Blooming LilacsHUM 2212: British and American

Literature IFall 2012

Dr. PerdigaoSeptember 26, 2012

How the West Was Won• Political, geographical changes• Louisiana Purchase (1803)• Mexican War—southwest, California into nation• 1848: discovery of gold in California• Westward expansion• Relocation of Native Americans, 1830s Removal, Ulysses S. Grant

forcing • Relocation of Native America in the 1860s

• American identity constructed during the period• 1861-1865: American Civil War• 8 billion dollars, 600,000 lives lost

• First transcontinental railroad completed in 1869• Shipment of goods, moving into industrial age

• 1840s: telegraph• 1879: Thomas Edison invents the electric light bulb• 1876: Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone

• Immigration—1870s, 1880s, from Scandinavian countries; eastern and southern European countries, Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Russia

American Expansionism• Urban migration—New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco as major

centers

• 1893: Frederick Jackson Turner said that the western frontier no longer existed, based on 1890 census and population density; no more “free” or “unoccupied” land

• US colonization—Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippines after Spanish-American War in 1898

• American expansionism

• Hawaii annexed as colony in 1898

• Mythologized frontier—already lost, never a reality due to industrialization (6)

• Steel industry—transport from Pittsburgh and Chicago to manufacturing in Cleveland and Detroit

• US population changes:• 1870: 38.5 million• 1910: 92 million• 1920: 123 million

Typifying• Change from rural landscape to urban centers

• Romanticism and Industrial Revolution, Enlightenment

• Immigration changing “national” identity

• Urban landscape as “jungle,” Darwinian model

• New figures in fiction: industrial workers, rural poor, ambitious business leaders, vagrants, prostitutes, unheroic soldiers (7)

Stop the Presses• Importance of newspapers—cultural and political changes• Pulitzer, Hearst

• Authors as journalists

• Magazines publishing stories

• “Literature of argument”—sociology, philosophy, psychology; exposure, reform

• Like “pamphlets” in Europe, Wollstonecraft

• Gender and women’s rights

• Political corruption, degradation of natural world, economic inequality, business deceptions, exploitation of labor, tenement housing (14)

Defining the Tradition• American protagonists, “American Girl,” middle-class family,

businessman, complicated citizens of new international culture (9)

• After Civil War, idea of “great” American novel

• Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as key figures in the tradition

• New forms of representation during the period after the Civil War to reflect the turbulence and disruption experienced

• Immigrants trying to “reconcile traditional values and ways of living with American modernity” (12)

What is Real?• Naturalism and realism

• Realism—1830s-1900—English, European, American

• Moral and psychological lives of upper class, surroundings; Edith Wharton and Henry James

• Power of language to represent reality (10)• Twain and James, interpretation of the real• Stream of consciousness

• Naturalism—version of realism, or alternative

• Life shaped by forces beyond human control• Far from middle class• Social Darwinism

• Scientific, realistic, not romantic• Biology, environment, material forces shape lives, especially those of

lower class

• Characters’ situations within “enchanting, exciting, ugly, and dangerous metropolis” (12)

April is the cruellest month• “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865-1866, 1881)

• Great star—Venus—as Lincoln

• Bright star, lilac, thrush

• Funeral procession (stanzas 5-6)

• Landscape changes: Manhattan, South and North (stanza 12)

• Civil War (stanza 15)

• Transcends death

• Private versus public mourning

• Question of remembrance of those lost to war versus the remembrance of the president

• Nature as consolatory or distanced?

How not to perform a funeral• How to write the elegy

• William Carlos Williams: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174772

• How to represent this loss to America? Of America?

Source Material• Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)• 16th president (1861-1865)• Vampire Hunter• Prose, common speech

• Declaration of Independence and the Bible as foundation for principles and ideals

• Mystical Christ-like figure in death, his death as redemption of a nature

• If undead?

• Born in Kentucky

• Incredible memory, limited schooling

• Father, farmer in Indiana

• Loss of mother at age 9, stepmother

• Illinois, career in law

Source Material• 1834: Illinois state legislator

• Moved to Springfield, married Mary Todd in 1842

• Elected to Congress in 1845

• Voted against abolition but for new territories to remain free

• 1854: Whigs (Lincoln’s party) and Democrats compromised on slavery issues

• Formation of Republican Party in 1854, Lincoln joined

• Emerged as 1858 candidate for Illinois Senate

• “House Divided” speech—house not to fall (counter to Usher? Other Usher)

• Elected president in November 1860

• Before he took office in 1861, 7 southern states seceded to form the Confederacy

• One month after inauguration, Civil War began

Memorialization• 1863 Emancipation Proclamation—free slaves in seceded southern

states

• 13th Amendment outlawed slavery

• One month after new term in 1865, assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, died on April 15, 1865

• “Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863”

• 6000 dead

• Return to terms of the Declaration of Independence, foundation for America

• “For the Union Dead” poem, St. Gaudens monument

• Cannot hollow the ground

• Idea of mourning the dead—forgetting or remembering?

St. Gaudens Relief, Boston Common54th Massachusetts Infantry, General Shaw