Die Welt hinter Moby Dick

Andrew Delbancos neues Buch über Herman Melville kann die Biografie des amerikanischen Erzählers nicht ergänzen. Dafür lockt es uns ins politisch bewegte New York des 19. Jahrhunderts

Von Friedhelm Rathjen

Für Biografen ist Herman Melville Chance und Albtraum zugleich. Eine Chance ist er, weil sein Leben alles enthält, was man für eine ebenso spannende wie vielschichtige Biografie braucht: Höhenflüge und Frustrationen, Erfolge und nachhaltiges Scheitern, abenteuerliche Reisen in zuvor gänzlich unbekannte Weltgegenden und Jahre häuslicher Stille, turbulente Zeiten und eine stetig sich wandelnde schriftstellerische Kreativität, die auf diese Zeiten reagiert. Ein Albtraum aber ist das Unterfangen, über diese zuzeiten schillernde Figur, zuzeiten stumpfe Figur eine Biografie zu schreiben, weil über das grobe Gerüst hinaus gar so viel von ihm nicht bekannt ist und weil das wenige, was man herausbekommen kann, schon bekannt und dokumentiert ist.

Alles, was bekannt ist, steht in der unübertrefflichen Melville-Biografie von Hershel Parker, zwei großformatigen Tausendseitern, die vermutlich nie auf Deutsch erscheinen werden. Das müssen sie auch nicht, denn die wahren Melville-Fans lesen Parkers Wälzer im Original, und für alle anderen lässt sich das, was darin steht, auch sehr viel knapper darstellen. Alexander Pechmann kommt in seinem 2003 erschienenen Buch über Melvilles Leben und Werk mit 350 Seiten aus; unwesentlich mehr benötigt Andrew Delbanco für sein Buch über – wie der Untertitel der Originalausgabe richtig formuliert – Melvilles Welt und Werk, das nun deutsch unter der irreführenden Bezeichnung Biographie erschienen ist. Delbanco schreibt (wie Pechmann) ausführlich über Melvilles Romane, Erzählungen und Gedichte, die er uns in bisweilen etwas langatmigen deutenden Nacherzählungen präsentiert, und er schreibt (ausführlicher als Pechmann) über die Welt, in der Melville lebte. Melvilles Leben selbst ist über weite Strecken nur indirekt präsent, gewissermaßen als Membran, die die Grenze zwischen Welt und Werk markiert: Zeitgeschichte verwandelt sich in Literatur, weil ein Autor in ihr lebt und aus ihr heraus schreibt. Wo aber bleibt dabei sein Leben?

»Die Ereignisse seines Alltagslebens« ließen sich »nicht einmal mehr ansatzweise ermitteln«, bekennt Delbanco gleich auf den ersten Seiten und macht Hoffnung, er könne uns »allenfalls an den Rand seines Innenlebens« führen. Dass die Faktenlage spärlich ist, beklagt Delbanco gar nicht weiter, ist es doch keineswegs sein Ziel, »den Vorrat an Fakten über Melvilles Leben zu vergrößern« – er erzählt knapp das wenige nach, was sicher bekannt ist, und wendet sich sodann dem Werk und seiner Bedeutung zu.

Wir erfahren also wieder, dass Melville in eine großspurige Familie hineingeboren wurde, die jedoch nach Bankrott und Tod des Vaters in nimmerendende Bedrängnis geriet, weswegen der junge Hermann (der seinem Vater zufolge ohnehin »sprachlich zurückgeblieben« war und über »eine etwas schwerfällig Auffassungsgabe verfügte«) nur eine dürftige Schulausbildung erhielt und sich früh nach eigenen Einkünften umsehen musste. Wir hören von den fünf Jahren zur See, die ihn bis in die Südsee (vielleicht auch »unter Kannibalen«) führten und anschließend ihren Niederschlag in den Romanen Typee und Omoo fanden, aber wir werden »nie erfahren, wie sehr Melville sich für Typee auf eigene Erinnerungen verließ«. Wir lesen von Melvilles allzu kurzer Karriere als Erfolgsschriftsteller und seiner Freundschaft mit dem Kollegen Hawthorne, aber »Einzelheiten ihrer Gespräche werden wir nie erfahren«, und auch eine »detaillierte Rekonstruktion« der Entstehung des Meisterwerks Moby-Dick sei »nicht möglich, da weder das Manuskript noch irgendwelche Notizen erhalten sind«. Wir müssen uns erneut der Tragödie des berserkerhaft schaffenden Autors aussetzen, der mit seinem Meisterwerk bei Publikum und Kritik scheitert, für das wenige, was er danach noch veröffentlicht, für verrückt erklärt wird und die letzten Jahrzehnte seines Lebens verdämmert, aus finanziellen Gründen gezwungen, einen schlecht bezahlten Posten als Zollinspektor anzunehmen, für den er denkbar ungeeignet ist, da ihn die gewerbeübliche Bestechlichkeit anwidert.

Viele dieser letzten Jahre verwendet er auf die Niederschrift des Versepos Clarel, »eine heilsame Disziplin für einen Schriftsteller, dessen Erfindungskraft nahezu erschöpft war«. Clarel erscheint in einer Auflage von 350 Exemplaren, von denen ein Drittel verkauft, der Rest eingestampft wird; den Gedichtband Timoleon lässt Melville kurz vor seinem Tod in einer Auflage von 25 Exemplaren drucken; selbst Moby-Dick trägt ihm zu Lebzeiten keine 600 Dollar ein.

Die äußere Bilanz dieses Schriftstellerlebens sieht desolat aus: zwanzig bedrückte Jugendjahre, fünf exzessive Wanderjahre, zwölf öffentliche Jahre als zunächst erfolgreicher, dann verhöhnter Schriftsteller, schließlich dreieinhalb Jahrzehnte der Leere, über denen stehen könnte, was Melville im März 1857 in Rom notiert: »An diesem Tag nichts gesehen, nichts gelernt, nichts genossen, aber einiges durchgemacht.«

Was aber genau hat er durchgemacht, wie hat er seine wenigen Erfolge und seine vielen Tragödien (darunter der Tod beider Söhne) erlebt? Darüber lässt sich spekulieren (Delbanco tut es, beredt und vorsichtig zugleich), doch wissen werden wir es nie. »Die Suche nach dem Privatmann Melville führt fast immer in eine Sackgasse«, mahnt Delbanco sich und seine Leser. Wie war Melvilles Ehe? Da helfen »die wenigen Augenzeugenberichte« und »der einzige erhaltene Brief Hermans an Lizzie (…) auch nicht richtig weiter«, und natürlich haben wir »keine Aussicht, etwas Genaues über Melvilles Sexualleben zu erfahren«. Welche Ursache hatte die Entfremdung von Hawthorne? »Wir wissen es nicht und werden es wohl auch nie erfahren.« Wie wurde Melville mit der ganz freudlosen zweiten Hälfte seines Lebens fertig? »Schwarze Jahre waren dies auch in dem Sinne, dass selbst die entschlossensten Forscher kein Licht in sie zu bringen vermochten.« Fast für jede beliebige Phase dieses nicht zu beschreibenden Lebens gilt: »Über Melvilles Aktivitäten in den folgenden Monaten wissen wir nicht viel.«

Wo Delbanco nichts weiß, da weiß er sich immerhin zu helfen. Er macht etwas, was dubios, im Falle Melville aber gar nicht zu umgehen ist: Er liest das komplette Werk auf der Suche nach Spuren des nicht zu erschließenden Lebens; er spekuliert darüber, welche Handlungsdetails der frühen Romane auf realen Erfahrungen des Autors beruhen und welche frei erfunden oder aus anderen Büchern abgeschrieben sein mögen; er versucht, Charakterzüge Melvilles und der Menschen seiner Umgebung in den Figuren der Texte zu identifizieren; er schließt von den Stimmungen und Stillagen des Werks auf Gemütsveränderungen Melvilles. Dergleichen ist immer zweifelhaft; umso wichtiger ist es, jedes »vielleicht«, jedes »mag sein« und den Zweifel in Formulierungen à la »kann man sich kaum des Eindrucks erwehren« mitzulesen und nichts für wirklich unwiederlegbar zu halten.

Dies aber ist nicht der einzige Umgang, den Delbanco mit Melvilles Werk pflegt; wichtiger und ergiebiger ist der Zusammenschluss mit Melvilles Welt. Delbancos eigentliche Leistung ist die anschauliche Akribie, mit der er uns New York zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, die amerikanische Politik und Gesellschaft in jener Zeit und immer wieder die zeitgenössische Debatte um die Abschaffung der Sklaverei vor Augen führt und die einzelnen Facetten des so entstehenden umfassenden Porträts der Melvilleschen Ära dann nutzt, um zeit-, gesellschafts- und kulturkritische Positionen, die in Melvilles Texten angelegt sind, auf sehr überzeugende Weise herauszuarbeiten. Voller Abscheu stand Melville vielen moralischen und politischen Verirrungen seiner Zeitgenossen gegenüber und setzte diesen Abscheu literarisch beherzt um – bisweilen wütend, bisweilen ironisch, manchmal mit mehr und manchmal auch mit weniger großer Virtuosität, oft allegorisch, aber nur selten gehemmt.

Melville reagierte in immer neuen Anläufen darauf, dass »das politische System Amerikas vor seinen Augen zugrunde ging«; Ahab ist Delbanco zufolge »der wahnsinnig gewordene amerikanische Traum«, der spätere Held Pierre hingegen eher »ein Kitsch gewordener Ahab«. Als reifste Leistungen Melvilles sieht Delbanco Moby-Dick, Bartleby, Benito Cereno und Billy Budd, und er sagt uns, warum.

Wirklich neu ist eigentlich nichts an Delbancos Melville, weder die wertende Analyse des Melvilleschen Werks noch der Rückbezug von Figuren und Handlungsabläufen auf literarische, geistes- oder zeitgeschichtliche Anregungen. Aber wir bekommen hier einen gut lesbaren und weitgehend verlässlichen Überblick über alle Facetten von Melvilles Welt an die Hand, der gleichberechtigt neben Alexander Pechmanns Herman Melville zu stehen vermag. Pechmanns Darstellung ist nüchterner, sachlicher, orientiert sich eher an geistes- als an zeitgeschichtlichen Hintergründen – wer einen bisweilen blumigen Plauderton und die Perspektive des politischen Historikers vorzieht, ist womöglich bei Delbanco an der besseren Adresse. Ärgern mag sich nur, wer die amerikanische Originalausgabe kennt: Von den dort abgedruckten knapp sechzig Abbildungen enthält uns die deutsche Ausgabe fast drei Viertel vor.

Andrew Delbanco: Melville
Biographie; aus dem Englischen von Werner Schmitz; Hanser Verlag, München 2007; 470 S., 34,90

DIE ZEIT, 10.01.2008 Nr. 03

03/2008

Der Mensch und das Meer

Du freier Mensch, du liebst das Meer voll Kraft,
Dein Spiegel ist's. In seiner Wellen Mauer,
Die hoch sich türmt, wogt deiner Seele Schauer,
In dir und ihm der gleiche Abgrund klafft.

Du liebst es, zu versinken in dein Bild,
Mit Aug' und Armen willst du es umfassen,
Der eignen Seele Sturm verrinnen lassen
In seinem Klageschrei, unzähmbar wild.

Ihr beide seid von heimlich finstrer Art.
Wer taucht, o Mensch, in deine letzten Tiefen,
Wer kennt die Perlen, die verborgen schliefen,
Die Schätze, die das neidische Meer bewahrt?

Und doch bekämpft ihr euch ohn' Unterlass
Jahrtausende in mitleidlosem Streiten,
Denn ihr liebt Blut und Tod und Grausamkeiten,
O wilde Ringer, ewiger Bruderhass!

Charles Baudelaire
Die Blumen des Bösen (Übersetzung 1925)

Das Ich, das in Lyrik laut wird, ist eines, das sich als dem Kollektiv, der Objektivität entgegengesetztes bestimmt und ausdrückt; mit der Natur, auf die sein Ausdruck sich bezieht, ist es nicht unvermittelt eins. Es hat sie gleichsam verloren und trachtet, sie durch Beseelung, durch Versenkung ins Ich selber, wiederherzustellen. ... Selbst lyrische Gebilde, in die kein Rest des konventionellen und gegenständlichen Daseins, keine krude Stofflichkeit mehr hineinragt, die höchsten, die unsere Sprache kennt, verdanken ihre Würde gerade der Kraft, mit der in ihnen das Ich den Schein der Natur, zurücktretend von der Entfremdung, erweckt.

(Lyrik und Gesellschaft)

The Norton Anthology of American Literature

Volume B: American Literature, 1880-1865

Emily Dickinson

Biography

A life-long resident of Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson left her hometown for only one year, when she attended Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary. She was raised in an intellectual and socially prominent family and at the age of eighteen had received a better formal education than most of her American contemporaries, both male and female. Yet Dickinson led a largely sequestered existence, and she devoted much of her time to writing poetry, producing close to eighteen hundred poems, which were characterized by terse lines, "slant" rhymes, and keen observation. Although most of Dickinson's work was not published in her lifetime, she did see three small collections of poems printed (1890, 1891, and 1896). A half-century later, the three volumes of The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955) and two volumes of The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958) appeared.
Explorations

Read as a group, Dickinson's poems seem to resist the masculinist poetics laid down by Emerson earlier in the nineteenth century--the idea that the "bard" must achieve dominion over experience and offer vast, coherent, overarching themes. Dickinson's experience of the world, through her poetry, seems more open-ended: dark moments commingle with hopeful ones, and poems that celebrate the small ordinary experience share space with poems that are mystical or overtly adventurous and speculative.

1. Read carefully several poems which convey high excitement, even ecstasy: for example, poems 214, 249, 528, 1072. What perceptions, hopes, or intuitions seem to underlie these celebrations? What is the effect of reading them alongside some of Dickinson's darker verses: for example, poems 67, 280, 341, 449, 465, 650, 712?

2. A number of these poems engage the natural world immediately around the Dickinson house: for example, poems 130, 285, 314, 328, 348, 824, 986. Describe Dickinson as a nature poet. Is she in the American Transcendental tradition? Is she a Romantic? What variations do you see in the tone and theme of these poems?

3. Dickinson's poems often engage, directly or subtly, with her own solitude and anonymity as an artist. Describe the variety of ways and moods in which this situation is addressed.

4. The Dickinson legend has loomed large in the reading of her poems. There is dramatic appeal in the tale of this brilliant artist living and dying out of the limelight and in the story of the discovery and gradual publication of the poems, their impact on the Moderns, and the eventual establishment of accurate and available texts. To what extent do you think we should bear in mind the Emily Dickinson biography, and the Emily Dickinson legend, in rereading the poems now?

The Norton Anthology of American Literature

Volume B: American Literature, 1880-1865

Edgar Allan Poe


Biography

Born to the teenage actors Elizabeth Arnold and David Poe Jr. (in a time when acting was a highly disreputable career), Edgar Allan Poe was raised by a Richmond, Virginia, merchant named John Allan when both his parents died. Allan sent Poe to the University of Virginia, but he left after a quarrel with Allan in 1827 and sought out his father's relatives in Baltimore. In Baltimore he published his first volume of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems, and later secretly married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. He moved with his wife and her mother to Richmond, Philadelphia, and then New York City, editing magazines and newspapers in each city but finding it difficult to hold onto a job. Poe's horror tales and detective stories (a genre he created) were written to capture the fancy of the popular reading public, but he earned his national reputation through a large number of critical essays and sketches. With the publication of The Raven (1845), Poe's fame was ensured, but he was not succeeding as well in his personal life. His wife died in 1847, and Poe himself was increasingly ill and drinking uncontrollably. He died on a trip to Baltimore, four days after being found intoxicated near a polling booth on Election Day.
Explorations

In descriptions of American writing between 1800 and 1850, Poe has been hard to accommodate. Preferring exotic settings for his poems and stories, he rarely writes about American experience. The emotional and psychological extremes which pervade both his work and the Poe legend set him apart from the sober and moderated temperaments which we have been reading and complicate the question of how "seriously" to read him. Is he a martyr for the unbounded imagination? A patriarch of American gothic kitsch? A practical joker? An allegorist of the unconscious? In both its Continental and its American forms, Romanticism opened up problems related to the place of dreams in the construction of art and the construction of the self. Poe's work is radically different from anything we have seen before, but it resonates as an address to these and many other questions. The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Philosophy of Composition (1846), and The Cask of Amontillado (1846) allow us to try out ambitious readings of popular gothic tales.

1. In The Fall of the House of Usher, we learn little about why the narrator visits Roderick Usher, why they were "boon companions" years before, why Usher and his sister live in such a dismal structure, and why Roderick and the narrator do nothing when they hear ominous noises in the depths of the house. Similarly, in The Cask of Amontillado, we have only a sentence or two about Montresor's relationship with Fortunato. Why are such potentially important matters about human relationships sidestepped in these tales?

2. In both of these stories, we move from an outer world into a dark inward place, join the company of obsessed or deranged characters, and end up with a final contemplation of horror. Should we read these tales as being about the movement of the mind from the waking state into reverie, dreams, and nightmares? Does doing so enrich a reading of these tales? Or does that kind of reading seem needlessly clever to you?

3. Perhaps as a put-on, The Philosophy of Composition arrives almost mechanically at the ultimate subject for poetry and at the idea of The Raven. Beauty and melancholy are the perfect combined mood--therefore, a poem seeking such a mood ought to be about the death of a beautiful woman. Do you see any relationship between the idea of art in The Philosophy of Composition and the construction of these two stories? Do they work as stories about the achievement of, or celebration of, an intense mood or psychological state? How would you compare Poe's Romanticism to Bryant's, Longfellow's, or Emerson's?

The Norton Anthology of American Literature

Volume B: American Literature, 1880-1865

Walt Whitman

Biography

Born on Long Island and raised in Brooklyn, Walt Whitman left school at eleven and found work as an office boy, a journeyman printer, and a teacher. He started his own newspaper when he was nineteen and subsequently went on to edit and contribute to several prominent New York periodicals. In 1855 Whitman published his first book, Leaves of Grass, a collection of twelve poems that both placed humankind within a transcendent spirituality and celebrated physical pleasure. As a hospital attendant during the Civil War, Whitman cared for wounded soldiers and in the months following the end of the war worked for the Interior Department, from which he was fired for the sexual content of Leaves of Grass, then in a revised edition. All told, Whitman published six editions of this book, which eventually contained some 389 poems, including Song of Myself, the Calamus poems, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.
Explorations

From the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself has emerged as Whitman's best-known and most-discussed long poem. Commentary about it often focuses on Whitman's commitment to Emerson's poetics and Transcendental values: the poet as bard for a new nation, speaking of the whole of human experience in a voice drawn from that nation's own vernacular and affirming the wisdom and divinity of nature and the "deathless" unity of all living things. In reading with Transcendentalism in mind, however, we need to recognize the range and experimentation which distinguish this poem as a poem, rather than as a predictable implementation of Emerson's tenets.

1. Read lines 101 through 139 as a single unit; then read lines 140 through 192 in the same way. Is there a tonal difference between these sections? By what logic, or by what sequence of perceptions, does the latter section follow the former? What has been resolved, or at least granted approval, which allows Whitman to tour American experience in lines 140 through 192?

2. Lines 257 through 325 affirm that a vast variety of Americans, of all races and creeds, are understood and empathized with by the "I, Walt Whitman" who speaks in this poem. Describe this "I," and comment on the risks that are taken in making such affirmations.

3. In lines 381 through 435, Whitman favors shorter lines; in lines 714 through 796, he moves back to very long ones. What connections do you sense between line length, subject, and mood in Song of Myself?

4. At various points in the poem, Whitman chides himself for saying too much, tarrying too long, or digressing from some greater subject. When he enacts departure at the end of Song of Myself, where is he going? How does this urge to move, to speak, and to stop speaking create tension, or even suspense, within the poem?

The Norton Anthology of American Literature

Volume B: American Literature, 1880-1865

Herman Melville

Biography

Herman Melville's father was a New York City merchant who, when he died suddenly, left his family heavily in debt. Melville was only twelve at the time, but he was forced to leave school to go to work. After a variety of jobs in his teens, Melville joined a whaler sailing for the South Seas in 1841. On that trip, Melville and a crewmate jumped ship and lived for several weeks with a native tribe; upon his return to America, Melville transformed that experience into Typee (1846), a popular adventure tale that established him as a literary celebrity. A sequel, Omoo, soon followed, but Melville's appeal was dampened by his more philosophical works such as Mardi (1849), Pierre (1853), and even Moby-Dick (1851). Critics of these novels declared Melville unbalanced, and Melville had to struggle to regain the economic and critical popularity he had enjoyed with his earlier writing. After Pierre, he primarily wrote short stories for magazines like Harper's. Financial concerns burdened the family for years, but an inheritance late in life allowed Melville to work on his final masterpiece, Billy Budd, Sailor. Only after his death did Melville rise from the ranks of second-rate adventure novelists to his present status as one of the most important American writers.
Explorations

The Moby-Dick excerpts in NAAL are selected to give you an experience of the novel's energy, intellectual reach, and array of compelling characters. Published in 1851, this freewheeling narrative was all but forgotten at the time of Melville's death forty years later. But generations of modern novelists have looked to it as a milestone in the liberation and expansion of American fiction and the achievement of a lively vernacular style on the printed page, a style that still resonates with democratic values and aspirations.

1. Read chapters I, X, and XVI, and describe Ishmael's personality and how his mind seems to move and work. As he moves through his experiences, what appeals to him? What is his attitude toward big value systems--religious, cultural, intellectual, political? Do you find him a plausible human being? Why or why not?

2. Look over the variety of crew members whom Ishmael introduces in the "Knights and Squires" chapters (XXVI and XXVII). Without worrying about the symbolic or allegorical significations of any one of these characters or the whole group, talk about them as a cast of characters in a drama, an adventure story, or a speculation about human nature.

3. In chapters XLI and XLVI ("Moby-Dick" and "The Whiteness of the Whale"), Ishmael offers us insight both into Ahab's obsession with Moby-Dick and into how that obsession spreads among the crew of the Pequod. Is there logic to Ahab's thinking? Do you regard him as a Romantic? As an existential hero? As a madman? How can we explain the hold which his rhetoric and thinking seem to have over so many of the crew?

4. Hundreds of pages have been published about symbolism in this novel. Rather than decode the symbols again, can you talk about Moby-Dick as being "about" a wish to read the world symbolically, to find signs and meanings in worldly experience? In other words, do Ahab's and Ishmael's symbol hunting and symbol finding tell us something about their temperaments, intellectual and psychological habits, and core beliefs?

The Norton Anthology of American Literature

Volume B: American Literature, 1880-1865

Henry David Thoreau

Biography

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and spent most of his life in and around that town. Thoreau was an outspoken abolitionist, and during his lifetime his most widely read works were such antislavery tracts as Slavery in Massachusetts and A Plea for Captain John Brown. Most readers, though, remember Thoreau as a naturalist. His most famous book, Walden (1854), records the two years he spent living in a self-crafted cabin beside Emerson's Walden Pond. The Walden experiment reflected the greater philosophy of Thoreau's life: he believed that people should not be driven by materialistic desires but should live according to their needs, simplifying their life-styles rather than earning money to support lavish and ostentatious show. Thoreau worked from time to time in his father's pencil factory, but the dust from the graphite aggravated Thoreau's tuberculosis, and he died a few years after taking over the family business. After his death, passages about nature were culled from his journal writings and printed in magazines; the journals were published as a whole in 1906. To this day, Thoreau remains among the most important and challenging of American nature writers, philosophers, and social critics.
Explorations

Walden (1854) is widely regarded (and taught) as a sacrosanct text, an eloquent, detailed, passionate refusal of materialism and of emerging American middle-class values and a celebration of a rigorously simple life in harmony with the natural world. While such readings are persuasive, they can miss the playfulness and changefulness in the book and the evolving consciousness that it chronicles. Thoreau is a dynamic personality, not a curmudgeon, and Walden is in part the story of a mind in motion.

1. Review the long paragraph starting at the bottom of NAAL 1.1939 ("However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names"). Then turn to NAAL 1.1769 and review the two paragraphs beginning "I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle . . ." What relationship do you observe between these paragraphs? How would you compare their tone and central themes?

2. In those opening paragraphs, Thoreau refers to the New Testament as "an old book." How would you describe his rhetorical strategy here? What kind of audience was he writing to and for? What might the response be, and how might that response work to Thoreau's advantage? Can you find other moments in the opening chapters of Walden where he uses a similar technique?

3. Throughout Walden, some of Thoreau's famous wisecracks are about new technologies and communication systems--newspapers, telegraphs, railroads. In what spirit should we take these comments? Do you find any grain of truth or usefulness in them, in the midst of the Information Age?

4. Thoreau built his cabin on woods owned by Emerson; he used manufactured tools, milled boards, and printed books; he was only about a mile from the center of Concord and came in frequently, not only to visit and talk with his gifted neighbors but to dine with them and enjoy some of the pleasures of town life. And eventually, as he tells us, he left his cabin and moved back to Concord. Do these facts compromise Walden? Why or why not?

The Norton Anthology of American Literature

Volume B: American Literature, 1880-1865

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Biography

Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, a descendant of Puritan ancestors, including one of the judges of the Salem witchcraft trials. He graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, where he had become friends with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and later president of the United States Franklin Pierce, and then returned to Salem to write. Hawthorne's early endeavors were mostly short stories, but even though he published many of these tales in magazines and literary annuals, they always appeared anonymously and did little to advance his literary career. Only when he published these stories in collections, as in Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), did Hawthorne become a recognized literary force. In 1842 he married Sophia Peabody of Salem, and Hawthorne's primary focus turned to family. His masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, appeared in 1850 and became an international sensation, with critics in Great Britain and the United States proclaiming him the finest American romance writer. Other novels by Hawthorne include The House of Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860).
Explorations

My Kinsman, Major Molineux (1832) and Young Goodman Brown (1835) are two famous Hawthorne stories, tales that are often strip-mined for allegorical signification. If we assume a good narrative ought to be more than the sum of its symbols, then we can ask what more there is to these two stories, and to Hawthorne as an artist, rather than as a mere allegorizer of human experience.

1. In My Kinsman, Major Molineux, most attention focuses on the moral or symbolic significance of Robin's outburst of laughter when he sees his kinsman humiliated by the Boston revolutionaries. But what about this as a psychological moment, as a revelation or confirmation of Robin's emotional state? Is this a believable response from a young man who has been through the sort of night that Robin has experienced? Does this fit of laughter suggest anything about his character or about what he has learned -- as an individual rather than as an emblem of young, naive New England?

2. In My Kinsman, Major Molineux, Hawthorne represents eighteenth-century Boston, about forty years before the Revolution, as a festive place, where masque and anarchy and playfulness have taken over the streets as a result of the widening political rift between England and the colonies. How does this portrait compare with other representations which you have seen of Boston in pre-Revolutionary times?

3. Working from the obvious cues in Young Goodman Brown, we can read Brown's wife, Faith, as a representation of his own religious "faith" and map out the color symbolism to understand the story as a commentary on innocence or purity, sin or the world of the flesh, and the complications of living in a world where these qualities are mingled. But is Brown a plausible human being? What internal conflicts take him on this wilderness errand? What does he want when he ventures into the woods?

The Norton Anthology of American Literature

Volume B: American Literature, 1880-1865

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Biography

The central figure in a group of nineteenth-century Boston thinkers known as the Transcendentalists, Emerson was the son of a Unitarian minister who died when Emerson was eight years old. His mother ran boardinghouses to put her sons through school: Emerson graduated from Harvard in 1821, and then, after studying theology, he was ordained a pastor in 1829. Though he enjoyed delivering sermons, Emerson's faith in Christianity began to waver as he came under the influence of German philosophers and the British Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge; after he lost belief in the rites of the Last Supper, he resigned from his church in 1831. His wife, Ellen Tucker, died tragically young from tuberculosis, leaving Emerson a legacy that allowed him to spend the rest of his life traveling, lecturing, and writing. Nature (1836), a major contribution to American Romanticism and Transcendentalism, appeared anonymously and was favorably received among his friends. Not until the publication of Essays (1841) was Emerson confirmed as a dominant presence in American letters. To this day, his influence on American writers, from Dreiser to Frost to Stevens to Ammons and on, is undeniable.
Explorations

Originally an address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard in 1837, The American Scholar was a radical document in its time, a blow against an educational system that favored rote learning, declamation, and a prescribed curriculum for all undergraduates. Later in the century, an American educational revolution brought concentration choices and elective courses to our college and universities. This reform was inspired in great part by Emerson's pronouncements about scholarship, about the idea of an education, and about the nature of thinking itself. If Emerson's Nature bewilders you with its abstractions and bold connections, The American Scholar can help, as in this essay we see Emerson's views applied to a specific social institution, the American college.

1. Consider first Emerson's idea of a paragraph. Turn to The American Scholar and read the short paragraph that begins "In this distribution of function, the scholar is the delegated intellect" and the two paragraphs immediately following. Recall the exercise of looking for a "topic sentence" or a "thesis statement" in a well-constructed paragraph. What would you say is the topic sentence in each of these three by Emerson? Do these paragraphs develop according to conventions you learned in writing courses? What sorts of evidence do they muster to develop key ideas? How would you describe the way that Emerson seeks to convince you?

2. Look through The American Scholar and choose four sentences which, if taken out of context, could strike a reader as outlandish. How can we explain their inclusion in this essay? What is their effect? When Emerson declares that books "are for nothing but to inspire," does he mean precisely that? How are we to respond? Is a sentence like this to be taken at face value? Is it intended as an insurrection against another way of reading books?

3. When Emerson delivered this address, the systematic study of the natural, physical, and social sciences was only beginning at British and American universities. Engineering, psychology, organic chemistry, economics--these were virtually unknown as subjects for formal study on campuses. Do modern college curricula reflect Emerson's thinking in significant ways? Has Emerson been left behind by the educational revolution which he helped to begin? Which principles voiced in The American Scholar figure in your thinking about this question?