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U n i t
The literary scene
The American novel.
In the course of the
19th century the American novel gradually
moved away from the literary influence
of the English models. Such a process
went together with the process of political
independence. Three American novelists
are highly representative of this tendency.
In his masterpiece,
The Scarlet Letter
(1850), set in 17th-century Boston,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
(
➤
p. 58
) deals
with the Puritan heritage of the first
English colonies in New England. The
young woman Hester Prynne has to
wear a scarlet letter on her breast – a
purple A – which points her out as an adulteress. The Reverend Arthur
Dimmesdale, her secret lover and the father of her daughter, is the
symbol of the Puritan
obsession with sin
and guilt and the necessity of
bringing it out through public confession. At the same time he cannot
acknowledge his own sin and share its consequences with Hester, and so
he also becomes the symbol of Puritan hypocrisy. With his American
version of the historical novel, Hawthorne is a most acute explorer of the
American past and its influences on the present.
HermanMelville
(
➤
p. 65
) writes the
epic of the sea-faring
young
American nation. His major novel,
Moby Dick
(1851), is now considered
a world classic and part of America’s myth. The book tells an adventure
story: Captain Ahab’s life-long fight with the White Whale that has
bitten off his leg and the whale’s final sinking the boat with all its crew.
But the novel is really about Ahab’s obsession with the
presence of evil
in the world
, for him incarnated in Moby Dick. His monomania finally
drives himself and all his men to destruction. As in most of Melville’s
sea stories, in
Moby Dick
too the ship becomes a microcosm inhabited
by
men of all races and creeds
– and in this sense the ship becomes
representative of American society, with its mixture of peoples from all
over the world.
Mark Twain
(1835-1910) is one of America’s greatest humourists. He
was a pilot on the Mississippi River and he knew the river and its people
inside out. He described their speech, habits, legends and superstitions in
one of the most famous American novels:
The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn
(1884), which has
the river and its unspoiled nature
as its setting.
This almost Edenic scenery is the background to the adventures of the
young hero and his runaway black friend Jim.
Huckleberry Finn
is also a
novel about growing up
: Huck, in the course of his river escape, has to
Developments
in American literature
A scene
from a popular
film version
of Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s
famous novel,
The Scarlet Letter
,
starring Demi
Moore as Hester
(USA, 1995).
Huckleberry
Finn and Jim
on the raft,
a scene from
The Adventures
of Huck Finn
(1993), directed
by Stephen
Sommers.
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