19th century fiction

INTRODUCTION: American Romanticism (1820s-1860s)

Some things related to Romanticism are: Nature, Emotions, etc.

Romanticism is very concerned with the position of man in the universe and the way man
affects the universe.

Romantics usually portray nature as powerful and wild (which is contrary to Neoclassical
writers, who thought nature should be modeled by man). Romantics reject the idea of nature
being modified by man.

● Romanticism is the cult of the individual–the cultural and psychological birth of the I–
the Self. How can I as an individual be connected to the universe? How I through
writing
● Belief in an inner spark of divinity that links one human being to another and all
human beings to the larger “Truth”.
● In poetry, visual art, and music, artists became increasingly preoccupied with
articulating the personal experience that becomes, in turn, a representative one.
● IMAGINATION becomes the source of artistic vision/creativity (during the
neoclassical age, imagination was linked to “fancy”, which implied the fantastic,
fictive, and even false).

Constant QUEST to absoluteness.

The task of a Romantic writer is to contemplate nature, get in contact with the oversoul, and
experiment what that brings. Then, you recollect those memories and put them on paper.

● Romanticism is a reaction against Enlightenment. The Universe was thought to be a

clock that worked as a machine. However, Romantics saw it as a tree. They view the
universe as an organic one, imperfect, but full of possibilities, in constant growth.

1798: Marks the beginning of Romanticism in England, with the publication of Lyrical
Ballads.

Romantics liked:
- On the one hand folklore and culture
- On the other hand supernatural (Edgar Allan Poe)

THE PIAZZA

Berkshire and Greylock mountains

Melville:

- Born in New York City in 1819.

- His father died when he was young and started facing difficulties.
- At age 18, he began working in a ship and started becoming interested in ships.
- In 1851, he published Moby Dick, and it was very badly received at first. For him, this
was a failure in all senses and this made him stop writing.

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- It was difficult for him to make money through literature.

Story:
- Written in 1856, it was thought to be the prologue of a group of short stories. They
were published in installments.
- The narrator has no name: this is opposite to Moby Dick.
- It is the story of a man that has moved to the countryside and built a piazza on his
house to get in contact with the universe through nature and become a better person
(Transcendentalist ideas).
- Central themes, there is a conflict between:
- Past and present
- Fact (reason) and fancy (imagination) - Romantics believed imagination was
the key, that reality depended on how everyone watches reality. It was all
about transcending reality and seeing the real meaning of things.
- Appearances and reality
- The story also portrays the social and economic tensions (particularly connected with
modernity) that appear in the rest of the stories.
- “Isolato narrator”: He’s witty, loquacious, learned and filling the story with
INTERTEXTUALITY (Shakespeare, Cervante, Bible, Spenser, Dante, Milton,
Emerson and classical mythology, etc)
- The story can also be interpreted as Melville’s particular warnings against the
excesses of transcendental imagination, and particularly, of the dangers of
ISOLATION.
- The theme of ISOLATION vs COMMUNITY is treated.

What is Transcendentalism? Everything is interconnected, God is in everything so everything

has a divine essence and is good. If man, by nature, is good how can you justify evil?
Society.

Self-assertive principle: Takes you to solation

● Importance of individualism, self-reliance, and self-expression.
● We should rely on our own instincts and intuition, rather to the expectations of
society.
● Be true to yourself.
● Through embracing their own unique perspectives and beliefs, individuals could
reach a higher state of consciousness.
Self-transcending principle:
● Interconnectedness of all things and the need for individuals to be mindful of their
impact on others.

Melville was not a Transcendentalist even though he uses some of their ideas in their writing.
Melville criticizes how some people took it to the extreme. He did not believe in the
Self-Reliance principle. A man should live in harmony with Nature and engage himself in a
solitary search for truth, in other words, to pursue the ABSOLUTE among ALLUSIONS.

He believed that we need to acknowledge that in life there is good and evil. It is through
balance that we can survive.

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What was going on in the city? Industrialization, urbanization, immigration, westward

expansion and slavery, ultimate cause of the civil war.

- Transcendentalists simply went away from these problems and didn't actually face
them.

MELVILLE WAS NOT TRANSCENDENTALIST. He just included the literary genres that were
popular at the time.

The story itself:

1. The building of the piazza
a. Piazza: Behold and enjoy nature, in the most clear transcendentalist
vein..BUT
b. Melville’s parody starts with the very beginning of this movement, justifying
the eventual construction of the piazza on the “north side” for economic
reasons: CONFLICT between materialistic modern society and romanticism.
c. Finally, the mental conflict is resolved, recurring to a “romantic” principle, that
of rejecting views of the landscape that portray Nature’s mindedness, in favor
of that that portrays Nature’s grandiosity.

Second paragraph:
- Religion was viewed as something to reject for the Romantics, so they actually liked
Thanksgiving because it was simply a social gathering.
- He identifies his farm house with the most sacred places. It is the place where he as
a Romantic can get in contact with the divinity. Therefore, a farmhouse=sacred place.
- To build the house, they had to eliminate the roots of trees that were there before and
they destroyed nature (NOT TRANSCENDENTALIST). Through the use of
exaggeration and hyperbolic descriptions, he emphasizes the importance of this
farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Only a tree survived.
Third paragraph:
- Orion was a mythological heroic character associated with the constellation.
- He’s saying the builder did such a great job choosing the place. It has to do with
imagination and the place he chose. There has had to be divine imagination.
- In order to know yourself better, you have to look inside. Knowledge resides in the
book of nature (observing nature), not that much in history nooks.
- Charlemagne=Greylock mountains. It has to do with the foundation of a new
empire/society and puts emphasis on the grandiosity of the place.
Fourth paragraph:
- House with no piazza=art gallery without a bench. The observer has no opportunity
to enjoy.
- Piazza and pew are the same thing. In order to be good, people look at nature or
they go to Church to become better.
Fifth paragraph:
- When you get in contact with nature, it isn’t that ideal. He just got an earache. He
relates it to killing a monarch.
- Absolute beauty does not exist.
- Getting in contact with nature is not so comfortable.

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Keep in mind: connection between the landscape and royalty.

19/04/23

Text: 2 parts
1. Structure
2. Topic

- Building of the Piazza

- The quest

The text starts with the Piazza, goes in the quest for something and then goes back to the
Piazza. It is quite a circular structure.

- There is mockery of the most famous contemporary literary movements.

Page 2, paragraph 2: Contradiction between nature vs the materialistic world. Opposition

between reality and idealization/imagination. If you’re poor, your imagination must be limited.
The carpenters want him to be realistic, another contrast between reality and imagination.

Continuation of page 2:

- The east is related to Christ and religion.

CONCLUSION:

- Narrator’s decision is in agreement with Melville’s fondness for writing stories in

which he examined the universal force which produces majesty and malignancy at
the same time (image of the Chinese creeper).
- Narrator’s discovery that the north side offers more possibilities for the contemplation
of nature emphasizes Melville’s dominant themes:
- Calmness, serenity: Comes only to those who, like Ishmael, accept life as a
mixture of goodness and evil (Chinese creeper).
- Destruction: Those who seek absolute truths or ignore reality in its
wholesome form (Ahab), are doomed to Destruction.

IN THE NEXT PART COMES THE QUEST:

A mission that you have to go into yourself in order to get to a goal. The character will enter
a process in which he goes from immaturity to maturity, from innocence to knowledge. The
goal at the end of the quest is something different

02/05/23

The quest is sort of a chivalric quest, as he founds obstacles.

Quest is a voyage of discovery in the search for a DREAM (the spot in the distance) that he

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Romantic idea: For most Romantics, particularly Europeans, it was normal to live in an
imaginative world to escape the horrible reality they lived in (Industrial Revolution).

Melville: Criticizes exactly that. You cannot escape reality (you should accept evil) or isolate
yourself like that.

The difference between the narrator and Marianna is that she hasn’t chosen isolation. She is
aware that those elements of nature that the narrator has converted into majestic things
aren’t just matters of fact.

The conditions of Marianna are miserable.

The way Marianna escapes reality is by interpreting the nature around her in a different way,
this relates to Plato’s myth of the cave. She’s aware of the reality but still tries to escape it.

CONCLUSION:

The narrator has the knowledge that fairyland does not exist, but he does not tell Marianna.
Some consider it Melville’s cruelty, while others see it as an act of compassion.

The narrator is an artist to create new realities and let his imagination wild, but Marianna
doesn’t. Her reality would clash.

Final idea: Nature can be benevolent and destructive at the same time, nature does not care
about man.

DILEMMA:
- Trip from romance to reality.
- Compassion prevents him from destroying Marianna’s dream.
- But he cannot escape from the crude reality he has discovered.
- The piazza is transformed into a theater box, where he can, as audience, attend
every day the drama of existence, where the Mariannas of reality play their real
stories.

In sum, the shadows of the world of so many Mariannas become the material of the
narrator’s art, knowing that art is not reality.

Only by accepting these premises can you survive.

As a metaphor for the human condition, if man lives and dies struggling against forces that
he can neither understand nor conquer, he’ll end up destroyed, as many of the characters of
the stories that follow the Piazza.

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Rebecca Harding Davis - Life in the Iron Mills (1861)

Realism and Naturalism in Literature:

- Realism is associated with the author’s intention to show things as close to reality as
possible. This portrays very detailed descriptions and similitude. They rejected the
idea of inventing a new reality.
- Realism later gave way to Naturalism. This other movement went a bit further and
was deeply connected with science (Darwin).

The author: REBECCA HARDING DAVIS (1831-1910)

- Author, essayist, and journalist.

- Wrote most often about issues of race and class.
- Focus: economic and social change in Reconstruction-era Alabama and the
industrialization and urbanization of the New South.
- She was born in Washington, Pennsylvania.
- Lived for a short time with her family in the South (Alabama)
- She moved to Wheeling, West Virginia because of economic reasons (1836). This is
crucial to understand her stories. This town was full of factories.
- She is going to write a realistic portrayal of life at that moment. She lived in a town of
iron-mills.
- The story was written just before the beginning of the Civil War.
- Here started THE AMERICAN DREAM; the moment when it was defended that every
man could be possible of being rich.

The city itself:

- The poor people in towns went to the cities, searching for work in cities like
Wheeling, a city of iron-mills.
- There was a conflict between the cogs and hands; different ways of working.
- Wheeling became an industrious town.
- Iron was the main product and steel mills were abundant.
- The atmosphere and situation of the town affects the atmosphere of the novel.
- Wheeling for prosperous and well located along the Ohio River.
- However, Davis depicts her early days as belonging to a slower, simpler time, as if
she regretted that “assumed” progress industrialization brought about.
- There is a sense of dream of a better past time. Industrialization was a positive thing
for a small group of people in society. The rest went to cities searching for work in
pessimistic conditions.
- She describes life in her 1904 autobiography Bits of Gossip: “there were no railways
in it, no automobiles or trolleys, no telegraphs, no sky-scraping houses. Not a single
man in the country was the possessor of huge accumulations of money”.

LIFE WAS EASIER BEFORE. SHE DOES NOT LIKE INDUSTRIALIZATION.

Her literary career:

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- Very prolific (over 500 published works), but almost totally forgotten by the time she
died in 1910. Maybe because she was a woman and that was a world of men.
- Rediscovered in the 1970s by feminist writer Tillie Olsen.

REALISM MAIN FEATURES:

(REALISM occurred in the moment of the most migratory movements. Transatlantic

migration)

- Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. Selective presentation of reality

with an emphasis on verisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made plot.
- BUT, not every reality was represented. Particular pieces of reality were the ones
selected to represent. Some scholars call it SLICE OF LIFE.
- Characters are also to be very important. More important than action and plot.
Complex ethical choices are often the subject. The psychological dimension of the
character is what matters.
- Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament and motive; they are in
explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past.
- Class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests and aspirations of
an insurgent middle class. The poor people did not have money to buy books, so she
wrote for the middle class.
- Events will usually be plausible/realistic. Realistic novels avoid sensational, dramatic
elements of naturalistic novels and romances.
- Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; the tone may be comic, satiric,
or matter-of-fact. (The fact of transatlantic migration is important in diction. Language
was an identifying element.)
- Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important.
- Interior or psychological realism variant form.

STYLE:

- Commonly labeled as realism, but this is not exactly right.

- Rebecca was considered a pioneer of Realism in America; BUT SHE WAS WRITING
IN A REALISTIC STYLE EVEN BEFORE THIS MOVEMENT TOOK PLACE.
- Her works mark a transition from romanticism to literary realism. In this sense, they
include elements of:
- Sentimentalism (emotions in a very exaggerated way.)
1. A narrator who directly addresses the well-defined reader.
2. A didactic purpose: Make this slice of life visible to middle class
readers in order to denounce the situation and find solutions for it. It is
hard though, they have been swallowed by a capitalistic system and
have no way out.
3. Characters in extreme situations for the purpose of emotionally stirring
the reader to action.
- Romanticism
1. The statue the narrator owns which stands for a spiritually hungry
woman.

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2. The romantic character of the story established a clear dialogue with

Transcendentalism. Some elements to be borne in mind as you read:
a. The tension between nature and culture. This is clear at the
beginning of the story, page 2 “my fancy...roses”.
b. A further passage to explore the dialectics Realism vs.
Transcendentalism is page 20 “thee were...mill-hands?”
- Realism
1. Journalistic specificity.
2. Characters typical of their social class and who “speak” like the people
from that class (in their vernacular). She’s one of the first writers to
introduce slang, registers, and dialects. Page 10: “The rain did not
cease…”
3. She has two ways to depict the social class of the characters:
- Register, as we have seen.
- The workers listing the owners (page 10).
- Naturalism vs Realism
1. Naturalism is thematically linked to realism.
2. Realists: they attempt to depict reality.
3. Naturalists: they add to the realistic depiction the scientific and/or
psychological influences on characters due to their environments, as
with Wolfe,
4. The story points to reality, but believes in the transcendent, harking
back to the days of Transcendentalism.
5. It also looks forward to the deterministic attitudes of naturalist novels:
page 7 and page 8.
- Realism, Naturalism, Determinism
1. All these elements combined in the uniqueness of the male
protagonist.
2. This uniqueness as an individual actually causes his downfall.
3. This is always the curse of the naturalistic hero: to be unique and to
stand out from surroundings into which he can’t/won’t blend or belong.
- The narrator is omniscient, she knows everything. This is in a way a bit far from
realistic narrative, as one does not know everything about every character.

QUESTIONS TO THINK OF AS WE READ:

● Are these characters/behavior of the male protagonist often associated with male or
female figures? Why do you think this is reversed and becomes relevant in the story?
● What do you think the author’s point is in her depiction of 19th c.
femininity/masculinity?
● Gender roles is something you can definitively explore and discuss in commentaries.

IN SUM :

All these “stylistic” features are put to the service of the main themes that the author deals
with in most of her works:
1. Women (and Womanhood)

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2. Race
3. The American Civil War
4. Regionalism
5. The working class
6. Progress (the kind industrialization is supposed to produce)

The Industrialization of the US

- By focusing on the effects of industrialism, the author develops he brown ideas and
disappointment linked to the marginalization of the working class
1. The description of the landscape
2. The daily routines of the laboring class is a recurrent theme
throughout her writing.

3. She believes that the physical and mental state of workers is due to
society looking aside and not doing anything about it. By relating the
physical and mental state of the workers, she expects to urge the
readers to come up with spiritual - rather than social - solutions to
these issues.
a. Read page 14 (“He went to Wolfe…”), 20 ("Shall I go…had
failed”), 28 (“Not too late…Dawn”).

CONCLUDING:

- Her “provocative” attitude is enhanced by the fact that she also brings the foreground
gender issues: female narrator, demale protagonist, feminized and male protagonist.
- Curious that the final SENTIMENTAL close of the story is also “led” by a woman, the
Quaker “saviour”.
- Appealing to the privileged reader directly, Davis also demands some kind of action
from them, once she’s forced them to enter the “misery of the workers world”.

Henry James “The Real Thing”

HIS LIFE:
● He’s classified as a realist.
● He spent a third of his life in Europe, between Paris and London. That is why critics
find it hard to classify him.
● All his travels through Europe and settlement in England will mark his work from the
middle of his career.
● He gained popularity from the moment he published Daisy Miller
● The Turn of the Screw was a gothic novel though, not realist.
● He was a master of the psychological treatment of characters, that is why his novels
have a somewhat ‘gothic’ tint.

THE REAL THING:

- This is not a novel, it is a short story.
- One of the most anthologized stories and considered by scholars as a masterpiece.

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- It has an ambiguous title. It is mentioned in the story 12 times.

- For some scholars, the story in itself is the real thing.
- The story can be read as a parable, where the author describes reality vs
fancy/imagination.
- The story provides a criticism on social issues.
- It is based on a real incident, a real story.
- A realistic artist, even if he or she wants to depict reality as real as possible in his
works, but that is impossible because in the process of taking the real object to the
text the writer ends up transforming that reality. In end that will be a transformation of
reality.

THE PLOT:
- First part:
- Characters:
- A couple comes in and they want to be painted: a woman and a man -
they seem wealthy because they have fancy clothes and the man has
a card. Their names were Mr and Mrs Monarch, which has a clear
connotation and evokes aristocracy. They come to be hired as models
and to be paid for doing a job.
- Artist and narrator: same person - he paints oil canvas
- The porter’s wife
- Miss Churm and Oronte: they represent the working class people, a
working class different from Rebecca’s. They represent women at
Sometimes the narrator and the artist differ, and have different perceptions.

CLASS CONFLICT:
- Old British Aristocracy: representing the Old World - Europe, and fight to keep their
privileges.
- Working class: representing the new social classes demanding their rights in a new
capitalist.
- king class: representing the new social classes demanding their rigths in a new
capitalist system (woman and immigrant rights).

THEMES:
- Artist seeking models - superficial level
- Appearances - reality
- Pride - shame
- Social issues

In his notes, James wrote that the story should be a magnificent lesson.

- LESSON: AN ARTIST NEEDS TO CHANGE REALITY IN ORDER FOR IT TO BE

RECOGNISED BY THE READER/VIEWER. THIS IS SHOWN THROUGH THE
PROCESS OF LEARNING OF THE PAINTER, WHEN HE REALIZES THE
MONARCHS DON’T WORK AS MODELS.

Black and white are key in the story. He was deeply influenced by photography, which was in
black and white. It was the title of the magazine in which the story was published.

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- “The real thing” will never be the illustration, as the illustration has no color.
- The story has to do with the creative process.

MONARCHS:
- Story centers on the issue of WHAT is ACTUAL (for literal) and WHAT will strike the
reader or viewer as REAL.
- It can be read as the “alchemy of art” that will turn characters like Miss Churm and
Oronte into what they are not, but cannot make the Monarchs be anything else but
“the real thing”. “Alchemy” concerned itself in its beginnings with transforming lead
into gold.
- Parallel to this, another dichotomy may spring up, that of MASTER/SLAVE.

The monarchs, socially speaking have been and are “the real thing”, no celebrities,
ruined, but retaining their quality and manners, even in such a DISREGARDED and
DESPISED institution as marriage, they are “a real marriage” and not merely
appearances.

BUT the real thing for society for society is the WRONG THING for art: pages
15,18,19

THUS the real thing for the artist must be “the ideal thing” (page 20) and this takes
the reader to a second level of interpretation, the AESTHETIC one. What is the role
of an artist?

Art was different in the new world and the old world. Art is presented through the
confrontation between the models, the real and the fake. Art for the narrator is
transformation, and this goes parallel with the transformation of the characters. Mrs Churm
and Oronte can be transformed because they are imperfect, while the Monarchs cannot be
transformed because of how stiff and perfect they are.

- At this level (AESTHETIC), for the artist, the real thing lies in his CREATIVE
IMAGINATION. Read pages 7, 10, 13, 16 and 20.

The Monarchs become servants and the servants become models: TRANSFORMATION IN
CHARACTERS AS WELL, AS THERE IS A CLEAR INVERSION OF ROLES. The Monarchs
have experienced a transformation as human beings, they went from aristocracy to servants.

Chiasmus: A crossed image, a double transformation (inversion of roles)

- This conflict between the real and the ideal is illustrated

- There is also a transformation in the narrator, in the was he treats the Monarchs and
the models in the beginning and in the end.

Tea time is included in the story as the author became a great fan of British culture.

The Monarchs gave the narrator/artist a lesson as well, as they got down and dirty. He
realized that it was not right to treat them badly, as they were human beings and good
human beings.

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The relationship goes through different phases that mark this process and reveal the
artist-narrator initially as “professional” (COMMERCIAL PERSPECTIVE), a “superior”
(AESTHETIC PERSPECTIVE), “a master” (even a cruel one SOCIAL PERSPECTIVE), “a
compassionate artist” (MORAL PERSPECTIVE), “a friend” (HUMAN PERSPECTIVE).

read: 2, 4, 6, 10, 13, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21

So the artist-narrator’s attitude changes dramatically and, somehow, he becomes part of “the
real thing”.

This has probably “blurred” his aesthetic perspective, but it has increased his moral insight.

In the same way that the Monarchs,at the end, become “alive” when they humbly adapt to
their new situation in the studio and this “humanizes” them (before simply “types”), the artist
narrator is also affected by this process of humanization.

From this painful experience with the Monarchs, the narrator emerges with a DEEPER
UNDERSTANDING of the human situation and with a greater knowledge if what “the real
thing” is in human relationships: COMPASSION.

Important passages:

REAL THING (The Monarchs): pp. 1ff

WRONG THING for art: pp. 15,17,18,19
Artists must “create”, not simply “copy” from reality: pp. 7, 8-9,10, 11-12.
Artist-critic: pp. 17, 18.
INVERSION of ROLES of the models: pp.13,19 (Tea Time)
NARRATOR’S “TRANSFORMATION”: READ: pp. 2, 4, 6, 10, 13, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21

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Nathaniel Hawthorne

● Born in Salem, Massachusetts. The town is known because of the trial in 1692,
where 19 women were condemned to death. It was all an invention, so they
condemned innocent people.
● He descended from Puritans, and one of his ancestors was one of the judges in trial
(John Hathorne). He was very ashamed of that inheritance, because he was clearly
opposed to Puritanism.
● He decided to change his name from Hathorne to Hawthorne, to distance himself
from that inheritance.
● 4 years old: his father passed away and was raised by his mother all alone. Her
mother was quite depressed, so his youth was quite secluded and isolated. He
became an addict reader from the time he was a young child because of that, so that
is why he became a writer.
● 1828: Fanshawe - He was being rather Transcendentalist, as he wrote whatever he
wanted. It was quite unsuccessful.
● After this failure, he decided to write short stories to start out in the literature industry.
● 1837: Twice-told tales – Short story compilation
● 1847: Mosses from an Old Man – Short story compilation
● He became successful after writing all these stories for many years, so that’s when
he decided to publish a novel.
● 1850: The Scarlet Letter
● Amphibious: Hawthorne was amphibious and hybrid in his appeal to readers.
○ Highbrow (more sophisticated and serious) and lowbrow literature.
○ Hawthorne belonged in both: some readers read him for pleasure and others
admired him for his quality literature/true meaning.

The universe Hawthorne creates is dark and tragic with:

- Tormented characters
- Guilt/Evil
- Puritan times in most stories
- Darkness
- Solitude
- Mystery
- Ambiguity
- Interest in human psychology (even before it was really invented)

“Young Goodman Brown” is a very characteristic story from Hawthorne, it has all of the
things mentioned before.

- Why is “young” being emphasized?

- Goodman: not good as much
- Faith: name of the wife
There are symbols everywhere.

Goodman and Goody were commonly added before names between Puritans.

The last name: “Brown” - it means something

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It is a story of disappointment.

The story is about: Can I trust what I see? You don’t actually know anything about most
people. We can’t take things for granted. Criticizing Puritanism.
The character is good because he is young, he chooses to remain young and innocent.

“Pink ribbons” is childish, as if Faith was a little girl. This refers to Appearance vs Reality: we
have no idea of what the reality is behind those pink ribbons, we can only see the
appearance. That is what happens between humans.

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