Earticle

Whereas miscegenation and hybrids in American culture and literature have been dominantly treated negatively and described in negative images, Leslie Marmon Silko, who herself has a mixed ancestry of Mexican, Native and Anglo Saxon blood, finds the possibility of mediation of conflicting cultures in the ways of thinking which hybrids stand for. In Ceremony, Tayo achieves a dramatic transformation from a mentally-ill veteran with confused uncertainty about his identity into a healthy man who is deeply rooted in his native tradition and ready for the changes that inevitably accompany the acculturation process. His transformation, while many other characters in the novel are trapped in worlds of their own construction and suffer the consequences in various ways, is the product of the lessons he learns from T’esh and Betonie, who teach him the love of nature and the interrelatedness of all beings in the world. Through hybrids in Ceremony such as Tayo, Betonie, Night Swan and Josiah’s cattle, Silko presents a way of thinking which can be a solution to the aggravating conflicts in today’s world which becomes more and more interracial and multicultural. As their bodies are the products of the contacts of conflicting cultures and can be more adaptable to the changes of the surroundings like Josiah’s cattle, they are more honest and more open to changes in their world and, by their existence and their insight, can contribute to the mediation and reconciliation of conflicting cultures and races.

This essay is an analysis of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady in terms of marriage and search for female identity. James pursues the change of Isabel’s consciousness before and after her marriage which is the main theme of this book. There is a big difference between married Isabel and unmarried Isabel. She is a prideful, romantic, and curious girl before her marriage, but she shows a conspicuous change in her attitude toward life after her marriage. She becomes a passive, obedient, and subservient woman to her husband, Gilbert Osmond. Isabel, who likes her freedom and independence, refuses her two suitors’ persistent proposals because she thinks that the marriage to them will limit and interfere with her own freedom and independence. Isabel rejects Lord Warburton’s proposal because she perceives herself as a captive animal in a vast cage. And she doesn’t accept Casper Goodwood’s proposal because she is afraid of his strong possessive manhood which may limit her freedom of mind. Isabel chooses Osmond as her husband in spite of other people’s concern and objection because she thinks that he will not hamper her independence. But her judgement proves wrong as Osmond’s hidden egotistic and oppressive character emerges. She lives a helpless and dependent life without her self-identity after her marriage. Though she realizes her marriage is her own mistake, she returns to her husband at the end of the book. James reveals his conservative ideology and antifeministic narrative strategy through Isabel's marriage and a negative change in her life.

Published in 1894, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson occupies a central position in the dark period of Mark Twain’s literary career. In this book, Twain criticizes the race slavery and American racial politics. The main topic is the highly artificial category of race. Both the servant Roxy and his son look white, but they are black according to “a fiction of law and custom,” and it is this fiction the novel sets out to expose. The fact that white and black can be changed simply by a single act of switching children testifies that the racial identity in Dawson’s Landing is nothing but a fiction supported by laws and customs. Twain introduces a stranger as a means of exposing and criticizing the evils and injustices of the slavery. Wilson, “pudd’nhead” stranger, tries to restore justice with scientific knowledge of fingerprints, but shows his limitations by joining the injustices of the slave-holding town. He scores a success in the court by restoring the switched identities of Tom and Chambers, but his success is anything but a real success. In the process of correcting the racial identity, he in effect justifies racial discrimination and re-establishes the distorted social order based on it.

This paper aims to launch a comparative study of American Romanticism and postmodernism, focusing on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s two short stories and Paul Auster’s postmodern novels. It argues that there are certain shared elements in what Melville once called “the power of blackness” in Hawthorne’s fiction and what the author of this papercalls the “aesthetic of chance” explored by Auster’s fiction. It has been claimed by researchers that postmodernism is subversive of the traditional literary imagination and its narrative strategies. American postmodernism, however, shares with American Romanticism an emphasis on the unavoidable role of the mysterious, the uncertain, and the contingent playing in human lives in this precarious world. Both Hawthorne and Auster unearth the mysterious and unknowable forces working in human transactions, though the latter tends to absolutize them to the extent that the former relates them to historical causalities, particularly to the ones between the undertakings of the Puritan ancestors and their descendents. Both authors also critically revisit the stained cultural pasts of the American republic, which presumably sprang up in the dark wilderness of the “New World.” Auster as a postmodern writer revisits and recycles the dark visions of the world shared by early American Puritans and American Romantics, proving himself to be an atavistic literary, cultural descendent of the traditional collective American imagination, or the symbolic universe to which Hawthorne made a conspicuous contribution.

The word “gothic” is hard to define because after the genre's popular from 1764 to 1820s, the form of the gothic novel became indistinct and diverse mixed with other genres to the extent that it lost its own characteristic form. Gothic novels begins in the late 18th century, with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otlanto-A Gothic Story. Most of gothic novels have their time setting from the 17th century, and their gloomy old castles and dark underground passages in their setting to make a sense of fear and tension, and the social milieu of the 18th century influences the formation of the gothic novels. The gothic novel is considered to be too lascivious and emotional by critics, and the readers see it as commercialized inferior literature. So the gothic novel becomes an infamous and an inferior genre in literature, and it influences the mystery novel to grow in some ways as a replacement for the gothic novel. Before coming out of detective stories in 19th century, the most famous genre of the novel was “the Tales of Terror.” But through their change and development, recent gothic novels are now studying as the motivations of their beginning of the detective stories. Detective stories started by Poe has shorter history rather than other genre, but it had many opportunities to change. Although it has been only 160 years since it was appeared and devloped, it was not easy to endure under the circumstance in which it was despised and admitted as low ranking literature. How it heading towered turning point.

One of the common misconceptions on the 1930's radical literature of the US has been caused by the general assumption that its political radicalism had a tendency of neglecting aesthetic formalism, thereby deforming literary works into manifestoes of the left-wing propaganda. However, a significant portion of the radical writers in the 1930s robustly disapproved the partisan distortion of literature. Rather, it is fair to say that, far from the negligence and deformation of artistic values in favor of political agendas and party propaganda, they recognized the inevitable and productive interaction between political radicalism and aesthetic formalism in creating literary text. In consequence, influential writers of the 1930s attempted to combine their spirit of American radicalism with the styles and techniques of modernist arts, such as imagism, cubism and modern cinematography, in their literary works. Moreover, by means of the creative fusion between radicalism and modernism, they were inspired to produce radical literature by which political messages can be disseminated to a broad-based audience while maintaining the aesthetic value and formalistic sophistication of the literature itself. Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, the masterpieces of the Depression era, should be appreciated as two prominent specimens of the creative fusion between modernism and radicalism. Using the aesthetic languages and devices of modernism, Gold and Roth portrayed the modern landscapes of American capitalism in an effort to accuse them of the absurd contradictions and monstrous inhumanity. As a main narrative device of combining modernism and radicalism, both Gold and Roth used the childhood narrative in which two young boys, Mikey of Jews Without Money and David of Call It Sleep, are not only heroes but also omniscient narrators of the novels. The childhood narrative is also a very effective style for drawing the novels’ popularity and wide-circulation, since the enhanced readability can help the reader overcome the linguistic complexity and formal sophistication risen from the modernist styles and techniques. Consequently, as the novels of radical modernism, Jews Without Money and Call It Sleep succeed in sending their radical accusations against the capitalist society by portraying the monstrous hardships of back-street lives in New York, without sacrificing their aesthetic quality.

The purpose of this study is to analyze The Scarlet Letter in the theological context of the Antinomian Controversy of 1636-1638 in the Massachusetts Bay colony. Up until recently, the researches on the relation between The Antinomian Controversy and The Scarlet Letter had a tendency to compare the tragic life of Ann Hutchinson with that of Hester from the feministic perspective based upon the traditional belief that Hutchinson was the central figure in the controversy. Most of the scholars in this context emphasized the role of Ann Hutchinson and Hester as a prophetic woman in the male-dominated puritan society, thus marginalizing the theological framework and the role of Rev. John Cotton, the model of Dimmesdale. However, according to David Hall, who collected the most comprehensive data about the controversy, the major figure is not Hutchinson but John Cotton. In this study, the emphasis is given on the theological context of The Antinomian Controversy and on the relation between the life of Rev. Cotton and that of Dimmesdale, thus giving the counter balance to the preceding researches on The Scarlet Letter in the context of the Antinomianism. The body of this paper is divided into two parts: the historical and theological background of the controversy and the novel are examined in the first part, so that the theological climate of the Massachusetts Bay colony may be revealed in the light of reformation theology, and in the second part the historical episodes in the lives of John Cotton and Ann Hutchinson are compared with the fictional episodes of Dimmesdale and Hester in The Scarlet Letter. The Scarlet Letter seems to express Nathaniel Hawthorne’s revaluation of the Antinomian Controversy by transforming the theological discourse into the artistic form of a novel : the “heretical” antinomians, when they are transformed into the characters of Dimmesdale and Hester by the imagination of the author, appear more faithful to the tradition of orthodox protestantism than the puritan leaders in Massachusetts who stigmatized them as heretics.

Mary, the heroin of Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing, represents the typical femininity which is located in the center of domestic ideology in America. Even though her name implies spirituality contrasted with Martha’s practicality, she combines spiritual religiousness which domesticates wandering and skeptical men and leads them to faith in God, with practical “faculty” to do all kinds of housework magically. This magical domesticity shows up again in Phoebe, the heroine of Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. Phoebe’s role as housewife is not only to transform a dreary house into a warm and comfortable home, but to adapt herself to others’ emotional needs. More importantly, Phoebe’s domestic femininity is essential for the community that Phoebe and Holgrave create with Hepzibah, Clifford and Uncle Venner at the end of the novel. When domesticity lose its magical power and domesticity reveals its internal paradox that it consists of two different features of emotional adaptability and practicality, magical fantasy about women’s domesticity turns into a nightmare. The ghost of her husband’s late wife in Wharton’s “Pomegranate Seed” is actually the real aspect of domesticity when the magic loses its power, and Ethan’s desolate life with Zeena and Mattie in Ethan Frome reflects a nightmarish fantasy about the inevitable failure of the domestic ideology based on the efficient caretaker and emotionally comforting woman.

This article examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s attempt to find a new idealistic society and establish a new relationship between members of the community in his The Blithedale Romance. The novel was written based on Hawthorne’s own experience in Brook Farm, which aimed for a transcendental utopian community. This novel is Hawthorne’s bitter criticism of his contemporary society in the sense that the people leave their ancestors’ god-blessed country to start a new ideal society. Hawthorne presents the experience and the individuals of the community through the eyes of Coverdale, the narrator, who participates in the ideal community to attain vitality to be a ‘major poet’ and to build up new identity. The narrator observes the complicated relationships among the three important characters: beautiful, voluptuous Zenobia, iron-willed philanthropist Hollingsworth, and frail and conventionally obedient Priscilla. Zenobia symbolizes the vitality that everyone in the society longs for; however, not only Hollingsworth but Coverdale rejects her even though he is much attracted to her. Because of her unconventionality, Zenobia’s chance for a new life is destroyed by both men and the society. After she commits suicide, others in the novel loses hope they had when they first became a part of the Blithedale community. Consequently they desert the community and their experiments end as a failure. With the frustration of experimenting the ideal community Hawthorne indirectly tells the readers to consider a way to establish a new better society themselves. The readers need to look beyond the surface of the novel to grasp Hawthorne's true message in The Blithedale Romance.

Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself and Toni Morrison’s Beloved basically share the form of slave narratives, in that they deal with the escape from slavery to freedom. This paper aims to examine the way in which the process of escape, in physical and psychological aspects, can be most fully understood considering the double bondage of women slaves who were both sexually exploited and racially oppressed. Slavery constantly threatened slave women with the suffering of sexual harassments, in turn making any human ties untenable. Especially, women slaves were often driven to do violence on their own children in actuality as well as in imagination, as is illustrated in Linda and Sethe. However, Linda and Sethe embody the archetypal type of the “outraged mother,” which is a primary archetype in the narratives of contemporary Black American women writers. The outraged mother embodies one who dares a heroic action fuelled by outrage at the abuse of her people and her person. This archetype of outraged mother is fully developed in Linda and Sethe. Their intense and decisive endeavor to save themselves derives from their strong motivation for protecting their children. As a result, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Beloved show the endeavors to cope with the problem of slavery by transforming a personal story into a historical text, without attenuating personal pain. The struggles can be seen as the attempts to redefine the traditional view of motherhood in terms of its social context.