W alt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan
Poe, Emily Dickinson, and the Transcendentalists represent the
first great literary generation produced in the United States. In
the case of the novelists, the Romantic vision tended to express
itself in the form Hawthorne called the "Romance," a heightened,
emotional, and symbolic form of the novel. Romances were not love
stories, but serious novels that used special techniques to
communicate complex and subtle meanings.
Instead of carefully defining realistic characters through a wealth
of detail, as most English or continental novelists did, Hawthorne,
Melville, and Poe shaped heroic figures larger than life, burning
with mythic significance. The typical protagonists of the American
Romance are haunted, alienated individuals. Hawthorne's Arthur
Dimmesdale or Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Melville's Ahab
in Moby-Dick, and the many isolated and obsessed characters of
Poe's tales are lonely protagonists pitted against unknowable, dark
fates that, in some mysterious way, grow out of their deepest
unconscious selves. The symbolic plots reveal hidden actions of the
anguished spirit.
One reason for this fictional exploration into the hidden recesses
of the soul is the absence of settled, traditional community life
in America. English novelists -- Jane Austen, Charles Dickens (the
great favorite), Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, William Thackeray
-- lived in a complex, well-articulated, traditional society and
shared with their readers attitudes that informed their realistic
fiction.
American novelists were faced with a history of strife and
revolution, a geography of vast wilderness, and a fluid and
relatively classless democratic society. American novels frequently
reveal a revolutionary absence of tradition. Many English novels
show a poor main character rising on the economic and social
ladder, perhaps because of a good marriage or the discovery of a
hidden aristocratic past. But this buried plot does not challenge
the aristocratic social structure of England. On the contrary, it
confirms it. The rise of the main character satisfies the wish
fulfillment of the mainly middle-class readers.
In contrast, the American novelist had to depend on his or her own
devices. America was, in part, an undefined, constantly moving
frontier populated by immigrants speaking foreign languages and
following strange and crude ways of life. Thus the main character
in American literature might find himself alone among cannibal
tribes, as in Melville's Typee, or exploring a wilderness like
James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking, or witnessing lonely
visions from the grave, like Poe's solitary individuals, or meeting
the devil walking in the forest, like Hawthorne's Young Goodman
Brown. Virtually all the great American protagonists have been
"loners." The democratic American individual had, as it were, to
invent himself.
The serious American novelist had to invent new forms as well hence
the sprawling, idiosyncratic shape of Melville's novel Moby-Dick
and Poe's dreamlike, wandering Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Few
American novels achieve formal perfection, even today. Instead of
borrowing tested literary methods, Americans tend to invent new
creative techniques. In America, it is not enough to be a
traditional and definable social unit, for the old and traditional
gets left behind; the new, innovative force is the center of
attention.
The Romantic Period, 1820-1860: Fiction
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