Assignment Code: MEG-06/2021-22

Course Code: MEG-06

Assignment Name: American Literature

Year: 2021-2022 (July 2021 and January 2022 Sessions)

Verification Status: Verified by Professor

Q1. Comment on the theme of Wallace Steven’s poem ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream.’

Ans) "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is one of the most well-known poems by American Modernist poet Wallace Stevens. The poem appears in Stevens's widely influential debut collection, Harmonium, which was published in 1923. The meaning of the poem is notoriously ambiguous, but its two equal-length stanzas present clear enough scenarios. An old woman has died, and in the first stanza the speaker issues instructions to others for the funeral or wake. In the second stanza, the speaker appears to be in a quieter room with the woman's cold, dead body. Here, the speaker seems to issue a mysterious plea for reality to be stripped of illusory appearances. Readers have often interpreted the poem as showing the ultimate triumph of life over the silence of death. This isn't necessarily some heroic victory, but rather a wider point about the nature of experience. Following are the themes of Emperor of Ice-Cream:

Life and death

The poem's primary contrast is the proximity of life and death, energy versus stasis, potential versus impotence. Stevens is far from the first poet to suggest that we can best appreciate life by juxtaposing it with death—such was a favorite topic of John Keats and his contemporaries—but “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” departs from the Romantic vision of life’s sublime beauty, offering instead a realistic picture of its messy, crude energies. After facing the cold fact of the dead body, the poem’s speaker seems to conclude that we must accept life at face value. In Stevens’ words from a 1951 letter, “The final reality is not death but life, as it is, without any pretenses.”

Ordinary objects

The poem gives great importance to physical objects: ice cream, flowers in newspaper, dresser knobs, an embroidered sheet, and a lamp. It suggests that by examining mundane items as evidence of the lives of the people using them, we can learn something about life. Stevens wrote in a letter, “The point of ["The Emperor of Ice-Cream"] is to isolate and make crisp the commonplace.” Certain objects in the poem become linked with life, some with death, and the poem seems to claim that we can make sense of reality by stripping it down to a set of basic physical components.

Youth

The age of the wenches and boys in the kitchen is unclear, but they embody a youthful energy that contrasts with the dead woman. Stevens’ choice to depict dallying young people waiting for ice cream suggests that their carefree sensuality contains the essence of life, as it contrasts most with death.

Lust and desire

Lust and desire appear in far more places than we would expect in a poem about a funeral, most notably in the “concupiscent curds.” This tone inflects how the characters appear, and highlights the romantic potential energy buzzing in the kitchen among the muscular man, the wenches, and the boys. The poem makes these energies central to everyday life, and thus they appear strikingly once we examine life plainly with all pretense stripped away.

Passing of time

The passage of time is implied in the poem through “last month’s newspapers” and the aging wood dresser whose owner never got around to replacing its missing knobs. Though the poem’s setting spans only a few moments in a limited space, these details help situate the scene in the broader stream of time. The newspapers, already obsolete, are reminders that time is fleeting, and that youthful love, such as the boys might be pursuing, is transitory and full of lost moments. The woman’s dresser signifies the human work undone by time or left incomplete at the end of a life: all the more reason to return to the ice cream party and appreciate life in all its mundanity.

Q2. Discuss the narrative structure in Huckleberry Finn.

Ans) In terms of narrative structure, Mark Twain's work Huckleberry Finn has an episodic pattern. There are three parts that can be separated:

Part I: We follow them on their escape journey in the first episode:

Throughout The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is continued by the protagonist Huck Finn, first-person narration is used. This gives the narrative an autobiographical sense, with Huck describing his own personal and social identity throughout. Because of the lack of comments, the storey becomes more serious and realistic. Because he wrote in first-person narration, Mark Twain was able to readily express the most horrific facts of modern social life. As an adult writer's statements, how they could have been thought disrespectful to the wider public is easily tolerable through the lips of a sensitive tiny kid. It begins with Huckleberry Finn introducing himself as the narrator and reminiscing about events from the previous book, much like Tom Sawyer. Nonetheless, in chapter 3, Tom is removed from the plot, and with him, the romantic aspect of his attempt to organise a gang of thieves is also removed from the storey. In chapter 4, the plot takes a dramatic turn with the entrance of Pap Finn, Huck's alcoholic father. Huck can't endure the disturbing presence of his father, who can't stand the Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson's efforts to civilise him. After faking his own death in the cottage where his father had imprisoned him, he goes to Jackson's Island. When Miss Watson's slave Jim learns of Miss Watson's plan to sell him for 800 dollars across the river, he runs to the Island as well. On the island, Huck and Jim embrace, and Huck pledges to Jim that he would never betray him again.

When Jim learns that he is being chased, he and a companion decide to escape on a raft down the Mississippi River in search of safety. The eleven chapters that follow lay the groundwork for Huck and Jim's daring escape.

Part 2: Their rafting excursion.

The novel's heart is comprised in the next twenty chapters (Chapters 12-31), which recount Huck and Jim's journey down the Mississippi, first on their own and later in the company of two con artists, the king and the duke. The journey is frequently disrupted by incidents on the beach, many of which involve the two con artists.

This section focuses heavily on Huck's relationship with Jim, as well as his struggle with his conscience.

At the start of their expedition, Huck and Jim come across a damaged ship named Walter Scott. Huck makes many unsuccessful attempts to help its stranded prisoners. They afterwards resolve not to get engaged in any further disasters.

Jim's attempt to reach freedom through Cairo and the Ohio River ends badly due to the fog. A fight occurs in Huck's mind as he listens to Jim's delight about his approaching release, but in the end, he chooses to side with Jim. After that, he saves Jim from slave hunters by leading them down the wrong path. They eventually avoid being ploughed down by a riverboat.

The beach adventures begin with Huck's encounter with the Grangerfords, who have a long-running but unsuccessful feud with the Shepherdsons, during which many of them have been killed.

The raft has been taken over by the two con artists as of Chapter 19. Their exploits include impersonating the English brothers of a local man named Peter Wilks, who has recently passed away, masquerading as a repentant pirate and printer, performing Shakespeare's plays, and, most importantly, imitating the English brothers of a local guy named Peter Wilks, who has recently passed away. With their last trick, they come dangerously close to tricking the entire town.

Huck discovers that Silas Phelps had bought Jim from the king for forty bucks. Following his sorrow for assisting Jim, he resolves to write Miss Watson a letter in which he conveys his regrets. However, he eventually rips the letter apart and vows to help Jim reclaim his freedom.

Part III - Jim's Liberation

The final phase, which spans 12 chapters (Chapters 32–43), focuses mostly on Tom's unnecessarily complicated strategy to free Jim, which he dubs 'evasion.' The entire action takes place in and around Pikesville, Maryland. Huck goes to the Phelps farm in pursuit of Jim, but Sally Phelps, Tom Sawyer's aunt, misidentifies him as Tom Sawyer. Assuming Tom would be coming at the farm, Huck sets out towards the town to retrieve his belongings, only to run into Tom along the route. Huck tells Tom what's going on and returns to the farm with Tom's belongings.

Tom is hailed as Sid, his younger brother, when he arrives. When Huck tells Tom about his plan to save Jim, the respectable Tom offers to be a 'nigger stealer.' This accord both surprises and astounds Huck.

Huck is displeased with the two con artists' embarrassing exit, which is covered in tar and feathers. Jim is being held captive in a cabin, as Tom rightly deduces. Tom is now in charge of planning and executing a large-scale rescue operation for Jim.

During the attempt to flee, Tom is shot in the leg. Huck abandons Tom on the raft and seeks out an elderly doctor who can treat his wounds. Uncle Silas is worried about Tom's disappearance. The elderly doctor quickly sends Tom home, and Jim is apprehended. Instead of departing, Jim chose to nurse Tom back to health, according to the doctor. Miss Watson had released Jim from her lease two months prior, as required in her will, according to Tom. Huck decides to go for the territory in order to gain his independence, knowing that Aunt Sally has plans to civilise him.

Q3. Attempt a comparative reading of ‘A Clean Well-lighted Place’ and ‘The Bear’.

Ans) Hemingway's “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” and William Faulkner’s “The Bear” are two different kinds of stories. The former deals with the terrible fate of an old man, is completed within the duration of a few hours and the space of less than 4 pages: the latter treats the ‘growing up’ of an adolescent, Ike, spans over more than 10 years and runs into over a 100 pages. The former uses sparse narrative, bits of dialogue, and very few characters; the latter is written in a spontaneous flow of rhetorical narrative and reveals almost a panoramic range of characters. Nothing much happens in the former story; but a great deal of action takes place in the latter.

Thematically “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” unfolds the despairing predicament of an old man of eighty, bereft of wife and children, almost deaf, unsteady on feet who attempted to commit suicide the previous week. “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” seems to be a very simple, unemotional, and almost unfinished short story.

However, when readers look for deeper insight, they can find how meaningful this story is. The author's diction gradually brings the readers to a higher level of understanding the reality of life. The truth is buried underneath the story the emotional darkness, eventual isolation, and existential depression caused by the nada, the nothingness. He is the lone, last customer at a clean well-lighted café nowhere he stays and drinks until the waiters pull down the shutters. His deprivation, infirmity, handicaps and loneliness are all manifested in the stark nothingness he is now confronted with, which, as Carlos Baker defines, is “something called Nothing which is so huge, terrible, overbearing, inevitable, and64 omnipresent that, once experienced, it can never be forgotten.” In contrast to this dispiriting theme, “The Bear” is focused on the sombre but bracing ‘growing up’ of Comparisons Ike, descendent of the legendary Old Carothers, who, under the tutelage of Sam And Contrasts Fathers in the woods, acquires the hunting skills and the courage and compassion human beings are capable of. Like that of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” it address the lives of families whose pasts are ugly and disheveled.

The genealogical lines are unclear, the actions between people are disgraceful, and the later generations are left with more questions than answers. In both novels, the authors provide their characters a place to retreat, to gather their thoughts, to experience serenity and find hope for the future. Although still an adolescent, he is befittingly named to lead the final, successful chase of old Ben: and later, despite pragmatic objections of otherwise well-disposed McCaslin and others, repudiates his inheritance. In terms of locale, it seems that “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” is deliberately situated in an anonymous place, for such ceaseless assaults of nothingness could have struck any old man at any place in any country: but the story of chase, of the appropriation of land, and of racial discriminations in “The Bear” is naturally embedded in the particularity and peculiarity of the American South and the tangled fabric of its community/society.

Of the characters in the two stories, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” transmits, through the intermittent bits of conversation between the two waiters (one young and the‘other old) at the café, their traits as well as those of the old man. We note the arrested myopic awareness of the young waiter which clearly betrays his brittle sense of security. He is confident, young, has a wife and a job, and is too self-contained and glued to his present to foresee, much less visualize, that youth implies age. Confidence may yield to loss of confidence, wife to absence of wife, and job to loss of job. In contrast to his incomprehension and insensitivity towards the gnawing despair of the old man, the old waiter registers greater awareness and human concern and empathy. He is unhappy at the unseemly haste with which the young waiter forces the old man to leave the café, and articulates his solidarity “with all those who like to stay late at the café. With all those who do not want to go to bed.

With all those who need a light for the night. “This extremely limited number of characters and scale of their characterization in “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” stands far apart from “The Bear” which involves a wide variety of characters from the hunting community and the American South. Of them, Sam Fathers, although he works for Major de Spain, is ‘the chief, the prince’ who nurtures the untamable Lion (the dog captured by him) with amazing skills and persistence in order to motivate it to hold and bay Old Ben, even as he empathizes a good deal with this legendary head bear. Unobtrusively, he possesses vast reserves of human courage and compassion, of endurance and dignity and humility which Ike learns from him, and grows from a raw, uncomprehending adolescent into a mellowing, understanding youth. Ike also learns from him the acceptance of the struggle for survival in the midst of wilderness with an accent on the principle of co-existence between men and animals.

All this stands in sharp contrast with Boon’s possessiveness of nature. Boon essentially remains ‘violent, insensitive and unreliable,’ despite his bravery and fidelity to Major de Spain and McCaslin. Notably, his eyes are “without depth or meanness or generosity or viciousness or gentleness or anything else” exactly like, Faulkner tells us, those of Lion. After its own manner, Lion also combines ‘unbroken courage’ and ‘indomitable spirit’ with a ‘cold and impersonal malignance’ and with a ‘will to pursue and kill.’ The major traits of many others who feature in “The Bear” may likewise be noted. They convincingly evidence much greater range of characters in this story than in “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.”

Apart from their belongingness to the indigenous American short story tradition and the shared human values of their characters; there is little in common between Hemingway and Faulkner as short story writes especially in their modes of writing. About the same may be said of “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” and “The Bear.”

Q4. Discuss The Scarlet Letter as a romance novel.

Ans) The Scarlet Letter is a psychological romance. Hawthorne proposes to study the effects of sin on the lives of his characters. Far ahead of his time, he delves into human alienation and what it does to the soul. Doubt and self-torture provide psychological shadows in the character of Dimmesdale. Rebellion and defiance in the face of repressive laws can be seen in his heroine, Hester Prynne. She may be forced to wear the scarlet letter, but she mocks that sentence with her elaborate embroidery. The Puritan concern with man's depravity and its effect on individual characters is intertwined throughout the plot. What happens when a person has an excess of passion or intellect? When a balance of the two is not achieved in an individual, what is the end result? Within the framework of the romance, Hawthorne lays out his evidence of the psychological conflicts within and around his characters.

The Real and the Imaginary

What this means for the modern reader of The Scarlet Letter is that, even though Hawthorne's story has a historical setting — Boston in the 1640s — the story includes elements that are not realistic. While the Puritan society was real and can be researched, the tale also contains elements of that society that are colored by marvelous imagination in his novel.

Thus, the romance can have the imaginary, the supernatural, and the unbelievable, but it must also have events that do not swerve from what the human heart knows to be true. The setting of Boston in the 1640s is a perfect choice for this type of writing. Seventeenth century Bostonians believed in devils, witches, and a vengeful and angry God. So not only is Hawthorne truthful to present his setting in that light, but he also leaves ample room for the imagined and the extraordinary.

Romances can concern real settings but are not limited to the probable. The fantastic can be added, and, in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne adds the scarlet A in the sky at midnight, the same letter allegedly carved into Dimmesdale's breast, the sunlight that follows Pearl but not her mother, and Chillingworth descending into hell. But there must be a balance; the probable must outweigh the strange and improbable, which leads to another tenet of Hawthorne's romance definition.

Unity and Structure

Certain artistic laws must be faithfully executed so that the reader can follow the trail. There must be unity and structure, literary devices, and a subject kept ever in the reader's sight. In The Scarlet Letter, the scaffold scenes provide the unity and structure, and the literary devices include symbols, colors of light and darkness, irony, and the consistent subject of guilt to provide artistic wholeness. While Hawthorne can go beyond the probable and use the marvelous, he must also do so without chaos; hence, he must provide artistic balance.

Gothic Elements

These definitions of Hawthorne's romance are also joined by another tradition: Gothic elements. Gothic novels often featured supernatural events, gloomy atmospheres, castles, and the mysterious. While eighteenth century writers did not like these subjects, the Romantic authors of the nineteenth century and their successors did. Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, and Stephen King all have elements of the Gothic in their stories.

Traditionally, there are a number of these Gothic elements. One used by romantic authors is a manuscript that is purported to be the origin of the story. In The Custom House preface, Hawthorne finds such a manuscript left by Surveyor Pue and a scarlet letter that is a magical artifact intertwining the real and the imaginary.

Besides magic, often Gothic stories have castles; in The Scarlet Letter, Governor Bellingham's home serves this purpose. It is covered with cabalistic figures and diagrams and has turrets like a castle. Inside is a set of armor, also a familiar element of the Gothic. In this armor which acts as a mirror, Pearl sees the distorted scarlet letter.

A crime, often illicit love, is usually the subject of a Gothic novel. Hester's affair is the crime committed in the Puritan community. Gothic novels sometimes have a villain who is identified as the evil person by some deformity. Chillingworth has such a deformed shoulder. And, finally, nature is often used to set the atmosphere of the story and provide some of the symbols. Nature abounds in The Scarlet Letter, and darkness, shadows and moonlight are all part of the Gothic ambience. The overall atmosphere of the novel is dark and gloomy, a proper milieu for the Gothic tradition.

In writing The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne was striking out in a new direction, the psychological romance, while using some of the elements of a far older tradition, the Gothic novel. Modern readers should not be surprised to find horrifying revelations, sinister red light coming from a character's eyes, a precocious child who is a living symbol rather than a human being, and the dark recesses of the human heart and conscience. These elements have kept readers enthralled for generations.

Q5. How is nature presented in Whiteman’s Poetry. Discuss.

Ans) Nature is central to Whitman's thought and writing in two aspects: as the material world of objects and phenomena (natura naturata) or as the force—usually personified as feminine—that pervades and controls that material world (natura naturans). In Whitman's pre-Civil War poetry the naturata aspect of nature tends to predominate, as he focuses on specific natural objects. In such later works as Democratic Vistas (1871) or his last major poem, "Passage to India" (1871), the naturans aspect predominates and nature becomes largely an abstraction.

Like most of his contemporaries, including Emerson in his book Nature (1836), Whitman does not try to distinguish between the two aspects, simply declaring in the lines moved to the final version of "Song of Myself": "I permit to speak at every hazard / Nature without check with original energy" (section 1). For him as for William Cullen Bryant in the opening lines of "Thanatopsis," nature as naturans speaks through "her visible forms" (naturata). Thus John Burroughs, describing his first encounter with Leaves of Grass in 1861, when he read it in the woods as a naturalist, wrote that he found the book unique in producing the same impression on his moral consciousness as "actual Nature did in her material forms and shows". Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman sees natural facts as inherently symbolic of spiritual facts, thus differing from Nathaniel Hawthorne, who depicts the symbolism of naturata as ambiguous, and from Herman Melville, who finds the symbolism of naturata not only ambiguous but often deceptive.

Whitman's poetic use of natural objects differs from that of his contemporaries such as William Wordsworth, Bryant, or Emerson chiefly by his inclusiveness. He rejects the prettified nature he finds in conventional poetry; in Specimen Days he describes that view of nature as artificial, repressing, and "constipating." Natural objects listed in his catalogues range from the "quintillions of spheres" that fill the universe to "brown ants," "mossy scabs," "poke-weed," and "beetles rolling balls of dung" ("Song of Myself," sections 33, 5, 24). Furthermore, like Emerson in the opening paragraphs of Nature, Whitman includes as natural objects products of human industry, such as the ships, foundries, and buildings of Manhattan in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." In the opening lines of "The Song of the Broad-Axe," that artifact is portrayed as though it were a natural object. And although like other romantic poets Whitman is strongly drawn to the unspoiled natural world, he is equally drawn to life in the city, which he is the first American poet to celebrate. Thus, after depicting the varied attractions of the countryside in the opening lines of "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun," he rejects them for the excitement of the city, ending the poem with the line "Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me."

The natural object most frequently and conspicuously employed by Whitman is the sea. In "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," and several of the shorter poems in the "Sea-Drift" section of Leaves of Grass, the sea is personified as an old mother or nurse and associated with death. In "Reconciliation" Whitman has this personification of the sea in mind when he writes that "the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world."

The air—used most frequently with the adjective "open"—generally symbolizes either freedom and happiness or the universality of Whitman's message. The sun figures prominently in Leaves of Grass—far more than the moon. Whitman makes frequent use of stars, listing them in "A Clear Midnight" as among his favorite themes, along with night, death, and sleep. The evening star, Venus, is a central and powerful symbol in "Lilacs."

Grass is a frequent symbol, most conspicuously in section 6 of "Song of Myself," as are leaves, which are often not merely parts of a plant but also parts of a book, as in "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing." The imagery of growing plants, with the use of words like "blossom" or "bloom," is used in such poems as "Song of Myself," "Song of the Universal," and "Passage to India" to symbolize the progress of the universe towards perfection.

Although Whitman occasionally mentions animals of the American wilderness such as alligators, bears, elk, moose, panthers, rattlesnakes, and wolves—most of which he had never encountered—his best known reference to animals is the generalized one at the beginning of section 32 of "Song of Myself," where he seems to idealize the natural behavior of animals as contrasting sharply with the guilt feelings and frustrations found in artificial lives of human beings. Later, however, toward the end of "Passage to India," the behavior of animals, now referred to as "mere brutes," is something to be eschewed and transcended.

Whitman depicts birds conventionally in poems like "To the Man-of-War-Bird" or "The Dalliance of the Eagles," but his boldest and most distinctive use of them is as speaking characters in two of his greatest poems, "Out of the Cradle" and "Lilacs." The songs given to the mockingbird in the former and to the hermit thrush in the latter are used with great effectiveness to express naked, heartfelt emotional responses to death: loss, sorrow, and grief in one case; triumphant acceptance in the other.

Whitman's description of the hermit thrush depends heavily on information given to him by his friend Burroughs, since Whitman is admittedly no naturalist; he even asserts in Specimen Days that one enjoys the natural world more if one is not too precise or scientific about it. Rather, he sees the function of natural objects and phenomena as revealing the characteristics of natura naturans—that is, nature as a reified or personified abstraction. The closest he comes to defining this abstraction is in "Song of the Banner at Daybreak," where he can do little except to state that it is something separate from the natural objects and phenomena it pervades, much as Wordsworth refers in "Tintern Abbey" to a "presence," "something," "motion," and "spirit."

Historically, conceptions of nature as naturans have varied widely, and among Whitman's contemporaries nature as an abstraction is depicted in contradictory ways. For Wordsworth, nature is a benevolent goddess; for Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his "In Memoriam," nature is a cruel force, "red in tooth and claw." Emerson in Nature generally shares Wordsworth's view, but in his later essay, "Fate," he refers to nature as "the tyrannous circumstance" (Emerson 949).

For Whitman, nature as naturans has six predominant characteristics: process, purpose, sexuality, unity, divinity, and beneficence. He never sets forth this conception of nature explicitly or systematically, any more than did Emerson, Thoreau, and other transcendentalists, most of whom would generally agree with all of these characterizations of nature except sexuality. This last was for Whitman's contemporaries often the most conspicuous—and to many the most objectionable—aspect of his poetry.