One of the more intriguing aspects of "Rip Van Winkle" is that among all of the literature we produced during what was arguably one of the greatest periods of literary production in America--the era of Romanticism--one of the very few characters that has emerged and endured as a pop culture icon has been Rip Van Winkle.  (Interestingly enough, another of Irving's creations, Ichabod Crane, has also done pretty well on the pop culture circuit).  I find this significant because something becomes iconic in pop culture when it speaks to something we value, something we want, something we want to be.  Keep in mind that Rip Van Winkle hasn't been a shooting star, lasting briefly then flaming out.  It's been almost 200 years since the story was published, and we still know the name and basic story of Rip Van Winkle, even if we've never actually read the story.  But what really makes this interesting is that the character of Rip would seem to stand against everything we presume to be central to American character.  All you need to do is think for a moment how the Puritans would have regarded a person such as Rip.



The story does have a significance beyond that of the character of Rip, and it's revealed in the opening of the story: the foregrounding of the American landscape in Irving's description and use of the Catskill Mountains.  In an earlier post I mentioned that one way American writers answered the call for an idiosyncratic American literature was to celebrate our landscape, which was perceived as meaningfully different (in look and value) from the Old World landscape.  In this story before Irving ever calls our attention to the main characters, he sets the reader into an identifiably American landscape, and a landscape that would serve both as setting and metaphor.

But no doubt, this story is about Rip.  In many ways Rip can elicit similar polar reactions as those elicited by Bartleby.  On the one hand Rip seems to be little more than a lump, and quite happy to be that.  He violates virtually everything our Puritan heritage has taught us about a work ethic and the moral value of work.  Before we at least partially excuse him for having to endure a shrewish wife, I think we have to consider that she has a point in her complaints.  After all, he seems willing to help others outside of the family, but would rather go on a 20 year bender than actually do something for his own house and family.  One thing to recognize in this story is that we see things as Rip sees them, not as his wife sees them.  And it doesn't take an intimate knowledge of Puritan values to imagine how they would react to a man who willfully leaves his family to indulge in drunken excess.

But that being said, things still are not that simple.  There's the nagging fact I mentioned before--for someone who seems so anti-American in character, he sure has enjoyed longstanding popularity.  And before you say that the popularity is because we can look at him and feel good about ourselves because we're not like him, there's that other even more nagging fact: Rip comes back from his bender, and becomes ... famous and respected.  Let me emphasize this--he has done nothing, he has accomplished nothing, and he becomes famous and respected.  Somehow he has managed to re-invent himself, which is indeed an American characteristic, but has re-invented himself by basically sleeping one off.

So this leads to a question similar to that which we asked of Bartleby.  Is Rip an example of individualism taken to an heroic degree?  He does, after all, seem to have the characteristics common to other rugged individualists in our culture and literature.  First, he has the ability to move at will.  Second, he refuses to behave according to social convention, and so perhaps presents a threat to society and social order.  Third, he defines his worth no according to how others outside of him perceive him, but according to his own internal values.

While many of the settlers who first came to this land came to explore new commercial possibilities, the Puritans came here to re-invent their world.  The new world that would become America offered more than an escape from oppression; it also offered the promise of a new start, with which they could leave behind their troubled past and begin again the process of redemption.  It was no accident that for many Puritans the new world was a second Garden of Eden (metaphorically speaking), a place where they could correct past mistakes of the original fall from grace.  The notion of re-defining and re-building the self, then, is embedded in our cultural origins.

Few writers in our history have better spoken to that ability to build a new self than Ben Franklin (though ironically enough, Franklin was about as far away from living the puritanical life as a person could be).  Franklin's autobiography (one of the best-selling books in our literary history) really is not so much about presenting an historically accurate portrayal of Franklin's life as it is about presenting a model for an American type.  Franklin's autobiography was published not long after our successful revolution, when we had basically cut the umbilical cord that tied us to the old world.  This, in combination with the new ideas abounding from the Age of Reason, helped shape a world that was both exhilarating and terrifying in its newness.  That the recommendations he was making about how to shape one's character had little bearing on the way he himself behaved was, frankly, irrelevant.  (Franklin was quite the hedonist.)  What was relevant was that Franklin was providing a scientific, programmed method for achieving character best-suited for this brave new world of post-revolutionary America.  The Puritans may have provided a scheme for proper character in the 17th century, but Franklin was providing his readers a way to redefine themselves and American character for the Age of Reason.

We conveniently like to think that autobiographies are self-histories, presumably objective retellings of the events of one's life.  In fact, autobiographies are notoriously selective, and in Franklin's time the purpose of an autobiography was not to offer verisimilitude, but to function as an exemplum--an example of how to live one's life.  Originally, an exemplum offered the path to live a life proximate to the life of Christ, but Franklin had little interest in matters of faith and religion.  His notion of exemplum had more to do with creating a model for secular success in a newly-minted America.  Franklin was not pulling his concepts of success out of thin air, but gauging them according to the needs of this new country.  So one thing to think about is how his design for proper character would fill what was needed in post-Revolutionary America. 

 Two of the Heirs to Franklin's Values for Self-Creation

I would also emphasize the significance of the charts Franklin creates.  They don't just simply make things easy to follow; they create a programmed, scientific, empirical method for achieving personal success.  In other words, Franklin rejects the notion of innate depravity and predestination dear to the Puritans in favor of the possibility that one could build a new self, and build one systematically.  If any of you are familiar with the plethora of self-help books that have come out in the last couple of decades or so--things like Five Minutes to.... or One Hundred Habits of Successful ..., etc. etc., you're not seeing anything new; Franklin was playing that shell game 200 years ago.

Crazy Lady

You may be familiar with the slogan "Question Authority," which has appeared on numerous buttons, posters, t-shirts, etc., over the years.  Among American poets of the nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson stands as a poster child for that slogan.  From the oddball content and structure of her poems (what's up with all those dashes?) to her disinterest in publication to her choices for how she lived her life, Dickinson represents a truly idiosyncratic American poet, matched only by Whitman in creating poetry that emerged from the mass of numbing sameness produced by most American poets.  Ironically, her singularity did not come from heeding Whitman's call for a unique American voice, but from the simple choice to live her life as she wished.

A common perception of Dickinson is that she was a somewhat loony woman living the life of an "old maid" because of some sort of psychological or emotional disorder.  It says a great deal about our culture that we would struggle with the notion that she would choose to live the life she lived.  Cultural authority at that time generally dictated two "acceptable" roles for single women of Dickinson's social standing: either marriage and motherhood, or a life devoted to charitable works (as a sort of secular nun).  Dickinson  was interested in neither one of these options.  (A little bit later in the semester we'll see just how insidious the concepts of marriage and motherhood would become with regards to defining the worth of women.)

But nothing defines her individuality more than her poetry, which looks and sounds like nothing else written during that time.  Again, we can tend to misread that and assume that the privacy of her life left her unexposed and unfamiliar to prevailing poetic trends.  She was, in fact, quite well read and aware of what was happening in the world around her.  While she was none too keen on the function of organized religions (something she had in common with Melville)--because they acted as intermediaries between the individual and God, they diminished the personal relationship with God--she wrote much poetry that was deeply spiritual and demonstrated her awareness of religious texts.  Her poetry owes a great deal to biblical verse, particularly the psalms.  Her poems about nature and God indicate that she had more than a passing familiarity with Transcendentalism, a spiritual philosophy primarily from pre-Civil War America that held, among some of its major tenets, that "pieces of God" are in all of us, and we are all part of God (which meant humans are intrinsically divine, not sinful; take that, Calvinists!) and that Nature was a far better expression of God than all the sermons in the world.  In her poem "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church," note, for example, both her disdain for the limitations of organized religion (which diminishes the personal relationship with God) and the sanctification of Nature--two key elements to transcendentalist thinking.  You can even see something else that we often don't associate with Dickinson--a wry sense of humor.  The line "And the sermon is never long" is a not-so-subtle dig at the tendency some preachers at the time had to see themselves as religious rock gods who enjoyed being the center of attention.  (A theme Hawthorne would also explore, in his short story "The Minister's Black Veil.") Given the existence of televangelists and Prosperity Gospel advocates in our own time, things don't seem to have changed much since Dickinson's time.

Nevertheless, there is no denying the uniqueness of her poetry in her time.  Among American poets, she was the yin to Whitman's yang--Whitman wrote hugely expansive, muscular, naked-to-the-world poems, while Dickinson wrote intensely personal, contemplative (which helps account for the dashes, which can signal, among other things, the hesitation and carefulness of the poem's narrator, sort of like the verbal pauses we take when we're trying to compose our thoughts while we think), minimalist poems.  American poetry would not see poetry like this again until the modernist movement of the early 20th century and the compressed poetry of people like William Carlos Williams and E.E.Cummings.  

The privacy and intense personal nature of her poetry are what provide the interesting characteristics to her spiritual and religious poetry.  She has no interest in proselytizing, indulging in public displays of praise, or spreading any sort of word.  God may be a deity, but she treats him like a companion--and even as a lover, as in her poem titled "God is a distant--stately Lover--."  We see something similar in the poem "Because I could not stop for Death," which instead of treating Death like the Grim Reaper with a scythe, treats him as a courtly lover: patient, courteous--but also cold and relentless.  The third stanza, where she points out that they passed a school, grain fields and a setting sun, isn't so much a travelogue or reminiscence as a reminder that everything dies, and that no one--even a child--is exempt. 

"I heard a Fly buzz" is another example of Dickinson approaching the subject of Death in an unconventional, and even whimsical way (and not just because of the fact that this poem and "Because I could not stop for Death" are narrated by someone who's already dead, though that certainly helps).  Here we have this crucial moment, the moment when our narrator is about to pass from this life into the unknown.  She is in a room full of weeping people, praying for the dying narrator ("And Breaths were gathering firm/For that last Onset - when the King [God/Christ]/Be witnessed..."), waiting for this most dramatic moment, terrifying and exhilarating--and along comes a stupid fly.  What a great reminder of  just how full of ourselves we are.  While we weep and moan and pray and mythologize Death, a filthy housefly (a creature that vomits and poops frequently, by the way) comes along, completely indifferent to our grandiosity and self-importance.  In a sense, Dickinson is easing into Realism by creating a context that deflates our perceived significance in the grand scheme of things.


Below you'll find one of my favorite and most intriguing Dickinson poems: "I know that he exists."  As is the case in many of her poems, "I know that he exists" is about her personal relationship with God.  The first line, in fact, can be quite comforting for many readers, because the narrator asserts ("know," not "think" or "believe") the existence of a Supreme Being (something that many American Realists would be loathe to do).  However, as is also often the case with Dickinson, she frames that relationship as a friend or even a kind of drinking buddy; she certainly is not awestruck, and fear and trembling aren't even part of the conversation.

In this particular poem what's intriguing is the analogy she uses to ponder that nature of her relationship with God: a game of hide and seek.  What I'd like your thoughts on is why do you think she would use that analogy to describe her relationship with God, and what do you make of the third and fourth stanzas, where the poem seems to take a dark turn, and something seems to happen that makes the game less ... fun. For now I'll just say that in her poetry Dickinson is not shy sometimes about chiding God.

I KNOW that he exists
Somewhere, in silence.
He has hid his rare life
From our gross eyes.
’T is an instant’s play,	5
’T is a fond ambush,
Just to make bliss
Earn her own surprise!
But should the play
Prove piercing earnest,	10
Should the glee glaze
In death’s stiff stare,
Would not the fun
Look too expensive?
Would not the jest	15
Have crawled too far?

The Unshorn Fields ... for Which the Speech of England Has No Name

William Cullen Bryant was the answer to a lot of prayers that had been said in America since the 18th century by those desperately seeking an authentic American voice of American poetry.  A question for many American readers and critics had been whether an artist could find in America a subject matter that would put American literature on par with its European counterparts.  Bryant, at least initially, provided the answer to that question, and he would have to do as a genuinely American poet until Walt Whitman came along and let fly with his barbaric yawp.

Bryant was not necessarily a brilliant poet, and certainly not an original one, but that perhaps is what actually made him appealing to so many readers.  (We need to keep in mind that in the nineteenth century people actually read poetry for pleasure and entertainment.  In a survey done before 1840, the American public identified their two favorite writers as Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant.)  If one's frame of reference for great poetry was the verse produced by someone else--in this case, classical and English poets--then you measure greatness by how close it comes to that frame of reference.  True originality can cause problems (as Whitman would find out), because we can't measure it against what we know and with which we are familiar.

So what then made Bryant an American poet?  To a large degree because he drew his inspiration from what many in the 18th and 19th century considered to be one of America's most distinct characteristics: its landscape.  Certainly in England you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a nature poet.  But America's nature was different--it was big and dangerous and wild and still populated with wild people.  Bryant infuses his poetry with a transcendentalist sensibility, and uses near-biblical cadences in his verse, resulting in poetry that raised the American landscape (and consequently America itself) to a profound level.

Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains - Albert Bierstadt

"Thanatopsis" is considered by many to be what's been called a "proto-Transcendentalist" poem; that is, it's one of the earliest literary expressions of a transcendentalist world-view.  The poem is fundamentally a meditation on death--not exactly new material for poetry.  Since we're still working out the principles of transcendentalism, we won't approach this poem through the filter of transcendentalism; rather, let's try to understand Bryant's perceptions of death as something that can also help lead us to an understanding of transcendentalism.

The first thing to think about is the nature of God in this poem.  Second, notice that while Bryant certainly seems to think that Death is not the end, he also never describes or talks about an after life--at least not the conventional after life.  What is the after life for Bryant?  Here the key section of the poem is the third stanza (beginning with line 31).  Finally, Bryant's point is not to obsess about death; as he tells his reader's in the last stanza "So live...," because death should not be feared.  But note that he says nothing in the last stanza about finding comfort in God--God is not mentioned at all.  So where does the comfort come from?

Just Like a Wheel Inside a Wheel

William Cullen Bryant's poem "Thanatopsis" brings us to one of the most idiosyncratic spiritual philosophies in American culture: transcendentalism.  It's difficult to account for the long-standing notoriety of this philosophy (to call it a religion would be inaccurate), considering that relatively few advocated it.  (Perhaps, to some degree, because it is a bear to understand.)  Typically we associate it with the writers of American romanticism, specifically people like Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Thoreau and perhaps the most celebrated of them all, Walt Whitman.  Hawthorne dabbled in it, but mostly found it mildly amusing, and Melville, ever the contrarian, thought transcendentalists were basically nuts. 

So why did it become so well known?  Part of the reason, I think, is that it is in many ways classically American--pretty much every part of the philosophy was borrowed from somewhere else, and we cobbled the pieces together into something wholly new.  (It's pretty much a given that in most circumstances in our history, we did not invent new cultural forms--we borrowed and adapted.)  So transcendentalism is a mix of Plato, Hinduism, Confucianism, German Existentialism, Kierkegaardian philosophy, assorted form of Eastern mysticism, and good old-fashioned Christianity.

Another reason for its enduring fame is that it came along at a time--first half of the 19th century--when our writers and artists were desperately trying to separate themselves from the Old World--particularly England--and establish their own cultural identity.  They were trying to figure out what exactly is American literature.  Transcendentalism at its best tries to accommodate two particularly significant aspects of American cultural identity: individualism and democracy. 

So what is it?  Well, the first step, before we turn our attention to Bryant, is to tease out its groundwork values, and to do that I'm going to ask you to deconstruct an image.  Below I've placed an image that metaphorically captures the essential values of transcendentalism.  Your task is to look at the image and figure out its implications.  If this image represents the essence of transcendentalism (and it does), what do you think this tells us about the nature of human relationships, the nature of human relationships to the universe, the nature of relationships of all living things, the nature of God.

The Wonders of the Visible World

If Cotton Mather profoundly believes in a vibrant interconnectedness between the supernatural world and this world, Thomas Paine casts a skeptical eye on that proposition, and --appropriate to one of the major philosophical forces of the Age of Reason--use logic and reason to deconstruct it. 

Even more so than his other Deist contemporaries, such as Jefferson, Paine sought to illuminate the fundamental flaws of reason that lay behind religion .  Since Paine was not particularly good (or even particularly interested) in approaching this issue with some diplomacy, you can probably guess that he was one of the more controversial writers of his era.  Nevertheless, his application of reason to issues of faith illustrates well the rationalist view that would displace puritanical world views and galvanize what was and probably always will be the contentious relationship between the sacred and the secular in this culture. 

Readers often confound Paine's assault on religion and religious structures with an assault on faith itself, though a careful reading of Paine reveals that he clearly distinguishes between the two.  And that generally is true of other rationalists and Deists--they commonly accepted the existence of God; they had trouble accepting that God needed spokespeople to do His business, or even that God had any interest in us whatsoever.  You have to remember that much of the impetus that lay behind the development of the dominant philosophies of the Age of Reason, especially in Europe, was the persistent institutional oppression by churches and the spiritual leaders of formal religions.  Those of a revolutionary mindset recognized that a major reason church leaders often claimed a special intermediary relationship with God was so that they could maintain their positions of cultural and political power. 

Thomas Paine

Paine's target isn't God; it's those who presume to speak for God.  (And remember, logically it makes no sense that God would need anyone to speak for Him. )  Paine was well aware of the bloody history of things done in the name of God--he's not that far removed historically from the Salem Witch Trials.  If you parse Paine's argument, it's really not that complicated:

1. We pin our faith on what other human beings tell us about God (e.g., The Bible).  There may have once been a person to whom God communicated directly, but as Paine says, "it is a revelation to that person only."  Everything beyond that is filtered.  It's akin to the party game in which person A whispers a phrase to person B, and by the time we get to person Z the original message has likely been lost.
2. Since the original message--and Paine does not necessarily believe there was one, but being the good rationalist that he was, he was willing to entertain that for the sake of argument--inevitably gets filtered by human beings, who are flawed, it's unreasonable to expect that the original message from God is intact.
3. So why in the world then do we unquestioningly believe what these intermediaries tell us?  For Paine the core problem isn't that we believe; it's that we unquestioningly believe.

For Paine, Mather's ideology would be the poster child for his argument.  Mather's problem (at least as Paine would see it) is that he pins his argument upon the unquestioned belief that the supernatural commingles with the natural world, a belief handed to him by his forebears, who had that belief handed to them by their forebears, and so on and so forth.  This leads to a fundamental logical flaw in Mather's argument--the evidence does not empirically proved the presence of Satan; rather, Mather presupposes the presence of Satan and makes the evidence fit his beliefs.  The result?  Much human suffering.

In both Mather and Paine you are seeing a snapshot of the antagonistic relationship between the sacred and secular that has been a  part of our culture since we first landed on these shores.

A Dreadful Knot of Witches

The Salem Witchcraft Trials, of which Cotton Mather writes in his Wonders of the Invisible World, were something of a tipping point in American culture.  While it would be naive to suggest that these trials ended the impact of Puritans upon American culture (and as I've said a number of times, their influence still persists in 2009), the trials certainly diminished them--and to a degree those directly involved with the trials knew it.  This was an event that took on a life of its own and moved beyond the control of those supposedly in control.  What began seemingly as a childish prank exploded into a kind of civil war in the town of Salem. 

Part of the tragedy of the Salem Witch Trials was that the disputes among the citizens of Salem had more to do with landgrabbing, personal conflicts, and problems with those who behaved outside of the norm than with genuine belief that Satan chose Salem as his personal playground.  However much those involved tried to cloak their actions in moral righteousness, the fact was that what happened stemmed from everyday human greed and pettiness.  Note, for example, in Mather's description of Martha Carrier's trial, how often he remarks upon Carrier's abrasive personality and the "differences" the witnesses commonly have with her--including Abbot's dispute involving land.  So how did things get so out of control?  The Puritan world view, in which God and the supernatural directly insert themselves into our world, and in which God had made the Puritans His chosen people, created a context within which claims of witchcraft had to be taken seriously--not to do so would essentially invalidate a fundamental precept of Puritanism--and acted upon.  Witnesses who claimed witchcraft would know exactly what the potential consequences of that claim would be. 

Martha Carrier's Headstone

The trials ultimately made the Puritans look old, tired, irrelevant and mean-spirited.  By 1692 science had made a significant impact upon the world-view of humans, and events that had once seemed mysterious or supernatural now had rational, quantifiable explanations.  In such a world Puritanical claims of New England being the "devil's territories," as Mather puts it, seemquaint and harmless--until those presumptions about the world lead to the executions of dozens of people at the hands of judges who themselves did not necessarily believe witchcraft had anything to do with what was going on.

Cotton Mather

When reading Mather, it's important to try to tease out the assumptions about the world that allow him make the assertions that he makes.  It's tempting to dismiss Mather as a loon for believing what he believes, but his view is consistent with Puritan beliefs.  It would also be a serious mistake to dismiss Mather as ignorant.  The fact was that Mather was a voracious reader, including scientific texts (remember that the Puritans placed a great deal of value in literacy and knowledge), and was one of the most formidable thinkers in our history.  His text on Wonders of the Invisible World is not the ramblings of some crank wearing an aluminum hat.  It's an exercise of powerful logic--of reason--that's operating within a particular spiritual and philosophical world view.  We can miss the logic because we would likely dismiss the underpinning world view.