THE GOTHIC TRADITION IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN

LITERATURE: origins, features and resources.

Dr. José Manuel Barrio Marco

University of Valladolid

The Gothic Tradition departs from the Enlightenment (Neoclassical period

between The Restoration 1660 and 1784, when Samuel Johnson died) in its rejection of
reason, order, accuracy, restraint, self-control, common sense and religious, political,
economic and philosophical conservatism. The Gothic can also be seen as a reaction to
industrialization and the scientific revolution associated with the Enlightenment. Gothic
literature is very far from reason and common sense, because explores the
supernatural, the malevolent, the wicked and the dark desires of the perverse. It is a kind
of literature where mystery, suspense, fear, horror, terror, sorrow, surprise, anxiety,
melancholy, disappearances or inexplicable events are part of the plot.

It is necessary to say that first gothic resources in English literature appeared in

the poems of the “graveyard school of poetry”, in the poems of Thomas Parnell,
Robert Blair, Edward Young, James Hervey or Thomas Gray in the decades of
1740s and 1750s. They found their inspiration in the image of death, graveyards and the
contemplation of mortality. The Gothic romance, as a type of fiction, was inaugurated
in England by Horace Walpole´s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story in 1764, then
the origin of Gothicism in England was previous to Romanticism (1789 to 1832) and
the most important followers of Walpole were Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of
Udolpho (1794) or Marie Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)
among others. The principal aim in these gothic romance-novels was to evoke chilling
terror by exploiting mystery and a variety of horrors. This is why gothic writers
included in their works of fiction the realm of the irrational, perverse impulses and the
nightmarish terrors. Gothic romances were usually set in the past (most often the
medieval past) and in foreign countries, but also they can be set in contemporary
locations and can happen in our ordinary life. The plots hinged on suspense and
mystery, involving the fantastic and the supernatural.

American Gothicism (1798) was also previous to Romanticism in American

literature (1832-1861), where this genre was cultivated for the first time by Charles
Brockden Brown (1771-1810), who in his relatively short literary career became one of
the new Republic’s most significant writers. His most important romance-novels were
Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Edgar Huntly (1799) and Arthur Mervyn (1799). He
adapted for the first time the English Gothic romance-novel to the American landscape
and he was admired by J.F. Cooper, E.A. Poe and N. Hawthorne, though he never
became a professional writer, because the new American mind -very pragmatic and
conservative- rejected this type of absurd and irrational literature. It was E.A Poe the

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first American writer that best connected the gothic and the romantic (Dark
Romanticism) in his only novel, tales, and poems, giving to his literary works a new
gothic perspective in American literature.

1. Traditional Gothic conventions and features that we can see in romance-

novels, novels, tales, short stories and poems:

1.1. Gothic narrative strategies:

Metafiction, Dream-visions, unreliable narrators, the use of the first person singular,
ambiguity (unsolved enigmatic events), open endings.

1.2. Gothic Time:

Seasons of the year: Autumn (Halloween) and winter. Solstices: October,

December, March and June. Moments of the Day: at twilight, at midnight or at
night.

1.3. Gothic settings: The Medieval past or foreign countries were the favorite gothic
settings in many romances and tales at the beginning, but these settings were
adapted to contemporary landscapes and sceneries.

1.3.1. Traditional Gothic locations:

Ruins, cloisters, castles, churches, abbeys, convents, monasteries, cathedrals, gothic

mansions, haunted houses in general, laboratories, dungeons, basements, lofts,
underground passages, mysterious and secret rooms, dark or hidden stairs,
catacombs, graveyards, tombs, vaults, morgues, labyrinth gardens, desolate
landscapes, woods, caverns, caves, hollows, gorges, ravines, islands, lighthouses,
etc.

1.4.Gothic resources:

Doubles or twins, mysterious disappearances, old manuscripts, talismans, legends

and superstitions, sacrifices, tortures, blood, corpses, skeletons, funerals, burials,
fortune-tellers, sorcerers, clairvoyance, poisons, potions, drugs (Poe: opium &
morphine), omens, portents, visions, prophecies, enchantments, invocations,
courses, magic spells, black magic, sects and rituals of any kind, poltergeist,
demons, specters, goblins, ghosts and apparitions, walking dead, fathom ships,
inanimate objects come to life, miracles and prodigies, resurrections,
metempsychosis (reincarnations), alchemy, necromancy, chiromancy, spiritualism,
shamanism, occultism, Satanism, lycanthropy, cannibalism, necrophilia, vampirism,
catalepsy, hyperesthesia, ventriloquism, Mesmerism (hypnosis), mental regressions,
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 galvanism (galvanic battery), spontaneous combustion, somnambulism, melancholy,
voyeurism, obsessions, mental diseases, claustrophobia, photophobia, and phobias
of all kinds, etc.

1.5.Gothic themes:

Love and death (Poe: “The death of a beautiful woman”), otherness, alter ego,
identity, phantasmagorias, existential or psychological crisis, taboos, a secret sin,
guilt, remorse, punishment, revenge, morbid sex, incest, violence, murders, crimes
of passion, madness, diseases, plagues, experiments, etc.

1.6. Gothic sensations in novels and tales: anything associated with the Blackness of
Darkness, Death and Decay, Mystery, Fear, Terror, Suggestion, Anguish,
Emotional distress, Anxiety, Melancholy, Pessimism, extreme Ambitions or
Emotions, Anger or Sorrow, all adorned with Preternatural (extraordinary,
unusual, abnormal, inexplicable, mysterious, strange, fantastic) or Supernatural
facts (paranormal, psychic, mystic, magical, superhuman) .

1.6.1 Gothic special effects:

A desolate landscape at twilight or at midnight,/ the Moon (the light of the moon or
moon shadows),/ darkness and shadows,/ the light of fireplaces, bonfires, torches
and candles,/ wind (especially howling),/ rain (especially blowing),/ mist or fogs, /
storms, thunders and lightning,/ doors grating on rusty hinges,/ sighs, whispers,
moans, howls or eerie sounds at night,/ mysterious voices,/ crazed laughter,/
footsteps approaching,/ clanking chains,/ inexplicable lights in abandoned houses or
rooms,/ gust of wind blowing out lights,/ doors or windows suddenly slamming shut,/
baying of distant dogs or wolves,/ moving objects, etc.

1.7.Gothic approaches in fiction are the final result of the literary techniques and
conventions used by authors in their gothic works.

a) Scientific: The appearance of the events is supernatural in the novel or tale, but
at the end all the events can be explained scientifically.
b) Spectral: Those events cannot be explained rationally, because the “spiritual
world” is real.
c) Psychological: This phantasmagoria is not supernatural but a psychological
manifestation because the problem is in the mind of the character.
d) Skeptical: It is an ambivalent or ambiguous presentation of the facts and you
never know for sure what really happened. It depends on the interpretation of the
reader.

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 Main features and devices in romantic literature.

Dr. José Manuel Barrio Marco

University of Valladolid

1. Romanticism was a European movement developed during

the last decades of the XVIII century in reaction to the dominant
style of the preceding literary period: Neoclassicism (Augustan Age:
Greek and Roman authors were taken as models) a period where
Reason, Science, Harmony, Proportion, Order, Objectivism,
Pragmatism and Symmetry were the dominant features in society and
arts. In literature we can also appreciate irony, sarcasm, satiric humor
and didacticism.

2. Those authors and artists who began to transform their artistic

styles and practices at that age were no conscious that they were real
romantics. But, in any case, the conceptions of life, society and art
had change in their minds, for that reason they developed, probably
unconsciously, new ways of evaluation and expression of their
artistic realities. Since the very beginning, we can see in their works
of art: idealism, individualism, passion, commitment, defiance,
nostalgia, subjectivism, emphasis on emotional and imaginative
spontaneity (imagination as a positive and creative faculty), the
importance of self-expression and individual feelings -personal
emotions reflected in the use of the first person singular- and, of
course, their self-mental and psychological realities with their
obsessions and frustrations, their nightmares and dreams sometimes
associated with darkness, pessimism and gloomy feelings (Gothic
aspects). In general, we can say that sarcasm, irony, optimism and
humor were out of their literary works.

3. Among the most important devices that we can see in romantic

works, I would highlight the following ones:

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a) The use of historical resources. The romantic writer is
always looking backwards to find out new topics because
he is fascinated by history.

b) The image of Nature is a recurrent theme in romantic

literature. But there are different perspectives of it:

b.1) The beauty of Nature as a Paradise of liberty and

innocence versus society, civilization and industrialization.
b.2) The power and strength of Nature versus the
inferiority of man. Man subjected to the forces of nature.
b.3) Nature is seen as a “wilderness” of dangers, where
we can discover the blackness of darkness of our feelings
and fears (Gothic aspects).
b.4) The religious perspectives of Nature, the Garden of
Eden, associated with the Divine image of the Creator and
the transcendental. We can see God through Nature
(Emerson) because Nature is the splendorous work of God.
“Nature always wears the colours of the spirit” (Emerson in
Nature) In American Literature Romanticism and
Transcendentalism are sides of the same coin, with very
few exceptions: Poe. (Poe, using his words, is a surprising
blend of “Terror, Mystery and Ratiocination, Grotesque
and Arabesque”)

c) The aesthetics of Death and the metaphysical aspects of

human nature.

d) The Quest for adventures and the loneliness of the romantic

hero in nature or in society.

e) Primitivism associated with liberty and innocence, also

related to ancient and primitive tribes and cultures and the
image of the “Good Savage”. Also romantic writers were
very interested in primitive forms of art and the revival of
old traditions in art and literature.

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f) The fusion of Dream and Reality, Fancy and Imagination,
the whimsical mind, the world of dreams and nightmares
associated with Gothicism and the human psyche.

g) The writer as a visionary figure, with an important role as a

prophet (in political or religious terms) and sometimes
interested in the outcasts of society (Native Americans or
Afro-American slaves).

h) A deep nationalistic sense. In the case of American writers

the exaltation of their country and the American
Democracy.

i) The use of symbolism, codification and ambiguity.

j) Gothicism is the darkest side of Romanticism. (See: The

Gothic conventions, themes and kinds of gothic approaches
in literature. Dark Romanticism).

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 SOME NOTIONS ON TRANSCENDENTALISM

Dr. José Manuel Barrio Marco

University of Valladolid

Emerson’s Transcendentalism is a logical evolution of those religious

movements and the intellectual development from idealism to pragmatism and
materialism developed in the American society: Puritanism, Calvinism, Unitarianism, as
well as Pragmatism, individualism, rationalism, and materialism were the necessary
protagonists in this process of evolution towards Transcendentalism. Unitarianism had
replaced Calvinism early in the 19 th century and this was the faith of many New
Englanders, mainly in Boston. Emerson had studied in Harvard University and he
became a minister in the Second Unitarian Church in Boston since 1829 to 1832. His
father was also a minister in the First Unitarian Church. Unitarians were those who
maintains that God was one being, rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity, and emphasizing
freedom in religious belief, tolerance of difference in religious opinion, character as the
fundamental principle in religion, and the use of all religious history and experience
interpreted by reason as a guide to conduct (Reason or Faith?). In Unitarianism, deity
had been reduced to a kind of immanent principle in every person and every individual
was the true source of moral light (religious individualism). Also every Unitarian
congregation had a complete control over its affairs (certain independence). Then, it is
very obvious and evident that the concepts of individualism, experience and spiritual
insight were in the mind of those Unitarians. Considering all those principles I have
underlined above, the evolution from Puritanism to Unitarianism had been very
important in many religious aspects and we can better understand why Emerson took
the important decision of leaving the Unitarian church and create his own religious and
moral philosophy.

Transcendentalism was never properly a religion but a religious,

philosophical, social (because some of them wanted to change and improve important
aspects of that American society with their contributions) and literary movement that
appeared in 1836, when Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) published, Nature, his very
famous essay including the most principles of his pseudo religious and philosophical
theory. Transcendentalism from a religious point of view was very different from the
rest of religions and protestant sects in the U.S., because there was never a
Transcendentalist Church as such and the followers never attended religious ceremonies
and Emerson never wanted to get disciples and he even rejected those Holy Scriptures
he had preached. He was a clear example of pure individualism and since then he
always rejected those religious formalisms. Emerson developed an image of God based
only on his own experience, in his own spiritual insights, using his own intuitions and
reason, that is why he rejected traditional religious teachings, religious books and the

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official revelations of the deepest truths by faith or miracles and this is also the reason
why Emerson was declared heretic in the Unitarian church and in Harvard University
during thirty years. He believed in a kind of anthropocentric conception of the world,
viewing and interpreting everything in terms of human experience and values, but in his
case, this was not a rejection of the existence of God, because he believed in God, but
he wanted to get his own image of God through his senses in the contemplation of
nature. Obviously for Emerson Nature was God’s work. Human senses (mainly the
eye) could register the impressions and beauty of the surrounding nature and man’s
reason could discern those spiritual ideas. This religious philosophy was based in
pragmatism and on extreme individualism, because every interpretation of the
natural facts was depending of a personal knowledge and a personal experience, for that
their interpretations were plenty of subjectivism and they were very different.
Transcendentalists did not reject the afterlife, but for them the emphasis was not in the
afterlife indeed, but on this life. This is a great difference in contrast with Puritanism or
Calvinism. They did not believe in predestination or religious determinism, because
they were much more optimistic in this sense than those Calvinists preaching
condemnation, violence and punishment.

From a philosophical point of view, and if we read the definition given by

Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary: “Transcendental Philosophy is any philosophy
based upon the doctrine that the principles of reality are to be discovered by the study of
the processes of thought, or a philosophy emphasizing the intuitive and spiritual above
the empirical.” This Emersonian pseudo-philosophy was a mixture of Neoplatonism
(The Neo-Platonic conception of nature as a living mystery plenty of symbolism),
Kantianism (Kantian idealism. Transcendentalism was a kind of idealism), Oriental
philosophy (Oriental Mysticism: “all knowledge begins with self-knowledge”) and
post-Unitarian free thinking in religion. For Emerson “knowing yourself” and
studying nature was the same activity, because we are one with nature and we are part
of nature. Nature is the most important for Emerson, everything is in Nature, and this is
the title of his most important essay Nature (1836). We know that the vastness and
richness of Nature was a shock for those first colonists who arrive at the new territories
in the 17th century, and since then the essence of nature was in the mind and the spirit of
many American generations, who associated it with the biblical word “wilderness”. This
word is the best evidence that since the very beginning they established a conscious or
unconscious connection between Nature and Religion. There were many writers and
writings before Emerson that helped to consolidate this religious association, but I am
going to mention only two examples, the first one is the puritan minister and religious
philosopher Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), one of the fathers of the emblematic
tradition, who in a notebook of his manuscripts in the Yale University library, he had
suggested several titles for his religious emblems associated with nature: “The Images
of Divine Things, “The Shadows of Divine Things”, The Book of Nature and Common
Providence” or Images or Shadows of Divine Things, as we know it nowadays. In his
emblem number 156, he wrote:

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 “The book of Scripture is the interpreter of the book of nature two ways, by declaring to us
those spiritual mysteries that are indeed signified and typified in the constitution of the natural world; and
secondly, in actually making application of the signs and types in the book of nature as representations of
those spiritual mysteries in many instances.”

The second writer I mention is the liberal and pre-romantic poet of the American
Revolution, Philip Freneau (1752- 1832), and his poem “On the Religion of Nature”
(1815), in the first stanza says:

“The power that gives with liberal hand

The blessing man enjoys, while here,
And scatters through a smiling land
Abundant products of the year;
That power of nature, ever blessed,
Bestowed religion with the rest.

Emerson will be the final solution for this “Religion of Nature”. This thinker,
poet and intellectual was the person in charge of consolidate this religion of nature with
God. This God can be found in both Nature and Human Nature, because man was also a
particle of God and one in nature.

The Literary Relations between Romanticism and Transcendentalism

Emerson’s Transcendentalism (1836) was closely related to literature from its

origins, because appeared nearly at the same time that American Romanticism (1832).
Hawthorne or Melville were very good friends of Emerson and Thoreau, and they
suffered his influence, though Transcendentalists were very positive and optimistic and
they were nor very keen on pessimism and the dark side of life, both literary movements
coexisted perfectly with the exception of Dark Romanticism and Gothicism, because
Transcendentalists rejected the Blackness of Darkness in man and nature. But in spite of
this, Romanticism and Transcendentalism sheared many characteristics:

1. Idealism.
2. Individualism (a tendency to exalt the individual and his needs and emphasis
on the need for freer and more personal expression).
3. An increasing interest in Nature, and in the natural.
4. Naturalism (The depiction and study of the physical environment. H.D.
Thoreau was a naturalist very keen on Natural History.
5. A considerable emphasis on natural religion.
6. The close relation between man and nature.
7. An association of human moods with the “moods” of nature and a subjective
feeling for it and interpretation of it.
8. The Image of Nature as a Paradise.
9. The liking for loneliness and isolation (Thoreau) very common in the
traditional American romantic hero.

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 10. An emphasis on the need for spontaneity in thought and action and in the
expression of thoughts and sentiments.
11. Sense and Sensibility. The use of sentiments and personal experiences in
their works (The first person singular).
12. The sense of Beauty and magnificence. (“Truth is Beauty and Beauty is
truth”).
13. A sense of rebellion against social injustices.
14. The rejection of industrialization and urban life.

Emerson as a poet

Emerson’s poetry is a transcendentalist adaptation of the English Romanticism.

Everything is intuition and communication in Emerson and his poems are the same. We
can characterize his poetic style in four features of style:

1. The election of a particular and very simple poetical image as the central
theme for a poem. All his poems are an artistic strategy to clarify, illustrate
and overspread his philosophical ideas and principles. His poetry is always
conditioned by his transcendental didacticism and should be read considering
the most important principles and striking sentences included in his essay
Nature (1836).

2. In his poetry we can appreciate his simplicity of vocabulary and symbols.

Emerson always wanted to be understood by his readers or listeners and in
his poems he never used difficult words or pompous expressions nor
complex images or sophisticated codifications.

3. A total conditioning of the FORM to the CONTENT. He wanted to

highlight his ideas and concepts and not the “frame” or the expression.
That’s why we appreciate a certain technical carelessness in many of his
poems.

4. We know that part of his philosophy is based on personal experience and

the observation and contemplation of nature through his senses. For that he is
going to exploit the use of the human senses in his poetry. The most
important one for Emerson was the sense of sight, represented in the “eye”.
So, reading his poems we can see an abundant use of synesthesia: “is a
psychological term for experiencing two or more modes of sensation when
only one sense is being stimulated.” In this synesthetic imagery we can
observe “sense transference”. It is a common device in Romantic poetry.

NATURE (1836)

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 Nature is very important to understand Emerson’s Philosophy, in this
essay he tried to present his philosophical principles, but it is necessary to
say, that the style and the way it was written were not the most appropriate.
In my opinion it is repetitive, confuse and boring. Now, I am going to
highlight for your own reflection, what in my opinion are the most important
striking sentences but this is only my point of view:

“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from
society. I am not solitary while I read and write, though nobody is with me.”

“To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature”….”The lover of nature is
he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other,
who has retained the spirit of infancy, even to the era of manhood.”

“Almost I fear to think how glad I am”…”In the woods is perpetual youth…
In the woods we return to reason and faith.”

“I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all”….”I am the lover

of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something
more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape,
and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as
beautiful as his own nature.”

“The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion
of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.”

“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit” ….. “The eye is the bests of
artist.”

“The simple perception of natural things is a delight”… “To the attentive

eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it
beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and shall never
be seen again.”

“Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.” (Beauty related to virtue)

“The creation of beauty is Art.”

“Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts” (“Every

natural fact is symbol of some spiritual fact”) ….. Nature is the symbol of the
spirit.”

“The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors because the whole
world of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”

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“Visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side.”
“The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth,
and a truth which is beauty, is the aim of both.” (This is the slogan of
romantic poetry)

“The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship”.

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 SOME NOTES ON WALT WITMAN’S PERSONALITY AND
POETIC STYLE.

Dr. José Manuel Barrio Marco

Valladolid University

WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892), the poet of Long Island and Camden town
and a major writer, was a “self-made man”, a voracious and comprehensive reader,
multifaceted (itinerant teacher, printer, editor, journalist, volunteer nurse,
correspondent, literary critic, clerk and poet) free, individual, bohemian, abolitionist,
nationalist, democratic and sometimes contradictory, who is considered nowadays
one of the best American poets in the History of American Literature and without a
doubt the father of free-verse in English language and the founder of modern poetry in
the western world. But this new way of writing poetry was not by chance, it was a
consequence of his personality, his creative rebellion (Whitman brushed aside all
formalities) and the reading of Emerson´s essay “The Poet” (1844) encouraged him to
be himself. To know Whitman as an artist, it is necessary to consider several aspects of
his personality: his egotism (“Song of myself”) represents the American self and his
narcissism, putting an engraving of himself in casual dress on the from cover of his
book, Leaves of Grass (1855), was something unusual at that time; his romanticism
(He always wrote in first person about his own sentiments and experiences plenty of
“sexual ambiguity”); his free spirit (He showed his physical and spiritual nakedness in
his lines); his Transcendentalism (The influence of Emerson and Thoreau on Whitman
was profound); the Oriental philosophy (“Know yourself”); his rejection of social
conventions; his obscenity, homoeroticism, sensuality and eroticism were scandalous
for his time (Calamus poems, for example, carried sexual images of homosexual love);
his vital optimism (Inheritance of Transcendentalism); his taste for simplicity
(“Nothing is better than simplicity”, he wrote in the prologue to the first edition of
Leaves of Grass, 1855); his rejection of sophistication and pompous rhetoric; the use
of an ordinary language, plenty of vulgar words and expressions; his love for nature
(The title of his only book of poems was “Leaves of Grass” and Nature is nearly always
present in his poems), but also he was in love with New York City all his life; his
idealism (Thomas Carlyle’s idealism), his mysticism, more secular than divine (Body
and Soul were at the same level); his radicalism and his populism; his love for lower
classes and manual work, his humility and his endurance, because he was a peaceful
libertarian and a great admirer and friend of H. D. Thoreau (“Civil Disobedience”):
“Resist much and obey little”. This was Whitman’s slogan, when he suffered all kinds
of disqualifications, insults and humiliations after the first edition of Leaves of Grass.

The first edition of Leaves of Grass was printed and published by Whitman
himself, the 4th July 1855, containing only 12 poems and a wonderful “Preface” very
important to know Whitman’s thoughts, his ideas and his new concept of poetry. During
the rest of his life, he spent 37 years and nine editions -the last one in 1892 with 390

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poems-, adding new poems, editing, moving and removing them until the last revision
previous to his death. Leaves of Grass was Whitman’s life work. After the publication,
nobody wanted to write a literary review and even Whitman wrote his own reviews, but
reviews when written were very negative and Whitman was very disappointed. In those
early reviews many critics condemned him, under a moral perspective, for being
obscene, vulgar, sensual, erotic and scandalous, and many others, from a formal point of
view, because they could not understand his strange versification.

“The "Leaves of Grass," under which designation Whitman includes all his poems, are
unlike anything else that has passed among men as poetry. They are neither in rhyme nor in any
measure known as blank verse; and they are emitted in spurts or gushes of unequal length,
which can only by courtesy be called lines. Neither in form nor in substance are they poetry;
they are inflated, wordy, foolish prose; and it is only because he and his eulogists call them
poems, and because I do not care to dispute about words, that I give them the name.” (The
Contemporary Review: December, 1875)

The only one who gave his support to Whitman was Emerson, the father of
American Transcendentalism, in a private letter:

“I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet
contributed… I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy… I rubbed my eyes
a little to see if this sunbeams were no illusions; but the sober sense of this work is a sober
certainty.” (Oliver, Charles M.: Critical Companion to Walt Whitman. A Literary reference to
his life and work, Facts on File, New York, 2006. p.12)

Emerson was a famous philosopher, intellectual and poet and his support was
really important, so Whitman decided to promote himself using this private letter
without the writer’s permission and he published it in The New York Tribune, and later
in the second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856). This support to Whitman is why Emily
Dickinson, a great admirer and reader of Emerson, decided not to meet him, when he
went to her brother’s home in Amherst (Massachusetts). Whitman and Dickinson are
the best American poets in the nineteenth century, both represent a new experimental
poetry, personal, romantic and transcendentalist with their own features of style and
modernity, but with two very different personalities and styles: Whitman is a public,
liberal and outgoing poet and Dickinson (“The Nun of Amherst”) is a private, moral,
conservative and shut-in poet.

“Only Emerson…the most influential American poet of the time, recognized something
in Leaves of Grass that others seemed to have missed. What Emerson saw was the possibility
that the author was the first truly American poet in the nation’s short story… Bryant,
Longfellow, Whittier and Emerson himself were old-stock English poets.” (Oliver, Charles M.:
Critical Companion to Walt Whitman. A Literary reference to his life and work, Facts on File,
New York, 2006. p. 3)

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 But in any case, Whitman step by step had been steadily grown in favor in
Europe and his own countrymen and critics were taken him up had gradually come to
see that he was a great an original poet.

The Preface to Leaves of Grass (1955)

Just before analyzing the formal aspects of his poetry, I consider necessary to
pay attention in the confessional aspects that we can read in the “Preface to Leaves of
Grass “(1855), because it is his own declaration of poetical independence, liberty and
rebellion against the traditional poetic rules, and also his new vision and conception of
his poetic, political, social and spiritual world. I have selected some striking sentences
and quotations of this “Preface”, which highlight his new and democratic poetical
philosophy in terms of themes, content and form. I think these fragments are self-
evident and everyone will be able to deduce clearly what Whitman wanted to say,
however, I would like to comment on some general aspects. His extreme nationalism
and his love for the American democracy and individual liberty are the main poles of
his poetry. The American nation and its society were not sophisticated in manners and
customs, and Whitman, a real son of America, decided to be the poet in charge of
singing and proclaiming the essence of its liberty, and to get that, he broke with
traditional poetic rules and social conventions. A new nation and a new society needed a
new way of expression and that is what he did.

“The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest
poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem”. “Here is
not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations”. “....but the genius of the United States is
not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or
churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors . . . but always most in the
common people.

“The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races.
Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people.”

“For such the expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new. It is
to be indirect and not direct or descriptive or epic.” “Of all mankind the great poet is the
equable man.”
“The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality.... He is a seer. . . . he is
individual . . . he is complete in himself. . . . the others are as good as he, only he sees it and
they do not. He is not one of the chorus. . . . he does not stop for any regulation . . . he is
the president of regulation.”

“The land and sea, the animals, fishes and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the
forests, mountains and rivers, are not small themes . . . but folk expect of the poet to indicate

3
more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects. . . . they
expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls”.

“The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses

to things nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and much
else and is in the soul. The profit of rhyme is that it drops seeds of a sweeter and more
luxuriant rhyme, and of uniformity that it conveys itself into its own roots in the ground out of
sight. The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and
bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and take shapes as
compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume
impalpable to form. The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music or orations or
recitations are not independent but dependent.”

“...re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss
whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the
richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the
lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . . The poet shall not spend
his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and
matured. . . . others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation.”

“The best singer is not the one who has the most lithe and powerful organ . . . the
pleasure of poems is not in them that take the handsomest measure and similes and sound.”

“The greatest poet does not moralize or make applications of morals . . . he knows
the soul.”
“The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is
simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity.

“The greatest poet has less a marked style and is more the channel of thoughts and
things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself.”

“The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks and by the
justification of perfect personal candor.”

“The spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body. Not one name
of word or deed . . . not of venereal sores or discolorations . . . not the privacy of the onanist . .
. not of the putrid veins of gluttons or rum-drinkers . . . not peculation or cunning or betrayal
or murder . . . no serpentine poison of those that seduce women . . . not the foolish yielding of
women . . . not prostitution . . . not of any depravity of young men . . . not of the attainment of
gain by discreditable means . . . not any nastiness of appetite not any harshness of officers to
men or judges to prisoners or fathers to sons or sons to fathers or of husbands to wives or
bosses to their boys . . . not of greedy looks or malignant wishes . . . nor any of the wiles
practised by people upon themselves . .”

4
 “A great poem is for ages and ages in common and for all degrees and complexions
and all departments and sects and for a woman as much as a man and a man as much as a
woman. A great poem is no finish to a man or woman but rather a beginning.”

“There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done..... A new order shall arise
and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches
built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women. Through the divinity of
themselves shall the cosmos and the new breed of poets be interpreters of men and women
and of all events and things.”

“The English language befriends the grand American expression.... It is the powerful
language of resistance . . . it is the dialect of common sense. It is the speech of the proud and
melancholy races and of all who aspire. It is the chosen tongue to express growth faith self-
esteem, freedom, justice, equality , friendliness, amplitude, prudence, decision and courage.
It is the medium that shall well nigh express the inexpressible.”

“The poems distilled from other poems will probably pass away.”

“An individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make a
superb nation. The soul of the largest and wealthiest and proudest nation may well go half-
way to meet that of its poets. The signs are effectual. There is no fear of mistake. If the one is
true the other is true. The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as
he has absorbed it.”

Whitman had absorbed the essence of his country in his lines, and at the
end he was completely absorbed and became a part of his nation forever.

WITHMAN’S POETIC FEATURES OF STYLE AND THECHNIQUES

Whitman is the “king” of poetic licenses, he wanted to break all the rules and he
did it, because he was the first modern poet, who understood that in poetry rules are
made to be broken and this is the beginning of modernity in poetry. Poetry is form and
content, both are sides of the same coin, he knew it and he was very respectful of this
principle, because in his poems he adapted his irreverent and liberal content to a free
form of versification, then nobody can deny his coherence in this sense.

Whitman’s innovative free verse owes a fundamental debt to the rhythms of the
Bible. He did not invent the free verse poetic style he used in “Leaves of Grass”,
because it is the verse form of much of the Old Testament and we can say that Whitman
and the Bible gave rise to the strong free-verse current in America and world poetry. In
any case, his way of writing shocked the readers and critics of his time and the freedom

5
of the poet was reflected in the liberty of his verses. He broke with the frame of
traditional stanzas, the uncommon length and irregularity of his lines without final
rhymes and his unconventional prosody were something new and very different from
the classical blank verse.

We can appreciate in his poems the following characteristics:

A) Variations of line length.

B) Irregularity of Stanzas.

C) No final rhymes, sometimes we can find instead alliterations, internal rhymes

or assonance.
D) New ways in rhythm: Whitman in his free verses developed new ways in
rhythm because classical meters were deleted, and he wrote in the same kind
in which much of the Bible was written.

“The main emphasis in this kind of free verse is on neither the beginning nor the end of
the line, but is balance. Whitman’s longer lines contain two stress groups, while the short lines
contain one. The stress groups are balanced within themselves; each begins and ends with an
important word. ……Whitman often built up to a climax by making his lines longer and longer,
and let sheer weight add to the intensity. Even his long lines are notable for their balance, and
for the fact that they end as strongly as they begin.” (Frances Stillman, The Poets Manual and
Rhyming Dictionary, London, Thames and Hudson, 1989, p. 89-90)

E) Grammar and Syntax:

- Grammatical conversions:
- Converting verbs into nouns.
- Nouns converted into verbs.
- Adjectives converted into verbs.
- Non personal verbs converted in personal verbs: Whitman used the Present
Participle (–ing forms) converted into Present Tense.

- Hyperbatons and ellipsis of verbs.

- Sequences of Coordinated sentences and enumerations by juxtaposition.

- Parallelisms. Parallelism is common in poetry of the oral tradition and it is a

common general device in traditional poetry. It consists of phrases, sentences or lines of
similar syntactic construction (Syntactic parallelisms) or meaning (Semantic
parallelisms) place side by side, one balancing each other or in a sequence of
consecutive lines in a stanza. In Whitman’s lines these syntactic or semantic
parallelisms are normally “Anaphoric parallelisms”. Its music is familiar to English

6
readers because of its use in the Bible. Whitman used this device more than any other
poet.

F) Rhetorical Devices:

- Direct address, colloquial address or rhetorical questions.

- Rhetorical repetitions: Anaphora, Epistrophe, Symploce (Anaphora +
Epistrophe), etc….

G) Poetic Diction:

- Frequent use of Italics and parentheses.

- Ordinary speech.
- Americanism.
- Slang.
- Dialect expressions.
- Colloquialisms.
- A rich amalgam of Neologisms by suffixes and compounding.
- Foreign borrowings.

H) Other devices:

- Catalogue verse: It is a device of ancient origin. This term describes a list

people, things, places, ideas, related terms, etc. Whitman used this device
in his poems.
- Synaesthesia.

There is an exercise of commentary in the next page.

7
 NOT HEAT FLAMES UP AND CONSUME

1. Not heat flames up and consumes, FIRE

2. Not the sea-waves hurry in and out, WATER
3. Not the air delicious and dry, the air of ripe summer, bears AIR
Lightly along white down-balls of myriads of seeds,
4. Wafted, sailing gracefully, to drop where they may; EARTH
----------------------------------------------------------------------
5. Not these, O none of these more than the flames of me, FIRE
Consuming, burning for his love whom I love,
6. O none more than I hurrying in and out;
7. Does the tide hurry, seeking something, and never give up? WATER
O I the same,
8. O nor down-balls nor perfumes, nor the high rain-emitting
Clouds, are borne through the open air, AIR
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
9. Any more than my soul is borne through the open air,
10. Wafted in all directions, O love, for friendship, for you.

Analyze the form, explain me the content of this poem and locate these poetic
devices: “Hyperbaton”, “Ellipsis”, “Paradox”, “Synecdoche”, “Anaphoric & Syntactic
Parallelisms”, “Rhetorical question”, “Comparison”, “Hyperbole”, “Semantic
Parallelisms”, and “Epistrophe”.

8
SOME NOTES ON EMILY DICKINSON’S PERSONALITY AND POETIC STYLE.

Dr. José Manuel Barrio

University of Valladolid

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born in Amherst a rural and puritan community
in Massachusetts, where she spent the rest of her life except for a journey to
Washington in 1854 and another to Boston. She received a stern and rigid education and
attended a school for women between 1847-1848. Her father represented the puritan
authoritarianism and was a Calvinist who believed in predestination and in an angry
God, for that reason Emily was educated under the religious precepts and the rhetoric
of Jonathan Edwards’s sermons, in which the only reward was purification or
punishment. The community of Amherst was very similar to the one described by
Nathaniel Hawthorne in his Scarlett Letter. Despite this religious environment, Emily
made her own image of God, she was a strong woman who was able to resist the social

1
and religious pressure from a psychological point of view, because she fought to make
the world to her measure and she developed her own internal world, a private and
personal space almost impenetrable, but this external and internal fight affected her
social personality. She lived secluded at home by her own desire, only surrounded by
her family. In fact, she spent twenty years without crossing the gate of her garden and
it was in 1858, when she adopted the custom of wearing only white dresses. It was her
“white election”, and she was known as “The White Nun of Amherst”. In many of her
poems she considers herself a “bride” and a “queen”, and her obsession of living in
isolation made her to receive some external visitors at home behind a folding screen. A
good example of her character and personality is the following one: Emily was a great
admirer of R.W. Emerson’s writings and his Transcendental philosophy, and she
followed his Theory of Mystic Individualism, very popular in her times. The only problem
with Emerson was that he gave his personal and critical support to Whitman’s poetry,
and this was something she could not stand for and could not forgive and when Emerson
went to Amherst in 1857 and he visited Emily’s brother, who lived just in front of her,
she refused to meet the philosopher because, his support to the poetry of Whitman was
something offensive and bad taste.
Dickinson suffered several existential crises along her life. The first crisis was
obviously religious. Her personal strength made her to reject the puritan theology based
on the radical limits of salvation or condemnation. She lived under her own religious
precepts, and though her poetry was not a religious poetry certain religious features can
be perceived, because the Bible was her main source of inspiration for many of her
poetic images. After overcoming this religious crisis, a new one came related with her
intellectual and vital independence in a patriarchal society, something very common for
women in the XIX century, when they wanted to get access to culture. Firstly, she had
to convince her own father to use his library at home, something that had been
forbidden to her. She convinced him not only to use it, but also to dedicate her life to
reading and thinking. Because she never married and her poetic work never was
published, she depended financially on her father, who provided her with sufficient
financial resources to live and dedicate her life to write without the need for a husband.
The third crisis was a sentimental one. Emily, being a spinster, had resolved her
economic and artistic independence, but what happened to her sentimental life? As far
as we know, there were three men in her life whose influences were very important for
the development of her poetic career, though her great love was SUSAN GILBERT, her
best friend and later her sister-in-law. Her first masculine friend was Benjamin Newton,
a neighbor from Amherst, who encouraged Emily her love for literature and introduced
her into the literary work of the Brönte sisters and the poetry of Emerson. The second
one was Charles Wadsworth, a minister of the Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia for
whom she felt a great admiration and probably something else, because he was her
“spiritual guide” and represented the paternal image. When Charles moved from
Philadelphia to San Francisco, Emily suffered a great emotional crisis, though they had
been only pen friends. The third one was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a minister of
the Unitarian Church, who was also a writer and editor. During many years Thomas

2
became her “literary advisor and critic”, and when Dickinson died, he edited
posthumously 115 of her poems in two editions 1890 and 1896, but the problem with
these editions was that Higginson modified Dickinson’s poetic style, changing her rhyme,
punctuation, and semantic style, because according to him it was inappropriate and very
unconventional.
Dickinson’s poetry was, like her personality, something very unconventional. She
used to write isolated at home using any kind of paper as support, envelops, bills and so
on. During her life, she only published anonymously five or six of her poems, and though
she tried to do it by all the means, she could not and at the end of her days she was
obsessed with being recognized as a poet. After her death, Lavinia, her sister, found out
forty-four original hand-sewn fascicles with all her poems and hundreds of letters. Many
of those letters were burned according to Emily’s wish and last will. The first complete
and original edition of her 1.775 poems was published in Harvard in 1955. Nowadays,
Dickinson is considered by the History of American Literature as one the greatest
American poets, despite she was completely unknown for her contemporaries in the XIX
century. The same happened to Edward Taylor (1645-1729), probably the best puritan
poet of early New England, whose complete poems were published for the first time in
1939.
Dickinson complex psychological personality has led to much speculation by
critics and scholars. She has been considered a mystic, individualist, neurasthenic,
repressed or lesbian. But in any case, she was an autodidactic and experimental poet,
who broke with the classical rules of the American poetry of her times and developed
her own poetic style to express her fears, anguish, and internal concerns. We can say,
she wrote a private and confessional poetry which is the result of her own personal,
domestic, and literary experience.

LITERARY INFLUENCES:
Dickinson was very fond of reading, English and American literature were her
personal windows to the world, and her source of inspiration for new experiences of life
and themes. Apart from the Bible, a reference in all senses, her favorite writers were W.
Shakespeare, John Bunyan, John Milton, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, the Brönte
sisters, George Elliot, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Emerson,
and Thoreau among others.

DICKINSON’S POETRY: General characteristics.

 Her poetry is personal, spontaneous, descriptive, experimental, and natural.

 Her poems have a conversational tone something like “little letters” in verse.
she wrote about her poems: “These are my letter to the world”.

3
 Her poems stand out for their brevity and fragmentation and are ephemeral
flashes of her personal feelings and observations, we can say, she used a kind
of “poetic shorthand” to describe: “The flight of a bird”, “The simplicity of a
flower” or “A leaf in the hands of wind”.
 Dickinson’s poetry is the result of self-reflection and observation, for that
reason it is a visual poetry, plenty of images and contemplative experiences
associated with a metaphysical style and some of her most famous and
complex metaphors can be compared to the style of the English Metaphysical
Poets of the 17th century, particularly Henry Vaughan.
 Due to her secluded life, Dickinson was very ignorant of the “real world”, her
lack of vital experiences outside Amherst led her to use images from the
Bible, literary readings, universal themes, and a domestic nature describing
the natural life of her own garden, she ignored the real wild nature of the
country and maybe for that reason she avoided the traditional description of
wild American landscapes.
 When Higginson edited 115 of her poems in 1890, he divided them
thematically in five groups that in fact represent their thematical essence in
general terms: LIFE, LOVE, NATURE (Beauty and domestic nature, no
traditional American landscapes), TIME (Seasonal Cycle, the Image of Death),
ETERNITY (Life after death and immortality). In short, Dickinson mixed in her
poems the ordinary with the sacred, the concrete with the abstract, the trivial
with the sublime, the ecstasy of life and the ecstasy of death.
 Emily Dickinson was a romantic and transcendentalist poet very different
from other romantic and transcendentalist poets in the XIX century like W.C.
Bryant, E. W. Longfellow, or Walt Whitman.

GENERAL FEATURES OF POETIC STYLE:

 Emily Dickinson began writing poetry in 1859 or 1860 and she developed an
original and experimental style very different from the rest of the American
poets in the XIX century. She has nothing to do with the traditional “free
verse” of Walt Whitman or the classical poetry of Bryant and Longfellow. Her
original poetry was unpublished till 1955 and for that reason there is not
influence of Dickinson’s versification in her contemporaries or in the
modernist writers because it was completely unknown.

 She wrote short poems and the formal aspects of her poetry (metrical foot,
rhyme, and stanzas) come from the English Hymnology. The most common
metrical foot is iambic or trochaic and sometimes dactylic, and we can find
stanzas in which the three of them are mixed. The rhythm in her lines is
unpredictable and syncopated and it is very difficult to distinguish it, because
it comes from the English religious hymnology she learnt from the books of
Hymns and Psalms, for that reason the rhythm is based on the phrase and

4
 not in the traditional metrical foot and instead of a sequence of regular
accents she used dashes to show the pauses in the lines.

 Her metaphors are personal and unconventional because they come from
ordinary situations of life, and the observation of a domestic nature and
produce a sensation of existential ambiguity.

 It is frequent the invention of new words (neologisms) and we find a great

abundance of synesthetic descriptions.

METER:

 Her favorite stanza is the quatrain following the “Ballad stanza” form in
iambic trimeter (u-/u-/u-) and iambic tetrameter (u-/u-/u-/u-) rhyming in
ABCB and exceptionally in ABAB. Apart from the rhythm another important
difficulty is the “final rhyme” because most of them are imperfect rhymes,
eye-rhymes or near rhymes (see below).

 Considering the number of syllables per line is possible to distinguish and

associate the type of rhythm with the sequences of syllables per line:

- Quatrains in Iambic meter (U -) is used in the following structures

1º “Common meter” sequence of syllables per line: 8/6/8/6/, the most used
by Dickinson.
2º “Long meter”: 8/8/8/8/.
3º “Short meter”: 6/6/8/6/
4º “Seven and Sixes”: 7/6/7/6/.

- Six-line stanza in iambic trimeter (u-/u-/u-) and iambic tetrameter (u-

/u-/u-/u-):

5º “Common particular meter”: 8/8/6/8/8/6/, the second most used by

Dickinson.
6ª “Short particular meter”: 6/6/8/6/6/8/.

- Quatrains in Trochaic meter (trochaic tetrameters: /-u/-u/-u/-u/:

1º / 7/7/7/7/, the third most used by Dickinson.
2º /8/7/8/7/. The fourth most used by Dickinson.

3º 8/5/8/5/.
4º 7/5/7/5/.

5
5º 6/5/6/5/.
6º 6/6/6/6/.

- Quatrains in Dactylic meter (Dactylic tetrameters: /-uu/-uu/-uu/-uu/:

1º 11/11/11/11/.
2º 11/10/11/10/.
3º 10/9/10/9/.
Note: These three meters above can be used mixed in the same poem, for
this reason it is very important to know the number of syllables in any case.
RHYMES:

A) Identical Rhymes or Perfect Rhymes: move/ remove; same/name.

But most of Dickinson’s rhymes are “NEAR RHYMES” or IMPERFECT
RHYMES:
B) Vowel rhymes or assonant rhymes: (time/ripe/vile) (eye/sight)
(leaves/sees) (above/skull), (say/same), (time/thine). * (see/buy) some
poets consider this imperfect rhyme possible.
C) Consonant Rhymes (half-rhyme): (gate/mat) (wind/God) (despair/more)
(one/stone) (plan/unknown) (up/step) (design/maintain) (gone/down)
(peer/pear) (set/lit).
FIGURES OF SPEECH: Unconventional metaphors, her metaphors are
personal, because they come from ordinary situations of life, and the
observation of a domestic nature to produce a sensation of existential
ambiguity; Paradox; Antithesis; Synesthesia; abundance of synesthetic
descriptions; Hyperbaton; Ellipsis of auxiliary verbs; Enallage: a figure of
speech which involves the substitution of one grammatical form for another.
Adjectives instead of verbs or nouns: “We talk in careless and in toss” = “We
talk without thinking”.
Adverbs instead of nouns: “I linger with Before” (the Time before).
Verbs instead of nouns: “Better an ignis fatuus/ Than no illuminate at all”
(without any illumination).
DICKINSON’S UNCONVENTIONAL CAPITALIZATION AND PUNCTUATION
Dickinson used dashes during all her life in different kinds of writings, for
that reason some critics consider that they do not result from a conscious
artistic concern, what probably might be her own way of handwriting.
Leaving aside the problems of edition that these personal features of style
can produce, and the different theories and interpretations, it is a reality that
the readers of her poems are shocked by her system of punctuation.

6
Dickinson used “dashes” (hyphens) instead of commas, semicolons, and full
stops, and there are different theories about it, but we can say that nowadays
some scholars are agreed that probably her dashes in poems represent a kind
of musical notation in stressing the connection between the rhythm of
Dickinson’s verse and her system of punctuation and pauses when reading
her poems.
Another unconventional feature of style is Dickinson capitalized her
keywords to highlight their importance and to draw the reader’s attention,
not only nouns but also pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and articles, and
sometimes even used capital letters in the middle and at the end of some
words. In some cases, capitalization reinforce the meaning of important
words in her poems, because those words can have a symbolic meaning.
SYMBOLOGY
The most frequents symbols in Dickinson’s poems are those ones coming
from the observation of a domestic nature. The seasonal cycle associated
with Death and Resurrection, and sometimes the cycle of the Day. Spring is
a traditional poetic symbol representing love, life, and rebirth, but in
Dickinson is a negative symbol that produce anxiety and distress, because it
is associated with love, sexuality, and reproduction. The flowers, manly the
rose, are symbols of female sexuality and flowers are courted by bees,
symbolizing the male admirer. Summer is Dickinson’s favorite season,
represents the brightness of the Sun, happiness, and the yellow color.
Summer thunderstorms paradoxically are something positive and enjoyable,
and the mature summer represent the warm mature love. Autumn is sadness
and decay, and winter is cruelty, destruction, and death: “It is the kiss of
Death” and it is represented by frost. Dickinson used different creatures as
symbols in her poems: birds, insects, butterflies, etc. The most common ones
are robin, oriole, hummingbird, bees, beetles, crickets. Crickets, for instance,
represent sadness and melancholy because their presence heralds the end of
summer.

7
 EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886)

Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters

to Susan Gilbert by Maria Popova.
Father: Edward Dickinson (A respected state legislator, US congressman and judge) had
three children. (Lavinia, Emily and Austin)
SUSAN GILBERT
 Emily Dickinson met her (Susan Gilbert) four months before her twentieth
birthday, and Susan was only nine days younger. Susan was the person who became her
first love and remained her greatest.

Susan Gilbert (an orphaned mathematician-in-training) had settled in Amherst,

to be near her sister, after graduating from the Utica Female Academy — one of a
handful of academically rigorous educational institutions available to women at the
time. She entered Dickinson’s life in the summer of 1850, which the poet would later
remember as the season “when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under
the Evergreens.” Throughout the poet’s life, Susan would be her muse, her mentor, her
primary reader and editor, her fiercest lifelong attachment, her “Only Woman in the
World.”

A tempest of intimacy swirled over the eighteen months following Susan’s

arrival into the Dickinson’s lives. The two young women took long walks in the woods
together, exchanged books, read poetry to each other, and commenced an intense,
intimate correspondence that would evolve and permute but would last a life- time. “We
are the only poets,” Emily told Susan, “and everyone else is prose.”

By early 1852, the poet was besotted (in love) beyond words. She beckoned to
Susan on a Sunday:

“Come with me this morning to the church within our hearts, where the bells are
always ringing, and the preacher whose name is Love — shall intercede for us!”
 In a letter from the early spring of 1852, eight months into Susan’s absence,
Emily hurls a grenade of conflicted self-revelation:

“Will you be kind to me, Susie? I am naughty and cross, this morning, and
nobody loves me here; nor would you love me, if you should see me frown, and hear
how loud the door bangs whenever I go through; and yet it isn’t anger — I don’t believe
it is, for when nobody sees, I brush away big tears with the corner of my apron, and
then go working on — bitter tears, Susie — so hot that they burn my cheeks, and almost
scorch my eyeballs, but you have wept much, and you know they are less of anger than
sorrow.

And I do love to run fast — and hide away from them all; here in dear Susie’s bosom, I
know is love and rest, and I never would go away, did not the big world call me, and
beat me for not working… Your precious letter, Susie, it sits here now, and smiles so
kindly at me, and gives me such sweet thoughts of the dear writer. When you come
home, darling, I shan’t have your letters, shall I, but I shall have yourself, which is
more — Oh more, and better, than I can even think! I sit here with my little whip,
cracking the time away, till not an hour is left of it — then you are here! And Joy is here
— joy now and forevermore!”

The electricity of Dickinson’s love would endure coursing through her being for
the remainder of her life. Many years later, she would channel it in this immortal verse:

I chose this single star

From out the wide night’s numbers —
Sue — forevermore!

Facing her desire for Susan, her deepest fear was not punishment from “God”
but that her wayward heart was its own retribution — as well as its own reward. She
writes plaintively that heated summer:

“Have you ever thought of it, Susie, and yet I know you have, how much these
hearts claim; why I don’t believe in the whole, wide world, are such hard little creditors
— such real little misers, as you and I carry with us, in our bosom every day. I can’t
help thinking sometimes, when I hear about the ungenerous, Heart, keep very still — or
someone will find you out! . . . I do think it’s wonderful, Susie, that our hearts don’t
break, every day . . . but I guess I’m made with nothing but a hard heart of stone, for it
don’t break any, and dear Susie, if mine is stony, yours is stone, upon stone, for you
never yield, any, where I seem quite beflown. Are we going to ossify always, say Susie
— how will it be?”

By June, anticipating Susan’s return from Baltimore in three weeks, Emily is

pining with unbridled candor:

“When I look around me and find myself alone, I sigh for you again; little sigh,
and vain sigh, which will not bring you home.
 I need you more and more, and the great world grows wider . . . every day you
stay away — I miss my biggest heart; my own goes wandering round, and calls for
Susie… Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say — my heart is full of you . . . yet
when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me… I shall grow
more and more impatient until that dear day comes, for till now, I have only mourned
for you; now I begin to hope for you.”

She ends her letter with aching awareness of the dissonance between her private
desire and the public norms of love:

“Now, farewell, Susie . . . I add a kiss, shyly, lest there is somebody there! Don’t
let them see, will you Susie?”

Two weeks later, with Susan’s return now days away, her anticipatory longing
rises to a crescendo:

“Susie, will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me
as you used to? . . . I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you, feel that I cannot
wait, feel that now I must have you — that the expectation once more to see your face
again makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast — I go to sleep at
night, and the first thing I know, I am sitting there wide awake, and clasping my hands
tightly, and thinking of next Saturday… Why, Susie, it seems to me as if my absent Lover
was coming home so soon — and my heart must be so busy, making ready for him.”

Dickinson would frequently and deliberately reassign gender pronouns for

herself and her beloveds, recasting her love in the acceptable male-female battery of
desire. Throughout her life, she would often use the masculine in referring to
herself — writing of her “boyhood,” signing letters to her cousins as “Brother Emily,”
calling herself a “boy,” “prince,” “earl,” or “duke” in various poems, in one of which
she unsexes herself in a violent transfiguration:

“Amputate my freckled Bosom!

Make me bearded like a Man!”

Later in life, in flirting with the idea of publication, she would masculinize
the pronouns in several her love poems — “bearded” pronouns, she called these — to
fit the heteronormative mold, so that two versions of these poems exist: the earlier
addressed to a female beloved, the later to a male.

But when Susan returned from Baltimore on that long-awaited Saturday,

something had shifted between them. Perhaps the ten-month absence, filled not with
their customary walks in the woods but with letters of exponentially swelling
intensity, had revealed to Susan that Emily’s feelings for her were not of a
different hue but of a wholly different color — one that she was constitutionally
unable to match.

Five months earlier, she had written to Susan:

“I would nestle close to your warm heart… Is there any room there for me, or
shall I wander away all homeless and alone?”
 She suspected, too, that she might injure — and not only herself — with the
force of her love:

“Oh, Susie, I often think that I will try to tell you how dear you are . . . but the
words won’t come, tho’ the tears will, and I sit down disappointed… In thinking of
those I love, my reason is all gone from me, and I do fear sometimes that I must make a
hospital for the hopelessly insane, and chain me up there such times, so I won’t injure
you.”

Susan is slipping away from her — and toward Austin, who commenced an open
courtship of her. That summer, Emily Dickinson cut off her auburn hair.

Emily Dickinson’s home, the Homestead. The poet’s bedroom — the “chamber
facing West” where she composed nearly all of her poetry — is located in the right-
hand corner above the porch. (Photograph: Maria Popova)
 The following autumn, Susan Gilbert married Austin Dickinson, largely to
be near Emily, and they moved into the Evergreens — the house erected for the
newlyweds by Austin and Emily’s father, across the lawn from the Homestead, the
house where the lovesick poet lived.

“A corridor denuded of grass soon formed between the Homestead and the Evergreens
as Emily and Susan traversed the lawn daily to see each other or to press into the other’s hand
a letter unpinned from the bosom of a dress. A “little path just wide enough for two who love,”
Dickinson called it. Over the next quarter century, 276 known poems would travel between
their homes — some by hand and foot, but many by post. I have often wondered what
prompted the poet to head for the mailbox and not the hedge, stuffing her sentiments into an
envelope addressed to a house a stone’s throw from her own. And yet the heart is not a stone
— it is a thing with feathers.”
 “She loved with all her might,” a girlhood friend of Dickinson’s would recall
after the poet’s death, “and we all knew her truth and trusted her love.” No one knew
that love more intimately, nor had reason to trust it more durably, than Susan. Where
Austin’s love washed over her with the stormy surface waves of desire, Emily’s carried
her with the deep currents of devotion — a love Dickinson would compare to the loves
of Dante for Beatrice and Swift for Stella. To Susan, Dickinson would write her most
passionate letters and dedicate her best-beloved poems; to Susan she would steady
herself, to her shore she would return again and again, writing in the final years of her
life:

“Show me Eternity, and I will show you Memory —

Both in one package lain
And lifted back again —
Be Sue — while I am Emily —
Be next — what you have ever been — Infinity.”

Something of the infinite would always remain between them. Thirty years into
the relationship, Susan would give Emily a book for Christmas — Disraeli’s romance
novel Endymion, titled after the famous Keats poem that begins with the line “A thing
of beauty is a joy forever” — inscribed to “Emily, Whom not seeing, I still love.”
FORMAL REPETITIONS AND POETIC
DEVIATIONS

RHETORICAL DEVICES IN POETRY

 Anadiplosis: repetition of the last word or words of a
line of verse, clause or sentence, at the beginning of the next.
1) “Stella, the only planet of my light
Light of my life and life of my desire.”
2) “Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! The very word is like a bell.”
3) “He gave his life;
His life was all he could give.”
4) “I seek this unfrequent place to find some ease,
Ease to the body, none to the mind.”
5) “The love of wicked men converts to fear;
That fear to hate, and hate turns one or both
To worthy danger and deserved death.”
6) “The mountains look on Marathon—
And Marathon looks on the sea;”
7) “I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
 Anaphora (Epanaphora): is a rhetorical device involving the
repetition of a word or group of words at the beginning of two or
more successive verses, clauses or sentences.

1) “He spake me fair, this other gave me strokes,

He promised life, this other threatened death,
He won my love, this other conquered me,
And soon to say, I yield myself to both”.

2) “Her lips did smell lyke unto Gillyflowers,

Her ruddy cheeks lyke unto Roses Red,”

3) “Not heat flames up and cosumes,

Not sea-waves hurry in and out,
Not the air delicious and dry, the air of ripe summer, bears.”

4) “Farewell the tranquil mind!

Farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars.”

• Anaphoras are associated with syntactic or semantic parallelisms.

• Anaphora is particularly effective when one wishes to emphasize the subject of an action or an idea.
Anastrophe (Hyperbaton): is the inversión of the normal order of words
for a particular effect. It is a figure of speech in which the normal syntactic word
order: subject + verb + object…, is changed.
1) “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”

2) “Here on the edge of hell

Stands Harlem –”

3) “While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red
Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead”.

4) “My country, 'tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims' pride,
From ev'ry mountainside
Let freedom ring!”

5) “Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm’d”
 Antimetabole (Antistrophe): is a figure of speech in which a phrase
is repeated, but with the order of words reversed. It means, "turning about in the opposite
direction," and sums up the effect of words being repeated in reverse order.

1) “What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba. *

That he should weep for her?”
2) “The master of the servant, the servant of the master.” *
3) “Old Gaunt, indeed; and gaunt in being old”. ***
4) “Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love”. *
5) "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do
for your country.“
6) “I mean what I say, and I say what I mean.”
7) “All for one and one for all!”
8) "Fair is foul, and foul is fair.“
9) “Beauty is truth and truth is beauty.”
10) “I know what I like, and I like what I know.”
Asyndeton: A rhetorical device where conjunctions, articles and even pronouns
are omitted for the sake of speed and economy. As a mean of achieving compact
expresión. In this device words are separated by commas, and no conjunctions are
used. It produces an accelerated movement.

1) “Without looking, without making a sound, without talking.”

2) “Call up her father,
Rose him, make after him, poison his delight,
Proclaim him in the streets.”

4) “The first sort by their own suggestion fell

Self-tempted, self-depraved; man falls, deceived
By the other first; man therefore shall find grace,
The other none…”

6) “I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems,

and that they are my poems,
Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s,
mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems,
Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,
Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking
or sleeping of the lids,
Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws,
and the jaw-hinges,
Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,”
 Atanaclasis: The repetition of a Word or phrase whose meaning
changes in the second instance.

1) “Old Gaunt, indeed; and gaunt in being old”. **(Ploce) (Epanadiplosis)

2) “Your argument is sound, but if you analyze it, it sounds all sound.”*
(Ploce)(Polyptoton)
3) “While we live, let us live.”
4) “If you aren’t fire with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.”* (Polyptoton).
5) “his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double
vouchers, his recoveries. Is this the fine of his fines and
the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt?”
6) “To England will I steal, and there I’ll steal:”
7) “Ah! He strikes all things, all alike,
But bargains: those he will not strike.
8) “Tender yourself more dearly,
Or—not to crack the wind of the poor phrase,
Running it thus—you’ll tender me a fool.”
9) “"Fruitless to mee, though Fruit be here to excess"
Epanadiplosis: A figure of speech by which the same word is used
both at the beginning and at the end of the same line, phrase, clause or
sentence.

1) “He smiled the most exquisite smile”

2) “The King is dead, long life the King.”
3) “Seems, Madam! Nay, it is; I know, not “seems.””
4) “Beloved is mine; she is Beloved.
5) “Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!”
6) "Nothing can be created out of nothing”
7) “Music I heard with you was more than music.
And bread I broke with you was more than bread.”
8) “Love is right because there is only one right love.”
9) “Common sense is not so common.”
10) “Blood will have blood.”
Epanalepsis: A figure of speech which contains the repetition of a word or
words in successive lines, or sentences, but in no particular position as long as
there are words between the repetitions.

1) “From me his languishments and fears,

And every killing dart from thee;”

2) “Say first, for Heaven hides nothing from thy view,

Nor the deep tract of Hell, say first what cause
Moved our grand Parents, in that happy state…”

3) “But these dark times are just like those dark times.
Yes, my sad acquaintance, each dark time is
Indistinguishable from the other dark time.”

4) “Take it easy, take it easy

Don't let the sound of your own wheels
Drive you crazy
Lighten up while you still can
Don't even try to understand
Just find a place to make your stand
And take it easy.”
Epistrophe (Epiphora): The repetition of the same word or
phrase at the end of two or more successive verses, clauses
or sentences. The opposite to Anaphora.
1) “If you had known the virtue of the ring,
*Or half her worthiness that gave the ring,
*Or your own honour to contain the ring,
You would not then have parted with the ring.”
2) “Hourly joys be still upon you.
Juno sings her blessings on you.
Scarcity and want shall shun you.
Ceres’ blessing so is on you.
3) “Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning Death.
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning Death.
Those who sit in the style of contentment, meaning Death.
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning Death.”
4) “Fie, fie, thou shamest thy shape, thy love, thy wit,
Which, like a userer, abound’st in all,
And uses none in that true sense indeed
Which should bedeck thy shape, thy love, thy wit.”
5) “Sweet Portia,
If you did know to whom I gave the ring,
If you did know for whom I gave the ring
And would conceive for what I gave the ring
And how unwillingly I left the ring,
When nought would be accepted but the ring,”
Epizeuxis: A figure of speech in which the same word or phrase is
repeated emphatically to produce a special effect. We find these immediate
repetitions in the same line without any intervening words.
1)“Come away, come away, death”.
2)“My darling – my darling - my life and my bride”. * (Ploce)
3)“If he do love, I burn, I burn in love”. * (Ploce)
4)“There's little in taking or giving,* (Anaphora)
There's little in water or wine;* (Anaphora)
This living, this living, this living
Was never a project of mine.“
5) “Hark, Hark! The lark at heaven’s gate sings.”
6) “My lady sweet, arise, arise, arise!”
7) “Alone, alone, all, all alone,*** (Anaphora, Anadiplosis, Epanadiplosis)
Alone on a wide, wide sea.”
8) ““Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death?”*
9) “For Lucidas is dead, dead are his prime,”
10) “O Absalom, my son, my son.”
11) “Having nothing, nothing can he lose.”
HOMEOTELEUTON ( HOMOIOTELEUTON)(“Similarity of endings”): A series of
words with the same or similar endings in a line, stanza, or poem. The
same derivational or inflectional ending on different words in two or
more adjacent words, clauses or lines of writing.
1) “But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings,
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in words not realized..”
2) “Quentiest thoughts – queerest fancies.”
3) "The quicker picker upper.“
4) "I must aim at lucidity, simplicity and euphony.”
5) “The waters rose rapidly, / and I dove under quickly. / Both “rapidly” and
“quickly.”

6) "Weeping, creeping, beseeching I wan/ The love at length of Lady Lucian."

 Pleonasm: is a redundant use of words to emphasize. It
merely repeats the meaning contained in words that
precedes o follows it. It is regarded as a fault of style.
1) “In this day and age.”
2) “With shifting change.”
3) “Fragrant flowers, odorous smell.”
4) “I have just seen it with my eyes”.
5) “He said with his mouth.”
6) “Hear with one’s ears.”
7) “I am going to divide it in four quarters.”
8) “Could you repeat that again?”
9) “my female grand mother”.
10) “A false lie”.
11) “A tiny Little child.”
12) “Think for one´s self.”
13) “Fate inevitable.”
 Ploce: is an intermitent repetition of the same word or phrase
in the same line with intervening words. This repetition produces a
special emphasis or an extension of meaning.
1) “Light of my life and life of my desire”.*

2) “Mark but this flea, and mark in this”.

3) “Our marriage bed and marriage temple is”.
4) “I am that I am”.
5) “With choicest words, thy words with reasons rare.”
6) “My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!”. * (Epanadiplosis)
7) “A rose is a rose is a rose.”

8) “. . . themselves the conquerors, * (Epanalepsis)

Make war upon themselves--brother to brother--
Blood to blood, self against self.”

9) “With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout,

Confusion worse confounded.” *(Polyptoton)
10) “Hear you this soul-invading voice, and count it but a voice?

11) “The future is no place to place your better days.“*

12) “If will, then she at will may will forget”. *

13) “He is more Irish than Irish” *

14) "We'll be over, we're coming over, *

And we won't come back till it's over
Over there."
 Polyptoton: The repetition of a word with varying grammatical
inflections, that it is to say, the same lexical root in a different case or
inflection.
1) “I dreamed a dream in times gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living.“
2) “And singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest.”
3) “Labours to kill in me this killing care.”
4) “A man in hue, all “hues” in his controlling.”
5) “Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee.”
6) “Sweet kiss, thy sweets I fain would sweetly indite
Which even of sweetness sweetest sweetener art”.
7) “Our fear-mongering press keeps us fearful”.
8) “My own heart’s heart, and ownest own, farewell.”
9) “Prize me no prizes.”
10) “love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove. (Shak. 116)
11) “There hath he lain for ages, and will lie.”
12) “And dying rise, and rising with him raise."
 Polysyndeton: is the repetition of a number of conjunctions in close succession
very common in poetry and prose. Polysyndeton is the excessive use of
the same conjunction or different ones. This kind of deviation is intentionally used for
stylistic purposes to achieve some functions such as slowing down the rhythm of the
utterances or adding cadence to them.
1) “Sir, she can turn, and turn, and yet go on,
And turn again; and she can weep, sir, weep;
And she’s obedient, as you say, obedient,
Very obedient.”

2) “I would not do such a thing for a

Joint-ring, nor for measures of lawn, nor for
Gowns, petticoats, nor caps, nor any petty
Exhibition;…”

3) “O nor down-balls, nor perfumes, nor the high-rain emitting

clouds, are born through the open air.”

4) “Or feed on nourishing dishes, or keep you warm,

Or sue to you to do a peculiar profit
To your own person...”

5) “And I made a rural pen,

And I stain’d the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.”
Symploce: (Anaphora + Epistrophe) When a word or phrase is used
successively at the beginning of a group of lines and another word or
phrase is used successively at the end of the same group of lines.

1) “In her sepulchre there by the sea

In her tomb by the sounding sea”.
2) “Of those who were older than we,
Of many far wiser than we”.
3) “For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail”.
4) “I will recruit for myself and you as I go;
I will scatter myself among men and women as I go.”
5) “Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning Death
“Those who glitter with the glory of yhe hummingbird, meaning Death.”
 THE RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOMESTIC AND SENTIMENTAL
NOVEL IN THE 18^" AND 19^" CENTURIES.

Dr. José Manuel Barrio

University of Valladolid

No novel was written in the American Colonies before 1789. As you

know, the RIse of the English novel took place at the very beginning of the
XVIII and this genre was very common and popular in England during that
century, both countries England and the Unites States shared the same
language, the same literary tradition, and the same culture. The American
novel was influenced by English themes, and it is impossible to think of the
rising of the novel in the United States without considering authors like
Defoe and Swift in the novel of adventures; Richardson, Stern and
Goldsmith in sentimental novel; Fielding in picaresque novel; Walpole in
gothic novel. Jane Austen in novel of manners, Walter Scott in historical
romances among others. The first American novéis were based on
sentimentalism, and imitation versus an American mind dominated by
pragmatism, reason, and moral precepts. The new American writers
broke immediately with neoclassical precepts and most of those American
novelists were self-made men and women, far from sophistication, with a
practical sense of life and plenty of enthusiasm and literary vocation, they
knew how to introduce in their novéis and romances their own native
features of style, American manners, American landscapes, their own
national valúes, and religious and historical events. In any case American
novelists modified the genre from the very beginning and during the
nineteenth century they will differ from English novelists not oniy in style,
but aiso in themes and more refreshing plots.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries English novéis were

imported from England to American. The first American novel appeared
seventy years after Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). Non-American
author wrote a novel before in the colonial period and in the new Republic
till The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown was published
anonymously in 1789, by then the United States of America had been
recognized as an independent nation by the rest of the worid. There were
many religious, social, cultural, and economical reasons for this late
development of the American novel, but the first novel in the History of
American Literature was, curiously, a Domestic and Sentimental novel.

1
 The first American romance-novéis published in the early national
period (1789 to 1820) were mainly inspired on sentimental themes. The
Power of Sympathy was written during "The Early national Period" (Liberal
period or Federal Period) 1775-1820, under the influence of the English
sentimental and epistolary novel, and particularly under the influence of
Samuel Richardson's novéis Pamela; or Virtue Reworded (1740) and
Clarissa (1747-48). The Power of Sympathy was a novel of sensibility, what
now we cali a domestic and sentimental novel, and it developed a
seduction plot. In many of these novéis as we shall see later, young
women were seduced and abandoned and these novéis including in their
plots seduction and incest were a sure success, for that many novelists
used since then these words in their titles or plots as a strategy of
attraction or marketing. We can say that Domestic and Sentimental novéis
were very successful because they made concessions to the tastes of the
reading public of the age.

One of the main reasons for the Rise and development of the
American novel was the role of female readers. The rising middie class of
the new Republic was very fond of reading books, especially novéis and
many women in cities and towns began to demand these novéis. The
increasing demand for books by this new middie class encouraged many
writers to earn a living by their pen and new printers appeared to face this
business, also the contribution of newspapers, magazines, gazettes and
pamphiets was very important for spreading culture all over the country
and créate new habits of reading in American citizens at low price. These
means of communication represented the opportunity to publish novéis in
parts and newspapers and magazines were used to promote titles and
novelties of literary fiction as well. In 1854 magazines like The Ladies'
Magazine or The Ladies' World came to give support to feminine literature
publishing domestic and sentimental novéis in their series at a low price
increasing the number of readers. These magazines were immediately
successful and soid million copies, being the forerunners of Dime Novéis in
1860. At that time, the cost of an ordinary novel was 25 cents and the
price of a Dime Novel 10 cents. "Dime Novéis were the first and most
influential of the democratic art forms to be produced in this country." (E.
Elliott, 1988:554)

To valué, magnify and highiight the important number of female

writers who developed their literary careers in the last decade of the
eighteenth century and during the whole nineteenth century, it is
necessary to explain how extremely difficult was to publish novéis in the

2
United States from 1789 to 1891. A period of one hundred years wliere all
the popular best-sellers were written by women

Moral, pragmatism, rationalism, and economy were the most

important and fundamental axes of the new nation, but a new difficulty
was added for those ones who wanted to start a literary career. The littie
recognition and economical reward before 1820, made writers to publish
their works anonymously or pseudonymously, though this was not the
case for some women. The main probiem was that after the American
Revolution the new government set by law a National Copyright in 1790,
and due to this National Copyright Agreement, American authors should
be paid for their books, but in fact the author's official recompense would
be whatever the printer agreed to pay for the rights to an edition of a
certain number of volumes. Nevertheless, the government of the United
States did not sign the International Copyright Agreement until 1891, a
hundred years later, therefore many printers went on publishing British
books. This fact produced a very paradoxical situation because to publish
an American Novel written by an unknown American author in the States
was much more expensive than to publish a novel written by a famous
English writer, since in this last case American printers should not pay for
the rights, because these editions were pirated editions, and they were at
a very low cost. The average printers who wanted to publish a novel,
especially one by an unknown American writer, hoped that the published
volume might sell several hundred copies, enough to pay the production
costs and perhaps to pay something over. But the author rarely profited
by these literary transactions until 1820s. Charles B. Brown complained of
pirated English Books being soId in American bookshops at a fraction of
the price of native products. Those American authors had to compete to
publish with Walpole, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and
many others during the whole XIX century. For this same reason, the
American novéis when published in England did not produce any profit for
American authors. James Fenimore Cooper, the first professional novelist
in the States, complained of his books pirated by British Companies and
soId in England without any profit for himself. He described the difficult
situation lived by American writers in his essay Notions ofthe Americons in
1828:

"The literature of the United States has, indeed, two powerful

obstacles to conquer before it can ever enter the markets of its own
country on the terms of perfect equality with that of England.... because

3
no man will pay an American writer for an epic, a tragedy, a history, or a
romance, when he can get a work of equal merit for nothing" (944)

American writers had to compete not oniy among themselves and

with the tastes of the reading public but also to get the necessary
economic support or social influences to publish their books. For many
writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, to publish their novéis and tales
was a real challenge and a very difficult task. Hawthorne saw in these
female writers a severe competence and called them contemptuously "a
mob of scribbling women" (Una multitude de mujeres garabateando,
emborronadoras de papel).

The oniy way for American writers to avoid this lack of benefit was
to publish the first edition of their books in England, something very
difficult for unknown writers, but this was the case of Washington Irving,
who obtained his rights in England and later in the United States because
he was an American citizen and in his own country printers could not
pirate his English editions.

Due to the large number of female readers the most famous and
demanded novéis were domestic and sentimental, and hundreds of these
went on publishing with great success along the whole 19th century being
a very profitable and popular genre. The most famous and successful best-
sellers from the beginning of the American novel belonged to this genre
and nearly all of them were written by female writers as Susanna H.
Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791), Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797),
Sarah Wood's Julia and the llluminated Barón (1800, Tabitha Gilman
Tenney's Female Quixotism (1801), among others. Leslie Fiedler wrote:

"Before the publication of Cooper's Precaution in 1820, one

third of all our novéis had been written by women and within that third
were to be found almost all the early best-sellers" (1982:83)

The attitude of these novéis projected toward men is in some cases

ambiguous, representing the ideal male highly considered as a benefactor
and protector to women, but most domestic and sentimental novéis
represented directly or indirectly the women struggles against the
restrictiveness of an American society dominated by stern, distant, and
demanding men. The literary discussion was always whether these novéis
according to quality and intention were any good. Maybe this was the
reason why they received very littie attention by critics and scholars and
were traditionally excluded from the literary canon to be considered
works of popular literature, in a derogative sense: "Literature for the
4
Populace". In any case, this type of literature represents the novel proper
because their plots depict a kind of social realism and represent the
conservative valúes of a patriarchal society that urges women to seek
fulfillment in marriage and maternity, a virtuous, home loving woman in
her proper domestic sphere, and the slaving of mothers as a part of the
natural order. When these female characters try to be themselves, and
break the rules, they are considered fallen women and suffered their
social and physical punishment. These novéis can offer simple and fíat
characters but also complex with mixed motives and feelings taken root in
upper, middie- or low-class, interacting with many other characters. These
novéis showed the reality of those women who suffered abuse in that
patriarchal society, a society in which women rights were not respected
and honor and virtue were the oniy treasure for them. Critics considered
these novéis highly sentimental (tearful) and for that reason they were
underestimated.

But female writers and readers were completely identified with the
domestic and sentimental novéis because they wrote, and they read
about something very cióse to their hearts and sentiments. Their fictional
heroines were more realistic in feminine hands than those of male writers
and they were able to show their feelings and sufferings with a proper
feminine and sentimental language. Women wanted to read and know
about a reality that was of their own, their domestic worids, their inner
concerns secluded in a familiar living space, which was very well known
for all of them because their oniy adventures and misadventures were
always at home. Many men writers tried to imítate their literary style and
wrote domestic and sentimental novéis at the beginning of their literary
careers with the intention of being read by women and sell their writings.
These were the cases of William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy
(1789 (1801), Charles B. Brown's Clara Howard (1801), or Jane Talbot
(1891), James Fenimore Cooper's Precaution (1820) and largely by
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850). Cooper's financial
success from the very beginning let him to earn his living by writing fiction
and he was the first professional writer in The United States.

In the eighteenth-century domestic novéis were often concern with

manners, family situations, love affairs and domestic livings, their
characters belonged to upper or middie class and the distresses of the
virtuous, sense of honor and moral behavior were justiy rewarded. In
many of these novéis the characters were divided into good or bad and
sometimes they were fíat with false and superficial emotions, feelings and

5
postures of grief and pain. From 1860 to 1890 domestic novéis are in
general terms literary works about dominance and subjugation but in the
late nineteenth century these novéis suffered a kind of reaction against
what was socially regarded as immorality and license. In 1890s with the
coming of a new generation of female writers these novéis began to
change in their purposes and the intention for these new women was
subverting male domination. Since the 1880s the new woman in theory
and fact changed the canon of American literature with a new fictional
design in characters, forms, and themes and in the 1890s "the new
woman- independent, outspoken, iconoclastic, empowered the work of
Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow or
Willa Cather among others". (E. Elliot, 1988:589)

JOSÉ MANUEL BARRIO MARCO I 81

REFERENCIAS CITADAS

BARRETT, P.W, (1981) «More American Adams: Women Héroes in American

Fiction», en Markhan Review, Spring, Vbl.lO, pp: 3 9 - 4 1 .
«Seduced and Abandoned» en Maurice Bassan (ed.), Mag^e:
S A N G E R , W W , (1966)

Stephen Granes text and Context, Belmont, Wadsworth P C , pp: 83-85.

FIEDLER, L.A., (1984) Love and Death in the American Novel, Harmondsworth,
Penguin.

APÉNDICE D E AUTORAS Y OBRAS D E FICCIÓN

NORTEAMERICANAS

« T H E AMERICAN EVES» (Las Evas Norteamericanas).

Finales del siglo X V I I I :

S A R G E N T M U R R A Y ( 1 7 5 1 - 1 8 2 0 ) : Ensayos titulados: «Desultory

1. J U D I T H
Thoughts» ( 1 7 8 4 ) y «On the Equality of the Sexes» ( 1 7 9 0 ) .
- W . H I L L B R O W N ( 1 7 6 5 - 1 7 9 3 ) : Harriot Fawcet: virtud-seducción-
casi incesto-muerte romántica-suicidio del seductor en The Power of
Sympathy ( 1 7 8 9 ) . De corte epistolar, sentimental y sensacionalista, se
considera la primera novela norteamericana.
Charlotte en Charlotte Temple {1791):
2. S U S A N N A H . R O W S O N ( 1 7 6 8 - 1 8 2 4 ) :
Charlotte: A Tale of Truth ( U . S . 1 7 9 4 ) . Seducción-huída-embarazo-
abandono-degradación-pobreza-muerte. De corte epistolar, didáctica y
sentimental es el Primer «Best-seller» norteamericano.
3. HANNAH F O S T E R ( 1 7 5 9 - 1 8 4 0 ) : Eliza Wharton: Seducida-abandonada-
embarazada-muere en el parto en The Coquette {1797). Novela epistolar
de tono sentimental. Reeditada sucesivamente con éxito hasta bien
entrado el siglo XIX.

Siglo X D G

Julia and the llluminated Barón ( 1 8 0 0 )

4. S A R A H S . B . K . W O O D ( 1 7 5 9 - 1 8 5 5 ) :
y Dorval; or, The Speculator ( 1 8 0 1 ) . Su especialidad son los «Gothic
Romances».
Dorcasina Sheldon y Betty en Female
5. T A B I T H A G . T E N N E Y ( 1 7 6 2 - 1 8 3 7 ) :
Quixotism ( 1 8 0 1 ) . Sátira crítica sobre lo absurdo de la novela sentimental
contemporánea. • •
182 EVOLUCIÓN DE LA FIGURA FEMENINA

-CHARLES B . B R O W N ( 1 7 7 1 - 1 8 1 0 ) : Clara Howard(1801), Jane Talbot

( 1 8 0 1 ) . Novelas epistolares de corte y temática sentimental.
- J.F. C O O P E R ( 1 7 8 9 - 1 8 5 1 ) : Precaution ( 1 8 2 0 ) novela de costumbres que
cumple los requisitos del género en su sentido más tradicional.
Novelas románncas de corte
6. C A T H E R I N E M A R L \K ( 1 7 8 9 - 1 8 6 7 ) :
convencional: Jane Elton, huérfana-pobreza-dependencia-madurez-
matrimonio-familia-felicidad, en A New England Tale ( 1 8 2 2 ) ; Ellen
Bruce: huérfana-virtuosa-búsqueda de raíces, con Caroline Redwood
resultan ser hermanas-matrimonio-armonía familiar-amor-felicidad en
Redwood ( 1 8 2 4 ) novela que dio enorme popularidad a esta autora.
Married or Single ( 1 8 5 7 ) la educación de la mujer como vía para
conseguir la independencia económica y vital sin necesidad de casarse.
H . G I L M A N ( 1 7 9 4 - 1 8 8 8 ) : Novela doméstica, tradicional y
7. C A R O L I N E
moralizante ensalzando las virtudes del hogar, de la moralidad y la familia
por encima de todo: Recollections of a Housekeeper ( 1 8 3 4 ) y Recollections
ofa Southern Matron ( 1 8 3 8 ) .
( 1 8 0 0 - 1 8 5 6 ) : Linda en Linda ( 1 8 5 6 ) huye del
8. C A R O L I N E L E E H E N T Z
entorno familiar que le agobia y hostiga y experimenta toda una serie de
aventuras propias de Huck Finn.
- E . A . P O E ( 1 8 0 9 - 1 8 4 9 ) : Prosa: «Berenice» ( 1 8 3 5 ) , «Morella» ( 1 8 3 5 ) ,
«Ligeia» ( 1 8 3 8 ) , «Eleonora» ( 1 8 4 1 ) . Poemas: «Lenore» ( 1 8 3 1 ) , «A
Valentine» ( 1 8 4 6 ) , «To Mrs Marie L . Shew» ( 1 8 4 8 ) , «For Annie»
( 1 8 4 9 ) , «To My Mother» ( 1 8 4 8 ) , «Annabel Lee» ( 1 8 4 9 ) .
- N . H A W T H O R N E ( 1 8 0 4 - 1 8 6 4 ) : Hester Prynne: amor-impulso natural-
pasión adulterio-lealtad-valentía y corage en The Scarlet Letter ( 1 8 5 0 ) ,
Phoebe Pynchon: matrimonio y regeneración en The House ofthe Seven
Cables ( 1 8 5 1 ) . Las hermanas Priscilla y Zenobia (despechada y pobre
se suicida ahogándose) en The Blithdale Romance ( 1 8 5 2 ) . El A M O R se
manifiesta como cualidad única y regeneradora en casi todos los
personajes femeninos de Hawthorne, que suelen ser los que en líneas
generales producen un mayor efecto positivo: Rosina en «The Bosom
Serpent» ( 1 8 4 3 ) , Dorcas en «Roger Malvin's Burial» ( 1 8 3 2 ) , Mary y
Margaret en «The Wives of Death» ( 1 8 3 2 ) , Mrs. Wakefield en «Wake
field», Elizabeth en «The Minister's Black Veil» ( 1 8 3 6 ) , Georgiana en
«The Birthmark» ( 1 8 4 3 ) , Hannah en «The Great Carbuncle» ( 1 8 3 7 ) o
Beatrice en «Rappaccini's Daughter» ( 1 8 4 4 ) .
9. MARGARET F U L L E R ( 1 8 1 0 - 1 8 5 0 ) : Ensayo Titulado:»Woman in the
Nineteenth Century» ( 1 8 4 5 ) . Intelectual feminista luchadora en pro de
los derechos de la mujer.
JOSÉ MANUEL BARRIO MARCO 183

Ensayos titulados: «Woman and

10. E L I Z A B E T H O A K S S M I T H ( 1 8 0 6 - 1 8 9 3 ) :
Her Needs» ( 1 8 5 1 ) : Conquistar el mismo grado de libertad e
independencia que el hombre para no verse obligadas al matrimonio.
11. E . D . E . N S O U T H W O R K (Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte) ( 1 8 1 9 - 1 8 9 9 ) :
Novela doméstica y sentimental al uso. De su primera novela Retribution
( 1 8 4 9 ) se vendieron 2 0 0 . 0 0 0 copias. Su novela más popular The Hidden
Hand (1859) presenta a Capitola una heroína masculinizada símbolo de
la «independent woman», que se ve envuelta en toda una serie de
aventuras. Escribió sesenta novelas.
seudónimo «Elizabeth Wetherell»: Marca
12. S U S A N W A R N E R ( 1 8 1 9 - 1 8 8 5 )
una nueva tendencia literaria con sus novelas domésticas y
melodramáticas de desarrollo moral. Ellen Montgomery: huérfana-
pobre-medio urbano versus medio rural-transición de la infancia a la
madurez-la fe como instrumento del éxito-su meta tener un hogar y una
familia, en The Wide, Wide World{\850), el libro más vendido de ese año
y el primero que vendió más de un millón de copias en U.S.A.
Unele Tom's Cabin ( 1 8 5 1 ) , un
13. H A R R I E T B E E C H E R S T O W E ( 1 8 1 1 - 1 8 9 6 ) :
auténtico «Best-seller» tanto en U.S.A como en Europa, el primer año se
vendieron más de 3 0 0 . 0 0 0 ejemplares; y Dred: A Tale ofthe Great Dismal
Swamp ( 1 8 5 6 ) , otra novela antiesclavista.
Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the
14. A N N S O P H L A S T E P H E N S ( 1 8 1 0 - 1 8 8 6 ) :
White Hunter ( 1 8 6 0 ) . Vendió más de 3 0 0 . 0 0 0 ejemplares y fue la
primera «dime novel»: novela de diez centavos.
The Morgesons {\8G1), «local colour»
15. E L I Z A B E T H S T O D D A R D ( 1 8 2 3 - 1 9 0 2 ) :
con tintes sexuales y una heroína conquistadora.
16. CAROLINECHESEBRO ( 1 8 2 5 - 1 8 7 3 ) : Isa ( 1 8 5 2 ) , The Ghildren of Light
( 1 8 5 3 ) y Getting Along ( 1 8 5 5 ) . Argumentos y personajes fememinos
poco convencionales otra mujer sustituye al hombre como pareja.
Novelas de corte sentimental, moral y
17. M A R Y J A N E H O L M E S ( 1 8 2 5 - 1 9 0 7 ) :
llenas de estereotipos: Tempest andSunshine {\85^), The English Orphans
( 1 8 5 5 ) y Lena Rivers ( 1 8 5 6 ) su obra más conocida y lacrimógena.
Escribió 3 9 novelas y vendió más de dos millones de ejemplares.
Gerty (ascenso): huérfana-bajos
18. M A R Í A S U S A N N A C U M M I N S ( 1 8 2 7 - 1 8 6 6 ) :
fondos-pobre-bondadosa y pura-recompensa-estabiüdad económica e
independencia, en The Lamplighter ( 1 8 5 4 ) ( 7 0 . 0 0 0 ejemplares en un
año) y Mabel (caída-ascenso): rica luego pobre-fortaleza y tenacidad-
emigrante al medio oeste-final feliz, en Mabel Vaugham ( 1 8 5 7 ) . Las dos
novelas fueron enormemente populares en su época.
184 EVOLUCIÓN DE LA FIGURA FEMENINA

19. HARRIET JACOBS (1813-1897), seudónimo «Linda Brem», escritora de

color: Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861). La
explotación física y sexual de las esclavas negras, su miedo, su indefensión
y la idea de no ser nunca libres y tener que estar siempre sometidas de
una forma u otra al hombre.
20. MARTHA FINLEY (seudónimo: «Martha Farquharson») (1828-1909): Elsi:
pía y extremadamente devota se debate entre el amor a Jesús y el amor a
su padre, en Elsi Dinsmore (1867) heroína sobre la que escribió 28
volúmenes entre 1867 y 1904, convirtiéndose en una serie novelada muy
popular entre los jóvenes.
21. EMILY DlCKINSON (1830-1886): nunca publicó su poesía en vida, la
primera publicación, aunque incompleta y manipulada, data de 1890 y
la totalidad de sus 1775 poemas se recoge en The Poems of Emily
Dickinson (1955), editados por Thomas H . Johnson.
22. REBECCAHARDING D A V I S (1831-1910): «Life in the Iron Mills»(1861) y

Margaret Howth (1862) novela industrial de corte realista. Waitingfor the

Verdict (1868) novela en favor de los negros.
23. LouiSA M A Y A L C O T T (1832-1888): La historia de cuatro hermanas: Meg,
Jo, Beth y Amy March en Littie Women (1869) un «best-seller».
24. AUGUSTA EVANS W I L S O N (1835-1909): Inez: A Tale ofthe Alamo (1855),
Macarla; or, The Altars of Sacrifice (1864) y la más famosa de todas
St. Elmo (1867) y su heroína Edna Earl que sueña con ser escritora,
prototipo de independencia, control, perseverancia, autosuficiencia y
religiosidad, logra redimir al perverso St. Elmo y se unen felizmente en
matrimonio. Una de las novelas más populares del siglo X I X que se
calcula leyeron alrededor de un millón de personas.
- H . J A M E S (1843-1916): Daisy Miller: americana-bella-rica- independien te-
sincera y coqueta-pese a las apariencias muere pura e inocente en Europa,
en Daisy Miller (1878). Isabel Archer: amcricana-su deseo de libertad y sus
desdenes le juegan una mala pasada-el matrimonio como trampa-el
sentido del deber conyugal frente a la pasión, en The Portrait of a Lady
(1881). Maisie: joven hija de un matrimonio divorciado se da cuenta de la
realidad mundana de la vida y a distinguir la moralidad de la inmoralidad,
en What Maisie knew^ (1897). The Governess (la gobernanta): las
frustraciones y sueños no cumplidos de una solterona, en «The Turn of the
Screw» (1898), «In the Cage» (1898). Nanda Brookenham: evolución de
la infancia a la madurez-libre-moderna-busca sensaciones de forma cabal-
salva a su madre, mundana y egoísta-llega al matrimonio y es feliz, en The
Awkward Age {1899).
JOSÉ MANUEL BARRIO MARCO 185

25. ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS W A R D (1844-1911): Novelas emocionales de

temática religiosa y corte moral que proyectan su consuelo en la vida
eterna: The Gates of Ajar (1868), Beyond the Gates (1883), The Gates
Between (1887).
26. SARAH O. J E W E T T (1849-1909): La protagonista anónima de A Country
Doctor (1884) renuncia al matrimonio para hacerse médico. Color local,
amplia descripción de ambientes y personajes en The Country of the
Pointedfirs (18%).
27. MARY E . W I L K I N S F R E E M A N (1852-1930): relatos de color local, realistas
con tintes sentimentales y morales. Louisa Ellis rechaza la aventura del
matrimonio por la comodidad y rutina doméstica que vive en «A New
England Nun» (1891); Sarah Penn, mujer fuerte y emprendedora salva a
su familia ante la debilidad de su marido, en «The Revolt of «Mother»»
(1891).
28. MARGARET DELAND (1857-1945): John Ward, Preacher (1888), las luchas
internas que sostiene un predicador mediatizado por una doctrina
calvinista y una mujer librepensadora. Sus dos mejores novelas: The
Awakening of Helena Richie (1906) la historia de una sufragista, y The
Iron Woman (1911) de fondo tradicional y conservador: exaltación del
matrimonio, la maternidad y la familia como pilares de la sociedad.
- S . C R A N E (1871-1900): Realismo Naturalista. Maggie: ambiente
familiar agobiante-pobre-seducida-abandonada-rechazada por la
familia-se prostituye-se degrada y se suicida, en Maggie: A Girl ofthe
Streets{\89?>).
29. KATE C H O P I N (1851-1904): Edna Pontellier: matrimonio-hijos-vida
cómoda-aburrimiento-pasión-sexualidad-deseo-adulterio-suicidio, en
The Aiaakening (1899). Calixta: matrimonio-pasión-adulterio-rutina, en
«The Storm» (1898) (1969).
30. CHARLOTTE P G I L M A N (1860-1935): Lider del movimiento feminista.
Jennie: la reclusión doméstica y la inmovilidad mental prescrita por el
médico y su marido vuelven loca a la protagonista, en «The Yellow
Wallpaper» (1890) (1899). Women and Economics (1898) ataque contra
la sociedad patriarcal, contra la dependencia material de las mujeres con
respecto a los hombres, y aspectos como la sexualidad y la maternidad
que se ven impulsados en detrimento de otras capacidades como las
intelectuales.
- T . D R E I S E R (1871-1945): Carrie Meeber: Pobre-provinciana-no ve
futuro en su trabajo-utiliza a los hombres-se deja seducir por dos veces-
abandona a sus amantes-triunfa en el teatro-estabilidad económica
186 EVOLUCIÓN DE LA FIGURA FEMENINA

pero soledad e insatisfacción, en Sister Carrie (1900) (1911). Novela de

corte realista que rompe con los convencionalismo sociales de la época
y que ante el escándalo que provocó fue retirada por los propios
editores en 1900. Jenny. seducida-embarazada-expulsada del hogar-de
nuevo amancebada-abandonada-alcanza la soledad como recompensa,
en Jenny Gerhardt (1911).

Siglo X X :

31. EDITH WHARTON (1862-1937): Lily Barth: débil-mundana-derrochadora-

marginación-suicidio, en The House of Mirth (1905). May Welland
(inocencia: américa): rica-tradicional-educada-sumisa-matrimonio y Ellen
Oienska (experiencia: europa): independiente-culta-mundana-abandona a
su marido, en The Age ofinnocence (l920).
32. GERTRUDE S T E I N (1874-1946): Anna: trabajo-deber-sacrificio-extenuación;
Melanctha: mulata-se entrega al hombre que ama-abandonada-muere sola;
Lena: sentimental-anodina-matrimonio-maternidad-muerte, en Three
Lives: Stories ofthe GoodAnna, Melanctha, and the Gentle Lena (1909).
33. WILLA CATHER (1873-1947): Antonia Shimerda: tenacidad-lucha contra
las adversidades-supera un abandono-tiene un hijo ilegítimo-se casa-
felicidad y más lucha, en My Antonia (1918). Mariana: mujer casada-
símbolo de virtud-enviuda-libera sus pasiones-dos amantes-falsa-sensual-
vulgar-nuevo matrimonio-recobra dignidad perdida, en A Lost Lady
(1923).
34. ELLEN G L A S G O W (1874-1945): Gabriella Carr: carácter casi masculino-
enérgica-vital-matrimonio-abandonada-abre un negocio-saca hijos
adelante-se casa otra vez-es feliz, en Life and Gabriella: The Story of a
Womans Courage (1916). Dorinda Oakley: la energía de una mujer para
salir adelante, tras una serie de fracasos familiares, personales y
sentimentales, en Barren Ground (1925). Ada Fincastle: amores
contrariados-tristeza-sufrimiento-matrimonio-viudedad-soledad, en Vein
ofiron (1935).
- ES. FnZGERALD (1896-1940: Daisy Buchanam en The Great Gatsby .
- W. F A U L K N E R (1897-1962): Caddy Compson en The Sound and the
Fury (1929), Temple Drake en Sanctiiary (1931), Temple Drake y
Nancy Manningoe en Réquiem for a Nun (1951).
- E . H E M I N G W A Y (1898-1961): Lady Brett Ashley en The Sun Also Rises
(1926), Catherine Barkley en A Farewell to Arms (1929), Margot en
«The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber» (1936), Helen en «The
Snows of Kilimanjaro» (1936).
JOSÉ MANUEL BARRIO MARCO 187

BiBLlOGRAPÍA

BANATA, MARTHA, Imaging American Women: Ideas and Ideáis in Cultural

History, New York, 1 9 8 7 .
BAYM, NINA, Womans Fiction: A Guide to the Novéis by and about Women in
America, 1820-1870, New York, Cornell U . E , 1978.
— La aparición de la mujer escritora en Emory Elliot (ed.). Historia de la
Literatura Norteamericana, Madrid, Cátedra, 1 9 9 1 .
C O N R A D , S U S A N R , Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic

America, 1 8 3 0 - 1 8 6 0 , Ney York, O.U.P., 1976.

DEGLER, CARL. At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution
to thePresent, Oxford, O.U.P., 1980.
FIEDLER, LESLIE A., Love and Death in the American Novel, Hardmondsworth,
Middlesex, England, Penguin Books, 1 9 8 0 ( 1 9 6 0 ) .
KELLEY, M A R Y . Prívate Women, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in
Nineteenth-Century America, New York, O.U.P., 1984.
KERBER, LINDA K., Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideologyin
Revolutionary America, Chapel Hill, N . C . , U . of N . Carolina E , 1 9 8 0 .
R A D W A Y , J A N I C E A . Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular

Literature, Chapel Hill, N . C . , U . of N . Carolina P, 1984.

SHOWALTER, ELAINE. In Sister's Cholee: Tradition and Change in American
Womens Writing, New York, Oxford University Press, 1 9 9 1 ( 1 9 8 9 ) .
MlNTER, DAVID. A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to
William Faulkner, Cambridge, C.U.P, 1 9 9 6 ( 1 9 9 4 ) .
NORTON, M A R Y B . , Liberty's Daughters: The revolutionary Experience of
American Women, 1750-1800, Boston, MA, Litde Brown, 1980.
 AMERICAN LITERARY REALISM AND NATURALISM

Dr. José Manuel Barrio

University of Valladolid

Realism and Naturalism occurred earlier in Europe than in

America. Realism rose in France from the late 1850’s and Naturalism to
the late 1880’s with authors like Flaubert and Zola. Realism and
Naturalism in American Literature flourished between the Civil War
(1865) and World War I (1914). Main authors of the American Literary
Realism: Mark Twain (Local color realism), W. D. Howells (Realism of
Middle Class), Henry James (International realism of High class and Moral
realism). Naturalism is an extreme form of realism. Main authors of
American Literary Naturalism: Crane, London, Norris, Dreiser were the
most relevant names. There is a major problem in the use of the terms
realism and naturalism because there could be semantic confusions and
we can associate these terms to a literary analysis or to a philosophical
discourse considering what is real, or the ethical implications of what is
natural.

As it is known, American writers always added new literary features

when they adopted and adapted those European Literary Movements to
their literary works, and in short, it is now generally held that American
realism and naturalism are not like the European varieties. It was the same
during the romantic period when American writers merged romanticism
and transcendentalism.

Before the Civil War, the plot of major novels had ignored current
affairs of the ordinary life and society, but afterwards, the country began
to experiment great changes, not only from a political point of view, but
also by the rapid industrialization and urbanization of America. Those
changes involved a “revolutionary progress” and this general progress
affected American society from an economic, social, material, and

1
intellectual point of view and the evolution of literature in this situation of
general progress was to reject the old values of the past in favor of those
new ones of the present. In other words, American writers after the Civil
War rejected ROMANTIC features (heroism, idealism and sentimentalism)
and those formulas of the early American fiction, in favor of a REALISTIC
AESTHETIC: “All is to be true and honest in fiction” and “Nothing is
absolute, all is relative”. These new writers “felt a mission to displace
fiction that inspired destructive fantasy through paragons of courage,
honesty, or chaste courtship.” (Pizer,37) But what about the role of
readers?

“The average American has no time to read anything but news-

papers, while his daughters have an abundance of time at their disposal,
and a general disposition to employ it in anything that is amusing.”
(Pizer,37)

This is the reason why hundreds and hundreds of domestic and

sentimental novels were sold during the nineteenth century in the States.
Despite of this attack of “realistic vocation” of some male writers the
sentimental romance in its several varieties sold by far the best, and all
the “best sellers” in that century were written by women.

AMERICAN LITERARY REALISM

The problem of definition. The use of the terms real and realistic
implies their antitheses, like unreal, unrealistic, fantastic, improbable, or
fanciful. All these adjectives were related to Romanticism and the
Romance novel before the Civil War. “As it initially appeared in French
aesthetic theory, “realism” designated an art based on the accurate,
unromanticized observation of life and nature, an art often defiant of
prevailing convention” (Sundquist,502). In literature, realism is the
portrayal of life with fidelity. It is thus not concerned with idealization,
with rendering things as beautiful when they are not, or in any way
presenting them in any guise as they are not. Overall, one tends to think

2
of realism in terms of the everyday, the normal and the pragmatic, but it is
a tendency of art to approximate reality. Some critics and scholars set the
beginning of the realist American novel in 1872, when W. D. Howells
published The Wedding Journey, in any case, Howells is the “intellectual
father” of American realism.

This Realistic fiction is often opposed to romantic fiction. The

romance-novel in America before the Civil War presents life more
picturesque, more adventurous, more heroic than the actual, while
Realism presents a more accurate imitation of life as it is. But this last
statement is not exact, because the typical realist sets out to write fiction
which will give the illusion that if reflects life and the social world as it
seems to the common reader. But the subject is represented in such a way
as to give the reader the illusion of actual and ordinary experience. To
achieve this effect realist authors prefers to use in their plots common
citizens of middle class living in towns and cities or those ones engaged in
the real estate business. Realist writers are deliberately selective in
material and prefer the average, the commonplace, and the everyday over
the rarer aspects of the social scene. But this realism of middle-class was
very conservative because omitted the negative sense of human nature
and, also those negative aspects of social life that were considered
“barbaric” or inappropriate. This Realistic Literature did not deal with
crime and abnormalities, nor with sexuality or social problems, dealt with
the love of honest men for honest women, with the dull heroism of labor,
with industrialization, with the national progress and with familiar,
patriotic, and democratic values, being moderative and conservative in
the treatment of sexual and political themes. There are not radical
implications in Realism, because represents middle-class taste and values.
People in general living a life very far from literary heroism, people living
through ordinary experiences of childhood, adolescence, love, marriage,
parenthood, fidelity, and death, who find life rather dull and often
unhappy. At the beginning, these realistic conventions were rejected by
popular audiences, because they were very fond of that romantic idealism
common to the romance-novel:

“..what Howells called the “opium-eating of conventional romantic fiction”. The

whole business of love, and lovemaking and marrying, is painted by novelists in a
3
monstrous disproportion to the other relations of life”, says reverend Dr. Sewell in The
Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), a novel that attacks sentimental self-indulgence in love as
fiercely as it does corruption and dishonesty in business.” (Sundquist,506).

Though in the second part of the 19th century there was an evident
evolution and migration from rural areas to new urban areas, we can
appreciate a sensation of nostalgia in some authors and readers, who are
interested in “discovering” social and cultural perspectives of the country.
In this period of realism, there was a proliferation and general acceptance
of “Local Color Realism”, “Regionalism” or “regional novels”. This literary
branch of realism depicted the detailed representation in fiction of
setting, dialect, customs, manners, dress, and ways of thinking, speaking,
and feeling which are distinctive of a particular region. A regional writer is
one who concentrates much attention on a particular area and its people.

“Local color records in part the rustic border world rendered exotic by
industrialization but now made visible and nostalgically charged by the nation’s
inexorable drive toward cohesion and standardization.” (Sundquist,509).

In this period an important number of American writers exploited

this local color in their writings, such as Mark Twain (The Mississippi
region), Bret Harte (The West), Hamlin Garland (The Midwest), Kate
Chopin (New Orleans), or Sarah Orne Jewett (New England) among
others.

Characteristics of realist characters. The effectiveness of

deliberation, choice and acceptance are the most important features of
realist characters in fiction, because they always accept their responsibility
for a bad decision and its consequences. Maybe, for that reason, the
realist character has a tragic stature, which the naturalistic hero lacks.
“Precisely because the realist hero might always act differently in
circumstances that destroy him, he can attain a tragic stature.”
(Mitche,531).

While realist characters suffer the drama of choice, naturalist

characters suffer the drama of coercion (determinism). Realist characters
resist the conditions that press upon them and act according to their
motives and desires. They are the owners of their destiny and take their

4
own decisions with moderation, self-control, and responsibility, we can
say they rule their own lives.

“..any sure evidence of effective choice, of free will or autonomous action,

makes a novel something other than naturalistic. Realist texts present a wide variety of
individuals, but each one has the ability to choose, and characteristically does so
through scenes that enact a process of deliberation -a weighing of alternative actions
through a consideration of consequences.” (Mitchel,530)

We observe in a realist character a kind of ordinary and moral

heroism, “none of them behaves as one might have predicted on the basis
merely of circumstances…the kind of character familiar to realism is a
more or less unifies self, subjectively whole and self-consistent.”
(Mitchel,531)

The morality of Realist characters obeys to a certain religious point

of view, because a religious man or woman are always responsible of
their acts and behaviors, they are coherent with their decisions and
responsibilities because they have free will, but from the amoral point of
view of a Naturalist character, man was not responsible of his acts in a
world he had not made. Yet in the mind of some realistic writers some
aspects of the naturalist nihilism and determinism appeared, for
example, in this quotation of Mark Twain’s novel, A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur’s Court (1889):

“Training-training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of

nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading
name is merely hereditary and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions
of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us.” (Eliot, 525)

Literary characteristics of American Realism:

1º. Realism observes and documents contemporary life and

everyday scenes as objectively as possible. The realist novelists paid
particular attention to exact documentation to depict the facts right.

5
 2º. The subject is represented, or “rendered”, in such a way as to
give the reader the illusion of actual and ordinary experience.

3º. Realist characters enjoy of “Free Will” and were autonomous

agents responsible for their behavior.

4º. W.D. Howells tried to avoid the use of an omniscient narrator,

that implies familiarity with the character’s livings and inner thoughts or
feelings, because this technique produces a false sense of psychological
deepening and lack of realism. He preferred an implicit description,
where characters’ traits were given implicitly through the own character’s
actions or other characters’ attitudes to them.

5º. Realist writers used characters form all social levels: Mark Twain
(picaresque characters, uneducated), W. D. Howells (Middle class
characters), Henry James (Upper class characters).

6º. Some of them reproduce the manners and the flavor of the
colloquial speech in their dialogues. Mark Twain (Local color realism and
sociolinguistic realism) used colloquial American language to capture the
rhythms of American speech that accurately reflected regional
differences. Twain was also a master of humor.

7º. Henry James is a master of the ambiguity, his style is more

pompous and sophisticated like his upper-class characters, reflecting the
status and manners of that society, and his characters’ states of mind. He
dramatized the way the mind perceives reality, and consequently he has
been often considered a psychological realist, because he was one of the
first using “stream of consciousness” in literature (psychological realism
and international novel).

8º. William Dean Howells wrote novels that were almost

sociological (sociological realism and regional novel) in their emphasis on
everyday details, on how people dressed, spoke, ate, and so. He strove to
avoid melodrama and sought a plain style aimed at recording, rather than
heightening reality, but he was very conservative and always avoided in
his works the dark side of life and human nature.

6
 9º. We must consider that due to its conservatism the realist novel
usually leads us to an end, where harmony is re-established and the
maintenance of a conventional social order is ensured, regardless of the
tragic ending or not of the characters, because the society is above the
individual. The realist character is only expected to accept the
consequences of his or her own actions.

10º. American realism in general terms is very conservative, moral,

and didactic.

The country suffered after the Civil War and during the second half
of the 19th century great changes. A migratory movement from small
villages and towns (rural life) to the new cities (urban life), from the
American wilderness to the American metropolis, from the American
Dream (idealism) to the American Way of Life (pragmatism and
materialism). This industrialization and economic progress turned America
again into a “New Promise Land of Labor and opportunities” at the end of
the 19th century, what produced great migrations from Europe and other
parts of the World to this new American pragmatic paradise, but the
newcomers began to live in the suburbs or ghettos of that “Paradise”. This
rapid industrialization produced social injustices, racial and class
antagonism. In this transition from the end of the Civil War 1865 to the
1890s “lies the substance and spirit of the purest American Literary
Realism”. In this realism of Middle class an important bulk of fiction (the
novel of business) was devoted to describing the evolution of the country,
reflecting the development of economic life in industrial cities,
competitive business, economic success, pragmatism, materialism, and
political corruption:

“Such a diversity of responses to the problems of labor and technological

progress indicates that no one strategy of “realism” seemed adequate to portrait the
effects of this new capitalism across the spectrum of American life.” (Sundquist,520).

This inadequacy of realist writers to describe the harshness of social

reality of those times produced a change in the literary perspectives and
literary naturalism was the response to realism.

7
 AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Naturalism arose only after absorbing the insights of realism and

American writers were especially stimulated by British and French models.
The French novelist Émile Zola, during the 1870s, did much to develop this
theory in what he called “le roman experimental”, that is, the novel
organized in the mode of a scientific experiment. While he was touting
his first novel Teresa Raquin (1868), he summarized the most relevant
features of future literary naturalism:

“I choose characters completely dominated by their nerves and their blood,

deprived of free will, pushed to each action of their lives by the fatality of their flesh”
(Elliot,525).

The principal intellectual influences that contributed to the

development of naturalism in the 19th century were the following ones:

The French philosopher August Comte’s theory of positivism and his

concept of sociology and social evolution in his work, A General View of
Positivism (1848).

Charles Darwin’s biological theory in his work On the Origin of the

Species (1859). Naturalistic thesis is a product of post-Darwinian biology in
the mid-nineteenth century. Darwin’s theory held that:

“A human being belongs entirely in the order of nature and does not have a
soul or any other mode of participation in a religious or spiritual world beyond nature.
That such a being is therefore merely a higher-order animal whose character and
fortunes are determined by two kinds of forces, heredity, and environment. A person
inherits personal traits and compulsive instincts, especially hunger, the accumulative
drive and sex, and then is subject to the social and economic forces in the family, the
class, and the milieu into which that person is born.” (Abrams,153)

Darwinian evolutionary theory describes the mechanism of natural

selection and reproduction under the influence of biological and
environmental forces that determine our traits and “the survival of the
8
fittest”. “Homo may act far less from sapience then from instinct, that
physical needs may override (nullify) the conscience, that life is a chancy
(unpredictable) process rather than a path toward redemption.” (29).
Man, as a victim. A toy in the hands of destiny.

This theory went further when Darwinism and Scientism replaced

the traditional religious and humanistic world view with one holding the
primacy of science over religion, and mythical or spiritual interpretations
of life.

The French historian H. A. Taine in History of English Literature

1864) was the first one in the application of scientific deterministic
theories to literature and he was the chief theoretical influence of Emile
Zola’s French Naturalism. Taine applied a scientific demonstration to
support his peculiar Theory of Criticism. According to him every writer is
governed by dominant principles of race, “position” and age, and those
external forces and circumstances modify man’s genius and its
development. Race is related to the innate and hereditary dispositions
implanted in a man at birth and to which are usually associated marked
peculiarities in frame and temperament. By position, he understands the
part of the earth whereon man lives, and the various accidents of politics
and social status by which is affected. Social Darwinism: argued human
races possessed distinguishing traits that determined their behavior and
achievement. Social Darwinism was a popular creed at that time in the
States, promulgated by Herbert Spencer, under the influence of Taine.

The rise of Literary Naturalism in America in the 1890s came

together with a social and moral degradation that was produced by the
rapid industrializing and technological development of America, an
agrarian nation became an industrial one in a short period of time. A
boom in population due to the influence of immigrants that produce social
dislocations, economic depressions in 1876 and 1893, and a social shock
between economic progress, poverty, and political scandals. The
American traditional religious Faith (idealism) was replaced by a
scientific and economic discourse (pragmatism) based on a secular belief
in progress and economic development. The irrelevance and weakness of
the individual, the strength of the society and the fight against the
9
economic forces of capitalism, materialism, and pragmatism produced a
deterministic view of the American society. This was the social landscape
at the end of the nineteenth century in the United States and naturalist
writers believed that individuals were shaped by society and that their
actions had to be understood in terms of how the society and their biology
formed them. Naturalism thus challenged the concepts of free will and
showed the material conditions of the past and present largely controlling
the behavior of individuals. Realism was conservative and Naturalism was
reactionary; Realism was moral, and Naturalism concentrated on the
physical and animal aspects in man’s nature.

Literary naturalism developed out of realism in the 1890s and it is

claimed to be an even more accurate picture of life than realism. But
naturalism is not only, like realism, a special selection of subject matter
and a special literary manner. It is a mode of fiction that was developed by
a group of writers (“never a school of writers”) in accordance with a
particular philosophical thesis. Properly speaking, it should be used to
describe works of literature which use realistic methods and subjects to
convey a philosophical form of naturalism, it is to say, a belief that
everything that exists is a part of nature and can be explain only by natural
and material causes and not by supernatural, spiritual, or paranormal
causes:

“The novelist’s task was to undertake a social or scientific study, recording

facts, styles and systems of behavior, living conditions, the workings of institutions,
and deducing the underlying processes of environmental, genetic and historical-
evolutionary development. Naturalism was thus realism scientized, systematized,
taken finally beyond realist principles of fidelity to common experience or of
humanistic exploring of individual lives within the social and moral web to an
experiment in the laws of social and biological existence.” (Bradbury,9)

Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodor Dreiser, or Jack London in

America tried to depict their subjects with an objective scientific and
materialistic attitude, “but the American naturalists seem to have little
more in common than their historical context.” (Clark Mitchell, 525). They
tend to choose characters who exhibit strong animal drives such as
greed and sexual desire, and who are victims both of their glandular
secretions within (internal forces) and of sociological pressures outside
10
(external forces). The end of a naturalistic short story or novel is usually
tragic, because the protagonist of the naturalistic plot is a victim of
multiple compulsions that usually disintegrates him or her. In this
naturalistic context all the literary characters were ruled by the
principles of determinism in its different varieties: social and
environmental, biological (heredity and innate traits), economic, social, or
psychological. These characters are not independent, the lack of “Free
Will” and opportunities is the main reason of their misfortunes, and they
are ruled by “the hand of fate”, that is because naturalist characters suffer
the drama of coercion. They are predestinated to their tragical endings
from the very beginning, they are toys in the hands of destiny and are
victims of the “dynamic forces and the “magnetic attraction” that
constrain their actions from within as well as from without.

“The concept of determinism inspired new narrative conceptions of setting and

character, and by the turn of the century four American authors had incorporated
these possibilities into their work. Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, and
Theodore Dreiser each began by rejecting certain illusions about individual choice-
illusions elaborately sustained in the popular tradition of literary romance. Instead,
they depicted experience in completely material terms." (Clark Mitchell, 534-535).

Those writers mention above were journalists during a long or short

period in their lives, so the influence of journalism in their literary careers
was relevant. Crane (War Correspondent in Mexico and in Cuba); Norris
(War Correspondent in the Boer War in South Africa and in Cuba); London,
as a journalist, wrote about the Russo-Japanese War and Mexico War;
Dreiser as a journalist wrote a great many works of journalism during his
life: “I went into newspaper work” at the age of twenty “and from that
time dates my real contact with life – murders, arson, rape, sodomy,
bribery, corruption, trickery and false witness in every conceivable form.
But finally, I got used to the game and rather like it.” (Prizer,39).
Journalism offered them the real dark side of life, and they took profit of
it.

But the four writers mentioned above produced “divergent

understandings of determinism”. Stephen Crane (1871-1900) merged in
some of his works impressionism (The Red Badge of Courage 1895) and
naturalism, but he always offered a nihilistic perspective in his literature.
11
Crane depicted the world as inherently amoral and irredeemable, and
human endeavor comes to seem futile (nihilism). Maggi: A girl of the
Streets (1893), the first naturalist novel in the History of American
Literature, is a contrastive impressionist experiment in misery, where we
can see the sordidness coercion of the urban and familiar environment, a
dark nihilist vision of the human effort that provokes a pessimistic
determinism that ruled most of Crane’s works.

Frank Norris (1870-1902) was more optimistic than Crane, though

he showed a biological determinism in MacTeague (1899,) where he
portraited the more brutal aspects of human nature and the same in
Vandover the Brute (1914). His characters are victims of terrible hereditary
forces associated with their instincts. But we can appreciate sociological
naturalism, economic forces and social Darwinism in The Octopus (1901),
one of his finest works, where Norris sum up his determinist credo:

“Falseness dies; injustice and oppression in the end of everything fade and
vanish away. Greed, cruelty, selfishness, and inhumanity are short-lived; the individual
suffers but the race goes on. Annixter dies, but in a far-distant corner of the world a
thousand lives are saved. The larger view always and though all shams, all wickedness,
discovers the truth that will, in the end, prevail, and all things surely, inevitably,
resistlessly work together for good.” (Elliott,539)

Jack London (1876-1916) was a self-made man, an active socialist,

and a hybridization of socialism, naturalism, and social determinism. In all
his plots embodied his philosophical and political ideas. His short stories
first appeared collected in The Son of the Wolf (1900). As we have seen,
characters in naturalistic novels are determined by forces beyond their
control, but London in his most famous novels chose dogs as main
protagonists, The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), also in his
finest short story “To Build a Fire” (1908):
“London occasionally avoided this problem by using dogs as central figures, making
questions of deliberation and free will seem to disappear. And by doing so, the consequences
of heredity, temperament defines, and innate capacity were more easily isolated allowing
success in these fictions to be simply defined as an adaptation to circumstances. A
coordination of inner energy and external force.” (Elliott, 541)

London believed that the true nature of a human being might not
be revealed except in the struggle against nature, as we can see in “To
12
Build a Fire”, or in the social struggle against totalitarianism in The Iron
Wheel (1908).

Theodor Dreiser (1871-1945) showed in his works his own system

of naturalist hybridization, different from the other major naturalist
writers:
“In Dreiser’s novels, impersonal energies always engulf desire, which becomes cause
for neither the nihilism of Crane nor the enthusiasm assurance of Norris. Success and failure
merely form opposite sides of the same coin, and while some characters live comfortably, even
virtuously, none possess traits that might sustain a consistent self. Because everyone acts
directly in response of impulses and temptations, no one is left able to deliberate or choose.”
(Elliott, 543)

Sister Carrie (1900), Dreiser’s first novel, produced a literary

revolution in editors, critics, and readers, because Carrie Meeber, as a
heroine broke the rules of the domestic and sentimental novels, she was
not going to be an easy victim for that society. Carry prevails by using her
sexuality and her physical appeal as weapons to get all her materials
desires and personal aspirations, and the victims will be men. Behaving in
that way, he challenges the rules of a patriarchal society and mocks
conventional religious beliefs. Carrie is incapable of feeling guilt or
considering herself a “fallen woman”. Dreiser’s literary strategies were to
write the story of a young woman without using sentimentality, without
moralizing and to achieve a “happy end”, because the protagonist does
not suffer the traditional punishment. This brutal vision of how a woman
could achieve success in America outrage the reading public and the
publishing industry. Dreiser in this novel is breaking stereotypes and
opening the “literary door” to anew female heroine. This new woman will
be independent, sophisticated, liberal, and materialist, with full capacity
to destroy men.

No less important was An American Tragedy (1925), based on a real

case of murder, this one was a great literary success, that surpassed the
achievement of Sister Carrie. The leitmotiv of the action is the pursuit of
the American Dream of Success by Clyde, who is a dreamer seeking his
fortune, but he becomes a “murderer”.

13
 “The American fiction of the 1890s, also expanded the essential
territory of American fiction, and here we see the beginnings of the city
novel, the business novel, the immigrant novel, the Jewish-American
novel, the black novel, and the feminist novel.” (Bradbury, 21)

Some literary strategies, techniques, and themes in Naturalism.

- The awakening of the instincts

- Freedom and crudity of expression.
- Pragmatic and materialistic values.
- Sexual themes, prostitution, seduction.
- The Survival of the fittest.
- Violence, passion, and death.
- Decadence.
- Materialism, pessimism, determinism, and nihilism.
- Multi-perspectivism.
- Impressionism.
- Expressionism.
- The relation of human nature to that of the lower animals. The
result is the use and abuse of animalistic metaphors, similes and
comparisons associated with the behavior of the characters.
- The relation between nature (the seasons of the year, clime, and
weather) and the awakening of human instincts.
- Unpredictable events: but those unpredictable events lead to the
indecent or the shocking.
- The subject matter deals with those raw and unpleasant
experiences: alcoholism, drugs, sexual abuse, etc.
- The traditional setting is urban: suburbs, ghettos, depressed
homesteads, corporations, department stores, etc.
- New York City is the naturalist city of brothels, struggles,
conflicts, and the Bowery the great reference. A Darwinian
Jungle.
- Characters are mostly from the lower middle or the lower
classes, and in general terms, they are unheroic, poor,
uneducated, and unsophisticated.
14
- Female characters are “objects of desire” like toys in dangerous
hands. The exception is Dreiser’s Carrie, the first protagonist who
is using her female weapons to use men in her own benefit.
- Naturalist strategies for structuring plots and representing time:
“Naturalism, with its thematic emphasis on the conflict between
the relentless movement of time and characters’ impotent
resistance to that movement, generally presents its sequence of
events in straightforward chronological order.” (Prize,224)
- Melodramatic or tragic endings: murderers, suicides, etc.
- Objectivism: the naturalist writer is simply a recorder of what
happens without much judgement or interpretation. Readers are
“witnesses” of those events and they draw their own conclusions
and form their opinions. An excellent example is Stephen Crane’s
novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.

Bibliographical References:

Abrams, M.H., A Glossary of Literary Terms, Holt, Rinehart and

Winston, Inc. Orlando, 1988.

Bradbury, Malcolm, The Modern American Novel, Oxford & New

York, Oxford University Press, 1992.

Elliott, Emory (ed.) Columbia Literary History of the United

States, New York, Columbia University Press, 1988.

Pizer, Donald, American realism, and Naturalism: Howells to

London, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

15
 Samuel L. Clemens (MARK TWAIN) (1835-1910)

The Celebrated Jumping frog of Calaveras County (Saturday Post, November 18th,
1865) carried him to fame.

In 1867 he travelled to Europe and the Holy Land. The innocents Abroad (1869)
Roughing it (1872) a humorous narrative of his early travels out West.
The Gilded Age (1873) a satirical novel of the post-Civil War era.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
The Prince the Pauper (1882)
Life in the Mississippi (1883)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)
Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)
Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)

The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900)

William Dean Howells (1837-1920)

The Wedding Journey (1872)

A Modern Instance (1882) a novel of manners dealing with large social issues. Depicts
a society in which traditional, religious, and family values are disintegrated by
commercial influences.
The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)
A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) The City contrasts of wealth and poverty and the
brutal treatment of striking workers.

Familiar Spanish Travels (1913). He came to Spain with his daughter in 1911.

From a critical point of view Howells is considered the father of American Realism but
his literary fame was overshadowed by Mark Twain and Henry James.
Henry James (1843-1916)

The American (1877)

The Europeans (1878)

Daisy Miller (1879)

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1879) A biography.
Washington Square (1880)
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
The Bostonians (1886)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

The Wings of the Dove (1902)
The Golden Bowl (1904)
The Ambassadors (1903)
AMBROSE BIERCE (1842- 1914?)

He was an excellent short short-story writer and became a very famous journalist
in his times. He went to England in 1872, where he lived and wrote until 1876. He started
his career as a journalist in San Francisco where he met and was a friend of Mark Twain
and Bret Harte. Bierce was a man of William Randolph Hearst, the great media mogul in
those United States, working for him in the San Francisco Sunday Examiner from 1886
to 1896 and later as a correspondent for Heart’s papers in Washington D.C. in 1897. He
was also another self-made man; his only formal schooling was one year in a military
academy in Kentucky. He fought in the American Civil War and reach the rank of
Lieutenant- major, during the war he was involved in several bloody battles, considering
his part as a soldier as little more than that of a paid assassin. One of these battles was
Chickamauga Creek (Tennessee). The thirty-four casualties made this battle one of the
bloodiest of the war. His Civil War experience was an important source of some of his
best fiction, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891), a collection of stories that has been
said to share Edgar Allan Poe’s macabre sensibility, where we discover defeat,
disillusionment, pessimism, nihilism, and black humor, some features that Stephen
Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (1895) inherited from Bierce. Bierce descriptions of
characters and scenes come from the realism he had learned from journalism, though
naturalism is also present in his raw descriptions and the use of instincts to survive. In
this collection of stories two of the best are Chickamauga and An Occurrence at Owl
Creek Bridge, a story that was a great influence for Ernest Hemingway in an episode of
A Farewell to Arms (1929) and in the outcome of The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1938).

Bierce developed a crude black humor plenty of irony, satire, cynicism, and
bitterness (his popular nickname was “Bitter Bierce”, and his sardonic style is in The
Devil’s Dictionary (1911)), his fiction is an attempt to scape and reject a society that he
detested. Perhaps his fascination with the supernatural is his own way of escaping from
that sad reality. Bierce suffered the influence and heritage of Poe’s poetry in Black
Beetles in Amber (1892), and Poe’s prose fiction pessimism, fondness of the grotesque,
“blackness of darkness”, and dark humor, very common in the Western and Southern
States. All these features above can be seen in Bierce`s gothic book, Can Such Things
Be? (1893), and his ghost stories, horrifying episodes and phantasmagories are in stories
like “The Damned Thing”, The Death of Halpin Frayser”, “Beyond the Wall”, “Some
Haunted Houses” or “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. Ambrose Bierce’s
supernatural stories have been read by generations of American and British readers. For
Poe and Bierce, the ultimate source of terror was the human mind. The general
characteristics we can appreciate in all Bierce’s literary works are his prose surprise
endings, and his strange twists in the action.

His last months of life are a mystery nowadays, in 1813 when he was 72 years
old, he decided to give his support to the Mexican Revolution, he crossed the country
and he joined to Pancho Villa’s army to fight against General Victoriano Huerta. But the
result was he disappeared without a trace, and it is not known when or how he died, in
a mood that is as mysterious and disturbing as his own best fiction.
 MAJOR AMERICAN NATURALIST WRITERS

STEPHEN CRANE (1871-1900)

American novelist, short story writer and journalist in the Tribune and in the
Herald in New York. He was a War-correspondent in the Graeco-Turkish war in 1897
and in the Spanish-American war in Cuba in 1899. The language of his novels and
stories is colloquial, following the language of journalism, simple and coordinated
sentences, repetitions, enumerations, and ordinary dialogues ruled by pure
objectivism. Impressionism and multi-perspectivism are his main features of style,
together with materialism, pessimism, determinism, and nihilism. He is considered the
most nihilistic of the naturalist group of American writers. During his short literary
career, no more than six years, because he died of tuberculosis at the age of 29, he
wrote two excellent novels:

- Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) (under pen name: Johnston Smith,
published in a private edition) is considered the first American naturalist novel,
though was not widely noticed at that time, and after four revisions was
republished in 1896. Crane offered in Maggie a sordid and brutal image of the
suburbs of New York and an over-realistic vision of that society.
- The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a novel about the experience and
transformation of a soldier during the American Civil War. it is not properly a
traditional war novel, but despite of it was an immediate critical and popular
success and is Crane’s major work. it is a psychological novel, a psychological
study of the effects of fear in the mind and behavior of a soldier, where we can
see the doubts, fear, and cowardice of Henry Fleming a young soldier, who
becomes a hero at the end of the novel. Henry at the beginning has a romantic
vision of the war, he is not there for political or ideological reasons, he is a
romantic ignorant and he is going to be a victim of his own strategies of survival
(a deserter soldier and a hero), he learns that in a war the only strategy is to
survive, the survival of the fittest, and it is his instinct the real protagonist of his
cowardice and heroism, this is the naturalist paradox of this novel. Henry’s fear
is what moves and pushes him back (coward) and forth (hero). It is all about
instinct and survival, action, reaction. The red badge of courage is firstly the red
badge of dishonor, and due to Henry’s moral problems he is going to change his
destiny, when he decides to return to his regiment. But the fate is also the co-
protagonist of the action when he is injured by another deserter soldier of his
own regiment. In any case realism, naturalism and impressionism are the main
stylistic features of this novel.

- The Open Boat and Other Stories (1898)

- The Monster (1898) a collection of his most highly regarded short stories
THEODORE DREISER (1871-1945)

American novelist, and journalist, known for his naturalistic portrayal of American
life and the tragic effects of materialism and luxury.

- Sister Carrie (1900) was Dreiser’s first novel, where he described a young
working girl’s rise to success and her slow decline, and it became one of the
most famous novels in literary history. But on a first try the novel after selling
500 copies was rejected by the editor for its unconventional subject matter and
its depiction of American life. Dreiser in this novel allowed vice to be rewarded
instead of punished and this was a scandal. The novel was reissued in England
in 1901, having condensing 200 pages into 80, and in the States in 1907 and
1912, but it was not until 1981 when the work was published in original form.
Dreiser wrote this story without using sentimentality and he did not moralize,
His brutal vision of how a woman could achieve success in America outraged
the reading public and the publishing industry. Carrie is following her instincts
to survive and using her female weapons to challenge the rules of society and
mock conventional religious beliefs. She prevails by using her sexuality and
seducing men (Charles and later George Hurstwood). The way in which Dreiser
is using the role of sex in human relations, the power of Carrie and her physical
appeal are the keys for her successful career, but she fails to find complete
happiness.

- An American Tragedy (1925) is a novel about the pursuit of the American

dream of success (the American Way of Life). Clyde seduces a young factory
worker, Roberta, who becomes pregnant, while Clyde falls in love with a rich
girl, Sondra. Roberta is going to die in a strange accident in a lake and Clyde is
accused of her murder. The novel traces the investigation of the case, the trials,
conviction, and execution of Clyde.
JACK LONDON (1876-1916)

American novelist and a self-made man who became a writer and a journalist
through persistence and ambition after living a childhood of poverty and struggle.
When he was 10 years old, he started to earn his living in different activities and jobs,
though much of his youth was spent on the wrong side of the law. At 17 he became a
sailor on a sealing boat that took him to the Artic and Japan, at 18 he toured America
and Canada and at 21, London joined the Klondike gold rush. He began his literary
career in 1898, writing about his various experiences. At 29 in 1905, he was the most
famous, most widely read, and wealthiest author in America, during his career he
earned over a million dollars, but his life was one of luxury, waste, drug abuse and
dipsomania, he was a socialist victim of his economic success and the commercial
civilization that he deplored. He died at the age of 40, perhaps a suicide. His
philosophy of life was that the true nature of a human being might not be revealed
except in the struggle against nature and in his novels of adventure in the Klondike
presents an authentic portrayal of a cold frontier world.

- The Call of the Wild (1903)

- The Sea-Wolf (1904) London memories of his sea voyages.
- White Fang (1906)
- The Iron Wheel (1907)
- “To Build a Fire” (1908)
- Martin Eden (1909) his autobiography.
FRANK NORRIS (1870-1902)

He studied in Paris and later in the University of California and in Harvard. He

would become the first practitioner of Zola literary method in America. He was a
journalist, and a war-correspondent in Cuba in 1898.

Frank Norris described the most brutal aspects of human nature. His
naturalism is going to describe the dark side of human nature, but it is a strange
synthesis of realism and romanticism, where he added pessimism, materialism,
determinism, and nihilism. Biological heritage, innate and hereditary instincts, the
mystery of sex, violence, degeneration, madness, and criminality. The most
naturalist of his novels was McTeague, where the protagonists are driven by the evil
effects of sexual desire, sadism, masochism, hereditary alcoholism, material greed,
(avarice), envy, anger, and primitivism.

McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899) (In men and women there are two
personalities ruled by primitivism (primitive) and evolution (evolved).

Suddenly the animal in the man stirred and woke; the evil instincts that in him were
so close to the surface leaped to life, shouting and clamoring.

It was a crisis—a crisis that had arisen all in an instant; a crisis for which he was
totally unprepared. Blindly, and without knowing why, McTeague fought against it,
moved by an unreasoned instinct of resistance. Within him, a certain second self,
another better McTeague rose with the brute; both were strong, with the huge crude
strength of the man himself. The two were at grapples (fighting). There in that cheap
and shabby "Dental Parlor" a dreaded struggle began. It was the old battle, old as the
world, wide as the world—the sudden panther leap of the animal, lips drawn, fangs a
flash, hideous, monstrous, not to be resisted, and the simultaneous arousing of the
other man, the better self that cries, "Down, down," without knowing why; that grips
the monster; that fights to strangle it, to thrust it down and back.

Dizzied and bewildered with the shock, the like of which he had never known before,
McTeague turned from Trina, gazing bewilderedly about the room. The struggle was
bitter; his teeth ground themselves together with a little rasping sound; the blood sang
in his ears; his face flushed scarlet; his hands twisted themselves together like the
knotting of cables. The fury in him was as the fury of a young bull in the heat of high
summer. But for all that he shook his huge head from time to time, muttering:

"No, by God! No, by God!"

……….. Suddenly he leaned over and kissed her, grossly, full on the mouth. The thing
was done before he knew it. Terrified at his weakness at the very moment he believed
himself strong, he threw himself once more into his work with desperate energy. By
the time he was fastening the sheet of rubber upon the tooth, he had himself once
more in hand. He was disturbed, still trembling, still vibrating with the throes of the
crisis, but he was the master; the animal was downed, was cowed for this time, at
least.

But for all that, the brute was there. Long dormant, it was now at last alive, awake.
From now on he would feel its presence continually; would feel it tugging at its chain,
watching its opportunity. Ah, the pity of it! Why could he not always love her purely,
cleanly? What was this perverse, vicious thing that lived within him, knitted to his
flesh?

…To reason with it was beyond him. He could only oppose to it an instinctive
stubborn resistance, blind, inert.

Trina (McTeague’s wife): (They won a prize of lottery)

One evening she had been spread all the gold pieces between the sheets, and
had then gone to bed, stripping herself, and had slept all night upon the money,
taking a strange and ecstatic pleasure in the touch of the smooth flat pieces the
length of her entire body.

The Octopus (1901): (The social and economic forces: The strength of nature,
the strength of progress and the means of production are ruling the world, and the
humanity)

And there before him, mile after mile, illimitable, covering the earth from
horizon to horizon, lay the Wheat. The growth, now many days old, was already high
from the ground. There it lay, a vast, silent ocean, shimmering a pallid green under
the moon and under the stars, a mighty force, the strength of nations, the life of the
world. There in the night, under the dome of the sky, it was growing steadily….What
were these heated, tiny squabbles, this feverish, small bustle(uproar) of mankind, this
minute swarming of the human insect, to the great, majestic, silent ocean of the
Wheat itself! Indifferent, gigantic, resistless, it moved in its appointed grooves. Men,
Lilliputians, gnats in the sunshine, buzzed impudently in their tiny battles, were born,
lived through their little day, died, and were forgotten; while the Wheat, wrapped in
Nirvanic calm, {grew steadily under the night, alone with the stars…

Men were nothings, mere animalcule (microscopic animals), mere

ephemerides that fluttered and fell and were forgotten between dawn and dusk….
Men were naught, death was naught, life was naught; FORCE only existed—FORCE
that brought men into the world, FORCE that crowded them out of it to make way for
the succeeding generation, FORCE that made the wheat grow, FORCE that garnered it
from the soil to give place to the succeeding crop.

Vandover the Brute (1914):

“For a moment Vandover felt as though he was losing his hold upon his
reason; the return of the hysteria shook him like a dry, light leaf. He suddenly had a
sensation that the room was too small to hold him; he ran, almost reeled, to the open
window, drawing his breath deep and fast, inhaling the cool night air, rolling his eyes
wildly.

It was night. He looked out into a vast blue-gray space down with points of light,
winking lamps, and steady slow-burning stars. Below him was the sleeping city. All
the lesser staccato noises of the day had long since died to silence; there only
remained that prolonged and sullen diapason, coming from all quarters at once. It was
like the breathing of some infinitely great monster, alive and palpitating, the systole
and diastole of some gigantic heart. The whole existence of the great slumbering city
passed upward there before him through the still night air in one long wave of sound.

It was Life, the murmur of the great, mysterious force that spun the wheels of
Nature and that sent it onward like some enormous engine, resistless, relentless; an
engine that sped straight forward, driving before it the infinite herd of humanity,
driving it on at breathless speed through all eternity, driving it no one knew whither,
crushing out inexorably all those who lagged behind the herd and who fell from
exhaustion, grinding them to dust beneath its myriad iron wheels, riding over them,
still driving on the herd that yet remained, driving it recklessly, blindly on and on
toward some far-distant goal, some vague unknown end, some mysterious, fearful
bourn (destination) forever hidden in thick darkness.”
 Women Writers and Female Characters: The image of the New Woman.

From 1890s women on both sides of the Atlantic were challenging the foundations
of a patriarchal society. In this last decade of the nineteenth century a new woman
empowered the works of female writers: Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith
Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein. The new woman, however,
had a decades-long developmental background. It is fair to say that from the 1880s the
new woman in theory and fact changed the canon of American literature.
The new woman proposed to seek personal fulfillment through work instead of
matrimony. Central to literary depictions of the new woman was the idea of women’s
sexual freedom, including the right to choose sexual partners in or out of marital
relationships. Such was the adultery without remorse of Chopin’s protagonist in “The
Storm”. From the 1890s we are going to see a rational and analytical demystification of
that “fair sex”. This is the case of Edna Pontellier, Kate Chopin’s character in The
Awakening, who is an upper middle-class wife and mother, who determines to have her
“own way.” Her priority was in large part sexual, the new woman was challenging the
status quo, and she did not want to be considered or rejected as a prostitute or a fallen
woman. This new woman was a model for writers like Gilman, Chopin, Cather, and
Wharton.
It is interesting to have a look at those women who were predecessors of
feminism and best- selling authors in 19th century American literature, in an era that
had idealized the values of the virtuous, home-loving woman in her proper domestic
sphere, but they showed the dark side of a patriarchal society and the tragic ending of
those women who wanted to be different and free.
(List of domestic and sentimental women writers in the 19th century)

1
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)
Feminist, author, and lecturer. Gilman’s polemical work and self-consciously
feminist fiction made her the leading feminist intellectual of her time. She was widely
known in for her incisive analysis of women’s role and status in society, she was
considered the preeminent intellectual in the woman’s movement at the turn of the
nineteenth century, because she moved to newer notions of female emancipation
through personal fulfillment and sexual liberation.
Gilman did not receive a great education, it is a self-made woman, because her
father abandoned his family after her birth and her mother supported herself and her
two children with great difficulty. She described her childhood life as painful and lonely.
Gilman learnt since her young years the importance of being an independent
woman, and she supported herself as a governess, art teacher, and as a designer of
greetings cards. In 1883 she married the artist Charles Stetson and began her literary
career, though she had to alternate her ambition to become a writer with the demands
of being a wife, housekeeper, and mother. In 1892, after the separation from his
husband, she published “The Yellow Wallpaper”, her master literary piece that it is
considered a classic of feminist literature, based on her own real experience of life, after
giving birth to her daughter Katherine in 1885 and suffer a severe depression. His
husband together with Dr. Weir Mitchell, the most prominent American neurologist of

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the day, specialized in women’s nervous disorders, applied a cure at that time very
common to middle-class white women who suffered from hysteria. This cure implied
mere domesticity and to the brink of utter mental ruin. The literary story is a harrowing
depiction of a women driven to madness by the well-meant but destructive
ministrations of her doctor-husband. It is an indictment of the sexual politics of marriage
and medicine in the nineteenth century.
In 1898, Gilman published her major unliterary work, Women and Economics,
eventually translated into several languages, it brought fame to Gilman, and she
continued to lecture widely in America and Europe during the decades that followed
until her death. Gilman's argumentation was based on history, sociology, anthropology,
and psychology, and gave an evolutionary perspective to explore women’s subordinate
status in society in the past and present, tracing it to their economic dependence within
marriage. Women were underdeveloped as social beings, because their energies were
focus pleasing a husband on whom they relied for economic support. And they were
undervalued because the essential work they performed of cooking, cleaning, and
childcare was unpaid. Her proposed reforms included socializing the work of the home
through the establishment of nurseries etc. Women should be paid for working at home.
The utopia Herland was published in 1915, and she described an all-female
society (with reproduction by parthenogenesis) in which women’s qualities of nurturing
and caring have created a peaceful, prosperous rationally ordered and ecologically
sound world, focused on the collective raising of children.

Katherine O’Flaherty, KATE CHOPIN (1850-1904)

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 On her mother’s side, Chopin was descended from French Creole aristocrats and
her father, a wealthy merchant, was an Irish immigrant. She received a good education
in a strict Catholic School. She married Oscar Chopin in 1870 and she was mother of six
children. Her husband died in 1883, leaving her in debt. She began to write after her
husband’s death to make a living and raise her children and began to publish her first
stories in the late 1880s. During ten years she published two novels and more than 100
stories about Louisiana people, especially women in unhappy marriages. Chopin read
Charles Darwin, Walt Whitman and contemporary women regionalists like Sara Orne
Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman, and the works of French naturalists’ writers like Zola,
Flaubert, and Maupassant. She escapes in her works from tradition, authority, and
religion, and examined the iniquities of traditional marriage. Her female characters
looked for more opportunities for emotional, sexual, and intellectual freedom. Her
prose style is realist, lucid, and unadorned; her stories were ironic, exuberant, and
sensual in a manner more French than American. She wrote about many social problems
including venereal disease, prostitution, and female abuse. Chopin was one of the few
white writers of her day to write about the anguish of black single mothers as well as
white ones. She was a writer ahead of her times.
Kate Chopin in her writings did a frank exploration of a late-nineteenth-century
woman’s growth toward sexual and emotional independence. The hostile reception of
Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), attacked as “sex fiction”, indicates the social and critical
obstacles that these female writers had to face and how they should mask their radical
impulses. Because in that conservative American society the sublime mission in life for
women was womanhood and motherhood, but this new woman was going to defy all
these traditional values. The Awakening, a novel explicitly concerned with women’s
sexual passions and extramarital love, was immediately rejected and received hostile
reviews and librarian’s refusal, because it was considered morbid, poisonous, and
vulgar. Chopin was “crushed” and very disappointed with this reception and she wrote
very little in the remaining five years of her life. All those female writers: Chopin, Cather,
or Wharton, who wanted to stablish a new canon and demystifying romance, marriage,
and motherhood, offered a new literary perspective but they were considered to be
regionalist or even local color writers.
In fact, though The Awakening (1899) has by now been recognized as an
American classic, Chopin never enjoyed during her short literary career - scarcely more
than a decade- of this success and her scandalous master piece fell into oblivion during
many decades. This novel was banned in Chopin’s home town, St Louis. The rejection of
The Awakening put an end to her literary career and the novel was not recovered for
readers until 1960s. Chopin never attempted to publish her more famous and graphic
short story, “The Storm”, eventually published in 1969. Her editor cancelled her last
short story collection, A Vocation and a Voice, which was published, for the first time, in
1991. Chopin was condemned by male critics, although women, recognizing Chopin’s
celebration of women’s individuality, wrote letters of praise and invited her to give

4
readings, those men who controlled publishing made it clear that Kate Chopin should
not publish anymore about women’s life, love and sinful desire.

Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

Edith Wharton was a very prolific American novelist and short story writer, who
was born into a wealthy New York family. Wharton received a very good education and
she spent part of her life in Europe. It is important in her literary career the influence of
his friend Henry James, who recommended her to write about the world she really
knew, for that reason, she analyzed old New York society class codes and the effects of
social snobbery based on economic status and social rituals. Wharton insisted that
sexual drives could not so easily be aside, that they were primary motives of self and
society. Wharton is going to describe the old social upper class of New York to expose
the hypocrisies of the wealthy. Like Chopin, Wharton made sexuality a crucial focus of
her literary consciousness. She insisted that sex is central to woman’s personal and
social power. Heterosexual passions lie at the heart of her major fiction, defining
characters’ relationships and forcing crucial turning points in their lives. We can see all
these features, for example, in Wharton’s first important novel, The House of Mirth
(1905) or in The Age of Innocence (1920). These novels contain Wharton’s most
devasting critiques of New York society. Declaring that a frivolous society may be judged

5
by the value of what it destroys. She left America in 1911 and became a permanent
resident in France until her death. She can be included in the list of American expatriated
writers. Wharton explored in her writings a psychic landscape ruled by primal forces and
her style is the best of the domestic realists and the female local colorists, though
categories such as realist, naturalist, or even sentimentalist can describe different
aspects of her work.

Willa Cather (1873-1947)

Willa Cather novelist, essayist, and writer of short fiction is associated with the
midwestern landscape. She became famous for her depictions of the pioneers who
settled the American West, but her work also portrayed strongly individual,
independent women who, to her, were pioneers in societies that expected female
submission. In many of her novels and short stories, she recorded the lives of Nebraska’s
immigrant settlers (Scandinavians, French, Russians, Bohemians and Germans), who had
introduced her to cultures and histories that first directed her gaze from America to
Europe. She redefined the terms of women’s power from the sexual to the sensual, and
she offered in her novels the landscape of preindustrial America. Her women are
identified with the West, and her fiction of the American land represented Cather’s
reaction against the male novel of industrial and urban America. Cather associated
herself with the energies of the land, and identify these forces as female. We can see
this in her novels: O Pioneers! (1913), where she described the story of Alexandra
Bergson, a Swedish immigrant, an independent woman and her struggle with the land,
and other settlers. In My Antonia (1918), she wrote about the heroism of a woman who
survives childhood poverty and adolescent seduction to marry and settle down as wife
and mother on a Nebraska farm. Critics praised the artistry of these novels and
unsentimental narrative voice. Willa Cather never had any romantic interest in men; her

6
emotional life centered on women, and maybe for that reason, her works encode a
lesbian sensibility and heroic womanhood. In A Lost Lady (1923), she deals with stages
of the moral decline and psychological crisis of a woman from a small Nebraska town.
Cather described powerful female figures and questions about female identity. She
preferred to evoke rather than to explain a character. Indeed, to be evocative rather
than explanatory was her general literary aim. She always wanted to provoke the
reader’s mind and imagination.

7
 THE RISE OF EMERICAN MODERNISM: THE
DIVERSITY OF AMERICAN POETRY AND PROSE.

In the nineteenth century the reference in art was the music, but at the turning of
the twentieth century literary arts (poetry and prose) aspired to the condition of painting,
and we find experimentalism and the hybridization of poetry, painting and
sculpture. This new poetry will be modeled on abstract art. “In short the interaction
between poetry and painting marked the beginning of the twentieth century and became
the hallmark of modernist and postmodernist poetics.” (V. Patea:2011:150) The great
revolution in the visual arts took place in Europe between 1908 and 1914 with cubist
painters as Kandinsky, Picasso and Lewis among others, and their paintings with
geometrical lines, planes, angles and colors, shocked the artistic world. Cubism was a
revolution in visual arts and broke with the classical tradition of the perspective point
of view and introduced the free association of visual elements. In Cubism there is not
perspective, objects are not fixed anymore in a spatial continuum, they are broken apart
and distributed freely on the canvas. Every possible perspective coexists in the same
plane, profile, frontal, or back views, external or internal elements of an object or image
coexist in the same plane from different angles and are represented under geometrical
forms. There is not then a unique point of view, there is a device of multi-perspectivism,
this is the case of Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, where they offered
a plurality of consciousness and multiple points of view.

Pablo Picasso 1908-1914

Wassily Kandinsky (1910-1920)

1
 The Modernist period of 1910 to 1945 was an incredibly productive and diverse
one in American poetry and prose. With reference to the period between the two World
Wars, American critics are accustomed to speaking of a “renaissance” of American
literature, and the next decades, in both quantity and quality of literary production, were
the most impressive in all American history, leaving aside experimentation, inquiry, or
excitement. It was a time of “expatriates,” and experimentation: Edith Wharton,
Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Hilda Doolittle, e.e.
cummings, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, F.S. Fitzgerald, William Faulkner,
etc. The writers of the 1920’s went to Europe to discover the American consciousness of
experience.
To define modernism is a difficult task. One consensus might simply say that
modernism is a cultural movement or period of style that was dominant in the arts
internationally, between the first years of the twentieth century and the end of the
Second World War. Modernism is the consequence of the transformation of society, and
it is an urban product. It was in the urban centers of Europe, mainly Paris and London,
where the pressures of modernity were most intensely felt, and where the origin of this
plural and experimental movement started. New styles of writing were necessary to
express new ideas and values, and modernism created what one critic called a
“tradition of the new” and the key was the principle of experimentation that was
defended by all modernists. Modernism is associated with different artistic movements:
expressionism, surrealism, futurism, imagism, vorticism, cubism, dadaism, minimalism,
etc.
Imagism (Imagists): is in the origin of modernist poetry together with
*Futurism. Imagism flourished in England and in the poetry of some American writers
between the years 1912-1917, just before the First World War. This movement was
organized by a group of writers in London. The first leader of the movement and the
best known was Ezra Pound (1885-1972).

Pound had decided to leave USA and he went as an

expatriate to London, together with T. S. Eliot in 1908. He wanted to get his literary
success and fame, with those new modern perspectives and possibilities associated with
2
poetic experimentalism. Pound spent his early days in London making Friends and eager
to break into artistic circles, during those years Pound worked as a critic, lecturer, and
poet, but he had to stress his difference from other poets, especially the most consecrated
of them, and at the same time create “a new position, ahead of the positions in the
vanguard.” His challenge was to compete against Futurism. Futurism was a literary
movement in Europe which advocated a complete break with tradition (They denied
tradition completely) and aimed at new forms, new subjects, and new styles. Its main
leader was the Italian artist Filippo Marinetti, whose manifesto of Futurism was
published in Paris in 1909. Marinetti’s manifesto carried the same message, and although
his message was aggressively assertive, it was a success. Pound and Marinetti were in
London at the same time, and Pound had to compete against him. Imagists were not
a revolutionary school, compared to the Futurists. In contrast to Marinetti, Pound
pleaded for modernization without sacrificing the ancient tradition. The Futurists
denied tradition completely, and that would form the major contrast with the Vorticist
under Pound’s influence. Futurism was a nihilistic doctrine, preaching the
demolition of the past and the glorification of the Age of Machines. The Futurists
hated museums, libraries, ruins, and history.
Pound essay published in Poetry in January 1913 functioned as a manifesto and
stated that “Imagism was the youngest school here that has the nerve to call itself a
school”, but he developed all these ideas more accurately in Des Imagists (1914). It is
necessary to remember that those imagists were not a revolutionary school, compared to
Futurists. Futurism, on the other hand, was by far the most dominating avant-garde
movement in the field, more than Imagism. Futurism dominated the avant-garde
position in the literary field, but Imagism and later Vorticism can be seen as
competing movements for that position. Compared to a movement like Futurism, the
Imagists gained very little economical profit, so it can be argued that Imagism as a school,
from the economical viewpoint, was more avant-gardist than Futurism. Pound and
Marinetti were striving for the title of leading the ultimate avant-garde movement.
It appears that Futurism won over Imagism and Vorticism.
For imagist poets the literary text became a visual object and imagism defines
itself as a school of images with a pictorial character. In origin Imagism was indeed not
involved with social transformations, because their only question was art. They rejected
all prescribed rules, especially the intrinsic qualities of poetry. Pound wanted to transform
and renovate poetry in English. This movement was informal, anti-theoretical, and
absorbed in matters of formal techniques. Pound discards rhyme, traditional poetic
devices, or patterns. He wanted to “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not
in the sequence of a metronome”, to summarize this, one could say that the meter should
be adapted to the modo. Pound’s idea of good poetry was a “union of words, rhythm and
music”, but to achieve that, the most fundamental was to select the right word. This last
statement became one of his maxims and obsessions as a poet. Apart from the use of
everyday language or to choose the right word, those words that do not contribute to
the poem should be left out, the same that those florid adjectives, elaborate
hyperboles, periphrasis, or purely ornamental metaphors. We can say that Pound
wanted to simplify modern poetry, using minimalism, and he developed a modified
version of free verse. The Central Features of Imagism are Exactness and Precision-
Compression-Common Speech-and a New Free Verse.
3
 What we discover in Pound early poems, or in William Carlos Williams poetry is
an Imagist minimalism. The term "minimalism" is also sometimes associated with the
briefest of poetic genres, haiku or hokku: is the poet’s impression of something in
exactly seventeenth syllables in three lines. Such a poem expresses a single idea, image
or feeling. A perfect example, by James Kirkup:
In the amber dusk (5 syllables)
Each island dreams its own night. (7 syllables)
The sea swarms with gold. (5 syllables)

Haiku was originated in Japan in the sixteenth century, and it was adapted in
English language by Pound and the imagist poets. The Chinese and Japanese languages
are ideographic (A written symbol represents a picture of the thing itself or a
representation of the idea) and Pound studied the different Chinese and Japanese literary
forms of expression in an attempt of rooting abstract notions in concrete elements. Pound
found in the ideogram the poetic equivalence of the modernist collage (a mixture of
allusions, references, quotations, and foreign expressions.) The ideogram illustrates the
pictorial possibilities of the Chinese script and Pound, years later, turned the ideogram
into the structural device of his most famous and monumental poetic work The Cantos.
The following example of ideogram belongs to Cathay, and Pound with an ordinary
language is using a superposition of images to suggest an emotional and sentimental
image of separation:
1. Ko-jin goes west from Ko-kaku-ro, (Sense of movement)
2. The smoke-flowers are blurred over the river. (The season of the year)
3. His lone sail blots the far sky. (The boat it not very far)
4. And now I see only the river,
5. The long Kiang, reaching heaven.
Lines 4 & 5 An image of void, distance, separation, and loneliness)

We can see some of the poetic strategies of imagism:

- Ordinary language
- Exactness in the use of the right words
- Direct presentation
- Juxtaposition
- Breaking of syntax
- Suppression of connectors
- Ellipses
*The elliptical style is the poetic equivalent of the suppression of
perspective in Cubist paintings. This compositional method is based
on bringing together disparate words and elements that do not belong
to the same semantic field and produce an impact on readers in the
same way that Cubist collages.

Pound imagist followers were the American poets Amy Lowell, T.S. Eliot, Hilda
Doolittle, Williams Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. They believed that a hard
clear image was essential to verse. They also believed that poetry should use the
language of everyday speech and have complete freedom in subject matter. Imagist poetry
abandoned conventional poetic materials and versifications, they felt aversion to the

4
iambic pentameter and were free to choose any subject and to create their own rhythms.
Poetry was expressed in common speech, and presented an image that was hard, clear,
and concentrated under the influence of Japanese Haiku. The typical Imagist poem was
written in free verse, and undertake to render as precisely as possible, without comments
and generalizations. It was the writer’s response to a visual scene (like in painting);
often the impression was rendered by means of short and powerful metaphors, or by
juxtaposing a description of one object with that of a second and diverse object. A very
good example and explanation of the imagist concept was Pound’s poem: “In a Station
of the Metro”. Pound gave an accurate description and explanation of the coming into
being of the poem in his essay in the Fortnightly Review, that it is probably the best and
most lucid explanation Pound ever gave to his idea of imagism:
“Three years ago, in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly
a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then
another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to
me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden
emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Renouard, I was still trying,
and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came
an equation ... not in speech, but in little splotches (stains) of color. It was just that --
a "pattern," or hardly a pattern, if by "pattern" you mean something with a "repeat" in it.
But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in color. I do not mean that I was
unfamiliar with the kindergarten stories about colors being like tones in music. I think
that sort of thing is nonsense. If you try to make notes permanently correspond with
colors, it is like tying narrow meanings to symbols. …That evening, in the Rue Renouard,
I realized quite vividly that if I were a painter, or if I had, often, that kind of emotion,
or even if I had the energy to get paints and brushes and keep at it, I might find a
new school of painting, of "non-representative" painting, a painting that would
speak only by arrangements in color. (Gaudier-Brzeska 87)”
The original poem was originally thirty lines long, but Pound destroyed it,
because it was a work of “second intensity” (Gaudier-Brzeska 89). It had to be a poem
that relied upon “similarity or analogy,” or upon “likeness or mimicry”. Six months later
Pound wrote another poem of about fifteen lines, but still he was not satisfied, and it
took him another year of pondering before he realized how to convey the accurate
emotion and energy, he had experienced that day in Paris. It took no more than a mold of
two lines to transform the memorable impression into a memorable poem:

“In a Station of the Metro”

The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.
(1913)

In just three lines and 20 words (including the title!), this poem manages to vividly
evoke both a crowded subway station and petals on a tree branch. By juxtaposing these

5
two very different images, the poem blurs the line between the speaker's reality and
imagination and invites the reader to relate urban life to the natural world—and to perhaps
consider each of these realms in a new light. The poem allows to combine two forms of
perception (one happening before the speaker’s eyes, and one happening in his mind),
creating a new, blended reality from the speaker's point of view. It is the connection
between sight and imagination, what the speaker sees (“faces in the crowd”) and what the
speaker imagines in response (“petals on a wet, black bough”). The poet is only offering
images in a superfluous language and without using verbs.

Imagist Poems:

EZRA POUND (1885-1972).

“In a station of the metro”

The apparition of these faces in the crowd.
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Alba

As cool as the pale wet leaves

of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.

Reflection

I know that what Nietzsche said is true,

And yet I saw the face of a little child in the street,
And it was beautiful.

In Epitaphium
Write me when this geste, our life is done:
“He tired of fame before the fame was won.”

6
Ts’ai Chi’h
The petals fall in the fountain,
the orange-colored rose-leaves,
Their ochre clings to the stone.

Epitaph
Leucis, who intended a Grand Passion,
Ends with a willingness-to-oblige.

EPITAPHS
Fu I
Fu I loved the high cloud and the hill,
Alas, he died of alcohol.

Li Po
And Li Po also died drunk.
He tried to embrace a moon
In the Yellow River.

The Epitaph to Lustra

And the days are not full enough

And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.

****
The Return

7
See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!

See, they return, one, and by one,

With fear, as half-awakened;
As if the snow should hesitate
And murmur in the wind,
and half turn back;
These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe,"
inviolable.
Gods of the wingèd shoe!
With them the silver hounds,
sniffing the trace of air!
Haie! Haie!
These were the swift to harry.
These the keen-scented;
These were the souls of blood.
Slow on the leash,
pallid the leash-men!
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965).

Morning at the Window (1914)

They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.

The brown waves of fog toss up to me

8
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.

Amy Lowell (1874-1925).

A Lady
You are beautiful and faded,
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord.
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir. In your eyes
Smolder the fallen roses of outlived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungency of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blend colors.
My vigor is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.
Gather it up from the dust
That its sparkle may amuse you.
This poem is in the public domain.

Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961).

Helen
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the luster as of olives

9
where she stands,
and the white hands.

All Greece reviles

the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.

Greece sees unmoved,

God’s daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.

With the creation of Imagism Pound had failed to create a popular movement with
a large following, and on top of that he could not control his fellow-countrywoman Amy
Lowell and the clash with her produced the group broke up in 1914. Pound then turned
to Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticism, and the other Imagists re-grouped around Amy
Lowell, as their new leader.
But just before, in 1913, it came to Pound’s notice that Lewis had plans to organize
a new literary movement and start up a new magazine. Pound immediately wrote a letter
to James Joyce to inform him that Lewis was starting a new Futurist, Cubist, Imagist
Quarterly, mostly a painter’s magazine with him to do the poems. When the full-page
advertisement for BLAST was printed in the Egoist in the April 1 and April 15 edition of
1914, Vorticism was yet to be born then and then Pound was very disappointed with his
fellows, imagist writers, but Imagism can be seen as the herald of Vorticism.
Vorticism was interdisciplinary movement in art and literature that flourished in
England between 1914-1919, founded by the British painter and writer Wyndham Lewis,
Ezra Pound, and the sculptor, Gaudier Brzeska. It was a mixture of expressionist and
neo-cubism. A movement that changed the poetic language of the twentieth century. It
opposed 19th-century sentimentality and rejected the prevailing orthodoxy of post-
impressionism. Several of the original Imagist ideas were transformed and

10
incorporated in the Vortex. The term “Vortex” had been first used by the American
poet Ezra Pound to describe the avant-garde spirit of London’s art world and modernist
poetry and it was adopted by Lewis to signify his version of the concentrated energy of
the new arts of modernism. Pound and the Vorticist movement incorporated tradition in
the modernization of art. They revived the ancient in their paintings, sculptures, and
poems. The infusion of this conservative habit into Vorticism saved it, and perhaps the
modernist tradition, from rootless nihilism and the sentimentalizing of a mechanized
future that makes Futurist art today seem so quaint and dated.

Edward Wadsworth, Vorticist Study, Workshop Wyndham Lewis, c.1914

1914, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

Vorticist paintings and drawings tended towards sharp-lined and angular

abstraction and non-representation, though they often celebrate modern machinery and
industrial landscapes. Vorticist painting combined cubist fragmentation of reality with
hard-edged imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment. It was, in
effect, a British equivalent to futurism, although with important doctrinal differences,
because Lewis and Pound were deeply hostiles to the futurists. Although Vorticism may
show similarities with Cubism and Futurism, it carried enough dissimilarity in its program
to form a separate movement. Pound in BLAST wrote:

11
 “We go to a particular art for something which we cannot get in any other art. If
we want form and color we go to a painting, or we make a painting. If we want form
without color and in two dimensions, we want drawing or etching. If we want form in
three dimensions, we want sculpture. If we want an image or a procession of images, we
want poetry. If we want pure sound, we want music. (New Age Jan. 14, 1915)”

Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound

by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, 1914

And in his ABC of Reading, he repeated his guidelines to read good poetry:
“The reader will be well advised to read according to sense and syntax, keep from
thumping, observe the syntactical pause, and not stop for the line ends save where sense
requires, or a comma indicates. That is the way to get the most out of it and come nearest
to a sense of the time-element in the metrical plan.” (ABC 127)
But in fact, especially when he came to Vorticist poetry, Pound produced little
practical examples of his experimental poetry and he never really expressed how it
ought to be conceived. The poems he produced in BLAST had no specific formal
features, besides the harsh content. Imagism and Vorticism are closely connected, and
while some claimed that Vorticism was merely Futurism bottled in England, it seems
more valid to say that Vorticism was an upgraded version of Imagism. Nevertheless,
Cubism was Parisian, Futurism was Italian, Imagism and Vorticism were Anglo-
American and the last one presented itself as a movement without boundaries looking to
a future without location. Imagism was an intellectual failure and Vorticism an even
bigger disappointment. In 1919 Pound would write “The Death of Vorticism” and it was
published in the Little Review. Despite what the title might lead one to think, however,
the poet still did not acknowledge the death of his movement.
Pound’s friend T.S. Eliot would take his place as influential literary critic in
England. Eliot was more diplomatic than Pound. He possessed the skill to voice his
opinion with a certain finesse, instead of bashing into conventions. The British
establishment responded by accommodating Eliot and rejecting Pound. Pound would

12
leave for France in December 1920, hoping to find a new vortex in Paris, and a fresh start.
After twelve years of “activity and controversy” in London. In his mind the idea that
England rejected all innovating art, while France would recognize that “all good art, goes
against the grain of contemporary taste”.

Ezra Pound examples of Vorticism.

VORTEX.
The vortex is the point of maximum energy.
It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency.
We use the words “greatest efficiency” in the precise sense—as
they would be used in a textbook of MECHANICS.
You may think of man as that toward which perception moves. You may think of
him as the TOY of circumstance, as the plastic substance
RECEIVING impressions.
OR you may think of him as DIRECTING a certain fluid force against circumstance,
as CONCEIVING instead of merely observing and reflecting.

THE PRIMARY PIGMENT.

The vorticist relies on this alone, on the primary pigment of his art,
nothing else.
Every conception, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some
primary form.
It is the picture that means a hundred poems, the music that means a
hundred pictures, the most highly energized statement, the statement that has
not yet SPENT itself it expression, but which is the most capable of
expressing.

THE TURBINE.
All experience rushes into this vortex. All the energized past, all the past that is
living and worthy to live. All MOMENTUM, which is the past bearing upon us, RACE,
RACE-MEMORY, instinct charging the PLACID,
NON-ENERGIZED FUTURE.
The DESIGN of the future in the grip of the human vortex. All the past that is vital,
all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW.
Hedonism is the vacant place of a vortex, without force, deprived of past and of
future, the vertex of a small spool or cone.
Futurism is the disgorging spray of a vortex with no drive behind it, DISPERSAL.

13
 EVERY CONCEPT, EVERY EMOTION PRESENTS ITSELF TO THE VIVID
CONSCIOUSNESS IN SOME PRIMARY FORM. IT BELONGS TO THE ART OF
THIS FORM. IF SOUND, TO MUSIC; IF FORMED WORDS, TO LITERATURE; THE
IMAGE, TO POETRY; FORM, TO DESIGN; COLOUR IN POSITION, TO
PAINTING; FORM OR DESIGN IN THREE PLANES, TO SCULPTURE;
MOVEMENT TO THE DANCE OR TO THE RHYTHM OF MUSIC OR OF VERSES.
Elaboration, expression of second intensities of dispersedness belong to the
secondary sort of artist. Dispersed arts HAD a vortex.
Impressionism, Futurism, which is only an accelerated sort of impressionism,
DENY the vortex. They are the CORPSES of VORTICES. POPULAR BELIEFS,
movements, etc., are the CORPSES OF VORTICES. Marinetti is a corpse.

THE MAN.
The vorticist relies not upon similarity or analogy, not upon likeness or mimicry.
In painting he does not rely upon the likeness to a beloved grandmother or to a
caressable mistress.
VORTICISM is art before it has spread itself into a state of flaccidity, of elaboration,
of secondary applications.

ANCESTRY.
“All arts approach the conditions of music.”—Pater.
“An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant
of time.”—Pound.
“You are interested in a certain painting because it is an arrangement of lines and
colors.”—Whistler.
Picasso, Kandinsky, father and mother, classicism and romanticism of the of the
movement.

POETRY.

The vorticist will use only the primary media of his art.
The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.
The vorticist will not allow the primary expression of any concept or emotion to
drag itself out into mimicry.
In painting Kandinsky, Picasso.
In poetry this by, “H. D.”
Whirl up sea —
Whirl your pointed pines,
Splash your great pines
On our rocks,
Hurl your green over us,
Cover us with your pools of fir.

14
 Ezra Pound is widely considered one of the most influential poets of the 20th
century; his contributions to modernist poetry were enormous. He was an early champion
of several avant-garde and modernist poets; developed important channels of intellectual
and aesthetic exchange between the United States and Europe.

15
THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT (T.S. ELIOT) (1888-1965)

Poet, critic, and dramatist, he was born and brought up in St Louis

Missouri in 1888 and died in London in 1965. His grandfather was a
Unitarian minister, who moved to Boston 1830s, his mother wrote poetry.
He studied in Harvard University from 1906 to 1914, where Eliot’s literary
ideas and philosophical training owed to George Santayana, a colleague of
William James (The Philosopher of pragmatism), who had retired in 1907,
and in addition he studied Dante, Dryden, the Elizabethan and Jacobean
dramatists, and the seventeenth-century British Metaphysical poets,
mainly John Donne. Eliot left America in 1914, and after studying briefly in
Germany, at the Sorbonne in Paris and Merton College in Oxford, he
settled in London in 1915. Like most of the artists exile, Eliot left the
United States primarily because he could discern there no usable
tradition. He remarked in 1919:
“it is inevitable that any work on American literature should contain
a good deal of stuffing. The fault is not in the lack of material so much as
in its lack of cohesion… The great figures of American literature are
peculiarly isolated, and their isolation is an element, if not of their

1
 greatness, certainly of their originality… There is Poe, Whitman, and Mark
Twain, but not tradition. The New England writers, the best is Hawthorne,
who showed some coherence.” (Cambridge History of American
Literature).
Eliot also suffered the influence of French symbolists, for that
reason, it is Poe who most interested Eliot. He admired Poe’s intellect, his
originality, his unmistakable idiom: “He was the most direct, the least
pedantic, the least pedagogical of the critics writing in his time in either
America or England.”
In September 1914 Eliot visited Pound in London, and soon after
sent him a poem titled:
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
2
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house and fell asleep.

And indeed, there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

After reading the poem Pound immediately sent an excited letter to the
editor of Poetry:
“I was jolly well right about Eliot. He has sent in the best poem I
have yet had or seen from an American…He is the only American I know of
who has made what I call adequate preparation for writing. He has
actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own.” (E. Elliott, p.
956)
In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915, 1917) we can see Eliot’s
doctrine of impersonality, that implied to see life from a distance. Eliot
had mocked the confident role of the Romantic poet. In the insisting on
the separation of the man who suffers and the mind which creates, he had
repudiated all Whitman-like inclusiveness, the union of the single separate
creature (the author) and the message (the work of art).
Eliot, following the individualism of previous American writers was
also a self-made poet, and from 1914 until the publication of The Waste

3
Land in 1922 – a work Pound called “the justification of out “modern
experiment”, both writers were essentially collaborators. The sharp
impact of Imagism is clear in Eliot’s early poems, and all his poetry of that
period came under Pound’s influence.
Leading characteristics of Eliot’s early poetry:
Apart from the basic principles of Imagism:
a) Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or
objective.
b) To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the
presentation.
c) As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the
musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.
d) The search for a freedom of language and structure.
e) To break the traditional distinctions between prose and
poetry.
f) The importance of the words and their precise
arrangement. It is to say, to know the word properly and
then to arrange it in the correct place to get an aesthetic
achievement.

We can appreciate in Eliot’s early style in The Waste Land:

1.- The use of free verse.
2.- The adoption of the quatrain form.
3.- The use of irony and satire.
4.- The use of symbolism.
5.- Pastiche and fragmentation.
6.- Cultural references and precise allusions included in his
scholastic notes to his poems.
7.- Interweaving of past and present. The need to see past and
present simultaneously.
8.- The need for an impersonal or objective poetry.

4
 9.- Personal and confessional features following the Romantic
tradition.
10.- The use of foreign language references.
11.- Lines showing deep feelings of disorder and anxiety.
12.- The use of the mythic method and mythic unity.
13.- The power of hallucinatory scenes.
14.- The use of urban landscapes, mainly the topography of London.
15.- A magisterial critique of modern society.
16.- Eliot’s desire to forge a modern idiom in poetry.
But all these stylistic features and devices above needed a
necessary technique to produce emotion (Eliot had read E.A. Poe’s essay,
The Philosophy of Composition, in which Poe described his own literary
techniques to produce emotion in his readers.) and Eliot, as a critic, in his
essay Hamlet (1919) coined a term for his own technique, the “objective
correlative”:
“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding
an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a
chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such
that when the external facts, which much terminate in sensory
experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”
In other terms a successful artistic creation requires an exquisite
balance between, a coalescence of, form and matter. If the matter
(thought, feeling, action) is “too much”, (“in excess of”) the form (in this
case words) we have a discrepancy, strain, a lack of unity (that is,
insufficient correlation). The experience is overwhelmed (crushed) by the
words. Eliot adapted his “objective correlative” by imagists techniques.
In late 1921, while recuperating from a physical and nervous
breakdown, Eliot began work on his long and most famous poem, The
Waste Land (1922). He wrote it in a fragmentary way and sometimes “in
an almost trancelike state.” (Elliott, p. 962). But the final work, it is the
result of Pound’s extensive cutting and revising. It is a sign of Pound’s
genius that he saw the formal possibilities in Eliot’s loose sequence.
“Under his hand the poem was transformed from a series of narrative and

5
dramatic episodes into a “cinematographic” montage of images and
incidents that is unified by a president sensibility.” (Elliott, p.962)
The Waste Land is a cubist collage depicting different cultures, eras,
and geographical spaces. Breaking with plot and narrative sequences. This
poem is an ensemble of fragments, segments, polyphonic variations of
interrupted voyages, unfinished sagas, and disconnected adventure,
mixing myth and reality. His arguments have no beginning, middle or end.
The poem advance using digressions, analogies, allusions, and repetitions,
and that are in fact unconnected, reflecting an innovator technique, a
surrealist world, which consists of five discontinuous parts containing so
many technical innovations, each composed of fragments incorporating
multiple voices and characters, literary and historical allusions, bits and
pieces of contemporary life, myths, and legends. Lacking narrative and
expository shape, the poem is organized by recurrent allusions to the
myth of death and rebirth. It is the story of a desert land brought to life by
a king’s sacrifice. It is a desperate quest for regeneration and a critic of
modern civilization.
“Eliot’s poem owed a great deal to Pound, as he acknowledged, and
it used imagists methods. Even, so it pointed another way from Pound.
Deeply indebted to the French symbolist tradition of irony and to the Eliot
*doctrine of impersonality (we can only watch life from a distance), this
five-part work distills what we now know was a personal psychic crisis in a
vision of a wasted world of lost religious faith and total cultural decline, of
clinics and breakdowns, sterile sexual liaisons and futile entertainments,
of Babylonish cities of degeneration where all faces are blank and where
commerce dominates.” (Ruland, R. & Bradbury, M. A History of American
Literature, 1991, p.223)
The Waste Land came to be accepted as a central text of
modernism. Eliot dedicated his poem to Ezra Pound in acknowledgement
to his considerable editorial role in crafting the final version.
The Waste Land
BY T. S. ELIOT
FOR EZRA POUND
IL MIGLIOR FABBRO

I. The Burial of the Dead

6
 April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago.”
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
7
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
8
 “Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh, keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

Later Pound and Eliot diverged, Eliot to become a British writer and
a close associated of the Bloomsbury group (A prestigious group of friend,
writers, artists and intellectuals, one of its members was Virginia Woolf),
Pound to continue his expatriate wanderings and his dreams of a
contemporary cultural transformation in Paris and then in Italy, but
between 1914 and 1920, when they were working most closely together,
they transformed the entire scenario of Anglo-American poetic
modernism and they helped point the general direction of modern
Western poetry.
A great turn in Eliot’s life took place in 1927, with his conversion to
the Church of England, the same year that he became a British citizen.
Those members of the “Lost Generation” were astounded, but reading his
early works and the religious tendency of his poetry, the decision seemed
inevitable, and the poetic effects of this “religious turning” were
immediately evident in the poems Journey of the Magi (1927) and Ash-
Wednesday (1930).
The major achievement of Eliot’s later poetic career was the
publication of Four Quarters (1943). A group of four long poems published
separately between 1935 and 1942 linked by recurrent motifs. The Four
Quarters make a meditative or devotional sequence, linked by common
themes:
a) Consciousness and memory.
b) The individual’s relation to time,
c) The transcendent experience of timelessness.
The four poems are “four meditations” set in a different place:
“Burnt Norton” (1935), “East Cooker” (1940), “The Dry Salvages” (1941)
and “Little Giddying” (1942), that represent an endless cycle of spiritual
quest. The poem is religious in tone but not specifically Christian in
content and stands in the great tradition of English landscape poetry. In
writing “Burnt Norton” “Eliot followed the pattern he and Pound had
9
devised for The Waste Land: five sections like a five-act play, with the
fourth a condensed lyric that “turns” the poem.” (E. Elliott, p.966)

BURNT NORTON
(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')

I
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to

10
 The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: humankind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present

“Eliot was firmly established as the controlling voice in American

poetry, partly through the forceful impact of Four Quartets in 1943 and
partly through his overwhelming dominance as a critic; his influential
definitions of the terms for poetic criticism, his authoritative reshaping of
poetic tradition. In the Quartets Eliot moved beyond, his earlier classicism
and impersonality, but the meditating self of these poems remains far
indeed from the open explorations of individual consciousness.… Eliot’s
effort to capture the rhythm of the thinking mind would nourish other
poets of philosophical meditation….But his personal integration of the
finite and infinite, the temporal and eternal, seemed to many to limit
rather than encourage either metaphysical speculation or poetic
experiment.” (Ruland, R. & Bradbury, M. A History of American Literature,
1991, p.328)
In the twenty years after World War II Eliot wrote several important
critical essays and three popular plays: The Cocktail Party (1950), The

11
Confidential Clerk (1954) and The Elder Statesman (1959). Many of the
younger poets of the 1940s and 1950s learned to write Eliot’s kind of
poetry, rich in metaphysical conceit, irony and mythic echoes, a poetry
contained, impersonal, carefully crafted. But he never returned to lyric
poetry after the Four Quarters.
Eliot assimilated British culture, he chose the British citizenship in
1927 and in 1948 he received the Nobel Prize of Literature and the Order
of Merit (The highest civilian award by a British subject) conferred upon
him by the Crown in 1948, like it was also the case of Henry James in 1902.

Edward E. Cummings (e. e. cummings) (1894-1962)

12
 One of the most technically innovative poets of 20 th century.
His creative work included painting as well as writing, his paintings
were frequently exhibited in galleries over the following decades.

The "bad boy” of American poetry was born in Cambridge,

Massachusetts. His father was a Congregationalist minister and
teacher at Harvard. He studied at Harvard University and he
graduated in 1915. He began to write poetry based on the classical
patterns of Pre-Raphaelite and Metaphysical writers. But he began
to innovate when he discovered and read the poetry of Ezra Pound.
His poems show the strong influence of the first phase of
modernism experimented in New York around 1915, particularly
imagism and experiments with typography.
He drove an ambulance in France during World War I and he
spent three months in a French detention camp, under suspicion of
sedition. This experience was treated in his first and best novel, The
Enormous Room (1922). Cummings met the Dadaists group during
his extended stays in Paris in the 1920s, and he became friend of
Louis Aragon, a practitioner of Dada, Malcolm Cowley, and John

13
Dos Passos. Cummings’s contributions in his early poems show clear
associations with the experimental dynamics of Dada, and many of
them can be considered Dadaist in their use of juxtaposition, satire,
typographical complexity, and childlike primitivism.
After the war he lived a bohemian life in Paris and New York
while he established a reputation as an avant-garde poet,
playwright, and painter. His first volumes of poetry were: & (1925),
Is 5 (1925), XLI Poems (1925), W, ViVa (1931), 1/20 (1936), 1 x 1
(1944), EIMI (I am), XIAPE (Hail) (1950) and one book in 1929 has
(No title) at all, this last book is the most Dadaist of all his books.
But we can say that Cummings is closer to Dada more in his prose
than in his poetry.
& and Is 5 presented cummings’s new style, which was
influenced by jazz and contemporary slang and characterized by an
innovative use of punctuation and typography, as in the use of
lower-case letters for his own name. Features of his poetry include
use of capital letters and punctuation in the middle of single
words, phrases split by parentheses and stanzas arranged to create
a visual design on the page (Visual or Shape Verse). Formal devices
are often used as visual manifestations of theme or tone; the
poem’s typographical dimensions itself becomes a new level of
meaning and grammatical experimentation. Cummings uses
typography in many poems like the interpretative marks in a
musical score, to suggest how he wanted them to be read, this
way, spaces indicate pauses; the absence of them continuity;
parentheses and the lack of other punctuation enhance a delicate,
suspended effect; capital letters are touches of emphasis, etc. His
poems are skillfully constructed, despite their arbitrary appearance
on the page, and they are deliberately simple. Superficially he is the
most shocking of modern poets but is one of the least radical. His
poems thus fall into two parts, “innocent hymns to the life of the
self (I) and rough satires on “most people”. His “semantic wit”
however, has no match among modern poets.
Most of his poems are short lyrics either in praise of the
qualities that Cummings admired, nature poems, or witty satirical
pieces. Formally, the poems might break up words into syllables

14
and sometimes into individual letters, or words may be run
together with spacing eliminated, techniques that contribute to the
celebration of unpredictability, and the refusal to obey set notions
of form. The syllables of a word might be scattered across a line
between or within other words or scattered across a poem. Parts
of speech might change their conventional grammatical function,
verbs becoming nouns, adverbs becoming adjectives.
Idiosyncrasies of spelling and capitalization might be used for
punning, or to reflect speech, emphasis, or variety of rhythm, and
such formal inventiveness and play sometimes also extends to a
poem’s visual pattern on the page.

Among Cummings’s best-known poems are: “O sweet

spontaneous,” “my father moved through dooms of love,” “Buffalo
Bill’s / defunct”, “Olaf glad and big”, and “since feeling is first”:

since feeling is first

who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady I swear by all flowers.

The special signature of Cummings’s verse was its use of

common speech and elements of popular culture in the diction, and
its attention to the visual form of the poem – that is, the poem as it
appears on the page as distinguished from its sound when read
aloud, then verses shapes were all carried out for reader’s eyes
rather than ears. Cummings’s poems praise concreteness,
spontaneous feeling, eccentricity, and individualism, and scorn mass
movements, consumerism, nationalism, and what he saw as the
monolithic abstractions of scientific and religious thought. For
unsympathetic readers, the visual and syntactic complications of
15
his verses are undercut by the simplicity, even naivety, of its
themes and sentiments. For the New Critics of the 1940s and
1950s, Cummings’s visual and verbal inventiveness masked a
sensibility essentially late Romantic rather than modernist. But for
some readers Cummings achieved a fresh, expressive vocabulary
which, while unlike that of any other modernist poet, explored the
possibilities of free verse in significant new ways, that have
influenced upon some later poets.

 DADAISM:

Dadaism (Dada) is a nihilistic movement in art and literature

started in Zurich in 1916 by Tristan Tzara (Rumanian) and later
André Breton, Louis Aragon, and others, that came to an end in
1925, when Surrealism, dada’s first and more conservative
offspring, decided to become political. The term was meant to
signify everything and nothing, or total freedom, anti-rules,
ideals, and traditions. Dadaism became popular in Paris
immediately after the First World War. The basic Word in the
Dadaist’s vocabulary was “nothing” (Nihilism). In art and
literature manifestations of this “aesthetic” were mostly
*collage effects: the arrangement of unrelated objects and
words in a random fashion. By 1921 Dadaism as a movement
was subsumed by *Surrealism and its influence was detectable
for many years. Dadaism was an appendix of Expressionism by
Germans, as an appendix of Futurism by the Italians and as a
forerunner to Surrealism by the French and by Anglo-American
writers.

To Make a Dadaist Poem by Tristan Tzara

Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article the length
you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.

16
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up
this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they
left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are--an infinitely original author of
charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar
herd.

A Dadaist poem (an example by Kurt Schwitters)

What a b what a b what a beauty

What a b what a b what a beauty
What a b what a b what a
What a beauty beauty be
What a beauty beauty be
What a beauty beauty beauty be be be
What a be what a b what a beauty
What a b what a b what a a
What a be be be be be
What a be be be be be
What a be be be be be be be a beauty be be be
What a beauty.

American expatriates discovered Dadaist’s precepts and

principles in Paris:

1) Dadaism vindicate the exploitation of the naïve.

2) The irrational.
3) The spontaneous and the abnormal.
4) The abolition of logicality.
5) The systematic transgression of the prevailing moral system.
6) They were also against art and literature insomuch as they
might conform to the conventions of the past.
17
7) After a period of support, the Dadaist came to reject even
the most innovative forms of artistic literary expression
(Cubism, Expressionism and Futurism), which they took as
systematized attempts to achieve a merely aesthetic goal.
They expressed their revolt against everything, and they
were against all systems, “the most acceptable system is that
of having non on no principle. (Tristan Tzara)
8) The Dadaists also believe that there is no absolute truth and
abolished the distinction between the concepts of high and
popular art and culture.
9) Their aims are: Anti-form, anarchy, exhaustion, silence,
performance, deconstruction, antithesis, absence, dispersal,
extreme combination, and no interpretation.

Some features distinguished the Paris Dadaist from the

Americans and the rest of Europe: their almost exclusive
dedication to literature and relative neglect of the visual arts,
their admission to belonging to a literary tradition of French
writers, that dated back to Rousseau and included the
Romantics, the Symbolists, and the Cubists. Apollinaire is one of
their main literary references, because he was the link between
Cubist and Futurist literature and the pioneer of automatic
writing and the use of associations.

10) The language of literature had to be invented all over

again just as painters were inventing new visual images for
themselves. The Dadaists developed a theory of language
based on their view that the existing linguistic sign system
was the most elaborate fabrication of human reason.
Through the codes of syntax, grammar, and semantics,
people have sought to interpret the world rationally and this
process of language constitutes the so-called “cultural
order”, and to break this social order they destroy words and
disrupt the syntax. The new language they wanted to
develop brought together elements from different semantic
fields and connected disparate items and concepts in absurd
images, irrational juxtapositions, nonsensical repetitions and

18
 doing away with the traditional notions of linguistic
coherence.

11) Dadaists’ features and devices of style in poetry were puns,

wordplays, and experimental writing. The aim of these experiments
was to reveal the arbitrary relationships between words and their
meaning, and they use this “new language” in their poems, short
stories, novels, plays etc. Dadaist poets made use of automatic
transcriptions, innovative distribution of the lines in shocking visual
patterns and different type of fonts in the same poem. They
rejected conventional forms of punctuation and used rhetorical
devices and free verse as a form of expression.

12) - Narrative is not a mere anecdote, but the projection of a

metamorphosis of reality.
- The literary creation has the right to disintegrate the primal
matter of words impose on writers by dictionaries and textbooks.
- The author has the right to use words of his own fashioning
and so disregard existing grammatical and syntactical laws.

Dadaist recurrent themes and features in prose fiction are

violence, eroticism, perversion, revolutionary destruction, praise of
the machine, suicide, and crime. The Dadaist fiction heroes are
invariably men on the verge of insanity. Plot is either abolished or
heavily disrupted by parenthetical insertions, the juxtaposition of
non-associated events, long lists of words, and typographical
experiments. The city is the emblem of modern world and fiction.
The characters, events and mental processes describes in Dadaist
fiction are alien to those with which most readers are familiar.
Complex characters development is absent, we find absurd
dialogues and a neglected or abolished plot.

*Surrealism was an evolution of Dadaism. Unlike Dadaism,

surrealism was not fully satisfied with the idea of absolute
destruction and firmly believed in the existence of a world between
reality and dream, a Surreality, wherein all the contradictions
between the two worlds were resolved. The only way to reach this
Surreality was through the liberation of the subconscious and by
19
bringing down the barriers imposed on man by reason. For doing
that, they used techniques such as dream recitals, hypnotic trances,
and automatic writing. Also, in contrast to Dadaism, the Surrealists
felt confident they could alter society by means of their intellectual
revolution. The desire to discover a new reality, or Surreality, and
their confidence in produce a drastic change in the social
consciousness were the only aspects that distinguished the early
Surrealism from Dadaism. The literary works published by the
Surrealists between 1922 and 1925 were hardly distinguishable
from those of the Dadaists. From 1925 onwards Surrealism became
the leading avant-garde movement in France and, soon in Europe.

l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness

Poem 42
“n
Othi
n
g can
s
urPas
s
the m
y
SteR
y
of
s
tilLnes
s”
20
ygUDuh

ydoan
yunnuhstan

ydoan o
yunnuhstand dem
yguduh ged

yunnuhstan dem doidee

yguduh ged riduh
ydoan o nudn

LISN bud LISN

dem
gud
am

lidl yelluh bas

tuds weer goin

duhSIVILEYEzum

maggie and milly and molly and may

went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang

so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star

whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing

which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)

it's always ourselves we find in the sea.

21
my love
thy hair is one kingdom
the king whereof is darkness
thy forehead is a flight of flowers
thy head is a quick forest
filled with sleeping birds
thy breasts are swarms of white bees
upon the bough of thy body
thy body to me is April
in whose armpits is the approach of spring
thy thighs are white horses yoked to a chariot
of kings
they are the striking of a good minstrel
between them is always a pleasant song.
my love
thy head is a casket
of the cool jewel of thy mind
the hair of thy head is one warrior
innocent of defeat
thy hair upon thy shoulders is an army
with victory and with trumpets
thy legs are the trees of dreaming
whose fruit is the very eatage of forgetfulness
thy lips are satraps in scarlet
in whose kiss is the combining of kings
thy wrists
are holy
which are the keepers of the keys of thy blood
thy feet upon thy ankles are flowers in vases
of silver
in thy beauty is the dilemma of flutes
thy eyes are the betrayal
of bells comprehended through incense

22
My Girl’s Tall with Hard Long Eyes

my girl’s tall with hard long eyes

as she stands, with her long hard hands keeping
silence on her dress, good for sleeping
is her long hard body filled with surprise
like a white shocking wire, when she smiles
a hard long smile it sometimes makes
gaily go clean through me tickling aches,
and the weak noise of her eyes easily files
my impatience to an edge—my girl’s tall
and taut, with thin legs just like a vine
that’s spent all of its life on a garden-wall,
and is going to die. When we grimly go to bed
with these legs she begins to heave and twine
about me, and to kiss my face and head.

23
 Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Afro-American novelist, short story writer, poet, and playwright,

who was born in Joplin, Missouri. His childhood was not an easy one, his
parents were separated, his father living in Mexico and his mother in
Detroit and Cleveland. Langston lived mainly with his maternal
grandmother, where he drew inspiration from his family heritage,
especially his maternal grandmother’s first husband, who died as part of
the group led by the radical rebel and abolitionist *John Brown in the
attack of Harpers Ferry. Hughes was a bright student and he began writing
poetry after leaving high school and later in the University of Columbia,
where he entered in 1920, but left after a year because it was very difficult
for him to find a job. So, he enrolled on a freighter on the west coast of
Africa as a merchant seaman, and then he left the ship in France where he
worked at a night club in Paris, at that time he met important members of
“The lost Generation”, such as Hemingway and S. Fitzgerald. He returned
to the States in 1924, where he worked as a busboy in Washington, D.C.
When he was twenty-four, he had lived in Cleveland, Mexico, and
Washington, sailed on a six-month trip to West Africa, sailed twice to
Holland, lived, worked, and hustled in Paris and Italy. All this time,
however, he was writing and publishing poetry. He had two patrons, who
help him to finance his studies first at Lincoln University (Pennsylvania)
and then in New York City, between 1828 and 1930, year in which he
solidified his reputation and sales, with the publication of his novel Not

24
without Laughter (1930), based in part on his own unhappy childhood in
the Midwest, enabling him to support himself.

When he enrolled in Columbia University in 1920, Hughes was

already a published author, because his landmark poem, “The Negro
Speaks of Rivers” had been published in the important journal Crisis, and
between 1923 and 1924 he published other poems. In this poem, Hughes
reflected his lifelong fascination with the origins of his race, and it
heralded the advent of Harlem Renaissance, which inspired Afro-
Americans with a desire to search out the origins of their creativity. The
magazine Crisis was edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, who was one of the
founders of the “National Association for the Advancement of Colored
people” (NACCP), and in fact, the history of *Harlem Renaissance begins
with De Bois’s publication of “The Souls of Black Folks” in 1903.

Social context in Harlem:

In the 1900s blacks lived in the Tenderloin district of lower

Manhattan. By 1910, with the migration to the North from the rural
South, New York's black population had increased from a few hundred to
5,000. It was at this point that blacks began to move North within the city
into Harlem, first into rented accommodation, then as a house-owning
bourgeoisie into what people called the “beige colony” of the first block
West of Fifth Avenue. Whites resisted and then deserted the
neighborhood and house prices dropped. In the twenties, Harlem, we
might say, 'jes grew', but, as above, this dynamism brought with it both an
intensely felt collective unity and a complex pattern of social and racial
differentiation. By the mid-twenties Harlem was unquestionably black.
Its population numbered 175,000 black residents, the most densely
populated area around Lenox and Fifth Avenue. Most were employed as
manual laborers or in menial, servicing, or domestic work. Many were
destitute and trapped in crowded, crime, prostitution, and drugs.

Blacks experienced an outburst of oppressive and even murderous

prejudice in the years immediately following First World War. Racial strife
was fueled in large part by the Ku Klux Klan. But the racism in American
society was such that even in prosperity blacks were not extended full civil
and political rights; so, when the post war period saw mounting concerns
about “foreign” influence in American life, especially in the marketplace
and the factory, the situations of blacks worsened. Maybe for that, black

25
Renaissance writers could not simply assume, as did the white modernist
authors, that the use of innovative forms was automatically a cultural
advance. The relationship between political desires and artistic choices
might well prove too restricted. Many of these writers used traditional
forms in is poetry, but their ideas and values were radical when it came to
issues of justice and freedom.

Harlem Renaissance, also called the “New Negro” or Black

Renaissance, is a term used to designate a period of cultural activity by
black American writers from the early 1920s until the Great Depression in
1929. Writers who established their reputation during this period were
Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston among many others. Harlem was
a vibrant centre, “a radiant node or cluster” in the language of European
Imagism; a vortex, even, “through which ideas were constantly rushing”,
and through which Hughes himself moved, in an irregular pattern of
departure and return.

The relations between modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

were also complex. Modernism was largely a European movement, and
the Harlem Renaissance exhibited many features that owe little to
European avant-garde art. In fact, it is possible to see modernism as
drawing on some of the Renaissance’s concerns to develop its energies: as
marginality, the use of folk or so called “primitive” material. But it is true
that in this period a tremendous amount of work in all forms, -- poetry,
fiction, drama, essays – was produce by a group of talented African
American writers, some like Hughes extended their careers beyond this
period. The leading writers of the Renaissance were themselves divided
to some extent about the conflicting claims of advancement through
cultural and educational “progress”, or political protection and power
gained through activist struggles, mass organizations and movements.

The question of folk material arose in two contexts: the life and
culture of blacks who lived in the South, and the world of folk music,
especially its more modern forms, blues, and jazz. Yet there is in the
blues tradition a series of images and themes that point the way towards
liberation even revolt, the world that was represented in blues lyrics could
be understood to be one based on mere complaint about one’s repressed
and exploited condition. The blues also owed an important debt to the
post reconstruction chain-gangs of black prisoners, who adopted the
“answer-and-call” format of black spirituals. The thirties underlined

26
Hughes' allegiance to black proletarian experience and cultural forms, now
more emphatically expressed in favor of jazz rather than blues. Jazz, by
extension, became a way for the black artist to create links to the past
while at the same time forging one of the most complex and sophisticated
of all-American art forms. For their part Europeans, and the German
avant-garde welcomed American jazz as joint symbols of the new age. The
black jazz entertainer and America were admired as discordant emblems
of an exotic otherness and frenetic modernity combined: a fevered
collision of the primitive and the new world. Meanwhile, the vocabulary of
“newness” and “renaissance” which percolated through the decade, the
association of jazz particularly with urban life and with the developing
technologies of transport (conveying musicians on an emerging 'circuit'
from city to city and continent to continent), of radio, recording and
promotion, only confirmed this metaphorical association with progress
and social modernity. Jazz is the new American modernism in music
because Jazz is improvisation, renewed music always alive, created and
performed spontaneously, without preparation, a collage of sentiments
and sounds. A “modernist” jazz appeared, in the 1940s and 1950s, well
after the generally recognized period of the Renaissance, and along with it
the most conspicuous and sustained examples of modernist “jazz poetry”
by Hughes, in the sequences Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) and Ask
your Mama (1961). The poetry of Langston Hughes exemplifies all these
possibilities that are further explored in the black literature of the 1960s
and 1970s. The appearance in the early 1950s of Ralph Ellison's
“modernist” Invisible Man (1952) was the best example of modernism in a
contemporary Afro-American novel, but the traditions of narratives in the
South were those of the folktale, with its use of mythic material and
schematic patterning, and the slave narrative, with its emphasis on
testimony and integrity. Slave narratives would serve as an important
artistic context for Z.N. Hurston, Richard Wright, and later for several
contemporary black novelists, such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.

Hughes poetic work was clearly inspired by Walt Whitman and

Carl Sandburg, poets who emphasized that poetry should mimic the
voice of people and deal with the everyday life. Hughes’s lyrical verse
often took the form of dramatic monologues, with simple yet evocative
images, metaphors, and the voice of people’s experience. Part of his
poetic success stemmed from his great ear for music, especially jazz, so
that his poetry had an improvisational and spontaneous quality. His first
book of poetry was entitled The Weary Blues (1926) and in the same

27
year wrote an important critical essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain”. By the 1930s he was being called “the bard of Harlem”.

The Great Depression brought an abrupt end to much African

American literary activity, and during the 1930s Hughes embraced
radical politics. In 1932 he travelled to the Soviet Union, and his poetry
began to reflect his leftist political views. Hughes and other blacks were
drawn by the American Communist party that made racial justice an
important vindication in its platform, promoting an image of working-
class solidarity that nullified racial boundaries. Hughes published a
collection of satiric short stories The Ways of White Folks (1934), and in
1935 he turned to playwright with Mulatto, a drama about
miscegenation and tensions between parents and children that was
produced in Broadway, and he founded black theatre groups in Harlem,
Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Hughes learned Spanish language while he was living in Mexico

with his father in 1919 and 1920. He was very fond of Spanish language
and culture, he read: Cervantes, Blasco Ibañez, Pio Baroja or García
Lorca. Before coming to Spain, he attended as a delegate and speaker
of American to the Second International Writers Congress in July 1937,
with his speech: “Too Much of Race”, afterwards, in August, he came to
Spain to write on those Afro-Americans, who joined the International
Brigades to fight against fascism and during six months he covered the
Spanish Civil War in different Spanish fronts for the Baltimore Afro-
American newspaper with reports as “Franco and the Moors”, “Negros
in Spain”, “Madrid-1937”, “Laughter in Madrid”, or “Artist Under Siege”.
He visited Barcelona, Valencia, and Madrid, where he was lodged in the
Headquarters of “Alianza Española de Intelectuales Antifascistas por la
Defensa de la Cultura”, whose secretary was Rafael Alberti. In Madrid
he also met Miguel Hernandez, Hemingway, John Dos Passos and
other war correspondents. During his stay in Spain he wrote some
brilliant poems on his experiences of war, some of those Spanish
impressions were included in his book, I Wonder as I Wander (1956).

28
 Langston Hughes and Ernest Hemingway

Langston Hughes and John Dos Passos.

Hughes continued to write poetry, which became less political in the

1940s as he began to reflect on his own life in an autobiography The Big
Sea (1940). Hughes´s next major book of poetry, Montage of a Dream
Deferred (1951) recaptured his feelings for jazz and for the plight of
oppressed African Americans in a vibrant and intense style reminiscent of
the Harlem Renaissance period. Hughes had entitled a poem 'Montage' in

29
One-Way Ticket (1948) and might have been influenced by the explicitly
“montage composition” of John Dos Passos' USA (1938). Hughes'
intentions are clear in the original prefatory note to the sequence of
poems Montage of a Dream Deferred:

“In terms of current Afro-American popular music and the sources

from which it has progressed -jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-boogie,
and be-bop – this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop is marked
by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent (insolent)
interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of
the jam session (improvised sessions), sometimes the popular song,
punctuated by riffs (short repeated phrases, like refrains), runs (series),
breaks, and distortions of the music of a community in transition.”

Hughes’ Montage consequently tracks this community through the

psycho-geography of Harlem, following life on the street and in time
through the passage from morning to night in an echo of the twilight areas
and stark contrasts between black and white. The poem's social content,
vernacular idiom and jazz form are unmistakable. As a poem of sound
and speech, its jazz riffs, trills (rapid alternations of vibratory sounds),
neologisms ('combinate', 'trickeration') and the occasional blues refrain
punctuate a sequence of often juxtaposed “conversational voices - of
children, women and men expressing resignation, defiant self-affirmation,
cynicism, and the humor of laughing back “in all the wrong places”. Jazz is
“modernist” by virtue of its internal formal experiment and be-bop
answers especially to this definition. We can go beyond this, however, if
we read into relations between the innovative solo, group dynamics and
tradition of jazz, the tensions between the individual and the social mass
marking social modernity. Jazz, and be-bop particularly, comes to model
the “disjunction and uprootedness” experienced by city dwellers and their
enforced, 'often painful' search for 'commonality'. Any judgment of
Hughes' Montage in these terms must take account of its internal form, as
above, and social content, but also of its critical purpose and the relation
between this 'modernist' jazz poem by a black poet and the prevailing
modernist orthodoxy.

In 1953 he was called before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s

congressional anticommunist committee to testify about his politics in the
1930s. The FBI listed him as a security risk until 1959, and during those
years he could not travel outside the United States. Hughes later wrote

30
about his past times in the Soviet Union and Spain in I Wonder as I
Wander (1956) and Good Morning Revolution (1973), where he collected
much of his protest writings. Hughes was a realist and a modernist that
used stanza forms deriving from blues music and adapted the vocabulary
of everyday black speech to poetry. He was a prolific writer and wrote
numerous books, essays and articles on social, historical, and musical
subjects, and edited collections of black folklore, poetry, and stories and
more than a dozen books for children.

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

If-ing

If I had some small change

I’d buy me a mule,
Get on that mule and
Ride like a fool.

If I had some greenbacks

I’d buy me a Packard,
Fill it up with gas and
Drive that baby backward.

If I had a million
I’d get me a plane
And everybody in America’d
Think I was insane.

31
But I ain’t got a million,
Fact is, ain’t got a dime —
So just by if-ing
I have a good time!

Dream Variations

To fling my arms wide

In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me--
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide

In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening...
A tall, slim tree...
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

The Weary Blues

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway. . . .
He did a lazy sway. . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone

32
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.

He played a few chords then he sang some more—
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied—
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

AIR RAID: BARCELONA

Black smoke of sound
Curls against the midnight sky.
Deeper than a whistle,
Louder than a cry,
Worse than a scream
Tangle in the wail
Of a nightmare dream,
The siren
Of the air raid sounds.
Flames and bombs and
Death in the ear!
The siren announces
Planes drawing near.
Down from bedrooms
Stumble women in gowns.
Men, half dressed,
Carrying children rush down.
Up in the ski-lanes
Against the stars
A flock of death birds
Whose wings are steel bars

33
Fill the sky with a low dull roar
Of a plane,
Two planes,
Three planes,
Five planes,
Or more.
The anti-aircraft guns bark into space.
The searchlights make wounds
On the night’s dark face.
The siren’s wild cry
Like a hollow scream
Echoes out of hell in a nightmare dream
Then the BOMBS fall!
All other noises are nothing at all
When the first BOMBS fall.
All other noises are deathly still
As blood spatters the wall
And the whirling sound
Of the iron star of death
Comes hurling down.
No other noises can be heard
As a child’s life goes up
In the night like a bird.
Swift pursuit planes
Dart over the town,
Steel bullets fly
Slitting the starry silk
Of the sky:
A bomber’s brought down
In flames orange and blue,
And the night’s all red
Like blood, too.
The last BOMB falls.
The death birds wheel East
To their lairs again
Leaving iron eggs
In the streets of Spain.
With wings like black cubes
Against the far dawn,
The stench of their passage
Remains when they’re gone.
In what was a courtyard
A child weeps alone.
Men uncovered bodies
From ruins of stone.

34
MONLIGHT IN VALENCIA: CIVIL WAR

Moonlight in Valencia
The moon meant planes.
The planes mean death.
And not heroic death.
Like death on a poster:
An officer in a pretty uniform
Or a nurse in a clean white dress-
But death with steel in your brain,
Powder burns on your face,
Blood spilling from your entrails,
And you didn’t laugh
Because there was not laughter in it.
You didn’t cry PROPAGANDA either.
The propaganda was too much
For everybody concerned.
It hurt your guts.
It was real
As anything you ever saw
In the movies:
Moonlight….
Me cago en la ostia!
Bombers over
Valencia.

35
 Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

No other writer was so influential in the development of modern American fiction

as Gertrude Stein and except for Ezra Pound, no other American writer of the 20th century
has had greater impact on the writing world. Stein was the most radically experimental
writer of her times. She pushed language to its limits, but the results were sometimes
literal nonsense, misunderstanding and incomprehension.
She was born on a wealthy Pennsylvania family and she was educated at Radcliffe
College, where she attended lessons under William James, the famous American
psychologist, brother of Henry James. In 1903 she moved to France (Paris was her
“hometown”) and soon she met her lifelong companion Alice B. Toklas, since then she
returned to the United States only once in her life- for a lecture tour in 1934. Her career
in Europe was as an art critic, like her brother Leo, as well as a writer. Her salons at 27
rue de Fleurus in Paris were world famous, because it became a famous gathering place
for French artists and intellectuals, Americana expatriates, and American visitors.
Stein began writing seriously in 1903, but some of her writings were published
many years after their completion. She also wrote poems during all her life, she wrote
lesbian love poems that developed a complex symbolism for socially unacceptable
feelings and events- a symbolism so obscure that their eroticism is by no means apparent,
and needs to be decoded if the poems are to be understood, a very good example of her
style is “Lifting Belly” a long excellent lesbian poem in prose (1915-1917), or this one
also dedicated to Alice B. Toklas:
I love my love with a l
Because it is like that
I love my love with a b
Because I am beside that
A king.

I love my love with an a

Because she is a queen
I love my love and a a is the best of them
Think well and be a king,
Think more and think again

I love my love with a dress and a hat

I love my love and not with this or with that
I love my love with a y because she is my bride
I love her with a d because she is my love beside
Thank you for being there

Nobody has to care

Thank you for being here

1
 Because you are not there.
And with and without me which is and without she she can be late and then and
how and all around we think and found that it is time to cry she and I.

But her major works were Three Lives (1904) published in 1909 and The Making
of Americas (1911-1912) published in 1925. Stein published her highly influential
experimental prose poems in Tender Buttons (1913), this book is a homage to Picasso and
cubism. Stein carried this cubist technique even further in Tender Buttons: Objects, Food,
Rooms. Published at her own expense, the book contains passages of automatic writing*
and is configured as a series of paragraphs about objects. Devoid of logic, narration, and
conventional grammar, it resembles a verbal collage*. “Tender Buttons is to writing,
exactly, what cubism is to art”. Stein was dependent upon Picasso for stylistic analogues
in writing, and Picasso’s paintings of his Cubist period and her thoughtful analyses of
them reinforced the abstractionist direction in Stein’s writings.
* Automatic writing (writing delivered over entirely to the promptings of the
unconscious mind) under hypnosis by influence of Sigmund Freud. Surrealism: This
movement originated in France in the 1920s was a development of Dadaism. It was a
revolutionary movement in arts and literature a rebellion against all restraints on free
artistic creativity. The surrealist’s works are non-logical and their results represent the
operations of the unconscious. Surrealists were particularly interested in the study and
effects of dreams and hallucinations: Picasso, Salvador Dali. Stein, like surrealists, broke
with conventional modes to experiment with free associations, violated syntax,
nonlogical and nonchronological order. Apart from poetry, these techniques affected
the novel. Surrealists’ novelists wanted to explore the territories of the conscious and

2
semi-conscious mind exposing the private chaos of their characters (stream of
consciousness). A term coined by William James in Principles of Psychology (1890) to
denote the flow of inner experiences. Now an almost indispensable term in literary
criticism, it refers to that technique which seeks to depict the multitudinous thoughts and
feeling which pass through the mind. Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner (The Sound
and the Fury, 1931) are two of the most distinguished developers of the stream of
consciousness method.
*Collage is a term adopted from the vocabulary of painters to denote a work which
contains a mixture of allusions, references, quotations, and foreign expressions. A
common in James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. The influence of Surrealism at this
respect has been considerable.
Gertrude Stein’s most popular works are likely her extended self-portraits: The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Everybody’s Autobiography (1937). These
works present some of her experimental techniques but in simplified and because they
were easier to read, they were very popular. The rest of Stein’s complete writings were
published after her death between 1951-1958 in eight volumes.
To understand these American poets of modernism it is very important to take into
account the “Philosophers of Modernism at Harvard University, circa 1900—William
James, George Santayana or Josiah Royce—and their influence on the generation of
modernist poets that passed through Harvard: Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens
or Gertrude Stein. Also, Darwinism is for Stein as a point of departure, language is not
just socially and historically conditioned but is also an evolutionary tool, as Stein stated
in Lectures in America, the appeal of “science as it is taught in laboratories” is significant:

“When I was working with William James, I completely learned one thing,
that science is continuously busy with the complete description of something, with
ultimately the complete description of anything with ultimately the complete
description of everything. If this can really be done the complete description of
everything then what else is there to do.” (p. 27)

Stein’s writings are necessary to regard them as intentional aesthetic

productions and not instances of her behavior. Stein’s writing is a product not of an
aesthetic but instead a natural kind of beauty, the odd pleasure of seeing the habit,
perception, sensation, etc., of a peculiar specimen, all in its unmediated form. Stein, in
concert with both, describes her intentions in her portraits, a desire to make a presentation
of complex internal dynamics:

“I had to find out what it was inside any one, and by any one I mean everyone I
had to find out inside everyone what was in them that was intrinsically exciting and I
had to find out not by what they said not by what they did not by how much or how
little they resembled any other one but I had to find it out by the intensity of movement
that there was inside in any one of them.” (p.39)

Here, Stein stages her intentions in her early portraits in the massive The Making
of Americans (1911-1912), Tender Buttons (1913) or such as “If I Told Him” (1915).

3
Clearly, mere description and the traditional deployment of adjectives and nouns (as tools
of resemblance) would not allow her to accomplish her new portraits. The extreme
difficulty of such a project is also addressed in her lecture.

“I began again to do portraits but this time it was not portraits of men and women
and children, it was portraits of anything and so I made portraits of rooms and food and
everything because there I could avoid this difficulty of suggesting remembering more
easily while including looking with listening and talking than if I were to describe human
beings.” (p. 44)

She was very skillful dealing with sentences and rhetorical devices in her
prose, and for her the sentence is the key unit of organization. Stein’s style relied on
simple, commonplace words arranged in surprising ways. She intentionally used
unliterary language and diction and wrote her experimental prose in unliterary
structures of repetition. Her earliest works (Three Lives and The Making of Americans)
have been compared to Pablo Picasso’s analytic cubism.
Gertrude Stein expressed this feeling of linguistic liberation in a still unpublished
paper which she called “American Language and Literature”. What American did, what
they could do, was not to change the English language but to make it feel different. Using
the same words but the words saying an entirely different thing. That is what she decided
to do, when she began to write at the end of the 19th century.
“I found myself plunged into a vortex of words, burning words, cleansing words,
liberating words, feeling words, and the words were all ours and it was enough that we
held them in our hands to play with them; what ever you can play with is yours, and this
was the beginning of knowing; of all Americans knowing, that it could play and play with
words and the words were all ours all ours….And so was born a new generation of writers
who did not have to think about the American language; it was theirs and they had it and
that was all there was to it, singing it a ragtime, Sherwood Anderson or Hemingway or
Faulkner, they all had it and now what are they going to do with it, that is the question.”
What Gertrude Stein did, with her experimental prose was not just a national idiom
but a contemporary idiom. In following new advances of experimental psychology as
she had learned under William James at Radcliffe College, she was exploring a new field
of realism in which we know man not by description but by what he does: character is not
to be conceived of in ethical terms but in individualities. Stein said: “To understand a
thing means to be in contact with that thing and the human mind can be in contact with
anything.”
Stein published her first—and some critics say her best—book in 1909. Three
Lives is comprised of three short tales, each of which investigates the essential nature of
its main character. Three Lives is also the most suitable for demonstrating the beginning
of Stein’s cubism, she wrote the first of these stories: “The Good Anna” in 1905-1906,
the first year of her friendship with Picasso.
We are going to see an example of “Melanctha,” the portrait of a young mulatto
girl in Three Lives, who suffers an unhappy affair with a black doctor, has been
particularly singled out for praise. A reworking of an autobiographical story Stein wrote

4
about an unhappy lesbian affair, the story “attempts to trace the curve of a passion, its
rise, its climax, its collapse, with all the shifts and modulations between dissension and
reconciliation along the way. Let us see a very good example of her literary technique, in
her short story “Melanctha” (1904-1905), Melanctha is with Jeff, a negro doctor who is
courting her:
“Jeff sat there this evening in his chair and was silent a long time, warming himself
with the pleasant fire. He did not look at Melanctha who was watching. He sat there and
just looked at the fire. At first his dark, open face was smiling, and he was rubbing the
back of his black-brown hand over his mouth to help him in smiling. Then he was
thinking, and he frowned and rubbed his head hard, to help him in his thinking. Then he
smiled again, wavering on the edge of scorning. His smile was changed more and more,
and then he had a look as if he were, deeply down, all disgusted. Now his face was darker,
and he was bitter in his smiling, and he began without looking from the fire, to talk to
Melanctha, who was now very tense with watching.”
What is Gertrude Stein doing here? She is showing in this scene the intensity of
feeling, the sequence of emotions and facts in Jeff’s behavior, with a coordinated
progression of mood which made the emotion, that at the end produces the tenseness of
Melanctha’s watching. Stein is building this intensity with rhetorical repetitions and a
very simple and coordinated syntax with “and” using very few adjectives. What
Hemingway would say writing “truly”. Stein was writing and giving a lesson in modern
writing:
“Jeff sat there this evening in his chair and was silent a long time, warming
himself with the pleasant fire. He did not look at Melanctha who was watching. He sat
there and just looked at the fire. At first his dark, open face was smiling, and he was
rubbing the back of his black-brown hand over his mouth to help him in smiling. Then
he was thinking, and he frowned and rubbed his head hard, to help him in his thinking.
Then he smiled again, wavering on the edge of scorning. His smile was changed more
and more, and then he had a look as if he were, deeply down, all disgusted. Now his
face was darker, and he was bitter in his smiling, and he began without looking from the
fire, to talk to Melanctha, who was now very tense with watching.”

Stein on Picasso (1938)

“The first picture we had of his is, it you like, rose or harlequin, it is “The Young
Girl With a basket of Flowers”, it was painted at the great moment of the harlequin period,
full of grace and delicacy and charm. After the little by little his drawing hardened, his
line became firmer, his color more vigorous, naturally he was no longer a boy he was a
man, and then in 1905 he painted my portrait.” (p.7) “…he wish me to pose for him…I
pose for him all the winter, eighty times and in the end he painted out the head, he told
me that he could not look at me any more and then he left once more for Spain. It was the
first time since the blue period and immediately upon his return from Spain he painted in
the head without having seen me again and he gave me the picture and I was and I still

5
am satisfied with my portrait, for me, it is I, and It is the only reproduction of me
which is always I, for me.” (Stein,1938, pp:7-8)

Picasso 1905

6
 “Once again Picasso in 1909 was in Spain and he brought back with him some
landscapes which were, certainly were, the beginning of cubism. The three landscapes
were extraordinary realistic and all the same the beginning of cubism. Picasso had by
chance taken some photographs of the village that he had painted and it always amused
me when everyone protested against the fantasy of the pictures to make them look at the
photographs which made them see that the pictures were almost like the photographs…
the Spanish villages were as cubistic as these paintings.” (Stein, 1938, pp: 8-9)
“Cubism was commencing… After his return from Spain with his first cubist
landscapes his hand, 1909, a long struggle commenced… Picasso’s first cubist paintings
were landscapes…” (Stein,1938, p. 13)
“I was alone at this time in understanding him, perhaps because I was
expressing the same thing in literature; perhaps because I was an American and, as I
say, Spaniards and Americans have a kind of understanding of things which is the same.”
(Stein,1938, p. 16)

7
8
Picasso 1911-1912

9
 In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an
abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts
the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater
context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a
coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one
another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics.
The written works of Gertrude Stein employ repetition and repetitive phrases as
building blocks in passages and whole chapters. Most of Stein's important works utilize
this technique. Not only they were the first important patrons of Cubism, Gertrude Stein
and her brother Leo were also important influences on Cubism as well. Picasso in turn
was an important influence on Stein's writing.

The Making of Americans, Being a History of a Family's Progress

(1911-1912) 1925.

This long book- over nine hundred pages- tells the story of Martha Hersland, who
represents Stein herself, and her family. “Making” in the title refers both to her family
history and to making the book.

“There is then now and here the loving repetition, this is then,
now and here, a description of the loving of repetition and then there
will be a description of all the kinds of ways there can be seen to be
kinds of men and women. Then there will be realized the complete
history of every one, the fundamental character of every one, the
bottom nature in them, the mixtures in them, the strength and
weakness of everything they have inside them, the flavor of them, the
meaning in them, the being in them, and then you have a whole
history then of each one. Everything then they do in living is clear to
the completed understanding, their living, loving, eating, pleasing,
smoking, thinking, scolding, drinking, working, dancing, walking,
talking, laughing, sleeping, everything in them. There are whole
beings then, they are themselves inside them, repeating coming out of
them makes a history of each one of them.

Always from the beginning there was to me all living as repeating. This
is now a description of my feeling. As I was saying listening to
repeating is often irritating, always repeating is all of living,
everything in a being is always repeating, more and more listening to
repeating gives to me completed understanding. Each one slowly
comes to be a whole one to me. Each one slowly comes to be a whole
one in me. Soon then it commences to sound through my ears and

10
eyes and feelings the repeating that is always coming out from each
one, that is them, that makes then slowly of each one of them a whole
one. Repeating then comes slowly then to be to one who has it to have
loving repeating as natural being comes to be a full sound telling all
the being in each one such a one is ever knowing. Sometimes it takes
many years of knowing some one before the repeating that is that one
gets to be a steady sounding to the hearing of one who has it as a
natural being to love repeating that slowly comes out from every one.
Sometimes it takes many years of knowing some one before the
repeating in that one comes to be a clear history of such a one. Natures
sometimes are so mixed up in some one that steady repeating in them
is mixed up with changing. Soon then there will be a completed
history of each one. Sometimes it is difficult to know it in some, for
what these are saying is repeating in them is not the real repeating of
them, is not the complete repeating for them. Sometimes many years
of knowing some one pass before repeating of all being in them comes
out clearly from them. As I was saying it is often irritating to listen to
the repeating they are doing, always then that one that has it as being
to love repeating that is the whole history of each one, such a one has
it then that this irritation passes over into patient completed
understanding. Loving repeating is one way of being. This is now a
description of such feeling.

There are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them
repeating and I hear it. I love it and I tell it. I love it and now I will
write it. This is now a history of my love of it. I hear it and I love it and
I write it. They repeat it. They live it and I see it and I hear it. They live
it and I hear it and I see it and I love it and now and always I will write
it. There are many kinds of men and women and I know it. They repeat
it and I hear it and I love it. This is now a history of the way they do it.
This is now a history of the way I love it. (The Norton Anthology, 4th
edition, Volume, 2, pp. 1064-1065).

The Making of Americans held no commercial interest and went

unpublished for 17 years. It began as a chronicle of a representative family and evolved
into a history of the entire human race, reflecting both Stein’s interest in psychology and
her obsession with the process of experience. Not trusting narration to convey the
complexity of human behavior, Stein employed description to achieve what she called
“a continuous present.” She compared the technique to a motion picture camera, which
freezes action into separate frames. Though no two frames are exactly alike, when
viewed in sequence they present a flowing continuity.

11
 Stein was a writer among visual artists, and she was doing with words what
Picasso was doing with paint. In this excerpt above is Stein’s pure style when she claimed
that “there is no such thing as repetition. “Only insistence” and that “[...] a sequence of
words [is] anything but a pleasure.” No other writer of Stein’s time could have written
something like this, but many learned from her. She used sentences that are sometimes
abstract and hermetic and sometimes simple and lucid.
“Stein’s world is full of clauses and phrases strung together one after another
without coordinating or subordinating connectives for the same reason that it is full of
gerunds: because it is a world in which nothing – neither things perceived nor the
consciousness that apprehends them, neither the moment of apprehension nor the fluid
words in which the apprehension is rendered- stands still. Using abstract ideas and
hermetic codes, she makes art a celebration of the “things seen at the moment it is seen”
in order to force us to examine relations not simply between things and words but also
among the process of world, the process of consciousness, and the process of
composition… She had also broken most rules governing punctuation and syntax and
many governing diction, both as a part of her effort to make things new and as a part of
her effort to draw readers into the process of renewal.” (Bercovitch, The Cambridge
History of American Literature, Vol. 6, 2002, p. 156.)
An example of Stein’s unconventional punctuation in Lucy Church Amiably:
“Lucy Church and her sister Frances Church and her mother and her brother she did not have a
brother it is Helen who had a brother and three sisters and a father Lucy Church had two sisters
and a father and a mother and of her it was said not Lucy.” (p.122)

In conventional punctuation this would be:

“Lucy Church and her sister Frances Church and her mother and her brother— she did not have
a brother; it is Helen who had a brother and three sisters and a father. Lucy Church had two
sisters [one besides Frances?] and a father and a mother and of her [of the mother?] it was said,
not Lucy [there is no antecedent for "it"]. (M. Gaddish Rose, Modern Fiction Studies, 1976-1977,
Vol.2 Nº 4, p. 551)

Stein’s poetry.

“No poetry more than Stein’s- neither Eliot’s nor Pound’s- so thoroughly
overturns language representational claims with exploring its signifying power. Stein’s
career constituted a lifelong project in cultural semiotics, in its totally quite impossible
to naturalize and domesticate in the way that much of the rest of modernism has been.
Indeed, because her long poems depend on incremental repetition and variation, they
are almost impossible to quote effectively or edit for anthologies. Her poetic work is
generally undecidable: sometimes feminist and sometimes lesbian….. and it remains
more purely and powerfully devoted to an exploration of how language works than
that of any other poet of the period. By 1914, her work had anticipated not only most
of the linguistically experimental strain of modernism but much of postmodernism as
well. These are perhaps the reasons why she is not yet considered to be a central figure in

12
modernist poetry.” (Emory Elliot, Columbia Literary History of the United States, New
York, 1988, p. 926)
Stein in Tender Buttons (1913) stages her intentions in her early portraits (such as
“If I Told Him” dedicated to Picasso). The extreme difficulty of such a project focus her
dynamic looking on her own looking-at-objects and not individual persons in Tender
Buttons, Stein felt she could better combine the multiple capacities she saw as
contributing to one’s perception of any thing:

“I began again to do portraits but this time it was not portraits of men and women
and children, it was portraits of anything and so I made portraits of rooms and food
and everything because there I could avoid this difficulty of suggesting remembering
more easily while including looking with listening and talking than if I were to describe
human beings.” (p. 44) Here is one of her portraits from Tender Buttons:

A long dress.

“What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the
current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current.
What is the wind, what is it.
Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white
and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color.
A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it.” 48

If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso

By Gertrude Stein (1923).

If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would
Napoleon would Napoleon would he like it.
If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him
if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told
him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it
if I told him.
Now.
Not now.
And now.
Now.
Exactly as as kings.
Feeling full for it.
Exactitude as kings.
So to beseech you as full as for it.

13
 Exactly or as kings.
Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters
shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutters shut and
shutters and so. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so and so and also.
Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact
resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly
and resemblance. For this is so. Because.
Now actively repeat at all, now actively repeat at all, now actively repeat at all.
Have hold and hear, actively repeat at all.
I judge judge.
As a resemblance to him.
Who comes first. Napoleon the first.
Who comes too coming coming too, who goes there, as they go they share, who
shares all, all is as all as as yet or as yet.
Now to date now to date. Now and now and date and the date.
Who came first Napoleon at first. Who came first Napoleon the first. Who came
first, Napoleon first.
Presently.
Exactly do they do.
First exactly.
Exactly do they do.
First exactly.
And first exactly.
Exactly do they do.
And first exactly and exactly.
And do they do.
At first exactly and first exactly and do they do.
The first exactly.
And do they do.
The first exactly.
At first exactly.
First as exactly.
As first as exactly.
Presently
As presently.
As as presently.
He he he he and he and he and and he and he and he and and as and as he and as
he and he. He is and as he is, and as he is and he is, he is and as he and he and as he is
and he and he and and he and he.
Can curls rob can curls quote, quotable.
As presently.
As exactitude.
As trains.
Has trains.
Has trains.
As trains.
As trains.
14
 Presently.
Proportions.
Presently.
As proportions as presently.
Farther and whether.
Was there was there was there what was there was there what was there was there
there was there.
Whether and in there.
As even say so.
One.
I land.
Two.
I land.
Three.
The land.
Three
The land.
Three.
The land.
Two
I land.
Two
I land.
One
I land.
Two
I land.
As a so.
The cannot.
A note.
They cannot
A float.
They cannot.
They dote.
They cannot.
They as denote.
Miracles play.
Play fairly.
Play fairly well.
A well.
As well.
As or as presently.
Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.

15
 Sometime during the early 1920’s Gertrude Stein, addressing one of her
interminable monologues to Ernest Hemingway in her flat 27 rue de Fleurus, remarked
that Hemingway and is contemporaries were “all a lost generation”. She thus gave a name
to the group of brilliant writers who appeared on the American scene during the decade
following the First World War: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald,
John Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis. But what Stein described in the phrase is the
generation’s own feeling that there was almost nothing in the tradition they inherited,
nothing in the conventional moral attitudes or political assumptions current in America
in their time. She felt that they had to start over again from the beginning to work out a
code of personal conduct they could live by.

16
THE PROSE FICTION OF MODERNISM: “The Lost Generation.”

Gertrude Stein in the 1920s named - “The Lost Generation”- to that

group of brilliant writers who appeared on the American scene during the
decade following the First World War and who still dominate American
fiction nowadays. These authors were Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway
(Nobel Prize, 1954), William Faulkner (Nobel Prize, 1950), and John Dos
Passos among others. With this phrase, Stein described the generation’s
own feeling that there was almost nothing in the tradition they had
inherited, nothing in the conventional moral attitudes or political
assumptions current in America in their times, that they could accept, and
for that reason these writers had to find out new ways of expression and
new attitudes of life. They rejected the provincialism of American manners,
the narrow hypocrisy of American public life and nearly all these writers of
the “Lost Generation” attacked the defects of the conventional American
way of life. All of them left the States, and as volunteers expatriates came
to Europe to discover a new consciousness based on experience:
“Europe (largely Paris) not only permitted writers to drink legally; it
also gave them a congenital atmosphere in which to refine their craft.
Some, like E.E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway, had
fallen under the spell of Paris during the war but they returned as soon as
they could to the center of avant-garde movements in Paris, the city of
James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. There they formed part of an
American enclave and contributed to the advanced magazines that did so
much to spread the news of dadaism and surrealism.” (E. Elliott, Columbia
Literary History of the United States, New York, Columbia University Press,
1988, pp. 713-714)

John Dos Passos (1896-1970)

American novelist, Dos Passos was born in Chicago, but spent much
of his early life living abroad with his mother. He returned to the USA to
attend Harvard University, after his graduation in Harvard, he came to Spain
in autumn 1916 and left in February 1917, then he served as an ambulance
driver in France and Italy during World War I, afterwards in summer 1919
1
he returned to Spain till spring 1920. He wrote upon his war experiences in
his first two novels: One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920), and Three Soldiers
(1921). In 1922 he published a collection of essays Rosinante to the Road
Again, writing on his own adventures in the Spanish countryside, where he
depicted the story of two nomads walking from Madrid to Toledo in the
years after the World War. Their travel interweaves Spanish customs,
literature, and art. For the author, Spain never ceases to tease the
imagination. He published a volume of poetry, A Pushcart at the Curb
(1922), his only book of poems, which includes “Winter in Castille”, twenty-
five poems on different parts of Castille, written in 1917 or “Vagones de
Tercera”, ten poems describing his journey by train in Spain between 1919
and 1920:
“The train throbs doggedly
over the gleaming rails
fleeing the light-green flanks of hills
dappled with alternate shadow of clouds,
fleeing the white froth of orchards,
of clusters of apples and cherries in flower,
fleeing the wide lush meadows,
wealthy with cowslips,
and the trampling horses and backward-strained
bodies of plowmen,
fleeing the gleam of the sky in puddles and glit-
tering waters
the train throbs doggedly
over the ceaseless rails
spurning the verdant grace
of April’s dainty apparel;
so do my desires
spurn those things which are behind
in hunger of horizons.
Rapido: Valencia-Barcelona
1919-1920

As a journalist, he returned to Spain in 1933 and again in 1937, during

the Spanish Civil War, where he collaborated with his friend Ernest
Hemingway. After this experience in Spain, he became disillusioned with
communism and broke completely with the left, as is made clear in his novel
The adventures of a Young Man (1939).

2
 It was during one of his frequent stays in Paris in the early 1920s that
Dos Passos experienced first-hand Dadaist techniques when he met Louis
Aragon, Tristan Tzara, and the rest of the Dadaist group. The influence of
Dadaism continued to be present in his literary works during the late 1920s
and the 1930s.
In his writings from 1910 to 1925 we can se the presence of several
Dadaists and pictorial techniques. Such literary strategies became
particularly evident in his first novel Manhattan Transfer (1925):
1) An Impressionistic picture of New York.
2) Highly experimental in its juxtaposition.
3) With a radically nonlinear structure.
4) A daring use of fragmentation.
5) A simultaneous and multi-faceted presentation of perspectives
(multi-perspectivism).

John Dos Passos the first on the left and Ernest Hemingway the last on
the right, when they were in Madrid filming with Joris Ibens, Spanish Earth,
during the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

3
 Dos Passos came to prominence with Manhattan Transfer (1925),
one of the first urban novels of the 20th Century. A novel set in New York
in which he introduced the stylistic innovations he would develop further in
his masterpiece, U.S.A. As we know, the relationships between modernism
and the modern city are very relevant in that period of experimentation.
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land referring to London in his modernist verses and
Dos Passos referring to New York City in modernist prose. Techniques from
all modern arts of that era can be found out in this work, specifically
impressionism, expressionism, dadaism and Cubism. Each chapter begins
comprising observations of city life and the whole novel appears as a
collage text, where one can find bits and pieces from newspapers
headlines, newspaper articles, phrases from advertisements, slogans,
songs, letters, notes, verse lines, snatches of dialogue, entries from
encyclopedias, etc. Dos Passos wanted to create in this novel a new way of
prose, and clearly, we can see the interinfluence between literature and
visual arts. The novel borrowed elements from the Cubist and Dadaist
techniques, mixing them in an irrational and unsuspected way. Manhattan
Transfer consist of three sections, each one divided into chapters headed
by short, highly impressionistic prose segments in italic type that serve as
an imagistic backdrop to the narrative. This novel illustrates Dos Passos’s
interests in innovation and experimentation in the overall concept of the
novel as the incorporation of montage, collage, colors and multi-
perspectivism, what particularly contributed to the uniqueness of the
novel. But he also used the overflow of sensory perception (psycho-
narration) because the narrator gives insight in both his external
impressions as well as in his own consciousness. Whereas the Cubist collage
was the result of deliberate manipulation of artistic materials by the
artist, Dos Passos’ novel is entirely governed by chance, and it always seeks
to convey a message to the viewer to reveals the chaotic disjointedness of
the modern world. Paradoxically, both Dada and Dos Passos sought to
produce chaos by following a pre-established formula. In this way,
Manhattan Transfer conveys a Dadaist message of despair, disgust,
isolation, and destruction.
Dos Passos often incorporates streams of consciousness as well,
what reveals the characters` impressions, personal feelings and thoughts,
Manhattan Transfer composes an enormous collage manufactured in a
cubist manner and the result was fragmentation. As we had seen for Cubist

4
artists the underlying idea was to reduce objects to geometrical elements:
cubes, lines, cylinders, cones, and spheres. Most cubist paintings lack any
significant content and mainly consist of surrealist “landscapes”, and figures
(if any identifiable content at all) all sides of one object simultaneously
spread out on the canvas from the dissolution of the coherent idea of point
of view and space. Dos Passos used what he called a cameralike zoom to
focus on a specific part of the panorama he wanted to describe. This also
explains his narrative technique of “spotlights” and the seemingly chaotic
fragmentation of this novel.
When Manhattan Transfer was published in 1925, Sinclair Lewis
(Nobel Prize in 1930) described it “as a novel of the very first importance…
The dawn of a whole new school in writing… more important in any way
than anything by Gertrude Stein or Marcel Proust or even Mr. Joyce’s
Ulysses.” Scott Fitzgerald said that it was astonishingly good, Ernest
Hemingway that it was a “spiritual Baedeker to New York, and D.H.
Lawrence “the best modern book about New York he had ever read”.
Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy including: The 42 Parallel (1930), 1919
(1932), and The Big Money (1936) interweaves the stories of fictional
characters with biographies of real people and accounts of historical events,
reality, and fiction at the same level. This trilogy begins roughly with the
Spanish-American War in 1898 and documents an era in America’s history
marked by a rising tension between capitalists and labor unions,
technological advances, involvement in World War I, and the Jazz Age,
which ended in the early 1930s with the aftermath of the 1929 stock market
crash. Again, in this trilogy, his narrative technique is quite unconventional.
His characters are types rather than fully developed individuals, who lead
lives that are interconnected in an almost random (aleatory) way. Although
several of these characters appear in the three novels, their activities do
not constitute a unified plot, but their lives have a common pattern: all are
destroyed -either physically or spiritually- by a society that is becoming
materialistic and hostile to individual freedom. Dos Passos made use of
different kinds of narrative throughout the trilogy. He interrupts the stories
of his fictional characters with brief biographies of politicians, inventors,
intellectuals, labor leaders, businessmen and artists, an authentic social
collage.

5
 These three novels contain three almost different perceptions or
perspectives, each one with its own isolated mode of expression, using
collage and montage. As you know, the term collage was mainly coined by
Cubists and Dadaists and montage in this context simply means the
arrangement of single pieces as part of a bigger work. Other examples for
montage can be found in newspapers and films. Newspapers usually are
made up of separate articles, pictures, and ads which together form a
unique informative paper. The integration of these so-called “objets
trouvés” were supposed to connect the work with absent parts of reality.
At the beginning of the chapters, we find impressionistic passages
called “Newsreels”, in which Dos Passos juxtaposes montages of slogans,
newspaper headlines, lyrics from popular songs, and parts of political
speeches. Dos Passos’ use of the Newsreels in U.S.A. to import reality into
fiction is more nearly related to the Dadaist spirit than to the documentary
spirit of the 1930s. Here is a sample representing the period of the First
World War:

“TO THE GLORY OF FRANCE ETERNAL

Oh, a German officer the Rhine
Parleyvoo

Germans Beaten at Riga…… Grateful Parisians Cheer

Marshalls of France….

PITEOUS PLAINT OF WIFE TELLS OF

RIVAL’S WILES
Wilson’s Arrival in Washington Starts Trouble”

6
 Right beside this *“Newsreel” above (“Noticiario”: “A short film of
news and current affairs, formerly made for showing as part of the program
in a movie theater.”) Dos Passos uses what he called the *“Camera Eye”
sections, written in *stream of consciousness form, that present a very
subjective view of American life as experienced by a young unnamed boy
who grows to manhood during the period covered by the trilogy
(Bildungsroman novel). Here is a sample that describes waking up in the
morning:

“daylight enlarges out of ruddy quiet, very faintly

throbbing wanes into my sweet darkness broadens
through the warm weighting the lids warm sweetly
then snaps on
enormously blue, yellow pink”

Between these stylistic extremes, the narrative of events is presented

in a dry, neutral style that often sounds more like a psychological report
than a fiction.

7
 The Camera Eye (51)

at the head of the valley in the dark of the hills on the broken floor of
a lurchedover cabin a man halfsits halflies propped up by an old woman
two wrinkled girls that might be young chunks of coal flare in the
edin mouth the taut throat the belly swelled enormous with the wound
he got working on the minetipple
the barefoot girl brings him a tincup of water the woman wipes sweat
off his streaming face with a dirty denim sleeve the firelight flares in
his eyes stretched big with fever in the women’s scared eyes and in the
blanched faces of the foreigners
without help in the valley hemmed by dark strike-silent hills the man
will die (my father died we know what it is like to see a man die) the
women will lay him out on the rickety cot the miners will bury him
in the jail it’s light too hot the steamheat hisses we talk through the
green painted iron bars to a tall white mustachioed old man some smiling
miners in shirtsleeves a boy faces white from mining have already the
tallowy look of jailfaces
foreigners what can we say to the dead? foreigners what can we say
to the jailed? The representative of the political party talks fast through

8
the bars join up with us and no other union we’ll send you tobacoo candy
solidarity our lawyers will write briefs speakers will shout your names at
meetings they’ll carry your names on cardboard on picketlines the men
in jail shrug their shoulders smile thinly our eyes look in their eyes through

Hemingway and John Dos Passos in France. 1924

Rafael Alberti, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway 1937.

9
 Langston Hughes and John Dos Passos in Spain 1937.

10
John Dos Passos on the left and William Faulkner in the middle.

11
 FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1941)

Fitzgerald was a victim of himself and his extravagant life-style.

Scott Fitzgerald was a famous American novelist and short story writer who was
born in Minnesota, he entered Princeton University in 1913, and in 1917 he left the
University without graduating to join the US Army in Alabama, where he met, courted,
and became engaged with Zelda Sayre. After leaving the army in 1919, and it was
rejected by Zelda, he moved to New York and sold his first short story, “Babes in the
Wood”. In 1920 after several attempts, he published his first novel This Side of Paradise,
an almost autobiographical work, that was an immediate success. Due to this literary
success, the money he received helped him to convince and marry Zelda. His second
novel The Beautiful and Damned, appeared in 1922. The protagonist Anthony Patch is
an alcoholic, whose goal in life is to inherit and spend his grandfather’s money. For much
of his life Fitzgerald was an alcoholic, too, though he always wrote sober, and he was a
craftsman, the same case as Poe, Hemingway, and Faulkner. The Fitzgerald’s went to
France in 1924, and they met other expatriate American writers, Ernest Hemingway,
who became a close friend forever, or Gertrude Stein, that after This Side of Paradise
and Flappers and Philosophers, thought that Fitzgerald had more talent than all the
other Lost Generation writers combined. T.S. Eliot called Gatsby “the first step that
American fiction has taken since Henry James”.
In 1925 he published his best and more famous novel The Great Gatsby, and during the
next five years they travelled back and forth between Europe and America several times.
In 1930 Zelda suffered her first nervous breakdown and from then, she was hospitalized
periodically in Europe and America until her death in 1948. Pressed for money, he
published his fourth novel Tender is the Night in 1934. In 1931, 1932 and 1937 he worked
as a screenwriter in Hollywood with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but he was fired because
of his drinking. By 1937 Fitzgerald was sick, alcoholic, unable to write and no longer
earning royalties because the theme of his writings was out of place during the American
Depression. A clear example, in 1931 he was still making 40.000 dollars a year from his
writing and in 1939 his royalties totaled 33 dollars. He died suddenly of a heart attack in
1940.

The Fitzgeralds 1921

Fitzgerald was the protagonist and chronicler of the Jazz Age in his novels and short
stories. The 1920s was a paradoxical decade of political ignorance, capitalism, and material
wealth, but also of euphoria, dreams, “Carpe Diem”, puritanism, hypocrisy, *Prohibition,
new technologies, illusory promises, flappers, jazz, and films, that ended in the Crack-Up
crisis in 1929, and the following economic Depression in the 1930s.
We can distinguish two different stages in his literary career. The first one during de
decade of the 1920s till 1929, and the second one from 1930 until his death.
First period of literary and economic success:
Novels
 1ª This Side of Paradise (1920)
2ª The Beautiful and Damned (1922)
3ª The Great Gatsby (1925)
Short stories
Flappers and Philosophers (1920)
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
All the Sad Young Men (1926)
Second period brought relentless decline for him:
Novels
4ª Tender is the Night (1934)
5ª The Last Tycoon (1941)

Short stories
The Crack-Up (1945)

Fitzgerald’s philosophy of life was that only the rich and successful people in
society have the means and therefore the opportunity to make of life a pleasant and
satisfying place for the Good Life, and for the realization of their dreams, as we can see
in his short story “The Rich Boy”, a brilliant study of the special character of the very
wealthy in America. He was a victim of his own obsessions and wishes for wealth, fame,
comfort, and success. His marriage with Zelda turned them into the beautiful couple of
the 1920s, their extravagances were told and retold in the gossip columns of the
magazines and newspapers, but their marriage was dominated by drink, marital
tensions, and mental illness. He made large sums by selling stories (178 short stories
during his literary career to 4.000 dollars each.) but he was more interested in making
money and spending it on glamorous parties, extravagant sprees held in hotels, rented
houses, or flats, than to save it or invest in equity or states.
Fitzgerald’s literary style in his novels is a clear example of autobiographical
literature and literary realism in the accurate descriptions of those manners and social
characteristics of the Jazz Age in the decade of the 1920s, a boom period of
unconventionality and dissipation, very well developed in his novels This Side of Paradise
(1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922) or The Great Gatsby (1925). The Great Gatsby
is in part a regional story of displaced Midwesterners who came East (Nick Carraway) as
well as of class conflict and status. Fitzgerald’s heroes live among the wealthy in Europe
or in America and Fitzgerald fascination with rich people would be one of his constant
themes of his fiction. In Fitzgerald’s works wealth is not an evil in itself; quite the
contrary, his characters and himself are attracted to the glitter and the promise of
enjoyment and success than money can afford them. Maybe, because he lived the same
life of luxury and dissipation than his characters, he depicted the imagery of his novels
with vivid and real pictures for his readers of settings, locations, historical events,
manners, and behaviors, always under a romantic perspective and a classical symbology
that reinforced his narrative. He always used a very descriptive, fluent, and poetic
language, with periodic sentences, some rhetorical devices, repetitions, alliterations, or
extended metaphors, together with an elaborate imagery, with allegorical qualities, and
traditional symbols, but he never wrote with those linguistic tincts of experimental
modernism as Stein, Dos Passos or Hemingway, who accused him of using a very
commercial style, but in any case, very profitable for Fitzgerald under an economic
viewpoint. We can compare their three different styles:

“the heavy trees of the small town that are a part of your heart if it is your town
and you have walked under them, but that are only too heavy, that shut out the sun and
that dampen the houses for a stranger; out past the last house and onto the highway
that rose and fell straight away ahead with banks of red dirt sliced cleanly away and the
second-growth timber on both sides. It was not his country but it was the middle of fall
and all of this country was good to drive through and to see.”

“The old island here that flowed once for Dutch sailor’s eyes--a fresh, green
breast of the new world. Its vanished trees…had once pandered in whispers to the last
and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have
held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic
contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history
with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

“When we came away we came away to stay we came away steadily. And where
are we. We are in the land of sky larks not in the land of nightingales. We do not mention
robins swallows, quails and peacocks. We do not mix them. We murmur to each other,
nightingales, we pleased each other with fruit trees.”

After the Crack-up Fitzgerald tried to find a new literary theme more suitable to
those new times of poverty, misery, and sadness. A new period, where his glamorous
novels no longer had a place, and he began to describe the displays and disorders of that
Jazz Age, the irrelevance of the rich he had admired, and he grew more conscious of his
own economic and psychic situation. This evolution can be seen in his last two novels,
Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon.
 He described a new world very far from the old idealism of the American Dream,
where we can see the corruption of that American Way of Life turned into a new
American Dream that had been destroyed by the crack-up in 1929. The ambition of his
last years was to work in the dream-factory of America, Hollywood, and to pay his debts.
This was his last dream.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald in France in 1924

 ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961)

Ernest Hemingway. American novelist and short story writer was born in Oak
Park, Illinois, near the Great Lakes region, the setting for his early stories. He never went
to the University, after his graduation in Oak Park High School he works in the Kansas
City Star, as a reporter. He joined the army as a volunteer in 1918, and he was an
ambulance driver in the Italian front during the World War I, where he was injured and
later was… In Milan’s hospital he met and fell in love with an English nurse, Agnes von
Kurowsky (A Farwell to Arms). After returning to the United States, he entered as a
journalist in the Toronto Star Weekly in 1920 and in the same year he married with
Hadley Richardson. In 1921 he was sent to Paris as a correspondent in Europe of the
Toronto. In Paris he met Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, who taught him the new
techniques of modernism and their encouragement and criticism were to play a valuable
part in the formation of his style. Then he would meet John Dos Passos, Wyndham
Lewis, Picasso, Ford Madox Ford, Scott Fitzgerald, and others. But Gertrude Stein not
only instructed him in literary matters, but she also recommended him to visit Spain and
attend bullfights. Hemingway came to Spain for the first time in 1923 and he was
infected by Spanish cultural traditions (bullfighting mainly), and excellent wines, and
since then Spain was present in his life and his works.

1
 In Plaza de Las Ventas, Madrid, 1923.

“Once I remember Gertrude Stein talking of bullfights spoke of her

admiration for Joselito and showed me some pictures of him in the ring and of herself
and Alice Toklas sitting in the first row with Joselito and his brother Gallo bellow.” (Death
in the Afternoon, p. 7)

2
 Gertrude Stein with John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, "Bumby", in Paris
(1924). He was named for his mother, and for the Spanish matador Nicanor Villalta y Serrés

His first collection of stories (18) was in our time (1925), a modernist book, as we
can see in its title in “small letters” and in the style, containing “Up in Michigan”. After
his stay in Pamplona in 1924 and 1925, he wrote The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta) (1926) that
made him famous. The setting is Spain, Pamplona, and its “Sanfermines”, the main
characters are a group of British and American expatriates in France, a Spanish matador
and a femen fatal, Lady Brett Ashley.

3
 Ernest Hemingway fighting a bull in "The Amateurs fights", Pamplona, 1925.

Ernest Hemingway at a cafe with friends and Hadley Richardson and Pauline
Pfeiffer. Pamplona, summer 1926.

4
 In 1927 he divorced Hadley Richardson, he married Pauline Pfeiffer and
published Men Without Women (short stories). Hemingway’s next novel A farewell to
Arms (1929), on his experiences in the Word War I, was another literary success.
Hemingway, since he came to Spain for the first time in 1923, was very fond of Spanish
bullfights, he attended the most major spectacles of this art all around Spain and met
the most famous Spanish matadors. His Spanish experiences, and the sense of tragedy
involved in bullfighting, produced a change in his literary perspective, and in the future
destiny of his characters.
“So, I went to Spain to see bullfights and try to write about them for myself. I
thought they would be simple and barbarous and cruel and that I would not like them,
but that I would see certain definitive action which give me the feeling of life and death
that I was working for.” (Death in the Afternoon, p. 9)
All these Spanish matters led him to write a study of bullfighting: Death in the
Afternoon (1932), a first-hand non-fiction book of 333 pages, with original photographs
and a very interesting, and explanatory glossary of certain words, terms and phrases
used in bullfighting, together with a calendar including dates on which bullfights will
ordinarily be held in Spain, France, Mexico and Central and South America. This treaty
gathered his experiences, opinions, and considerations about…..
I agree with Kenneth Kinnamon in “Hemingway, the Corrida and Spain”:
His attitudes from 1922 to 1932 were becoming progressively more Hispanicized.
According to Spanish folklore, which Hemingway accepts in this respect, human courage
resides in the “cojones”. In the explanatory glossary at the end of Death in the
Afternoon, he says of “cojones” that “a valorous bullfighter is said to be plentifully
equipped with these”. The protagonists of each subsequent Hemingway novel are
plentifully equipped by the novelist with “cojones”.
Winner Take Nothing (1933) was his second book of short stories (14) containing:
“A Clean-well lighted place”, and “The Capital of the World”, two excellent Spanish
stories in Madrid.

In 1933 Hemingway and wife went to Africa during more than two
months, but one was spent on safary to Kenya. This experience of living in
the savannah and hunting wild animals provided him material for his
following non-fiction book, Green Hills of Africa (1935) and two wonderful
short stories, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and “The short Happy Life
of Francis Macomber” (1936).

5
 In 1937 published To Have and Have not, a short novel about smuggling
in the Key West-Havana region. The Spanish Civil War blew up in 1936, and
during this war Hemingway came to Spain four times as a correspondent
for the NANA Agency (North American Newspaper Alliance) writing 30 war
dispatches. The first time from March 16th to May 9th, 1937; The second
time from September 3rd to December 28th, 1937; The third time from
March 31rst to May 14th, 1938; and the last one from August 31st to
November 15th, 1938. The last time he visited the front lines was in Mora
de Ebro (Tarragona) on November 5th, 1938, during the Ebro Battle.

6
Literary works about the Spanish Civil War:
Short Stories.
- “The Chauffeurs of Madrid” (May 1937)
- “Old Man and the Bridge” (May 1938)
- “The Denunciation” (November 1938)
- “The Butterfly and the Tank” (December 1938)
- “Night Before Battle” (February 1939)
- “Under the Ridge” (October 1939)
- “Nobody Ever Dies” (October 1939)

A Prose Poem: “On the American Dead in Spain” (February 1939)

Film: The Spanish Earth (1938)
Play: The Fifth Column (1938)
Novel: For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) probably his greatest literary
success sold 270.000 copies in the first year. Though it was forbidden in
Spain.
7
 In 1940 Hemingway was divorced from his second wife and married
Martha Gellhorn, the famous American war-correspondent he met in
Madrid, during the Spanish War and they went to live to Cuba. They
divorced in 1945 and he married Mary Welsh in 1946.

8
 He spent World Word II as a war-correspondent and in Cuba as a pilot
of his own “Q” ship (El Pilar) to detect German submarines. In 1946
Hemingway married his fourth wife Mary Welsh. In 1950 he published,
Across the River and into the Tress, his first novel in a decade, which was
poorly received. But his short novel The Old Man and The Sea (1952) was a
best seller with a great impact in millions of readers, with this novel he
recovered the best moments of his first literary style. A parable of inner
strength and courage about an old fisherman’s struggle to bring home a big
marlin he has caught. In fact, a metaphor of his own real and physical
situation in life. The following year he received the Pulitzer Prize and in
1954 the Nobel Prize of literature, but he couldn’t attend personally to his
ceremony in Stockholm, due to the aftermath of two consecutives plane
crashes in Africa, when he was doing a safary, besides he was suffering a
general, physical, and nervous degeneration. Despite of that Hemingway
visited Spain during five days in 1954 and 58 days in 1956. The motive for
these journeys to Spain was to prepare an appendix for an updated edition
of his study of bull fighting entitled Death in the Afternoon (1932). Life
Magazine hired Hemingway to write a journalist essay about two famous

9
Spanish matadors, Antonio Ordoñez and Luis Miguel Dominguin, during the
bullfighting season in summer 1959. To accomplish this, Hemingway
journeyed through Spain for 173 days in 1959 and 75 days in 1960. His last
two stays in Spain are particularly relevant, we know the most about these
visits because Hemingway wrote about his experiences in a travelogue
entitled The Dangerous Summer (non-fiction book written between 1959-
60, published posthumously in 1985). Due to his nervous breakdown and
mental psychosis, he committed suicide on July 2, 1961.
A Moveable Feast, a memoir of his years in Paris after the World
War I, was left completed but unrevised at his death and it was published
in 1964. This book contains very interesting chapters on Gertrude Stein,
Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, Sylvia Beach, Ford Madox Ford,
Scott Fitzgerald among others.

10
Rafael Alberti and Ernest Hemingway 1937.

11
Ernest Hemingway and Pio Baroja, 1956.

Ernest Hemingway and Camilo Jose Cela, 1959.

12
 B i V I S I O N DE LA OBRA DE E R N E S I HEHINGWAY EN PERIODOS

1923. - I h r e e S t o r l e s a n d Xen Poems-*

1924, - i n o u r t i m e . ( P a r i s ) <13) í^t^

EBilÜiR PERIODO 1926.- The J o r r e o t s of SBring.

Obras Comprendidas 1 9 2 6 . - J h e Sun A i s g Bises,

e n t r e 1923 y 1929-

1927,- Men W i t h o u t Women.(14)*

1 9 2 9 . - A F a r e w e l l t o Arms.

1932-- Death I Qthe Alternoon-(Tratado)

1933.- Winner lake NothLQa-<i4)*

1935. - B r e e n HLLLs Qf A f r i c a - ( T e s t i m o - )

SEGUNDO PERIODO 1936. - I h e S h o r t Ha^B^ ULfe o f F r a n c a s

Obras Comprendidas Macomber-

entre 1932 y 1942.
The Snows o f KILImaniaro-*

1937. - T o H a y e and H a y e n g t -

1938. - I h e F l f t h CoLumn.(Teatro)

The Fi.rst FortyrNine Storíes. *

1 9 4 0 - - F o r Whom t h e B e L I iQlls.

1942.- Men a t War- iZ)%

1950-- A c r o s s The Rlyer and I n t o J h e

lERCER PERIODO Trees.

Obras Comprendidas 1 9 5 2 . - I h e O í d Man a n d I h e S e a -

entre 1950 y 1960.
1 9 6 0 - - D a n g e r o y s Symmer- ( L i - f e , G a c e t a
Ilustrada)

1964.- A Mgyeable Feast.(1960)(Testimo.)

OBRAS POSTUMAS
1970.- i s l a n d s LQ t h e S t r e a m . ( 1 9 4 6 - 1 9 5 1 )

1986.- Ihe Barden of Edén.(1946-1958)

(*) V o l ú m e n e s c o n t e n i e n d o " S h o r t Stori es".

 DINAMICA DE VOCES EN LA. NARRATIVA DE ERKBST HEMINGVAY

José Manuel B a r r i o Marco

•THE SUN AL30 R I 3 E 3 ( 1 9 ? 6 )

Ji.BARNES J.BAHNES J.BARNES

PEDRO R g i E R O ROBERT COHN ^L'IKE CAMBELL

COUWT MIPPIPOPOLOUS

J.BARNES

.~A PARBVELL TO ARMS (1929) (simplificada)

RINALDI _ HELEN FERGÜSON

CATHERINE BARELEY

>-T0 HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1937)

JOHIÍSON
1§ P a r t e :

EDinr M A R S H A L L

H A R R Y MORGAN V,'ES L E Y

WILLIE ADAJ.-.3 ^ 1-REDKRIC HARRISON

^ Parte: THE LAUGHTONS

.JOHN MACWALSEY FREDHf

RED

HELEN GORDON. RICHARD GORDON POOCHYf

NEL50N JACK3
•HELENE BRADLEY
.HERBERT SPELIMAK
V
ROGER JOHNSON

Kilr. S D . U Ú O N S

MARIE HARRY ALBERT TRACYf

FREDDY ROBERTO

-POR VHOM THE BELL T0LL3 (1940)

_ P A E L O ^ .
PILAR
MARIA- RAFAEL
JOAQUIN- AGUSTIN

SANTIAGO

(El:Sordo)

X
FERNANDO

AJTDRE MASSART

,-ACR035 THE RIVBR AND IITO THE TREE3 (1950)

ANDREA JACKSON ARNALDO THE SURGEON

THE BAR-TENDER

RICHARD CANTWELL THE ASSISTAN M.

THE PORTER

THE GRyjT M A E S T R O DOTÚENICO * T H E BOATT.IAN

THE OLD MAN A I ^ THE 3EA (195?)

PESCADOR N5 1

S.ANTIAGO KAIÍOLIN PESCADOR NO 2

DUEÑO DEL BAR-

I3IANDS IN THE STREAM (1970)

1* P a r t e :
Antonio ^ Georg^e ^ Petera-

2» P a r t e :
FRED ARCHER' IGNACIO N.RE VELLO

3^ P a r t e :
THCT.IAS HUDSON

THOMAS HUDSON

THE gARDEH OF EDEN (1986)

DAVID BOURNE

CATHEUINE HILL 4 > MARITA

HEMINGWAY’ STYLE.

Hemingway never went to the University, and he was a self-made

man, as many other American writers were before him after the Civil War.
As it was the case of Mark Twain and Stephen Crane, both coming to fiction
from a newspaper background. Since the beginning, Hemingway was also
trained as a newspaper writer. When he was twenty years, without any
experience of writing or reading good literature, he started working as a
reporter in the Kansas City Star and later in the Toronto Daily Star and the
Toronto Star Weekly and he wrote for these two papers for the next four
years. His first guide as a reporter was the Star stylebook of writing. The
general rules were objectivity, terseness, and clarity. Hemingway learned
to value the short, simple declarative sentences, to avoid the descriptive
and therefore often subjective adjectives. If the nouns and verbs are
accurate the reader will find the appropriate emotional response. These
instructions will remain in his writings as the basis of his literary style. Above
all, newspaper writing must be readable, and the prose style should be
close to the pattern of everyday spoken language, away from the more
ornate academic style of the New England tradition.
When he went to Paris in 1921, many things changed, Sherwood
Anderson wrote letters of introduction for Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound,
recommending him as an unpublished writer of unusual promise.
Hemingway met Sylvia Beach, the owner of the famous Shakespeare and
Company bookstore in Paris, the favorite place of James Joyce in 1922. They
became good friends and she encourage him to read the great fiction
writers- Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Twain, Crane,
James, Conrad, or Joyce. He
worked hard on how to say more
in fewer words or suggesting
more than telling the reader
what he was supposed to feel.
Gertrude Stein’s The Making of
Americans was the book that
Hemingway analyzed more
carefully trying to discover the
influence of Cubism in literature.

1
He was very conscious of the difficulty of reading such a book, but Stein
showed a great mastering in the use of rhetorical devices, and Hemingway
adapted this technique to his own syntactic and economical style. He was
influenced by Stein’s conversational and literary style and by the technical
skills of composition. Hemingway’s sentences were short and declarative,
with just enough variation to avoid monotony. In his first style he rarely
used the subordinating conjunctions like “since” or “although” that enable
a writer to do the thinking and feeling to the reader. Hemingway induce
emotion, but he does not describe it. The most important is the recreation
of the emotion by the reader himself. Pound taught T.S. Eliot and
Hemingway how to recreate emotions through specific concrete images,
and imagism is also in the essence of their style. Ezra Pound hated hollow
abstractions and taught Hemingway the accurate use of the correct word in
the proper place, and the absence of adjectives to create vivid images and
real impressions.
Leaving aside experimentalism and modernism, Hemingway wanted
to write an antiliterature, after the model of Mark Twain, he said “All
modern American literature comes from one book called Huckleberry
Finn”. Saying this he was vindicating the common and colloquial language,
but with a certain degree of experimentalism. Other characteristic of
Hemingway’s style is the art of omission of what is essential in the plot, his
famous “Iceberg theory”:

“If it is any use to know, I always try to write on the principle of the
iceberg. There are seven eights of it under water for every part that shows.
It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does
not know it there is a hole in the story.”

In A Moveable Feast he gave a clear example of this theory, which is

more interactive with the reader and leaves free way to speculation:

“It was a vey simple story called Out of Season and I had omitted the
real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted
on my new theory that could omit anything if you know that you omitted,
and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel
something more than they understood.” (p.58)

2
 1. Rhetorical devices.
“Liz liked Jim very much. She like it the way he walked over the shop /and/
often went to the kitchen door to watch for him to start down the road.
She liked it about his moustache. She liked it about how white his teeth
were when he smiled. She liked it very much that he didn’t look like a
blacksmith. She liked it how much D.J. Smith liked him. One day she found
that she liked it the way the hair was black on his arms /and/ how white
they were above the tanned line when he washed up in the washbasin
outside the house. Liking that made her feel funny.” (“Up in Michigan”,
1925)

2. Descriptions of movement.
“The bus levelled down onto the straight line of road that ran to Burguete.
We passed a crossroad /and/ crossed a bridge over a stream. The houses of
Burguete were along both sides of the road. There were no side-streets.
We passed the church /and/ the school-yard, /and/ the bus stopped. We
got down /and/ the driver handed down our bags /and/ the rod-case. A
carabineer in his cocked hat /and/ yellow leather cross-straps came up.”
(The Sun Als Rises, 1926)

“We went down the stairs /and/ out of the door /and/ walked across the
square towards the Café Iruña.” (The Sun Also Rises, 1926)

“(1) The innkeeper come in /and/ went over to the table. (2) He spoke in
dialect /and/ the sexton answered him. (3) The peasant looked out of the
window. (4) The innkeeper went out of the room. (5) The peasant stood up.
(6) He took a folder ten-thousand kronen note out of a leather pocket book
/and/ unfolded it. (7) The girl came up.” (“An Alpine Idyll”, Men Without
Women, 1927)
3. Description of behavior.
“Mike was a bad drunk. Brett was a good drunk. Bill was a good drunk. Cohn
never drunk. (The Sun Also Rises, 1926)

3
 4. Dialogue:
“- What did you say?
-I said – we could have everything.
- we can have everything.
- No, we can’t.
- we can have.
- No, we can’t.
- we can.
-No, we can’t. – It isn’t ours
- It’s ours
- No, it isn’t. – They take it away.
- They haven’t taken it away.
-We’ll wait and see. (“Hills Like White Elephants”,1927)

*****

5. Dialogue.

“Maria”.
“Yes”.
“Maria”.
“Yes”.
“Maria”.
“Oh, yes. Please”.
“Art thou not cold?”.
“Oh, no. Pull the robe over your shoulders”.
“Maria”.
“I cannot speak”.
“Oh, Maria, Maria, Maria”. (For Whom the Bell Tolls,1940)

4
 6. A Dialogue within an Interior monologue.

“What can you do but go ahead /and/ do it even though, even though, even
anyway, even anyway, oh, he isn’t, I’m sweet, yes you are, you’re lovely, oh,
you are so lovely, yes, lovely, /and/ I didn’t want to, but I am really, he is
sweet, no he’s not, he’s not, even here, I’m here, I’m always here /and/ I’m
the one that cannot go away, no, never. You sweet one. You lovely. Yes you
are. You lovely, lovely, lovely. Oh, yes, lovely. /And/ you’re me. So that’s it.
So that’s the way it is. So what about it always now /and/ over now. All over
now.” (To Have and Have Not, 1937)

7. Description: A landscape

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked
across the river /and/ the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river
there were pebbles /and/ boulders, dry /and/ white in the sun, /and/ the
water was clear /and/ swiftly moving /and/ blue in the channels. The
troops went by the house /and/ down the road /and/ the dust they raised
powered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of trees too were dusty /and/
the leaves fell early that year/and/ we saw the troops marching along the
road /and/ the dust rising /and/ leaves stirred by the breeze, falling /and/
the soldiers marching /and/ afterwards the road bare /and/ white except
for the leaves.
The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit
trees /and/ beyond the plain the mountains were brown /and/ bare. There
was fighting in the mountains /and/ at night we could see the flashes from
artillery. In the dark it was like summer lighting, but the nights were cool
/and/ there was not the feeling of a storm coming. (A Farewell to
Arms,1929)

1º. Simple and coordinated sentences with “and” that produce a

chain of very simple images join by prepositions.
2º. The nouns become simpler, than in his earlier work, but they are
the milestones that support all the description and separate the
different focalization planes.
3º. Reduction of descriptive adjectives.
4º. Very few verbs in personal form and use and abuse of the verb
“to be”.
5
 5º. Actions are shown using present participle.
6º. The outlines of the images are not sharply cut.
7º. The technique is impressionistic because the author focuses the
image by combining colors without defining images.
8º. Hemingway shows his artistry in knowing when no to say more.

Daniel J. Schneider says in “Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: The

Novel as Pure poetry:

“Almost invariable Hemingway employs the copulative “to be”, and

the expletives “there was” and “there were” occur ten times in twenty-one
sentences of the chapter, six of the sentences being introduced by them.
The repetitions (Rhetorical devices) give a sense of endless sameness and
weariness: abandon hope, all you who enter here.” (p.86)

Harry Levin in Observations on the style of Ernest Hemingway” says:

As in the movies, the illusion of movement is produced by repeating

the same shot with further modifications every time. Whenever a new
clause takes more than one step ahead, a subsequent clause repeats it in
order to catch up.” (p.110)

8. An ocean liner under water.

“The water was clear out there /and/ there was a spar of some kind sticking
out just above the water /and/ when I come up close to it I saw it was all
dark under water like a long shadow /and/ I came right over it /and/ there
under water was a liner; just lying there all under water was as big as the
whole world. I drifted over her in the boat. She lay on her side /and/ the
stern was deep down.” (“After the Storm”)

9. Description of “banderilleros”:

“Banderilleros are sometimes lean, brow, young, brave, skillful /and/

confident; more of a man that their matador, perhaps deceiving him with
his mistress, making what seems to them a good living; enjoying the life;
6
other times they are respectable fathers of families, wise about bull, fat but
still fast on their feet, small business men with the bulls as their business;
other times they are tough, unintelligent, but brave /and/ capable, lasting
like ballplayers, as long as their legs hold out; others may be brave but
unskillful, eking out a living, or they may be old /and/ intelligent but with
their legs gone, sought out by young fighters for their authority in the ring
/and/ their skill at placing bulls correctly.” (Death in the Afternoon, 1932)

10.Description of Goya’s world:

“Goya did not believed in costume but he did believe in blacks and greys, in
dust /and/ in light, in high places rising from plains, in the country around
Madrid, in movement, in his own cojones, in painting, in etching, /and/ in
what he had seen, felt, touched, handled, smelled, enjoyed, loved, hated,
lusted, drunk, mounted, suffered, spewed-up, lain-with, suspected,
observed, loved, hated, lusted, feared, detested, admired, loathed, /and/
destroyed.” (Death in the Afternoon, 1932)

11.Description of movement. The buffalo charging Macomber. Three

Different perspectives and one sensation.

“…/and/ (1) they saw him coming out of the bush sideways, fast as a crab,
/and/ the bull coming, nose out, mouth tight closed, blood dripping,
massive head straight out, coming in a charge, (2) his little pig eyes
bloodshot as he looked at them… and Macomber, as (3) he fired…saw
fragments like slate burst from the huge boss of the horns, /and/ the head
jerked, (4) he shot again at the wide nostrils /and/ saw the horns jolt again
/and/ fragments fly, /and/…aiming carefully, (5) shot again with the coming
head, nose out, /and/ he could see the little wicked eyes /and/ the head
started to lower, /and/ (6) he felt a sudden white-hot, blinding flash
explode inside his head /and/ that was all he ever felt.” (“The Short Happy
Life of Francis Macomber”, 1936)

12. An example of Dadaism. “Our Lord”, and “Hail Mary”. Full of nihilism.

“It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing /and/ a man
was a nothing too. I was only that /and/ light was all it needed /and/ a
certain cleanness /and/ order. Some live in it /and/ never felt it but he knew
7
it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada,
nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada.
Give us this nada our daily nada /and/ nada us our nada as we nada our
nadas /and/ nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada.
Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled /and/ stood
before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.
What’s yours? Asked the barman.
“Nada”. (“A Clean Well-Lighted Place”,
1933)

8
 WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-1962)

William Faulkner (1897-1062) The greatest writer in the History of American

Literature and one in the list of the best ones in history together with Shakespeare,
Milton, or Cervantes.
His finest fictional explorations of form and consciousness can be fully compared with
those of Joyce, Proust, or Virginia Woolf. He was novelist, short-story writer (more than
one hundred stories), poet, and scriptwriter in Hollywood. He was born in New Albany,
Mississippi, into a family which had played a prominent role in the history of the South.
When he was five years his family moved to Oxford, Lafayette County, which was his
residence for the rest of his life and the social and geographical landscape
(Yoknapatawpha County: see map) for many of his most important fiction works. He
was an indifferent student and never completed High School, later, as a special student,
he spent only one year at the University of Mississippi. We are before another self-self-
made writer, who learnt how to write by reading. When he left High school, it was his
mother who led and ruled his education, and Faulkner became an avid reader in
Shakespeare, Fielding, Voltaire, Dickens, Victor Hugo, Balzac, and Conrad, and later he
included early modernist, such as James, Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot, and the 19th
century English and French poets. Apart from this reading activity, since a child he was
very fond of listening to tales and stories of the family and the Old South belonging to
oral tradition, and stories of the Civil War from men who had fought in it, where he
learnt the past grandeur of the Southern tradition and the main problems. In 1918 after

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being rejected by the U.S. military army, he changed details of his own identity to join
the British Royal Force, and he added a “u” to his family surname “Falkner” to look more
British, but the war ended before he could fight. It was very important his stay in New
Orleans in 1925 where he started his career as a writer and he met a group of artists and
authors included the experimentalist Sherwood Anderson, the only intellectual bond
William Faulkner could get with Ernest Hemingway, because they were two very
different writers in their lives and literary works. They never met each other,
Hemingway a man of action and experiences, with an existential sense of tragedy,
uprooted from the American tradition and the United States, focused on an
international theme, and William Faulkner a taciturn, shy, and provincial man, rooted in
the Southern tradition, with a gothic perspective, with little international experience,
and rejecting all that Hemingway loved since his childhood, hunting, fishing, or shooting
in the woods. The only commonalities between them were their modernist
experimentation in prose, both were Americans and Nobel Prizes and their fondness for
drinking.
In July 1925 he sailed for Europe, he traveled to Italy and stayed in Paris, where
he wrote for six months. He used to go to the café that James Joyce frequented at that
time but being a great admirer of the Irish, never spoke to him, but Joyce’s Ulysses
(1922) was to have a profound effect on him. His first two novels were Soldier’s Pay
(1926) a decadent text where we see the aftermaths of the war in a postwar society and
Mosquitoes (1927), about a decadent life in bohemian New Orleans, though both were
set in the South, they did not represent the spirit of the Southern tradition, that made
him famous later. It is in his next novel Sartoris (1929) the first Faulkner’s novel to be set
in the fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha, his literary setting and landscape
for his best novels to describe a virgin land of past chivalry, lasting guilts and the defeat
of 1865. The hand-drawn map of this apocryphal county was included a few years later
in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and he signed the map: “William Faulkner, Sole, Owner &
Proprietor”. Yoknapatawpha in northern Mississippi represents the geographical reality
of Lafayette County, the real capital was Oxford (“Jefferson” in his imaginary county),
where Faulkner was living.

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 In 1929 he married Stelle Oldham Franklin, and in the following year he bought Rowan
Oak in Oxford (Mississippi), the house where he wrote and lived the rest of his life, in the
same year he published his masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury in which showed for the
first time a great change in his literary style and a new concept in form, it was immediately
considered the great American equivalent of Joyce’s Ulysses. We are before an
experimental and complex novel with dense symbolic qualities, and a modernist narrative
technique offering multiple points of views using stream of consciousness, and a non-
chronological plot supported by flashbacks, but its literary strategics and tactics were
finally very different from Joyce’s. Faulkner in this way was able to connect and adapt
form and content to describe the history of this Southern family, and he chose a chaotic
world of voices, thoughts, psychic crisis, and experimental prose to link the glory of past
with the chaos and decadence of the present, due to its new narrative technique, the

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novel had a limited literary success. Many of those first American readers assumed that
fiction should be rather sociological and rather simple in form, the plots usually being
presented in straight chronological sequence.
This novel consists of four numbered and dated sections. The first three are
interior monologues by the three brothers, Benjy, Quentin, and Jason. The fourth section
is presented from the point of view of the author as a covert narrator in the character of
Dilsey (a black servant). Caddy, the sister, has no section of her own, but she is the central
subject of each one of those interior monologues by her brothers. Regarding at the plot
the novel is pure naturalism. Benjy, the youngest, is a huge man with the mentality of a
3-year-old, an idiot that lives in emotional deprivation and he is castrated for the rape of
Caddy, the only one who had shown affection toward him in the absence of affection from
his hypochondriacal mother. This is how Faulkner is describing that tragic moment with
the language of a very simple mind (Benji’s mind): (gestures of surprise, horror,
harassment, fear, submission)
“We were in the hall. Caddy was still looking at me. Her hand was against her
mouth and I saw her eyes and I cried. We went up the stairs. She stopped again, against
the wall, looking at me and cried and she went on and I came on, crying and she shrank
against the wall, looking at me. She opened the door to her room, but I pulled at her
dress and we went to the bathroom and she stood against the door, looking at me. Then
she put her arm across her face and I pushed at her, crying.”
Quentin represents intelligence and tragic sense because he is drawn to his sister
but repelled by social convention. Quentin’s emotional dependence on his sister is so
great that he centers all his idealism upon her. Religious and moral values are equated
with her sexual innocence, and with her conduct. Quentin is not really in love with her
sister’s body, only in love with a notion of virginity that he associates with her. Quentin in
his dreams has a running sexual and incestuous obsession with Caddy:
“Did you ever have a sister? No, but they’re all bitches. Did you ever have a sister?
One minute she was. Bitches. Not bitch one minute she stood in the door.”
All these obsessions and thoughts lead him to commit suicide and he drowns
himself in Harvard College. Jason is extremely cruel, represents money, continually angry
with his family, hates Caddy. One of the most abject characters Faulkner ever created is
Jason. He is a man depicted at his lowest possible state. He values nothing, and cares only
for surface appearances. The tragedy of Caddy is that she sees her family disintegration
unable to help her brothers Quentin and Benji or her father, Mr. Compson, who is a weak,
selfish and nihilist man very fond of drinking. Caddy is abandoned by the man she loves,
becomes extremely promiscuous, she is pregnant, later married and divorced, she finally
becomes a prostitute and cannot return home to her family.
One of the keys of this novel is that Faulkner was able to adapt each one of these
monologues to the personality and sentiments of each one of the monologists, using the
adequate syntax, tone, and style. The “form” adapted to the “content”. In The Sun and
the Fury Faulkner adopted “the mythic method” used by Joyce. It consisted of keeping the

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surface of the novel as realistic and accurate in detail as the most Naturalistic novel, while
simultaneously making the surface story’s events, characterizations, and dialogue bear in
detail a significant relationship to an underlying myth or pattern. In this novel, Faulkner is
using an ironic parallelism between the Compson children and Jesus Christ during the
week of His Passion. Three of the sections bear dates in 1928 during the Easter Week of
that year: Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. The remaining section,
Quentin’s monologue, bears the date of a Thursday in 1910 which is the Octave of Corpus
Christi. So, the four sections of the novel have dates related to the four major days in
the sequence of Christ Passion. All these matters lie below the surface for non-insightful
readers. This novel received a great public recognition for those post-Naturalist American
readers in the period following the second World War.
Faulkner was frequently in financial straits, and to earn money over the next
twenty years he worked periodically as a scriptwriter in Hollywood in more than eighteen
films. As I lay Dying (1930) his most successfully modernist text is a wonderful an
experimental novel that tells the story of the six-day funeral journey of Bundren family
through fifty-nine monologues and a great variety of characters.
Faulkner wrote deliberately this sensational, controversial, and commercial
novel, Sanctuary (1931), more gothic than the rest, was a scandal because of its graphic
description of the horrific rape of the whore-woman Temple Drake, but despite of this
was a success amid the scandal it aroused. In Light in August (1932) we find
miscegenation, pursuing and a lynching, in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) Faulkner told the
gothic tragedy and downfall of Thomas Sutpen’s family a deepened and dense drama in
a racist society. Go Down Moses (1942) a novel composed by seven interrelated stories
about the family McCastlin, where we find “The Bear”, probably, his most famous and
reprinted short story.
Faulkner was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1949 and
was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1950. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for A Fable
(1954) and for The Reivers in 1962.

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 NOVELS

 Soldiers’ Pay (1926).

The period 1929-1936
Is the most modernist
and experimental.
The period 1929-
1942 is a time of
extraordinary
literary out put
for its high level
of excellence and
abundance.
Novels in green color are
set in his imaginary
Yoknapatawpha County.
 Mosquitoes (1927).
 Sartoris (1929)
 The Sound and the Fury (1929)
 As I Lay Dying (1930)
 Sanctuary (1931)
 Light in August (1932)
 Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
 The Unvanquished (1938)
 The Wild Palms (1939)
 The Hamlet (1940)
 Go Down, Moses (1942)
 Intruder in the Dust (1951)
 A Fable (1954)
 The Town (1957)
 The Mansion (1959)
 The Reivers (1962)

FAULKNER’S STYLE AND TRADITION.

William Faulkner never belonged to any literary group or school of writers. The
great paradox comes when we want to categorize Faulkner as a modernist or
traditionalist writer (some critics said provincialist). Because his characters and Faulkner
himself live in a secluded world surrounded by walls of tradition, bearing the weight of
past generations, entrapped in an irresistible memory of the old times, and living a
present consumed by the false desire of emulate the grandeur of their ancestral past.
Faulkner’s characters represent a chorus of alienated voices by a disturbed conscience,
dark thoughts, and unspeakable sins. A legacy of great chivalric tradition, but also lack
of identity, violence, racism, miscegenation (Southern aristocratic landowners, poor
whites, blacks, and Indians), where each generation repeated the sins of fathers and
grandfathers, the enslavement of the blacks, the destruction of the wilderness, the
sexual exploitation of black kinswomen. All these elements mentioned above belong to
the purest Southern gothic literary tradition to which it would be necessary to add
certain doses of irony and black humor. A common southern heritage where we find out
aristocratic families, Grenier, McCastlin, Sutpen, Compson and Sartoris, suffering
dramatic disintegrations, deteriorations, and degenerations while they are prosecuted
by fatality and doom. Faulkner with all this socio-cultural legacy on his shoulders was

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moving his style towards the fusion of symbolism, realism, and modernism, looking for
a new way of aesthetic expression able to communicate the essence of that chaotic
world through an experimental and modernist prose. In this way the chaos of the form
was representing the disintegration of the content, the confusion and simultaneity of
voices, and loss of identities. Apart from a novelist of gothic extremity and violence,
Faulkner was also a modernist and a regionalist writer, who wrote about the defeat,
poverty, and disillusionment of the South.
Faulkner’s work is ritual, tragic, mythic and it is considered modernist and
correspondently critical in its relationship to the social context described in his novels,
his apparently grotesque disturbances and distortions marked in his literary style are
due to the psychological problems described in the plots of his novels that disturbed the
flow of his sentences as a narratological symbology of those psychic crisis of his
characters. It is very interesting that the best practitioners of “stream of consciousness”
were Joyce, Wolf and Faulkner, who came to show the Anglo-American interest in depth
psychology and the use of the language like a seismograph of the mind. Of the masters
of twenty-century fiction, Faulkner was the most impetuous and the most passionate.
Main modernist and experimental features of Faulkner’s style in prose fiction:

 A non-chronological order in his plots.

 Quick shifts in the temporal development of the events.
 Sudden changes in style, whose origin is in the adaptation of the form to
the chaos of the moment. This happens in his famous “The Bear”, where
the first three parts are written in a fluent and ordinary style, but the
Fourth Part is told through quite a different fictional method. The whole
part is written in a stream-of-consciousness technique, and the
experimental prose is evoking the tortuous processes of self-examination
and self-knowledge which Isaac McCastlin undergoes in his search for the
meaning of his heritage and identity. Readers are very confused in this
part, like the mind of the hero, and the experimentalism is leading the
expressions. For example: a single sentence is five pages long, or a
parenthesis is enclosing a thousand words, an authentic chaos of
meanings and ancestors.
 His writings are a puzzle of perspectives and focalizations. Multi-
perspectivism encourages different distorted visions of the same reality,
what can produce in the reader ambiguity, ambivalence, and confusion.
 Temporary indefiniteness (ambiguity between past and present).
 Use of images through symbols.
 Stream of Consciousness.
 Collage.
 A personal use of punctuation or non-punctuation at all.
 The use of a mythical method under the surface of the novel.
 Faulkner’s literary texts are sometimes difficult and complex for reading.

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 “According to the literary work of Faulkner, a text should
disorient, it should challenge us by confusing us in its structure, by
forcing us to take out time, to meditate and above all, according to
Faulkner’s example, the text should captive. It is impossible to read a
Faulkner’s text for the first time. It is impossible as any Faulknerian
knows, to know anything about anything by reading it, or looking at it,
for the first time. However, any successive reading yields meaning.
Those who do not want to look more than once will never know. (Joseph
Urgo, Vol2: 101)

 In fact, we see something like Hemingway’s theory of Iceberg. There

are important hidden events behind each action unknown for the
reader. Events in Faulkner’s novels are always in relation to others and
are always behind something, we must discover.
In Faulkner words: “When life stops moving it dies, when facts are
stablished and fixed the become untrue.”

Donald Kartiganer in Columbia Literary History of the United States

referring to Faulkner gives an example of his style, and says, “The first facts are
the sentences, the act of style”:

(1) “From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot
weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called
(2) the office because her father had called it that- (3) a dim hot airless room
with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because (4)
when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried
heat and that dark was already cooler, and which ((5)as the sun shone fuller
and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full
of dust motes which (6) Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old
dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have
blown them.” (Absalom, Absalom! 1936)

“One must read what “Quentin thought” twice to realize that what is
“blown inward” is not the proximate “paint” but “flecks”, and the whole sentence
twice to know that at its core is a “room”- the place where “they sat”- a room at
once buried and freshly brought forth in the details of what it has been called and
why it is so dim and hot and airless. For William Faulkner the origin of such
sentences lay in a desire to say it all… to put everything into one sentence- not
only the present but the whole past on which it depends, and which keeps
overtaking the present, second by second.” Implicit to this prose is the larger
structure of Faulkner’s greatest novels - including The Sound and The Fury, As I lay
Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! – each one a series of voices, like the
modifying elements of sentences, poised at odd intervals on the rim of a single
event. (p:887-888)

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