independence, ethical
commitment to abolitionism and political theory of civil disobedience and peaceful
resistance, His ideas are still fresh, and his poetic style and habit of close
observation are still modern.
Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships
... . We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood
and bones.
It takes two to speak the truth, − one to speak, and another to hear.
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Simplify, simplify.
Walden, `Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Walden, `Economy”
Walden, `Sounds”
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Journal, 25 July 1839
 Although his friends
included a number of
noted transcendentalists
− such as Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry David
Thoreau, and Bronson
Alcott − Nathaniel
Hawthorne's
(1804−1864) works show
little of the optimism and
self-confidence that
marked
transcendentalism.
Instead, he preferred
themes drawn more from a Puritan preoccupation with guilt and the natural
depravity of humans.
Hawthorne was born in Salem, Mass. His family, early Puritan settlers in
America, had lived in Salem since the 1600s. He was a fifth generation
descendant of a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials. Hawthorne's father, a ship's
captain, died when Nathaniel was only 4, and his mother became a virtual recluse.
Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he befriended
Franklin Pierce, who later became a president of the United States.
Hawthorne decided to become a writer, but until the 1840s he wrote little
except for an amateurish novel, 'Fanshawe', published anonymously at his own
expense in 1828. Some stories he sold to magazines were published as 'Twice
Told Tales' in 1837. The publication cost of the collection was underwritten by
another of his college friends, Horatio Bridge. Hawthorne worked in the Boston
Customhouse from 1839 to 1840, after which he spent a few months at Brook
Farm, a cooperative agricultural community in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. The
Brook Farm experience was later described in his novel 'The Blithedale
Romance' (1852).
Hawthorne moved a lot, settling for short periods of time in various cities in
Massachusetts. In 1842 he married Sophia Peabody and the young couple spent
the next three years in the Old Manse in Concord, where he wrote a second
series of 'Twice Told Tales'. 'Mosses from an Old Manse', published in 1846,
describes their happy life in Concord. In 1845, Hawthorne returned to Salem and
again worked in a customhouse. Relieved of that job in 1849, he found time to
write. His best-known work, 'The Scarlet Letter', was published in 1850. Moving
from Salem to Lenox, Massachusetts, Hawthorne wrote 'The House of the Seven
Gables', which came out the following year. At Lenox he made the acquaintance
of Herman Melville, a fellow writer whose novels show Hawthorne's influence.
After a short stay in West Newton, Mass., the Hawthornes returned to Concord,
where they purchased a house that had belonged to Bronson Alcott, renaming it
Wayside.
In 1853 Franklin Pierce became president. He offered Hawthorne a
consulship in Liverpool, England, a post that Hawthorne held until 1857. After
resigning his position as consul, Hawthorne traveled in Europe, mostly in Italy. In
1860 the Hawthornes returned to their home in Concord. After 'The Marble Faun',
published that year, Hawthorne wrote little. He aged rapidly and found it
increasingly difficult to write. On May 19, 1864, while traveling with his friend
Pierce, Hawthorne died in Plymouth, New Hampshire.
Hawthorne wrote relatively little, but if he had
written only 'The Scarlet Letter' his position as a
major American writer would have been assured.
The symbolism, psychological insight, and clarity of
expression found in his writing have provided a
model for generations of American writers.

The main character

of The Scarlet
Letter is Hester
Prynne, a young
married woman
who gave birth to
an illegitimate child
while living away from her husband in a village in Puritan New England. The
husband, Roger Chillingworth, arrives in New England to find his wife pilloried and
made to wear the letter A (meaning adulteress) in scarlet on her dress as a
punishment for her illicit affair and for her refusal to reveal the name of the child's
father. Chillingworth becomes obsessed with finding the identity of his wife's
former lover. He learns that Hester's paramour is a saintly young minister, Arthur
Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth then proceeds to revenge himself by mentally
tormenting the guilt-stricken young man. Hester herself is revealed to be a
compassionate and splendidly self-reliant heroine who is never truly repentant for
the act of adultery committed with the minister; she feels that their act was
consecrated by their deep love for each other. In the end Chillingworth is morally
degraded by his monomaniac pursuit of revenge, and Dimmesdale is broken by
his own sense of guilt and publicly confesses his adultery before dying in Hester's
arms. Only Hester can face the future optimistically, as she plans to ensure the
future of her beloved little girl by taking her to Europe (check out a trailer to the
novel’s loose interpretation at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzoFrXEdC74&t=5s ).
The book is superbly organized and beautifully written. The historical topic
finds its form in the historical stylistic device – allegory.
The House of the Seven Gables is a sombre study in hereditary sin based
on the legend of a curse pronounced on Hawthorne's own family by a woman
condemned to death during the witchcraft trials. The greed and arrogant pride of
the novel's Pyncheon family down the generations is mirrored in the gloomy decay
of their seven-gabled mansion, in which the family's enfeebled and impoverished
poor relations live. At the book's end the descendant of a family long ago
defrauded by the Pyncheons lifts his ancestors' curse on the mansion and marries
a young niece of the family.
In The Marble Faun a trio of expatriate American art students in Italy
become peripherally involved to varying degrees in the murder of an unknown
man; their contact with sin transforms two of them from innocents into adults now
possessed of a mature and critical awareness of life's complexity and possibilities.
Hawthorne's high rank among American fiction writers is the result of at least
three considerations. First, he was a skillful craftsman with an impressive
arthitectonic sense of form. The structure of The Scarlet Letter, for example, is so
tightly integrated that no chapter, no paragraph, even, could be omitted without
doing violence to the whole. The book's four characters are inextricably bound
together in the tangled web of a life situation that seems to have no solution, and
the tightly woven plot has a unity of action that rises slowly but inexorably to the
climactic scene of Dimmesdale's public confession. The same tight construction is
found in Hawthorne's other writings also, especially in the shorter pieces, or
"tales." Hawthorne was also the master of a classic literary style that is remarkable
for its directness, its clarity, its firmness, and its sureness of idiom.
Another reason for Hawthorne's greatness is his moral insight. He inherited
the Puritan tradition of moral earnestness, and he was deeply concerned with the
concepts of original sin and guilt and the claims of law and conscience.
Hawthorne rejected what he saw as the Transcendentalists' transparent optimism
about the potentialities of human nature. Instead he looked more deeply and
perhaps more honestly into life, finding in it much suffering and conflict but also
finding the redeeming power of love. There is no Romantic escape in his works,
but rather a firm and resolute scrutiny of the psychological and moral facts of the
human condition.
 Hawthorne's was also a master of allegory and symbolism. His fictional
characters' actions and dilemmas obviously express larger generalizations about
the problems of human existence. But with Hawthorne this leads not to
unconvincing pasteboard figures with explanatory labels attached but to a sombre,
concentrated emotional involvement with his characters that has the power, the
gravity, and the inevitability of true tragedy. His use of symbolism in The Scarlet
Letter is particularly effective, and the scarlet letter itself takes on a wider
significance and application that is out of all proportion to its literal character as a
scrap of cloth.
Hawthorne also wrote a number of excellent short stories, the best known
among them is My Kinsman, Major Molineux and Young Goodman Brown
(see a trailer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuY0qRI-7mM ). It shows one
of the most striking elements in Hawthorne’s fiction – the lack of functioning
families in his works. Unlike Cooper, introducing the family, Hawthorne showed
the isolated suffering individual – the eternal American topic.
Hawthorne's work initiated the most durable tradition in American fiction, that
of the symbolic romance that assumes the universality of guilt and explores the
complexities and ambiguities of man's choices. His greatest short stories and The
Scarlet Letter are marked by a depth of psychological and moral insight seldom
equaled and never surpassed by any American writer.
Transcendental philosophy provided the ideological foundation for American
Romanticism, emphasizing self-reliance, self-searching, intuition, and optimism.
Non-fictional essays by the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry
Thoreau and classical romances by Nathaniel Hawthorne were not only eminent
works of their own value, but also an immediate influence that shaped both the
outlooks and, to a large degree, works by the pleiad of the best American fiction
writers and poets of the 19th century.
One of such writers, ranking among
America’s major authors, is Herman
Melville (1819−1891), who enriched
American literature with perfect sea novels,
universal humanism, vivid imagination,
philosophical skepticism, and a remarkable
skill in handling the new American
language. He wrote Moby-Dick, or the
Whale, one of the greatest novels in world
literature, and his reputation largely rests
on this book, but many of his other works are literary creations of high order,
blending fact, fiction, adventure, and symbolism.
 Like many American writers before him, Melville’s life was not a life of a
reclusive academic writer. He was born in New York City into a family of a
merchant. When Melville was 12, his father died after suffering a financial and
mental breakdown, and Melville had to earn his living. Inexperienced and now
poor, Melville tried a variety of jobs, working as a clerk in his brother’s hat store
and his uncle’s bank, as a school teacher, and finally, in 1837 sailed to England
as a cabin boy on a merchant ship. His first sea voyage started his long sailing
career and was later described in his novel Redburn (1849).
When Melville returned to America, he signed as a seaman on a newly built
whaling ship the Acushnet for a trip in the Pacific Ocean. From this trip came the
basic experiences recorded in several of his books, and above all, the whaling
knowledge he put into Moby-Dick.
Melville sailed from Massachusetts in 1841 and stayed on the Acushnet for
18 months. After the ship reached the Marquesas Islands, he and a shipmate
deserted. The two men headed inland until they accidentally came to the lovely
valley of the Typees, a Polynesian tribe with a reputation of fierce cannibals. But
the natives turned out to be gentle, charming hosts, and Melville later described
his experiences with them in Typee (1846).
Melville lived in the valley for about a month. He then joined another whaling
ship, but soon deserted it with other sailors after a mutiny at Tahiti. After a few
days in a local jail, Melville and a new friend began exploring the beautiful and
unspoiled islands of Tahiti and Moorea. These wonderings were later described
by him in the novel Omoo (1847).
After a short service on a third whaling ship, Melville landed at the Sandwich
Islands (now Hawaii), where he lived by doing odd jobs. In 1843 he again enlisted
as a seaman on the frigate United States, flagship of the Navy’s Pacific Squadron.
The long voyage he made onboard this ship is recounted in his novel White-
Jacket (1850).
When Melville returned to Boston in 1844, he was released from the Navy
and headed home to Albany, New York, his imagination overflowing with his
adventures.
Melville wrote about his experiences so attractively that he soon became
one of the most popular writers of his time. The books that made his reputation,
Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, and White-Jacket, described his voyages to
exotic places and were refined examples of original American travel literature.
Having earned his reputation as a writer of exciting travelogues, Melville
then began Moby-Dick, another ‘whaling voyage’, as he called it, similar to his
successful travel books. He had almost completed the book when he met
Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne inspired him to radically revise the whaling
documentary into a novel of both universal significance and literary complexity.
Moby-Dick, or the Whale (1851), on the one level, is the story of the hunt
for Moby Dick, a fierce white whale supposedly known to sailors of Melville’s time.
This is a story of a whaling ship the Pequod and its captain, Ahab, ‘an ungodly
godlike man’. He has lost one leg in an earlier battle with Moby Dick, and is
determined to catch and kill him. His quest leads himself and the whole ship to
destruction. The novel brilliantly describes the dangerous and often violent life of a
whaling whip, and is an encyclopaedia of the whaling industry and the nature of
whales (check the trailer at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhAp708PeOw&t=6s ). On another level,
Moby-Dick is a deeply symbolic story. The whale symbolizes the mysterious and
complex force of the universe, and Captain Ahab represents the heroic struggle
against the crippling limitations that confront an intelligent person. On this level,
whaling represents human strife for knowledge.
The novel is tragic. Ahab strives to conquer and destroy Moby-Dick, but from
the very beginning is doomed to death. To arise this feeling of inevitability in his
readers, Melville uses many symbols. Captain Ahab receives his name after an
Old Testament king, who desires god-like knowledge. Like Oedipus, who pays
tragically for his wrongful knowledge, Ahab is struck blind, wounded in his leg and
finally killed. The narrator’s destiny is suggested by his name, Ishmael, which he
received after the Old Testament son of Abraham, who was cast into the
wilderness. The ship is named after an extinct Native American tribe, and its crew,
consisting of all races, which drowns in the end of the novel, symbolically
represents humanity. The novel finishes with the word ‘orphan’, suggesting the
ultimate loneliness of a human-being. The novel is packed with such allusions,
and is modern in its tendency to be self-referential and reflexive, speaking about
itself.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how
long precisely – having little or no money in my purse,
and nothing in particular to interest me on shore, I
thought I would sail about a little and see the watery
part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the
spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find
myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a
damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find
myself involuntarily pausing before coffin
warehouses, and brining up the rear of every funeral I
meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an
upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral
principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into
the street and methodically knocking people's hats off
– then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as
I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato
throws himself upon a sword; I quietly take the ship. There is nothing surprising in
this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish
very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
Moby-Dick became the natural epic that was so long expected to appear in
American literature. It dramatizes a human spirit set in primitive nature, celebrates
the elemental and subverts the urban civilization. But these transcendental
features are blended with the deep symbolic reflections of Hawthorne. Melville
does not state that men can read truth in nature, like Emerson suggested. He
presents a grand natural vision, but whether it is good or bad is never explained,
and the novel still remains an enigma.
Despite the clear attractiveness for a modern reader, Moby-Dick was either
ignored or misunderstood by critics and readers and damaged Melville’s
reputation as a writer. No one recognized this novel as the long-expected epic of
American literature. After the publication of his masterpiece, Melville’s popularity
began to decline. When Melville followed Moby-Dick with the pessimistic and
tragic novel Pierre (1853), his readers began to desert him, calling him either
eccentric or mad. The public was ready to accept unusual and exciting exotic
adventures, but they did not want ironic, frightening exposures of the terrible
double meanings in life.
After his public failure with Moby-Dick and Pierre, Melville turned to writing
short stories. Two of them, Benito Cereno and Bartleby, the Scrivener, rank as
classics and are now often anthologized. But the haunting and disturbing question
of the meaning of life that hovered over the stories also displeased the public.
After two more novels, Israel Potter (1855), set during the Revolutionary War in
America, and The Confidence-Man (1856), a bitter satire on humanity, Melville
gave up writing.
To make a living, Melville worked as deputy inspector of customs in the Port
of New York in 1866−1885. He wrote poetry for private pleasure and published it
at his own and his uncle’s expense. In 1856−1857 he toured the Holy Land and
his trip resulted in a narrative poem, Clarel (1876), representing a powerful picture
of a man’s struggle to find his faith in a skeptical, materialistic world.
After his retirement, Melville again started to write prose. His death did not
allow him to finish the manuscript of Billy Budd, Sailor. This short novel, first
published in 1924 and considered Melville’s finest book after Moby-Dick, is a
symbolic story about the clash between innocence and evil, and between social
forms and individual liberty.
Melville died almost forgotten and unknown to his contemporaries. Only the
1920s marked the start of a Melville revival among critics and readers. By the
1940s, Americans at last recognized his genius. Since then, his reputation has
spread throughout the world.
No less consciously indebted to
Transcendentalism and Emerson
personally was Walt Whitman
(1819−1892), one of the best American
poets of all times, a part-time
carpenter, a man of the people, whose
brilliant, innovative work expressed the
American democratic spirit.
Like Melville, Walt Whitman was born in New York, like Melville he was
largely self-taught and had to leave school at the age of 11 to go to work. Such
absence of traditional education saved him from the destiny of many American
authors, who studied the classics so well, that inevitably became the imitators,
while the many jobs he changed gave him practical experience, knowledge of life,
and the gift of a communicator.
As a poet, Whitman started with quite conventional verses, and maybe
would never have entered the history of American literature as a great poet, but
for his trip to New Orleans that allowed him to see the country, and for essays by
Emerson. Whitman was inspired by Emerson’s writings, especially his essay The
Poet, which predicted a robust, open-hearted, universal kind of poet, uncannily
like Whitman himself. Here’s what Whitman said about Emerson: “I was
simmering, simmering, and Emerson brought me to boil.”
 Whitman was another writer who took seriously Emerson’s appeal for
American originality and in response devised a loose, ‘natural’ form of versification
that seemed quite unpoetic to his contemporaries.

The new poetic form was gloriously used in a small green book of verses titled
Leaves of Grass, first printed by Whitman himself in 1855 and revised till the end
of his life. Leaves of Grass describes the best and worst of American life, from
exuberant democracy to suffering slaves. The longest poem in the collection,
Song of Myself, glorifies spiritual life grounded in the body and everyday life,
placing the Romantic self at the centre of the consciousness of the poem:
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
…
My ties and ballasts leave me…
I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents
I am afoot with my vision.
(check the reading of a fragment at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjMoRb5f-EQ&t=17s )
Whitman seems to project himself onto everything that he sees or imagines.
He is a mass man:
Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure
Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any…

But he is equally a suffering individual:

The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children
gazing on…
I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs…
I am the mash’s fireman with breast-bone broken.

The poem’s innovative, unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of

sexuality, vibrant democratic sensibility and extreme Romantic assertion that the
poet’s self was one with the poem, the universe, and the reader, permanently
altered the course of American poetry. Whitman expressed the variety of
American life in long lines that remind of the rhythm of operatic singing and
restless music. His verse often takes the form of rhythmic lists, sprawling and
seeming improvised. But Whitman also packed his poems with vivid images and
memorable phrases, and more than any other writer invented the myth of
democratic America:
The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the
fullest poetical nature. The United States is essentially the greatest poem.
When Whitman wrote this, he daringly turned upside down the general
opinion that America was too brash and new to be poetic. He invented a timeless
America of free imagination, peopled with pioneering spirits of all nations, and by
this established himself as a poet of the open road.
Whitman’s greatness is visible in many of his poems, among them those
presented in the collections 'Calamus', 'November Boughs', 'Sands at
Seventy', and 'Good-Bye My Fancy'. His voice electrifies with his proclamation
of unity and vital force of all creation. He was enormously innovative. From him
spring such concepts as the poem as autobiography, the American everyman as
bard, the reader as creator, and the still modern discovery of the ‘experimental’
form of the poem.
The Era of Expansion in American literature stems from the optimism of the
expanding independent democratic nation translated into the romantic philosophy
of Transcendentalism. Though about fifty years later than in Britain, Romanticism
in America became not just a powerful literary movement, but the intimately
American philosophy of the self. American Romanticism celebrated and criticized
democracy, developed the concept of self-awareness as universal cognition,
introduced ecological conscience that is still modern and gave birth to powerful
non-fiction, innovative poetry and prose with romance as a variety of the novel.
This was the period of the first truly American epics emerging both in prose and
poetry.