Thematic trinity: three lenses for American Literature
Our Three Themes
There are many themes that have been and that could be used to organize a survey of American Literature, and each lens will offer a different focus and perspective. Historically, certain texts and authors were always studied—crucial works of “the canon” that any educated individual was expected to be at least familiar with. But over the past 30-40 years especially, scholars and students alike have recognized that the canon excluded the writings and literature of Native Americans who inhabited this continent long before Europeans began to colonize it as well as the narratives and literature of African Americans who were brought to this continent against their will and their descendants who were doomed to spend their lives as slaves. The voices and experiences of “newer” Americans, as well, were often excluded: the Chinese, Japanese, Irish, Eastern Europeans, Latin Americans, etc. And of course, only a few women were considered to be sufficiently accomplished as writers to qualify as “literary.” You will read some authors and texts that I read as a student, and you will also read ones that I didn’t encounter until later in life, despite being an academic and literary scholar. The truth is, the volume (bad pun intended) of literature is almost infinite; it is far too vast to be read by one person, even one who devotes their life to learning. Even when you narrow the scope down to a particular region or scope of time—in our case literature written predominantly in the continental United States between 1492 and the present—it is still so vast that it would be more than one lifetime’s errand to become a true expert.
Given this context, this textbook and survey course will attempt to balance a range of perspectives and texts, organized asynchronously and thematically rather than in geographical or chronological order. The themes themselves have been chosen because they encompass a range of experiences and perspectives within themselves; they can be interpreted and applied in multiple ways, depending on the perspective of the reader.
As part of our course approach, I will NOT assign these themes to specific readings—together we will consider how the themes and the readings intertwine and relate. Arguably the only “wrong” pairing of readings and themes is one that is careless and unconsidered.
French writer Andre Gide said that “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” If at times you feel lost, this is only natural. Use our themes and learning materials as a map, to help you chart your way. Ask questions of me and of your peers. We shall be on this voyage together. We only have a few weeks and the blink of an eye to gain some knowledge, insight, and understanding. Hopefully, the small sampling we will cover will be enough to open up New Worlds in your mind that will return to you and enrich your life in ways you can now only dimly imagine.
Theme 1: E Pluribus Unum—Out of Many, One
In 1782, the Constitutional Congress of the United States adopted this 13 letter phrase as a motto to signify the union of the 13 former British colonies into a new nation. The founding documents of this nation included the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution. The men (for certainly at that time no woman could have had an official role) were passionate about the “American Experiment” in self-government. It is easy now to look back and see how much inequity remained despite the bold assertion that “all men are created equal.” But that revolutionary ideal, held imperfectly by imperfect men, has led to the greatest expansion and inclusion of freedom and rights for diverse individuals in modern history—and perhaps all of history.
From the very beginning we will see the conflict between the rights and worth of the individual versus the expectations and norms of society, the conflict between democracy versus hierarchy, the right to self-determination and to self-government, both for an individual and for a civic group, whether that be a town or a nation contrasted with and in competition with the desire of those in power to retain, consolidate and extend their dominion. It is not just in the American institution of slavery that we will see the collision between right and freedom for some but not all. It is also in the clash of societies and cultures, vying for space, for land, for power, and prestige. It is in the clash of the “new comer” and the established—and the demographics of those terms will change quite a bit over the course of American history.
What does it mean to create a union “out of many?” Unless your ancestors were the indigenous tribes and nations here long before Europeans or Africans set foot on this continent, you are the child of immigrants. Your parents might have been despised or desired—the strife and division we experience today at our borders is nothing new.
These are not easily answered questions, and the real world issues are not easily solved either. The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States begins with these words: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union . . .” The men who wrote these words were idealists and pragmatists. They knew that their goals exceeded their capacity, and they knew that the nation they were establishing would encounter myriad challenges they could not anticipate. How to truly forge a society that can justly claim “out of many, one” has been one of the greatest of these challenges.
Theme 2: Terror and Transcendence
From Columbus’s first encounters with the American continent and peoples, Europeans were fascinated by this “New World” that was as exotic and exciting to them as the moon or Mars is to us today. Poems, stories, and essays were written about this marvelous and mysterious place whose geography, topography, botany, peoples, animals were all “new” and unknown. But the encounter between the “old world” of Europe and the “new world” brought brutality and destruction as well as knowledge and possibility
As most of us know by now, Columbus and his followers were not exactly charitable to the natives of the Americas. Using guile and superior weaponry and surprise, they murdered and subjugated individuals and wiped out entire civilizations and societies. The wealth that poured out of the Americas and into the coffers of Spain, Portugal, France and England was often produced by slaves—indigenous peoples, Africans brought to the colonies, and indentured English servants. Plantation owners and overseers used extreme brutality and torture to keep enslaved people from revolting.
The colonizers brought terror to the New World; but they also experienced terror themselves. The vast forests and jungles of the Americas required survival skills that few possessed. The native inhabitants were not always pleased to see strangers show up and begin transforming and claiming their territory. New diseases, failed crops—this new world was definitely terra incognito—unfamiliar territory—and navigating it was not the same as living in a city, a town, a farm or village in Europe. Many early “colonists” were actually indentured servants, primarily impoverished people with few prospects for an occupation or income in England. They usually signed up willingly in the hopes of being able to start a new life once their time of servitude was over. But in reality, they were often brought to the colonies and “dumped” here, with inadequate provisions of food and shelter. The companies and investors that held their contracts did not hold much regard for their lives. Many starved, died of disease, or were massacred by natives.
One example of a failed colony is the infamous Roanoke settlement, first established in 1585 and abandoned in 1586 by the English on Roanoke Island, off the coast of North. In 1587 they made a second attempt. The leader of the new colony, John White, returned to England for supplies, but was delayed in returning to the colony until 1590. All he found was a deserted settlement and the words “cro” and “croatoan” carved into the wooden palisades. To this day, the fate of the 112-121 colonists remains a mystery—one that still has enough menace to inspire an entire season of American Horror Story.
Every culture tells horror stories, and as American culture developed, the seeds of our horror stories grew out of encounters between the indigenous peoples and the descendants of immigrants, the fear of what might be lurking in the primeval forest & hostile nature, the idea of a diseased or decayed “house” (and here you could read bloodlines or culture), the doppelganger or double—in short many of the tropes or motifs from German Romanticism, but through an American lens.
A peak time in the development of the themes of terror and transcendence was the years between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th—approximately 1775–1840. This time period is generally known as Romanticism—not in the sense of a boy/girl (or any variation thereof) love affair. Romanticism was a reaction to the rationality of the Enlightenment, and valued emotional and moving experiences—especially the experience of the Sublime which could be terrible, but also could be transcendent.
European (primarily German and English) Romanticism influenced the develop of American Romanticism, but on these shores the movement developed into the American Transcendental movement. You could say it married the awe and delight in nature of European Romanticism with the spiritual aims of the New England colonists. Communing with nature (to oversimplify extremely) was one way to commune with God or the Universal Spirit. Whether “transcendental” or “romantic,” this strain in American literature and culture was focused on immersion in life and its experiences. The idea of living life both simply and to its fullest is very “romantic” in this sense.
In many ways, terror and transcendence are polar opposite experiences. But they could also be seen as the opposite ends of the same continuum: they are immediate, overwhelming, and profound.
Competing Strains: Divergent Visions of the End
“A vision demanded of me that I begin at the beginning, not at the beginning of the fall.”—Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness.
In my beginning is my end.”—T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
In my end is my beginning.”—motto, Mary Queen of Scotts, motto
America has always perceived itself as exceptional. Our Puritan forefathers had a teleological (meaning that they had an ultimate purpose or end in mind) view of the world and of their “errand” into the wilderness of North America. In a sense, they came here with an apocalyptic vision that would, if it succeeded, establish a “New Jerusalem” on Earth, and they would be the inheritors of God’s covenant with the ancient Israelites. Needless to say, this is a VERY high bar for a community to aspire to, and it created a pressure cooker environment.
Because, if they failed, death and destruction would be the outcome. It all depended on if they could stay true to their purpose throughout the generations. That idea of being an ideal nation that brings other people and nations to the Light? In the modern era that begins, arguably, with the Puritans even if it doesn’t end there.
This theme considers the influence of sacred and secular visions of the purpose of the New World. For the Puritans, it was to create a new society that would live up to the promise of an ideal society led by God. The first generation of the Puritans were extremely devout and excited. But as time went on, the devotion and ardor dimmed, and Puritan ministers did their best to rekindle it, reminding people of the glory of their future if they followed God’s word—and the tribulation that would follow if they failed—as all model and utopian societies must.
Therefore, along with the rhetoric of Divine Appointment came the rhetoric of infection, appealing prominently in the writings of the Puritans and other early settlers. At times the infection refers to literal illness that devastated many of the early colonies. At other times, it refers to a spiritual taint, manifested by growing complacency on the part of the second and third generations or embodied, quite literally, in the Native Americans and the vast wilderness of the American continent. The rhetoric of infection as a threat to America’s divine destiny, and therefore her mission and prosperity, can be traced to John Winthrop and Cotton Mather who envision infection as pernicious heresies or witchcraft. In A Modell of Christina Charity, Winthrop presents God’s wrath as the price of failure and sets up the metaphor of the community as a body, susceptible to infection.
As American society became more diverse, this idea of Divine Appointment transformed into the idea of Manifest Destiny. In the mid-19th century, during the rush to expand west to the Pacific, a journalist coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny” in 1845 to promote the idea that the United States was blessed, even pre-ordained by Providence to stretch from “sea to shining sea.” So, this nation that was profoundly influenced by theology began to see that spiritual mission develop into a secular version as well, where the United States would begin to take its “rightful place” as a leader among nations—again, another very high mission driven by teleological fervor, with tremendous consequences for failure or success.
Among many other ramifications, this means that at least two distinct strains fuel the contemporary American obsession with the apocalypse, one sacred and one secular. Divergent in many ways, these competing narratives share a common source: the above-mentioned Puritan and early American jeremiads (sermons modelled after the prophet Jeremiah) and texts that warn of the dire consequences of failing to uphold the divine covenant we inherited.
From the spiritual Divine Appointment perspective, the “strain” of infection is our moral failure and depravity—based on a more traditional interpretation of Christianity—which will cause our destruction as a nation. As American society becomes more and more diverse, the way in which we balance our personal morality with our national identity and laws becomes more challenging.
From the secular Manifest Destiny perspective, the dis-ease or infection threatening America and the world is our failure to act on our knowledge of climate change and species extinction and to control the destructive capacity of our technology. The apocalyptic threat coded into this vision for America informs the literary work of environmentalists. An early an important example is Silent Spring, written by Rachel Carson in 1962. This book foretells a time when spring might become silent, due to the extinction of bird species from the indiscriminate spraying of DDT . For this strain, you should also think of The Walking Dead or 12 Monkeys, as well as the numerous post-apocalyptic narratives and even the very current and pressing debate about openAI.
An unintentionally satirical twist on both of these perspectives are various contemporary social phenomenon, such as Burning Man, a secular-spiritual errand into the wilderness that has been perverted into a commercial venture. Or tik Tok or Instagram influencers performative environmentalism while they consume fast fashion and other vapid trends, trading authenticity for cash and promotions.
An underlying dis-ease in both strains is a perception of ourselves as the infection that perverts and destroys, an unsettling premonition that we will toxically alter our nature and environment, disrupting and distorting our inheritance The idea of a polluted inheritance—whether spiritual or genetic—is endemic to apocalyptic narratives. And in both strains there is no escaping infection and its resulting mutation. In The Walking Dead, Dr. Jenner of the CDC informs Rick that all of the survivors are infected. Like original sin, this virulent evil is now in our blood.
Along with the warning to preserve, protect and purify our natures or be prepared for the consequences, both contemporary sacred and secular apocalyptic texts contrast what is with what could be, envisioning a potential “New Jerusalem” if we reverse course. However, the location and nature of this paradise diverges sharply, and this split is potentially the deciding factor in terms of real world strategies and consequences.
