American Literature 1860-1914

Up From Slavery

1. Booker T. Washington 2. Published in 1901 3.THEMES The value of education The first and most important theme is the value of education. Booker emphasizes this idea throughout his autobiography, because as a slave, he had been denied the right to learn and once he was free, like nearly everyone of his race, he soaked up learning like a sponge. The dignity of work A second important theme is the dignity of work. Booker firmly believed that no education was complete without learning a trade. He believed that there was tremendous value in work and that his race would never rise up without being able to work a trade in their communities that was needed by every race. Slavery The net of slavery is often thematically presented. Booker believed that slavery affected the Negroes, but affected the white race morally, and so no one escaped its terrible impact. The relationship between the races The relationship between the races is a theme that naturally flows out of the idea of the net of slavery. Booker came to understand that he had the influence to reach as many people of both races as possible to convince them how valuable a good relationship between them would be to the growth of the individual, the community, and the nation. Success is measured by the obstacles we have to overcome to reach it and not what we have actually attained The last theme involves the idea that success is measured by the obstacles we have to overcome to reach it and not what we have actually attained. Mr. Washington felt that a man's character was built by how many walls he had to climb over before he reached his goal. It was the process of achievement that was more important than the finished product. MOOD Overall, the mood is one of setbacks interspersed with optimism. Washington emphasizes the optimism and believes that whites and blacks living together in harmony is not only possible, but probable in spite of the ghost of the institution of slavery. CHAPTER ONE - A Slave Among Slaves Summary This chapter begins where it should begin - at the beginning! Or least at the beginning as Booker knew it. He tells us he was born in Franklin County Virginia, but he is not sure of the year - it's either 1858 or 1859 - and he doesn't know what month or what day. He does know that his birth took place near a crossroads post-office called Hale's Ford. Otherwise, his earliest impressions are of the plantation and the slave quarters, the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging of surroundings. His owners were not especially cruel, at least not as compared to other owners, but still he was forced to live in a 14 x 16 foot cabin with his mother, his brother, and his sister. He knew almost nothing of his ancestry other than the whispers in the quarters about how horrible the voyage their ancestors had taken from Africa to America. However, that didn't help him know the history of his own family. He did know that his mother had a half-brother and a half-sister, but her purchase as a slave attracted little more attention than the purchase of a cow or pig and there were no records of black people. He also didn't know who his father was other than reports that he was a white man who lived on another plantation. His name was unknown to Booker, but he didn't hate his father; he merely saw him as just another victim of the institution of slavery. His mother was the plantation cook and the kitchen was also where they lived. It was without glass windows, had a door that barely hung on uneven hinges, and had large cracks in the walls that let in the coldest air in the winter and the humidity in the summer. The floor was the naked earth. Booker had a distinct memory of a potato hole in the cabin where sweet potatoes were stored. He was in charge of putting potatoes in or taking them out and in the process, he was able to snatch a few for himself. All the plantation cooking was done in an open fireplace, and there was none left for the slaves unless his mother was able to steal a chicken and cook it for her children late at night. In spite of the fact that taking the potatoes or stealing a chicken might be labeled as theft, Mr. Washington refused to believe that their actions were wrong given the circumstances of the time. Like his white father, his mother and he were also victims of the institution of slavery. Booker had no memory of ever playing games or sports. He regretted that situation, because he believed he would be an even more useful man if he had. However, his life was devoted to work, because he was slave. He cleaned yards, carried water, or took corn to the mill. Carrying corn to the mill was the one of the hardest jobs he ever had. He was small and not very strong and even though he had a horse, if the corn shifted and slipped off, he had to wait until someone came along to help him put it back, and the time waiting was usually spent crying. Add to that the fact that he had to walk through the woods alone. He was always frightened, because the woods were often full of army deserters who were said to cut off the ears of any Negro boy they found there. Then, if he came home late, he was at the least, severely scolded, and at the worst, flogged. Life was very hard. As for schooling, as a slave, he had none, but from the earliest he could remember, he ached for the opportunity to learn. Being able to walk into a schoolhouse would be like walking into paradise for him. His earliest understanding that he was a slave came when he awoke early one morning and heard his mother praying that Lincoln and his armies would be successful, and that one day, she and her children would be free. He was also eternally amazed how a large mass of people like slaves, who were ignorant of books and newspapers, nonetheless, were completely and accurately informed about "great National questions that were agitating the country." He calls it the grapevine telegraph. The news was usually received through the colored man who was sent to the post office for the mail. He would linger as long as he could to listen in on conversations of white people congregated there, and in this way, he often brought back news to the slave quarters before it was even heard in the "big house." Booker also had no memories of ever sitting down together at a table with his family to share a meal. Like most slaves, they ate with their hands, and since food was scarce, they ate quickly to satisfy their hunger. As a result, when he was sent to the big house at mealtimes to fan flies from the food by means of a large set of paper fans operated by a pulley, he saw for the first time how a meal could be shared in a genteel way. He also was able to listen in to their conversations on the subjects of freedom and war and absorb the news that he could tell his fellow slaves. Furthermore, he saw his masters eating ginger cakes, and the height of his ambition became to reach a point where he could eat ginger cakes in just the same manner as his owners. Surprisingly, as the war progressed, the slaves felt it easier to accept deprivation than their white owners did. They had spent their lives deprived while white people were often in great straits when it came to those things they took for granted - coffee, tea, sugar, and other articles they were accustomed to. Booker's first pair of shoes were wooden - leather on top, but wooden bottoms that made a fearful noise and made him walk awkwardly. He also had to wear flax shirts, an ordeal that was one of the most trying he ever faced. It was made from the refuse of the flax, the cheapest and roughest part and pulling it on for the first time was to him like pulling a tooth. However, he had no choice, because he either wore the flax shirt or he wore nothing. Fortunately, his brother John often generously offered to wear the shirt to help break it in. Mr. Washington is quick to pint out at this point in his narrative that one might suppose that he and the rest of his people would have had bitter feelings towards whites. However, in the case of the slaves on his plantation, this was not true. In fact, he believed it was not true for most of the black population of the South at that time. Instead, when one of their young masters was killed in battle, their sorrow was as great as that of the white family. "Mars Billy" had often begged for mercy for the slaves when they were being flogged or punished as he cared deeply for them from childhood. The slaves would also stay up around the clock to help nurse their wounded masters, and when the men were gone to battle, the slaves took upon themselves the serious responsibility to protect the white women and children with their lives if necessary. It was an honor among the slaves to be appointed as the ones to sleep in the big house during the absence of the men. All of this, to Mr. Washington, was a result of the kind and generous nature of the Negro race, which never in his memory would betray a specific trust. In later years, the former slaves were even known to support and care for their former masters with gifts of money, food, and time to keep them from suffering. One ex-slave from Ohio had made a contract with his master two or three years before the Emancipation Proclamation to buy himself by paying so much per year for his own body. Once freedom came, he still owed his former master $300. Because he was free, he could have walked away from the debt, but the man walked the greater portion of the distance to Virginia to finish paying the debt. He had given his word to his master, and he felt his word must never be broken. He could not have enjoyed his freedom until he had fulfilled his promise. The generous nature of the Negro slaves was no indication that they really didn't want to be free. In fact, freedom was the greatest hope of their lives. However, said Washington, having been slaves or being the descendents of slaves had made Negroes better than any other black people in the world. He said that Providence so often uses men and institutions to accomplish a purpose and that it had made Negroes better people. Furthermore, slavery wasn't just hurtful to blacks; it was also hurtful to whites who had no spirit or self-reliance and had never mastered a single trade or line of productive industry. They had no idea how to care for their homes and the refinements of their lives once the slaves were gone so when freedom came, the slaves were almost as well prepared to begin life anew as their masters. In the days preceding their freedom, the grapevine telegraph worked overtime and the slaves catered to all the Yankee soldiers who passed through in order to get vital information about the end of the war. There was more, bolder singing in the quarters where the word "freedom" in their hymns had been assumed by the white race to mean death and a glorious meeting with God, but now the true meaning came out. The word "freedom" was the reality of Emancipation. Then, one morning the slaves were all called to the "big house" where they were told first by the sadness on the faces of their masters and then by the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation that they were really free. There was great rejoicing for some minutes, but no bitterness towards their former owners, and then the reality set in: they were suddenly in charge of themselves and it was a greater responsibility than they had ever faced before. What was even more sobering was the condition of the old people - those in their seventies and eighties - who had a strange attachment to their owners. As a result, one by one, they stealthily wandered to the big house to have whispered conversations with their former masters as to their future.CHAPTER TWO - Boyhood Days Summary The coming of freedom brought two points to the surface with which most Negroes agreed: they needed to change their names and they needed to leave the plantation for at least a few days to try out their freedom. For Booker, this meant traveling to West Virginia with mother and siblings, because her husband had secured employment in the salt mines. They began their journey from Virginia to a little town called Malden about five miles from Charleston, West Virginia. His stepfather had not only gotten them jobs, but he had also secured a little cabin for them all. However, in many respects life in that cabin was worst than the slave quarters. They were crowded very close together and the filth was intolerable. The people were a "motley mix" of colored and poor, degraded white people. Even young Booker had to go to work at 4:00AM in one of the salt furnaces, which were filthier than the cabin where they lived. The first thing he ever learned in the way of book knowledge was in the furnaces. The packers marked their barrels with certain numbers, and his boss would put an "18" on all his barrels and Booker soon came to learn his first number symbol. He had an intense desire to learn to read. He finally got his mother to get him a book and somehow she procured a Webster "blue-back" spelling book. It contained the alphabet and meaningless phonic sounds, but Booker devoured it. He realized the alphabet would lead to words, and he was determined to apply it anywhere he could. His mother was the one who shared with him, aided him and abetted him in his desire. Later, a young colored boy came to Malden, and he knew how to read. At the close of every day's work, people who wanted him to read the newspapers to them surrounded him. Booker really envied this boy. Then, about that time, the questions of opening a school for colored children became the subject of discussion among the former slaves. The problem was finding a teacher. Not long after, a former colored soldier with considerable education came to town and the first school opened. The school was open night and day to accommodate work schedules. For the older people, it was learning to read the Bible before they died. For everyone, though, it was just the opportunity finally to go to school. Booker, however, was disappointed, because his stepfather could not afford to allow him to quit working and go to school with the other children. So his mother arranged with the teacher to give Booker lessons at night. He accepted this arrangement happily, but his boyish desire was to be just like the other children and go to day school. He finally succeeded in his desire as long as he went to work before school and after. Because the school was some distance walk from the furnace, Booker was often late. Work ended at 9:00AM and school began at the same time. He conceived the idea, as a result, to move the clock hands at work from 8:30 to 9:00AM, and he could leave work earlier. Eventually, the boss locked the clocked face, but this emphasized Booker's desire to be at school on time. Another problem he faced was his lack of a cap. All the other boys wore caps to school, but Booker didn't have one. Once again, his mother saved the day by taking two pieces of "homespun" (jeans) and sewing them together to make his first cap. He was inordinately proud of his mother who didn't give in to the temptation to go into debt and buy him a store cap. Instead, she came up with one that he was always proud to wear. Once he had a cap, he then had another problem: choosing a name. When the teacher asked him his name, he decided that he was Booker Washington. Later, his mother reminded him that when he was born, she had given him the name Booker Taliafero, but that the second name had been forgotten. Now, he added it and became Booker Taliafero Washington. With a cap and a name, he resolved to continue with his desire to create an ancestry for his children of which they would be proud and which might encourage them to strive even higher. As a result, knowing that a Negro youth starts out with a presumption of failure against him, he determined that, day or night, he would get an education. About the same time, his mother adopted into the family another son who was named James B. Washington. Booker dreaded working in the salt mines more than anything he did. They were filthy and filled with the blackest darkness. He feared constantly of getting lost in the mine or his light going out. What's more, it was dangerous on just a regular basis. He noted that young boys who began life in a coalmine were often physically and mentally dwarfed and had no ambition beyond the mines. At the same time as he was being educated, Booker tried to imagine the feelings and ambitions of a white boy who had no limit placed upon his aspirations and activities. Under such circumstances, he knew he would begin at the bottom and keep rising until he reached the "highest round of success." However, he confessed that he did not envy the white boy as he once did. He had learned that success is measured not in the position you have reached in life, but the obstacles you have over come to get there. Out of the struggles he has to overcome, the Negro youth achieves a strength and a confidence that he would miss if his pathway in life were comparatively smooth because of his race or birth. Race will not carry one forward unless he has individual worth, and because of these observations, Booker had come to be very proud of the race to which he belonged. CHAPTER FOURTEEN - The Atlanta Exposition Address Summary The exposition opened with a short address by Governor Bullock and then Booker was introduced. Uppermost in his mind was the feeling that he needed to say something that would cement the friendship of the races and bring about cooperation between them. He recalls now how when he looked out on the audience he saw thousands of eyes staring intently at him. And so he began . . . His first important point was that one third of the population of the South was Negro and that no one could disregard this element of the population. Furthermore, he ais he was impressed by how the managers of the Exposition had recognized this fact with the building devoted to the Negro's industrial progress. His second important point came from an anecdote he used as a metaphor: a ship lost at sea for many days sighted a friendly vessel and begged for water. It was told, "Cast down your buckets where you are." The ship cried out again, because they wouldn't drink sea water, but again the command from the other vessel was to "cast down your buckets where you are." The captain finally heeded the command and gratefully discovered that he was at the mouth of the Amazon and the water was safe to drink. Booker then used this story to emphasize that the Negro, in order to cultivate the friendship of the South, should cast down their buckets where they were to make friends in their own surroundings. They should cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in domestic service and in the professions. He then told the white audience that they, too, should cast down their buckets to the people who had been there for generations tilling their......... CHAPTER FIFTEEN - The Secret of Success in Public Speaking Summary The attitude of those in the hall when Booker gave his Atlanta speech was best expressed, he felt, by Mr. James Creelman, the noted war correspondent. He said that Booker delivered an oration that made a new epoch in the history of the South. he asserted that Mr. Washington had electrified the audience and the response was as if it had come from the throat of a whirlwind. He also said the Booker was the foremost man of his race in America and that "not even Gladstone himself could have pleaded a cause with more consummate power than did this angular Negro standing in the a nimbus of sunshine, surrounded by men who once fought to keep his race in bondage." After the Atlanta speech, Booker accepted some invitations to speak in public, but only those that would take him into territory where he thought it would pay to plead the cause of his race. He understood that he should talk about his life work and the needs of his people and not speak as a professional lecturer for financial gain. However, he could never understand why people wanted to hear him speak. He always suffered intensely from nervousness and it always took him about ten minutes to master the audience, something that was ultimately a great delight to him. While he was speaking, Booker would.......

The House of Mirth

1. Edith Wharton 2. Published in 1905 3. Characters: Lily Bart, Lawrence Selden, Simon Rosedale, Gus and Judy Trenor, George and Bertha Dorset, Carry Fisher, Gerty Farish 4. Themes: Wharton's work as often been considered realism, as style in which turn-of-the-century authors reacted against sentimental Victorian literature by prioritizing the documentation of life as it "really was." Wharton's Mirth combines a realist's observations of revealing detail with a modernist's interest in questioning the meanings and practices of culture. Unlike modernists who sought to cast aside the conventions of the past, Wharton sought to understand how they impacted the present. Mirth shows Wharton's early development as a writer with a voice that verges on cynical, but stops far short of nihilism. Here, as in her works to come, she never gives up completely on what can be gained by sharing even the most seemingly privileged human's story with others, if not to garner pity, then at least to achieve understanding. Naturalism: Critics recognize House as Wharton's contribution to the literary movement known as naturalism, in which American authors emphasized the relative powerlessness of humans within "ecosystems" such as those created by a modernizing industrializing economy. Naturalist writers applied Charles Darwin's conception of the "survival of the fittest" to stories of human struggle marked by futility. Wharton repeatedly emphasizes that Lily has been brought up to be "ornamental" and that she cannot step outside the ideal for her life -- marrying well -- that her mother once held for her. Wharton neither blames nor excuses Lily for her failings, but she does repeatedly point out ways in which Lily might choose to avoid her downfall: she could have married for money and cleared her debts, renounced her materialism and married Lawrence Selden, blackmailed Bertha Dorset and won back Simon Rosedale, or refused to repay Gus Trenor and saved her inheritance. Lily's refusal, perhaps her sheer inability, to do any of these things reflects Wharton's belief that Lily cannot successfully resis the power of the system in which she lives. Social Hierarchies: Class and Gender Wharton's depiction of the power of social systems includes a pointed account of the class and gender hierarchies fueled by Lily's environment. In this world, money alone does not ensure high school class. The most powerful characters in the novel, like the Trenors and the Dorsets, grant patronage and acceptance to characters like Lily Bart, Lawrence Selden and Gerty Farish because, despite their relative lack of wealth, they bear respectable and powerful family connections. Simon Rosedale, on the other hand, struggles to gain such acceptance despite his enormous riches. Because Edith Wharton grew up in an "old money" family that also experienced financial insecurity, she understood the kind of vulnerability experienced by Lily. The financial volatility brought by this period's boom and bust economic cycles and growing industrialism led to continual redrawing of the hierarchies of class, which Wharton likely perceived as necessary to correct an unjust system. Still, her own family's position of advantage led her to favor the kind of conservative approach to the "traditional" social values of class espoused by Lily, who resists being old fashioned but seems to perceive an innate, inherited nobility in "old money" families such as her own. Wharton seems more ready to criticize traditional hierarchies of gender. The values Lily's mother taught her to embrace serve Lily only if she is financially dependent on wealthy parents or a wealthy husband. Lily is socially shrewd and emotionally guarded, characteristics that grant her strength not typically possessed by traditional romantic heroines. Even so, she is socially vulnerable: she cannot support herself and she has little understanding of finances, as revealed by both her debts and her willingness to trust Gus Trenor to manage her money. Wharton criticizes this misguided approach toward "protecting" women from economics, showing how easily putting women on such pedestals can lead to oppression. For example, Lily's "ornamental" femininity makes her vulnerable to the sexual double standard that excludes her for supposed sexual affairs without chastising the men with whom she is rumored to be having them. The novel emphasizes how Lily dreams of independence but cannot achieve it, in part because doing so contradicts the kinds of power that her good looks and family connections have granted her in the past. Thus, Wharton shows class women like Lily might resist gender equality because it means losing access to the advantages offered to upper class women by traditional ideals of femininity. Self-Realization: Despite the novel's emphasis on the injustice and inevitability of Lily's situation, House also offers an idealistic faith in individualism. Lily and Selden's discussion of the "republic of spirit" early in the novel illustrates their determination to believe that one can aspire to maintain integrity even when social forces conspire against it. As Lily points out, Selden, as a man, has an easier time resisting the system than she does, because he can earn a good living. When her social downfall decimates her already limited opportunities for wealth, Lily must cling to a sense of worth that is defined only by her faith in herself. Lily's refusal to compromise her integrity grants her strength, but it also further contributes to her downfall. Like the hero of the Greek tragedies she reads and admires, Lily has a tragic flaw. The ending of the novel implies that those who will accept no compromise with self-realization face a certain doom. Lily's awareness of her limitations -- her sense that she is materialistic and vain but unable to stop being so -- intensifies her tragedy. Creating an intelligent and idealistic protagonist who also makes mistakes allows Wharton to show Lily sympathetically, if not heroically.--- According to the back of the book.

The Turn of the Screw

1. Henry James 2. Published 1898 3.The Corruption of the Innocent The governess only rarely indicates that she is afraid the ghosts will physically harm or kill the children. In fact, Miles's death comes as a shock to us as readers, because we are unprepared to think of the ghosts as a physical threat. Until she sends Flora away, the governess never seems to consider removing the children from the ghosts or trying to expel the ghosts from the house. Instead, the governess's fears focus almost entirely on the potential "corruption" of the children—whether they were corrupted by Quint and Jessel when the latter were alive and whether they contiue to be similarly corrupted by the ghosts. Before she even knows about Quint, the governess guesses that Miles has been accused of corrupting other children. Although the word corruption is a euphemism that permits the governess to remain vague about what she means, the clear implication is that corruption means exposure to knowledge of sex. For the governess, the children's exposure to knowledge of sex is a far more terrifying prospect than confronting the living dead or being killed. Consequently, her attempt to save the children takes the form of a relentless quest to find out what they know, to make them confess rather than to predict what might happen to them in the future. Her fear of innocence being corrupted seems to be a big part of the reason she approaches the problem so indirectly—it's not just that the ghosts are unmentionable but that what the ghosts have said to them or introduced them to is unspeakable. Because the corruption of the children is a matter of fearful speculation rather than an acknowledged fact, the story doesn't make any clear and definitive statement about corruption. Certainly, the governess's fears are destructive and do not result in her saving the children. Notably, while the governess is the character most fearful of and vigilant for corruption, she is also the least experienced and most curious character regarding sex. Mrs. Grose is married, and the uncle, though a bachelor, seems to be a ladies' man. The governess is singularly horrified by Miss Jessel's sexual infraction and apparently fascinated by it as well. We might conclude that the governess's fear of the children's corruption represents her projection of her own fears and desires regarding sex onto her charges. The Destructiveness of Heroism The governess's youth and inexperience suggest that the responsibility of caring for the two children and being in charge of the entire estate is more than she could possibly bear, yet she does not look for help. Her isolation is largely her employer's fault, because he chooses to remain absent and specifically tells her to deal with all problems by herself. However, the governess responds to her experiences at Bly by taking on even more responsibility—to bury the headmaster's letter and keep Miles at home; to be the one who sees the ghosts rather than the children and who attempts to screen them from any exposure to the ghosts; and to save the children from the ghosts' corrupting influence. These decisions are all self-conscious—she is not forced to make them because she can't think of another way to respond. Instead, she deliberately chooses to view these challenges as "magnificent" opportunities to please the master and deludes herself into thinking that the master recognizes her sacrifices. Clearly, she is misguided on both counts. The master never comes down or sends any letter, and her crusade to save the children is an even worse disaster. Flora leaves the estate sick and in hysterics, vowing never to speak to the governess again, and Miles dies. Whether or not the governess was correct in thinking that the children were being haunted, she was definitely wrong in thinking she could be the hero who saves them. The fact that the governess was misguided in adopting a heroic stance suggests several interpretations. One possibility is that the forces of corruption are too powerful for one person to oppose. Perhaps the governess could have succeeded only with the concerted efforts of the school and the uncle, and perhaps the children could not have been saved. Another possible reason why her heroism might have been inappropriate is that childhood and innocence may be too fragile to be protected in such an aggressive fashion. The governess's attempt to police and guard the children may have proven to be more damaging than the knowledge from which she wanted to protect them. Forbidden Subjects One of the most challenging features of The Turn of the Screw is how frequently characters make indirect hints or use vague language rather than communicate directly and clearly. The headmaster expels Miles from school and refuses to specify why. The governess has several guesses about what he might have done, but she just says he might be "corrupting" the others, which is almost as uninformative as the original letter. The governess fears that the children understand the nature of Quint and Jessel's relationship, but the nature of that relationship is never stated explicitly. The governess suspects that the ghosts are influencing the children in ways having to do with their relationship in the past, but she isn't explicit about how exactly they are being influenced. This excessive reticence on the part of the characters could reflect James's own reticence (which was marked), or it could be interpreted as a satiric reflection on Victorian reticence about sex. More straightforwardly, it could be a technique for engaging the imagination to produce a more terrifying effect. Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes. Vision Throughout The Turn of the Screw, references to eyes and vision emphasize the idea that sight is unreliable. Vision and the language used to describe it are particularly important in each of the governess's encounters with Quint and Miss Jessel. She deems her first meeting with Quint a "bewilderment of vision," an ambiguous phrase that suggests she imagined what she saw. Characters lock eyes with each other several times in the novella. The governess shares intense gazes with both Quint and Miss Jessel and believes she can determine the ghosts' intentions by looking into their eyes. Although she and Miss Jessel do not actually talk, the governess claims Miss Jessel's gaze appears "to say" she has a right to be there. At times, the governess regards the clarity of the children's eyes as proof that the children are innocent. In these cases, she determines whether the children are capable of deception by looking at their eyes, when it may be her own eyes that deceive her. A Ship Lost at Sea Early on in the novella, the governess imagines herself at the helm of a "great drifting ship," and the metaphor of Bly as a ship lost at sea soon proves to be appropriate. When the governess goes out to look for the vanished Quint, she describes Bly as "empty with a great emptiness," as though it is a vast, unlimited sea. After her first ghostly encounters, she decides she will save the children but later cries that they are hopelessly "lost." Her navigation skills have failed her, and she envisions the children drowning. However, she perseveres, and when she speaks with Miles near the end of the novel, she feels she is "just nearly reaching port." The ship imagery extends further when, soon thereafter, she imagines Miles "at the bottom of the sea," a disturbing image that foreshadows Miles's fate. Ultimately, the governess is the character who is most lost. She cannot find a direction or destination for her theories and suspicions, and her perceptions are constantly changing. Silence Sound acts as a signal of life and nature in The Turn of the Screw, and its absence is a predictor of the governess's supernatural visions. Prior to the governess's ghostly encounters, she experiences a hush in the world around her. When she first sees Quint in the tower, the sound of birds stops and the rustling of leaves quiets. The governess takes the scene to be "stricken with death." Nothing else changes, however, and the visual aspects of the world around her are unaffected. The governess's sense of a hush is more marked when she meets Quint on the staircase. She interprets the "dead silence" of the incident as proof that the encounter is unnatural. In fact, she remarks that the silence is the specific thing that marks the event as unnatural and that otherwise she would have assumed Quint to be a living being. Quint's subsequent disappearance into silence suggests that the dead dwell in a realm without sound, making silence a mark of the unnatural and unliving. Symbols Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. Light Candlelight suggests safety in the governess's narrative, while twilight suggests danger. On a number of occasions, the governess's lighted candle is extinguished, always with the implication that something is awry. At the top of the stairs, her candle goes out at the exact moment she sees Quint. She views him in "cold, faint twilight." A week or two later, the governess wakes up to find her candle extinguished and Miles on the lawn in bright moonlight. Her view of him in that light suggests danger and, in a way, prefigures his imminent death. Later, Miles blows out the governess's candle, plunging the two into darkness. The lack of moonlight implies an absence of the supernatural, and the blowing out of the candle indicates a loss of protection. The Written Word In The Turn of the Screw, events become fully real only when they have been written down. The governess at first refuses to record the circumstances at Bly in a letter to her employer. If she preserves the events in a material document, she will have reached a point of no return—she will be forever unable to deny what happened. She also has relied on threats and passionate speech to persuade Mrs. Grose of her visions and theories, and convincing someone through the written word will be much more difficult. Eventually, she does write the letter, and she also writes down the entire account in the manuscript that we are reading. The manuscript, unlike the letter, allows her to present events in a way that will persuade her readers she is both sane and telling the truth. In keeping with the ambiguity of the tale, the trajectories of both written records, the letter and the manuscript, are interrupted, which further impedes our ability to determine whether the events are or are not "real." The letter is never sent, and the manuscript stops short of a definite conclusion. These interruptions suggest the story remains unresolved—and cast doubt on its reliability.

Behind A Mask or A Woman's Power

1. Louisa May Alcott 2. Published in 1866 3. Themes and Analysis:

The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson

1. Mark Twain 2. Published in 1894 3. Analysis: Twain's novel Pudd'nhead Wilson can seem like an enigma at first, since it is a story about slavery written almost forty years after the end of the Civil War. Certainly race was still a pressing contemporary issue for Twain at the time: by 1893 Reconstruction had failed and race relations in the United States were a mess. Although a black man no longer had to fear being sold "down the river" as Roxy and Chambers do, extreme forms of violence were a distinct possibility. Part of the point here is that although the institutions surrounding race may have changed since 1850, the fundamental problems, even by 1893, had not. By featuring characters who are racially indeterminate--that is, characters who can "pass" or who are not immediately identifiable as black--Twain confuses the issue still further. When slavery was still legal, an individual's racial profile mattered on a concrete level: someone who is one-thirtysecondth black, like Chambers, could be owned as a slave, while someone with no known black ancestry could not. Racial identity, by the 1890's, had become a much more nebulous concept. Broader issues of identity are a compelling problem in this novel. Although this is by no means a carefully structured and polished piece of literature, Twain's multiple plots and thrown- together style do serve to inform a central set of issues, with the twins, Pudd'nhead, and Tom and Chambers all serving as variations on a theme. The coexistence of many characters and many localized plots mirrors the novel's setting. In its vacillation between the tiny town of Dawson's Landing and the metropolis of St. Louis, and in the centralized presence of the Mississippi River, with its possibilities for endless mobility, the novel offers both hope and despair: the world is too big a place for everyone to be known absolutely to their neighbors, yet one also has the ability to start over in a new place. The idea of being able to start over is continuously interrogated in American literature. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, which appeared almost exactly one hundred years before Pudd'nhead Wilson, sketched out the ideals of self-determination and personal identity in American culture: a man can become whatever he wants, no matter what his background, as long as he has a plan and the work ethic to realize it. Echoes of Franklin can be seen in the eccentric, scientifically-minded Pudd'nhead Wilson, whose writings mirror Franklin's and whose careful analysis and re-categorization of the world around him is also reminiscent of the American icon. Pudd'nhead's self-realizations, though, are dark and socially unsuccessful. Twain's characters live in an America where social mores are largely fixed and one's success depends not on determination but on fitting into a pre-existing public space. Twain, like Franklin, was a celebrated public figure, immediately recognizable as a collection of carefully developed mannerisms and trademark items. Like Judge Driscoll in this novel, Twain somehow found himself high placed enough in society so as not to be bound by its rules. In Pudd'nhead Wilson, though, Twain looks at those who avoid constraints of reputation and public opinion by being so far beneath society as to be almost irrelevant. He also looks at those who, like the twins, get caught in the middle, in a mire of shifting opinions and speculations. The "plot" of this novel, if it can be said to have one, is a detective story, in which a series of identities--the judge's murderer, "Tom," "Chambers"--must be sorted out. This structure highlights the problem of identity and one's ability to determine one's own identity. The solution to the set of mysteries, though, is an incomplete and bleak one, in which determinations about identities have been made but the assigned identities do not correspond to viable positions in society. The seemingly objective scientific methods espoused by Pudd'nhead may have provided more "truthful" answers than public opinion, but they have not helped to better society. In the rapidly changing American culture of the 1890s, where race, celebrity, and publicity were confounding deeply ingrained cultural notions of self-determination, the depopulated ending of Pudd'nhead Wilson is a pessimistic assessment of one's ability to control one's identity. Twain's novel moves us from Franklin's comic world of possibility to a place where self- determination is accompanied by tragic overtones, a place reminiscent of the world of another, later American novel about a self-made man that does not end well: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

The Promised Land

1. Mary Antin 2. Published in 1912 3. Mary Antin's The Promised Land: Constraints of Women in the Jewish Community Lindsay Kleiman Although Mary Antin wrote The Promised Land in 1912 with the ostensible intention of shedding light on the Jewish-American immigrant experience for a non-Jewish audience, one can see through close readings that this autobiography was also written to serve a secondary purpose. That is, Antin also wrote this novel for the Jewish reader as a means of critiquing the religious customs that governed the role of women within traditional communities. Due to the fact that the messages intended for her Jewish readers are far more implicit than those meant for her American audience, Antin uses literary tactics like language and plot to effectively communicate the idea that Judaism can be repressive for women. Moreover, her work suggests the notion that women within these religious communities possess the ability to move beyond these boundaries, in order to become learned and accomplished. Through a careful examination, it is possible to see how Antin wrote this novel for a dual audience, with the intention of making a strong, but covert statement for her Jewish readership. When analyzing Antin's writing from this perspective, it is imperative from the outset to carefully read Antin's descriptions of the differences in gender roles within her own Jewish community in Polotzk. Her judgmental depiction of gender positions within this town is often revealed in her description of the drastic differences between educational opportunities available to men and women, with particular regard to those opportunities awarded for religious study. While a surface reading of this text serves as an explanation for the traditions characteristic to her religious Jewish community, her choices in language subtly convey her intention to criticize these institutions. One of the most notable passages about the imbalanced treatment of boys and girls occurs quite early in the text, when Antin, explaining the importance of boys obtaining a Jewish education, describes her own brother's experience in beginning his studies. She writes: My brother was five years old when he entered on his studies. He was carried to the heder (Hebrew school), on the first day, covered over with a praying- shawl, so that nothing unholy should look on him.... After a boy entered heder, he was the hero of the family. He was served before the other children at table.... If the family were very poor, all the girls might go barefoot, but the heder boy must have shoes; he must have a plate of hot soup, though the others ate dry bread.... No wonder he said, in his morning prayer, 'I thank Thee, L-rd, for not having created me a female.' It was not much to be a girl, you see. Girls could not be scholars and rabbonim. (33) Through careful reading, it becomes clear that Antin is conveying both explicit and implicit messages within this passage. On a surface level, she is writing for the American readers, who are unfamiliar with traditional Jewish customs, and in this way, she depicts how strongly education is valued within the Jewish community. Yet she is simultaneously conveying a more covert idea, by quietly condemning the unfair consequences that education has on determining the value of each gender. As Antin later phrases it, the community believed that "a boy stuffed with learning was worth more than a girl stuffed with bank notes" (37). In other words, Antin demonstrates that academic limitations generate standards of personal value for community members that women are hindered from ever reaching. Because women within these communities were not given the opportunity to study at a heder, and to become as learned as their brothers, their fate of being considered less valuable, and consequently, inferior to men, is an inevitable trap. Moreover, it is interesting that Antin chooses a passage from a traditional morning prayer to further illuminate her attitude. Though one could read this verse as an example of how strongly men valued their opportunity to study, she carefully contorts this passage to serve her own arguments, for in citing a primary religious text, she is able to read it against its own grain. Consequently, she is able to conclusively demonstrate that the Jewish tradition does exclude and consequently disvalue females, by finding evidence within its governing religious texts. As her novel continues, Antin continues to critique the way in which Jewish tradition constrained the rights and opportunities of women by citing the personal experiences of her own mother. Unlike most traditional young women, her mother had the opportunity to study with a tutor, and Antin is careful to note that because her mother had access to education, she was reluctant to wed on the grounds that "she had nothing to gain by marriage, for already she had everything that she desired, especially since she was permitted to study" (49-50). Here, Antin makes a subtle, but important statement, suggesting that perhaps one of the reasons women allowed themselves to be subjected to the sexist and often brutal traditions surrounding marriage was to obtain access to religious texts. Still, Antin is certain to note that even a small opportunity for education could not rescue her mother from constraining traditions of the Jewish community. Antin explains that her mother was "doomed" when she came of age to wed. As her parents force her into marriage, she explains, "Of course (my mother) submitted. What else could a dutiful daughter do, in Polotzk? She submitted to being weighed, measured, and appraised before her face, and resigned herself to what was to come." She later adds, "It (did not) really matter how my mother felt" (52-53). Here again, Antin's choice in vocabulary places an extremely significant role in conveying her novel's implicit defiance of her community's traditions. With words like "doomed" and "submitted," she clearly suggests that tradition rendered women powerless in the course of their own destiny, and that they were virtually slaves to the will of the men in their community, forced into a future in which they had no freedom of choice. Moreover, by using words like "weighed, measured, and appraised," she suggests that women were barely even viewed as human, and were bartered for marriage as though they were inanimate objects. In other portions of the text, Antin uses the fate of her mother as a vehicle of criticizing all traditions that governed the practices of weddings in her community. When illustrating the scene of her parents' wedding day, she describes her mother as being a "sixteen-year-old bride, suffocated beneath her heavy veil, blushed unseen at the numerous healths drunk to her future sons and daughters" (39). Once again, vocabulary places an invaluable role in conveying Antin's perspective. By describing her mother's wedding veil as suffocating and heavy, Antin depicts her as being uncomfortable and trapped on an occasion that should be the happiest day of her life. It is also notable that she describes her mother as being "unseen," an idea that correlates with her continuing belief that women are undervalued within the community. If this sentence were to be rewritten with different word choices, significant sentiments would be lost, and thus, it is clear that language, and not only content, is one of Antin's strongest tools in conveying her silent argument. Lingering doubts about Antin's perspective on young brides must be eliminated when she expands the subject of her narrative, moving away from telling only her mother's story to describe the fate of all young religious girls in her community. She describes the abrasive manner in which these girls found themselves yanked from childhood and forced into marriage, stating, "How soon it came, the pious burden of wifehood! One day the girl is playing forfeits with her laughing friends, the next day she is missed from the circle" (34). Though one might read this as being a simple ethnographic account of typical time frames for marriage within the community, a closer reading shows Antin's evident aversion to this practice. First, one must note the deliberate vocabulary chosen; in place of phrases like "pious responsibility" or "pious role" of wifehood, the author deliberately chooses the phrase "pious burden," suggesting that a young girl is being weighed down by an overwhelming and undesirably position in which she is placed. The imagery in this sentence is also significant in understanding Antin's implicit message. In writing that a girl is "missed from the circle" implies that she is removed from a community of sisterhood, and that an important, emotional link in her life has been broken. From this singular sentence, it becomes clear that Antin views young marriages not as pious occasion to be celebrated, but instead, as a traumatic act of robbing a girl of what should be a blissful childhood experience. However, it seems apparent that Antin's goal in writing this novel was not solely to criticize her community. Rather, in telling her own story of success, Antin achieves several important feats; for her American audience, she triumphantly demonstrates that immigrants can acculturate successfully. But in a less overt way, she also fulfills another important goal of inspiring her Jewish women readership. Her book implies that in America, women like herself have the ability to achieve a level of success that was not possible in Polotzk. In this way, she promotes the idea that women who have grown up in religious communities can move beyond the religion-constructed restraints of their Old World lives by beginning a new life in America. It is noteworthy that when Mary first makes a conscious decision to defy religious authority in her community and take personal strives to increase her own Judaic learning, she once again relies on language and plot in order to successfully achieve her goal. Linguistically, she draws on allusion to religious texts, explaining that she was "undeterred by the fate of Eve (and) wanted to know more" (107). It is interesting that Antin chose to reference Eve, for the Biblical figure was famously penalized for attempting to gain knowledge against the will of G-d's authority. But in this context, Antin suggests that a woman can benefit from demanding and acquiring an education. It is also worth noting that Antin carefully manipulates plot, and her style of storytelling is deliberate in this section. Rather than telling this experience in the first person, as she does for the majority of the novel, here Antin insists that this is simply the story of a nameless little girl. Her choice to tell her own story under an anonymous guise perfectly demonstrates the overall technique Antin employs in writing this novel for a Jewish audience; the ideas are present, but they are stately quietly and covertly. After introducing readers to the idea that a religious woman does have the power to enhance her own learning experience, Antin keeps this idea in play, and begins to push it even further when she describes the initial success she obtains as a writer in America. When her poem is published in a local newspaper, Antin once again uses careful language choices to make a point about how she was able to successfully become learned in a male-dominated community. She swells with pride as she considers how she, "Mary Antin, was one of the inspired brotherhood who made the newspapers so interesting" (200). Here, it is interesting how Antin deliberately includes herself under a male categorization when describing her initiation into the world of education. In doing so, she makes a clear point that in America, it is possible for Jewish women to overcome former boundaries. In this New World, women have the opportunity to assimilate into a culture of academia, an achievement that could not have been feasible in Polotzk. Plot is also significant to Antin's goal in this passage, for she later adds that she smiled "in delicious amusement when a man deliberately put me out of his path, as I dreamed my way through the jostling crowd; if only he knew whom he was treating so unceremoniously!" (200). When considering this passage as a means of explanation for a non-Jewish, American audience, it would seem as though Antin included this image to show how she, as an immigrant, was able to assimilate and find academic success within American culture; yet, when reading this passage as a covert message to Jewish women readers, it is quite notable that Antin determines that she is being pushed aside by a male. In this way, it is as though the author is creating a metaphor for the experience of all Jewish females, and henceforth, suggesting that while men may try to deter women in "their path," women in America have the power to overcome these obstacles. In summary, The Promised Land can be considered a prime example of how a work can adopt an entirely new meaning when its intended audience is reconsidered. Though this text was initially considered to be a demonstration of how a Jewish immigrant could successfully blend into American culture, it also retains a second, perhaps more pertinent function; though Antin lacks the power to extrinsically disparage traditional Jewish culture, she is able to successfully use this novel as a means of critiquing the limitations that traditional Jewish communities place on women. When successfully discovered, her novel's intrinsic messages allow her novel to be read and appreciated in a new way.

Emily Dickinson

1. Poet 2. First volume published in 1890, last volume, 1955. 3. Biography: In 1830, Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but severe homesickness led her to return home after one year. Throughout her life, she seldom left her house and visitors were scarce. The people with whom she did come in contact, however, had an enormous impact on her thoughts and poetry. She was particularly stirred by the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she met on a trip to Philadelphia. He left for the West Coast shortly after a visit to her home in 1860, and some critics believe his departure gave rise to the heartsick flow of verse from Dickinson in the years that followed. While it is certain that he was an important figure in her life, it is not certain that this was in the capacity of romantic love—she called him "my closest earthly friend." Other possibilities for the unrequited love in Dickinson's poems include Otis P. Lord, a Massachusetts Supreme Court Judge, and Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican. By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost total physical isolation from the outside world, but actively maintained many correspondences and read widely. She spent a great deal of this time with her family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was actively involved in state and national politics, serving in Congress for one term. Her brother Austin attended law school and became an attorney, but lived next door once he married Susan Gilbert (one of the speculated—albeit less persuasively—unrequited loves of Emily). Dickinson's younger sister Lavinia also lived at home for her entire life in similar isolation. Lavinia and Austin were not only family, but intellectual companions during Dickinson's lifetime. Dickinson's poetry reflects her loneliness and the speakers of her poems generally live in a state of want, but her poems are also marked by the intimate recollection of inspirational moments which are decidedly life-giving and suggest the possibility of happiness. Her work was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity. She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as John Keats. Though she was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary Walt Whitman by rumor of its disgracefulness, the two poets are now connected by the distinguished place they hold as the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice. While Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. She died in Amherst in 1886. Upon her death, Dickinson's family discovered 40 handbound volumes of nearly 1800 of her poems, or "fascicles" as they are sometimes called. These booklets were made by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems in an order that many critics believe to be more than chronological. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some are even vertical). The poems were initially unbound and published according to the aesthetics of her many early editors, removing her unusual and varied dashes and replacing them with traditional punctuation. The current standard version replaces her dashes with a standard "n-dash," which is a closer typographical approximation of her writing. Furthermore, the original order of the works was not restored until 1981, when Ralph W. Franklin used the physical evidence of the paper itself to restore her order, relying on smudge marks, needle punctures and other clues to reassemble the packets. Since then, many critics have argued for thematic unity in these small collections, believing the ordering of the poems to be more than chronological or convenient. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1981) remains the only volume that keeps the order intact.

Life in the Iron Mills

1. Rebecca Harding Davis 2. Published in 1861 3. Themes and Analysis: "the story was an oddity -- an invocation -- a bold indictment of the dark satanic mills. It was an entirely new kind of fiction. In anticipated the future...Yet it did not lean, as so many of those later works of social protest did, upon gloomy, philosophical abstractions concerning the animalistic elements of human nature. Instead, it took the insights of Harriet Beecher Stowe one step further. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe had eloquently urged the essential humanity of black people -- the indefensible inhumanity of their enslavement -- and the imperative of making political reforms. Her mode of "argumentation" had been "domestic": these feel and love just as you do; understand them as you understand yourself and the members of your own family, and grant them full and equal membership in the "family" of America. What Davis argues, through the medium of her compelling short tale, was that slavery is not essentially a matter of color, that "slavery" is a socially constructed category, and that the white millworkers of western Virginia are perhaps as brutally "enslaved" as their unfortunate black brothers and sisters of the Deep South. Once way of describing Davis's work is to observe that she introjected the 'woman's realm' and its network of moral values into the specifically public world of economic competition. Even more daringly than Stowe, whose work was consistent with the abolition movement's attitudes, Davis invaded territory that had been reserved entirely for men in this country -- territory that was unquestionably consigned to their supervision -- the realm of business and manufacture and money. 'Life in the Iron Mills' demands that this squalid realm (dominated by the ethics of conquest) yield to the virtues of compassion and amity (hitherto consigned to the lesser realm of women). The men of power within the fiction are those who manipulate money: professional men like "the doctor" and businessmen like "the factory owner," Mr. Kirby. And if not all seem equally callous, their varying degrees of avarice and passivity merely constitute different forms of acquiescence to the fundamental notion than an individualistic pursuit of money and success is possible without the intrusion of troubling moral doubts. 'What has the man who pays them money to do with their soul's concerns, more than the grocer or butcher who takes it?' Mr. Kirby inquires with irritation. Will YOU be equally complaisant? the narrator asks the reader as the story moves agonizingly toward its conclusion."--Cynthia Griffen Wolf

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

1. Stephen Crane 2. Published in 1893 3. Characters:The novel's title character, Maggie Johnson grows up amid abuse and poverty in the Bowery neighborhood of New York's Lower East Side. Her mother, Mary, is a vicious alcoholic; her brother, Jimmie, is mean-spirited and brutish. But Maggie grows up a beautiful young lady whose romantic hopes for a better life remain untarnished. Her seemingly inevitable path towards destruction begins when she becomes enamored of Pete, whose show of confidence and worldliness seems to promise wealth and culture. Seduced and abandoned by Pete, Maggie becomes a neighborhood scandal when she turns to prostitution. Crane leaves her demise vague--she either commits suicide or is murdered. She seems a natural and hereditary victim, succumbing finally to the forces of poverty and social injustice that built up against her even before her birth. Like all the people in this short novel, she seems chiefly a type rather than an individuated character, serving to illustrate principles about modern urban life. Jimmie - Maggie's brother and Mary's son, Jimmie Johnson is the first character we meet in the novel, and from the start he is fighting a street battle. He grows up violent and combative, hardened against sympathy and introspection. Although he himself has seduced and abandoned women, he fails to see himself in Pete, whom he hates for seducing Maggie, and he cannot muster any sympathy for Maggie, whom he blames, hypocritically, for bringing disgrace on the household. Unlike his naïve sister, Jimmie has the toughness necessary to survive in the rough world of urban poverty, but this toughness seems inseparable from the casual cruelty that seems endemic to the novel's world. He survives his sister, but one senses that he will only engender the same kind of cruelty and misery that his parents engendered in him. Mary - Maggie's and Jimmie's mother, the alcoholic and vicious Mary Johnson is a virtual incarnation of the devil. She spends the novel shattering furniture and flying into uncontrollable rages; even in the rough-and-tumble Bowery, where we sense that drunkenness is hardly foreign, Mary is a neighborhood joke. After terrifying Maggie into fleeing from home, Mary is hypocritical enough to condemn her daughter for immorality, and crassly sentimental enough to stage an elaborate scene of mourning for the daughter she never really loved. Pete - A friend of Jimmie's, Pete seduces and then abandons Maggie. A bartender with bourgeois pretensions, Pete affects bravado and wealth; to the downtrodden Maggie, he seems to promise a better life. But Pete is easily drawn away from Maggie by the manipulative and relatively sophisticated Nellie. He certainly seems the villain in Maggie's story, but it is important to remember that he is only the proximate cause of her tragedy; in Maggie, tragedy is inevitable, and it waits only for human agents, of whom there are many readily available. And it is also true that Pete seems, as we first meet him, to be the product of the brutalizing atmosphere of the Bowery, shaped as much as Maggie by his surroundings. Indeed, he, too, can be considered a victim of his environment, and we see at the end, when he is abandoned by Nellie, that he, too, is an innocent despoiled by circumstance. Nellie - Nellie is the "woman of brilliance and audacity" who, nearly effortlessly, lures Pete away from Maggie. She promises the sophistication and worldliness that Pete craves, just as Pete represents the same things to Maggie. In the novel's penultimate scene, it becomes clear that Nellie has nothing but contempt for Pete, whom she is using for money. It seems from Maggie that only tough women like Nellie can survive male predation in the world of the Bowery. Tommie - Maggie's youngest brother and Mary's son. Brought up amid the curses and flying cutlery of his parents' battles, Tommie dies early in the novel. Father - The father of Maggie, Jimmie, and Tommie, and Mary's husband, Mr. Johnson is known only by his last name, and dies early in the novel. In what little we see of him, he seems casually brutal to his children, even to the extent of stealing beer from his son Jimmie. Like his wife, he is an alcoholic, going to bars to escape the "livin' hell" of his home. The old woman - A nameless old woman who lives in the same tenement house as Maggie's family. She befriends the children to a degree, offering Maggie shelter in her apartment after Maggie has been rejected by Mary. Miss Smith - Miss Smith appears abruptly in the novel during the closing scene. She helps to whip Mary up into a sentimental fit of mourning for her lost daughter, Maggie. Billie - A Rum Alley urchin who fights with Jimmie in the novel's first scene and who, like Jimmie, grows up to be a violent brawler. He is Jimmie's ally in the fight against Pete late in the novel. 4. Analysis:Stephen Crane's first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is in some respects barely a novel at all. It is very short--in most editions, barely 60 pages long. This brevity is no mere superficial detail. The novel (or, if you prefer, novella) is short because the narrative it conveys is, in important ways, a slight narrative. It is a story that has become a cliché, a story about a virtuous and naïve girl who becomes ruined by forces larger than she. The setting is unremarkable. The characters are barely distinguishable from any number of sordid types who serve as stock and secondary characters inhabiting the alleyways of numerous longer novels. If it were not so deeply troubling, Maggie would be so banal as to be forgettable. Indeed, Maggie is so troubling that it almost was forgotten. Crane had to publish his novel himself to almost no critical acclaim and even less public notice, because no editor was willing to take a risk on a novel that seemed both crass and disturbingly pessimistic about American society and human nature. Crane was a prodigy, bringing the literary movement of realism to America before Americans were really prepared for his unflinching honesty. In an era that has been labeled the Gilded Age Crane was prepared to expose the misery, hypocrisy, and sentimentalism that he believed lay beneath the gilt. In this sense, his novel is "realistic": it refuses to accept platitudes about the goodness of human nature, and about the prosperity of American society. Largely ignored, Maggie paid a price in its time for being revolutionary. And it is precisely because Maggie was so revolutionary that it continues to pay a certain price. After a century of novels that have responded to Maggie by broadening their perspectives and telling stories in greater depth and at greater length than the story told in this novella, it is easy to question Maggie's contemporary importance; after all, for all its historical importance, it now seems merely a slim example of a literary genre. But Maggie was not simply first--it was, and remains, one of the best American realist novels. The literary school of realism seeks to portray life without pretenses or tinted lenses. But realism is not without its own set of beliefs. Realist novels tend to expose society's gaping wounds in the service of an ideology that downplays human agency, substituting a belief in the power of social forces that approaches fatalism. Realist novels tend to portray their protagonists as subject to massive social forces. These social forces are virtually inescapable; they are as inevitable as fate. When we first see a broad-brush picture of the Bowery in the second chapter of the novel, we are told that the people are "withered. . . in curious postures of submission to something." Think about the set of events at the center of Maggie. Social circumstances--poverty, a lifetime of brutality, and a lack of realistic prospects--force Maggie towards Pete. She is steered towards a single escape route, and then finds that the only door out is in fact the path towards tragedy. The ruination of naïve women in Maggie is inevitable, as common as the incidence of desperate girls and reckless bachelors. But one of the remarkable things about Maggie is that the novel's refusal to blame Maggie does not mean that her mistakes are forgiven. Maggie's own failings are exposed here as surely as the social forces that lead to her downfall and death. As the writer Jayne Anne Phillips has observed, Maggie's romantic nature obscures her ability to see the world clearly, and is as much to blame for her downfall as the forces of reality. This is a novel that shows sympathy to the humanity of every one of its characters, with the arguable exception of Mary. The novel recognizes that, to a great and perhaps overwhelming extent, these are people brutalized and hardened and victimized by social forces beyond their control. But it is also a novel that refuses to condescend through showings of cheap pity. Even as it extends sympathy to all its characters, it critiques the injustices they work, their hypocrisy, sentimentalism, ridiculous ideas and attitudes. Maggie is a novel that mocks but rarely condemns utterly, that forgives and seeks to understand even those things that it cruelly exposes. And thus it is a novel that troubles the reader with its moral complexity. Who is to blame for these tragedies that continue to repeat themselves, tragedies that breed and interbreed, perpetuating themselves endlessly? Crane, and Maggie, refuse to provide an answer.

The Souls of Black Folk

1. W.E.B. DuBois 2. Published in 1903 3. Summary: W. E. B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is a seminal work in African American literature and an American classic. In this work Du Bois proposes that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." His concepts of life behind the veil of race and the resulting "double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others," have become touchstones for thinking about race in America. In addition to these enduring concepts, Souls offers an assessment of the progress of the race, the obstacles to that progress, and the possibilities for future progress as the nation entered the twentieth century. Du Bois examines the years immediately following the Civil War and, in particular, the Freedmen's Bureau's role in Reconstruction. The Bureau's failures were due not only to southern opposition and "national neglect," but also to mismanagement and courts that were biased "in favor of black litigants." The Bureau did have successes as well, and its most important contribution to progress was the founding of African American schools. Since the end of Reconstruction in 1876, Du Bois claims that the most significant event in African American history has been the rise of the educator, Booker T. Washington, to the role of spokesman for the race. Du Bois argues that Washington's approach to race relations is counterproductive to the long-term progress of the race. Washington's acceptance of segregation and his emphasis on material progress represent an "old attitude of adjustment and submission." Du Bois asserts that this policy has damaged African Americans by contributing to the loss of the vote, the loss of civil status, and the loss of aid for institutions of higher education. Du Bois insists that "the right to vote," "civic equality," and "the education of youth according to ability" are essential for African American progress. Du Bois relates his experiences as a schoolteacher in rural Tennessee, and then he turns his attention to a critique of American materialism in the rising city of Atlanta where the single-minded attention to gaining wealth threatens to replace all other considerations. In terms of education, African Americans should not be taught merely to earn money. Rather, Du Bois argues there should be a balance between the "standards of lower training" and the "standards of human culture and lofty ideals of life." In effect, the African American college should train the "Talented Tenth" who can in turn contribute to lower education and also act as liaisons in improving race relations. Du Bois returns to an examination of rural African American life with a presentation of Dougherty County, Georgia as representative of life in the southern Black Belt. He presents the history and current conditions of the county. Cotton is still the life-blood of the Black Belt economy, and few African Americans are enjoying any economic success. Du Bois describes the legal system and tenant farming system as only slightly removed from slavery. He also examines African American religion from its origins in African society, through its development in slavery, to the formation of the Baptist and Methodist churches. He argues that "the study of Negro religion is not only a vital part of the history of the Negro in America, but no uninteresting part of American history." He goes on to examine the impact of slavery on morality. In the last chapters of his book, Du Bois concentrates on how racial prejudice impacts individuals. He mourns the loss of his baby son, but he wonders if his son is not better off dead than growing up in a world dominated by the color-line. Du Bois relates the story of Alexander Crummel, who struggled against prejudice in his attempts to become an Episcopal priest. In "Of the Coming of John," Du Bois presents the story of a young black man who attains an education. John's new knowledge, however, places him at odds with a southern community, and he is destroyed by racism. Finally, Du Bois concludes his book with an essay on African American spirituals. These songs have developed from their African origins into powerful expressions of the sorrow, pain, and exile that characterize the African American experience. For Du Bois, these songs exist "not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas." Andrew Leiter

The Rise of Silas Lapham

1. William Dean Howells 2. Publication in 1885 3. American Realism 4. Analysis: The length of the first chapter is significant because the great number of events, facts, and concepts that it contains prepare the reader for most of what is to follow. The Hubbard interview is the most objective, yet clever, way to present Silas' background. Howells has discovered a workable technique by which a great deal of data can be presented without being heavy like Balzac's narration. Hubbard's humor lightens the interview, and again this is a credit to Howells' style of writing. Lapham's money is immediately stressed as his sole claim to fame. This is important later when the Coreys are presented with not only money but also education and social elegance as reasons for their prominence. The sterling morality of Lapham's parents is pointed out, for it is significant that Silas Lapham, greedy capitalist, has come from moral origins. Later he can return to these origins when he refuses to cheat the English settlers in a business deal. The fact that he admires his mother's working instead of praying points out Silas' philosophy of "Work and it shall be opened to you. Toil and you shall receive." He has discovered that he is much surer to get the things he wants by working for them, rather than by waiting for God to interfere in the course of daily events and give them to him. His return from Texas to begin the mining and selling of paint is later paralleled by Tom Corey's return from the same state to work in the business with Silas. Silas' defense of man using the landscape is a prediction of the artistic blunders he will make when planning the house he builds. It also forecasts why the artist Bromfield Corey is repelled by Lapham, who covers nature with a coat of paint. The material downfall of Lapham is prepared for by the mention of the partner Lapham used for his capital. Howells later reveals that Mrs. Lapham plagues Silas with remembrance of his sin, and he seizes the opportunity to repay his partner by lending him money that he cannot return. The rise of an underselling paint company and a loss in the stock market force Lapham to demand repayment. His old partner proposes the unethical selling of the mills he has put up for collateral to English settlers. Lapham refuses and loses his business, but his concern for the good of the settlers redeems him morally. Lapham's display of his stock also predicts his downfall, which is additionally due to his overstocking the market. Only the Persis Brand that he shows to Hubbard saves him as a businessman; the underselling paint company cannot produce such high quality, and Silas is able to maintain his family on his profits from it. Hubbard's notice of Lapham's typist is significant, because she is later revealed to be Jim Millon's daughter. Millon is the man who took a bullet meant for Silas during the Civil War. Because his wife would object to his generosity, it is later revealed that he is secretly supporting the typist and her mother. The first chapter not only prepares for the plot to follow but, also, for the themes as well. Silas' sterling moral parents give him a peaceful state of mind to which he returns; this brings the book to a happy ending, thus satisfying one requirement of comedy. His material fall owing to his moral flaw of greed in his dealings with Rogers is predicted to introduce an element of tragedy. Interweaving these two elements into one chapter displays Howells' ability to subtly present tragicomedy. Silas' material rise is a romantic story, but it also sets the framework for a more realistic one dealing with his moral rise as a humanitarian who refuses to cheat the English settlers. The Rise of Silas Lapham opens at the end of the protagonist's material rise and at the beginning of a moral one. It shows him to be a non-artistic man whose only claim to social position is money. These aspects are later discussed in these notes under the headings of morality, society, and art. The moral predicament that Silas is in is common to all Americans who can live profitably by exploiting others. These facets are considered under the heading Americanism and Universality.

The Goopher Grapvine

Author: Charles W. Chesnutt Published 1887

The Wife of His Youth

Published 1898 Author: Charles W. Chesnutt