Author: Tessa Hartzell

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In reading Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron,” I found myself wondering if the titular bird does not symbolize the innocence – I’d even go so far as to suggest the virginity – of young Sylvia. When she first encounters the young man in the woods, she is alarmed to hear “a boy’s whistle, determined, and somewhat aggressive.” She immediately identifies him as assertive and forward – Sylvia seems afraid of him, as though she herself is the prey he hunts. The man evidently evokes some shamefulness or fear in the girl, as Sylvia “did not dare to look boldly at the tall young man.” From the get-go, Sylvia seems somehow ashamed to have even “invited” this young man’s attention: “Would not her grandmother consider her much to blame?” The tone surrounding the first meeting is one of apprehension, timidness, and shame — which seems attributable to what Sylvia perceives as her grandmother’s expectations of her. One might quite easily translate these emotions into those surrounding a young girl’s early discoveries of or introductions to sexuality. 

Perhaps I am reading too much into it, but the young man’s immediate demand for milk upon his arrival at the farmhouse seems specific and intentional: could the milk further imply his “hunt” for a “fertile” young woman?

The guest’s “eager interest” in Sylvia and her potential knowledge of (in his words) the “tall white bird with soft feathers and long thin legs” might carry similar connotations. This description of the bird is human-like, feminine, and even mildly sexual. Sylvia’s “heart” gives a “wild beat” in response – she is excited, in some way, by the mention of this rare bird. In her description of her encounter with the creature, one detects a sense of danger or sensuality: “the sunshine always seemed strangely yellow and hot;” “her grandmother had warned her that she might sink in the soft black mud;” Sylvia “dreamed about” the salt marshes beyond this space, but she “had never seen” them. Sylvia knows the bird is there – she’s seen it, heard it – but the mystery and intrigue remains; there is much she has not yet explored. 

Soon Sylvia is captivated by the young man, whom she describes as “charming and delightful; the woman’s heart, asleep in the child, was vaguely thrilled by a dream of love.” In the woods, the young man leads the way, and Sylvia follows him. This maintains a dynamic of ‘experienced’ versus ‘inexperienced.’  

In her knowledge of the bird, Sylvia has power – she has something the guest wants. The issue at hand is whether or not she should give the stranger access to the bird. However, once she has climbed the tree and spotted the white heron, Sylvia wishes to keep the “secret” of “the wild, light, slender bird,” for to do so would be to “give its life away.” While Sylvia is tempted by the young man’s promises of money, as well as her desire to please him in light of her newfound affection for him, she finds herself bound to her morals and her obligation to nature — her obligation to innocence, perhaps. Jewett’s introduction remarks that her stories negotiate between a young woman’s “conception of herself in nature and to the world of men.” Of course, Sylvia is very young. But does the story suggest a woman to be effectively impure or sinful upon giving up her “secret” to a man? Are men inherently corrupting?

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Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” evidently influenced by the sentiments expressed by Emerson, echo religious ideologies. As has been noted by others, he spends much time reflecting on nature and its demonstration of the “oneness” of beings, as well as suggests that “there is really no death.” Section 24 contains one aspect of his various attempts to convey to his reader a sense of interconnectedness and unity in seemingly individual experiences. He says: “Whoever degrades another degrades me; And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.” I am certainly swayed here by my history in Catholic school, but this immediately struck me as similar to the Christian teaching that if you hurt others, you hurt Jesus. This line of thinking feels supported a few lines later: “Voices of the interminable generations of slaves…of prostitutes…of deform’d persons…of the diseas’d and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs…” etc. Jesus is portrayed as having stood up for outcasts in society, such as the “prostitute” and the “diseas’d” leper; in a similar way, here, Whitman seems to present himself as the spokesperson or even savior for those who suffer at the hands of a corrupt society. 

This is amplified by the overall tone of “Song of Myself” that seems to place the narrator — presumably Whitman himself — as “enlightened” or as having access to some deep truth or esoteric meaning of life that allows him to see beyond superficial, worldly perspectives. In fact, Whitman suggests that his perceived extreme empathetic capacity allows him to experience the suffering of other people. This is most prevalent in section 33: “I am the hounded slave.” This is just one – and perhaps the most striking – example of Whitman’s alleged sensitivity to others, accompanied also by the “fireman” and the “mother, condemn’d for a witch.” Of course, this is a poem, and Whitman may have intended for his reader to interpret these lines hyperbolically. However, he expands upon these claims with strong, specific language. Does he really mean to evoke a Jesus-like persona, “taking on” the suffering and sins of others? Most likely not. I assume, dangerously, that he is just trying to send a general message as to the interconnectedness of humankind. However, regardless of his intentions, Whitman’s claim to understanding the plight of enslaved people is not only bold, but quite disturbing, given the fact that slavery was still in operation at the time of this poem’s composition and that Whitman was a white, male intellectual. I am not positive as to his specific opinions on slavery, but I don’t think any ideology can justify this insensitive claim to “sensitivity.” 

That is, unless Whitman actually believes himself to be the second coming. Or if he is being literal here and claiming to have the ability to physically drift between the consciousnesses of others. These would be entirely separate issues.

 

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Upon reading Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” I naturally noticed the direct contrasts between the two accounts: “Paradise (Heaven)” vs. “Tartarus (Hell);” “Bachelors” vs. “Maids;” London versus New England; etc. 

Upon first glance, the titles of the collaborative short stories suggest that England represents a paradise, or heaven, whereas America represents hell. This conclusion is further supported by the potentially symbolic physical dwellings described in each account: The bachelors of paradise dine in an “apartment…well up toward heaven” (1498), which stands in stark juxtaposition to the “great, purple, hopper-shaped…hollow…called the Devil’s Dungeon” (1502) that contains the maids’ paper mill. Following this line of reason, the bachelors indulge in lavish meals, an abundance of alcohol, splendid stories of their pasts, and embrace the narrator with “warm hearts and warmer welcomes” (1497). This appears to be a rather heavenly existence! On the other hand, the maids working at the paper mill greet the narrator “pale with work, and blue with cold; an eye supernatural with unrelated misery” (1505). They spend their days inhaling toxic fumes and monotonously feeding machines that they come to resemble themselves. The reader certainly recognizes this as hellish.

However, a reflection on the two dwellings reveals that the Bachelors of Paradise live in an ivory tower of ignorance, isolated from the rest of the world. The narrator goes so far as to speculate that “pain” and “trouble…seemed preposterous to their bachelor imaginations” (1501). Despite the light tone and apparent admiration of the narrator regarding the Paradise of Bachelors, Melville certainly seems to be sending a critical message of their sluggish, hedonistic lifestyle. The Maids of Tartarus, while in vastly different physical circumstances, are similarly isolated from the rest of the world, unaware of any existence beyond the mechanical dreariness of their own. While they are constantly hard at work, the maids are stagnant, just as the bachelors, in that they mindlessly repeat the same task in perpetuity. The narrator himself marks similarities between the Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, the latter recognized as “the very counterpart of the Paradise of Bachelors, but snowed upon, and frost-painted to a sephulcre” (1504). 

The term “sephulcre,” however, suggests a depleted relationship between the Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, and, therefore, between England and America. Representative of this relationship might be Cupid, the character in the Tartarus of Maids. Of course, the name “Cupid” alludes to some sort of traditional love story, as does the juxtaposition of “Bachelor” and “Maid.” However, the Cupid within the story is a rather ignorant character himself who acts “impudently.” When the narrator incredulously wonders how the maids work in a tight space full of “poisonous particles” without coughing, Cupid merely replies, “Oh, they are used to it.” If Cupid represents the link between the bachelors and maids and England and America, then it is evidently weak. The old-fashioned, detached English bachelors have lost any bond or communication with the young, industrialized American maids. In fact, these bachelors’ Paradise seems to make the maids’ lives reminiscent of Tartarus, or hell. I wonder if Melville’s metaphor of “bachelor” and “maiden” actually alludes to a broader commentary on the frigid, stagnant relationship between old England and young America.

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As I read “The Custom-House” and the assigned pages of The Scarlet Letter, I found myself intrigued by the motif of “soil” as symbolic of ancestry, death versus rebirth, purity versus sin, etc. Hawthorne first introduces soil imagery in “The Custom-House” when he suggests a mystical relationship between the individual and the place where his ancestors’ “deep and aged roots…struck into the soil,” and specifically describes his own experience of “attachment” to Salem, where his own ancestor, William Hathorne, “mingled their earthy substance with the soil” (429). For Hawthorne, “the spell survives” through generations. This is not necessarily an original or even remarkable metaphor on its own, but Hawthorne extends it a few pages later: Hawthorne suggests that his ancestor, William Hathorne’s, “hard severity” and “persecuting spirit” in some way diseased the “old trunk of the family tree” (430). He concludes this metaphor by contending that although he finds himself drawn to this “natal soil,” “the connection” is “an unhealthy one,” and that “human nature will not flourish…if it be planted and replanted…in the same worn-out soil” (431). 

I recalled this passage when the soil imagery reappeared in chapter five of The Scarlet Letter. Here, Hawthorne ponders Hester’s decision to remain in Salem despite her ostracization from the rest of the pilgrims, stewing in her shameful reputation. He suggests that some “force of doom” binds her to the city, as “her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had stuck into the soil” (469). This parallels, strangely, the notion of Hawthorne’s ancestor, William, lodging his own family tree into Salem’s history through the cruel deeds of his lifetime. Hawthorne seems to believe that this casts some sort of strange spell on the future generations (ironic given the Salem Witch Trials), condemning them to a life of bondage to the “natal earth” (431) if they cannot somehow atone for the ancestors’ unresolved sins. Has Hester’s adultery subjected her daughter, Pearl, to some “ghost-like” (469) manifestation of her sin that chains them to Salem, pending some repentance? Could this “evil spirit [that] possessed the child” (478) possibly be unrelated to the “mystic shadow” (470) attached to the isolated dwelling of Hester and Pearl? What’s more striking is Hawthorne’s characterization of their house, whose surrounding “soil…was too sterile for cultivation” (470). I cannot consider this detail independent of Hawthorne’s metaphor in “The Custom-House” that suggests that “human nature will not flourish” in “worn-out soil,” and that the later generations should move elsewhere despite their pull to this “soil” (cited above). So what does all this mean? How does this connect to the rose bush near the prison referenced in the beginning of the novel, or to Governor Bellingham’s vegetable garden that will never achieve “the native English taste for ornamental gardening” (484)? Could this recurring “mystical soil” allude to a commentary on the history of Salem and its English, Puritan pilgims – perhaps even to its service as “poisoned soil” in which the later Salem Witch Trials “took root?” 

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Frederick Douglass’ “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” is prefaced by six pages of William Lloyd Garrison convincing the reader that the account is legitimate. I understand that this was a common practice — the “authentication” of slave narratives by white men — but I think it’s important to note that just as Douglass would have likely found difficulty making strides as a speaker and an abolitionist without the facilitation of the white man, without this preface, his narrative would have reached far fewer, if any, audiences. This probability, of course, is completely unrelated to Douglass’ own merit and, and is instead owed to the racism and white perception of black individuals, even among abolitionists. This is not to attack William Lloyd Garrison, as his “endorsement” likely contributed to opening a space for Douglass’ voice within the abolitionist movement; the issue extends beyond one man. However, even in the brief biography detailing Douglass’ life preceding the Narrative, it is clear that Douglass’ power was limited by Garrison in various ways: “Garrison attempted to bully him into shutting down his newspaper, the North Star…Douglass resettled in part to escape the influence of Garrison” (1161). Douglass, while aware of the dynamic in calling for African Americans to “be our own representatives and advocates,” also recognized the reality of the situation, locating this autonomy as “not distinct from, but in connection with out white friends” (1161). According to the biography, though “Garrison…wanted absolute loyalty and control of the movement;” we can only speculate that Douglass himself curated, to an extent, his own statements in order to sustain the necessary support from Garrison and other white abolitionists. In other words, Frederick Douglass could have a voice only on the white man’s terms. I think it’s especially important to recognize such a tension as Garrison assures the reader that Douglass’ success was made possible only by Garrison’s own power and volition, having “endeavored to instill hope and courage into his mind, in order that he might dare to engage in a vocation so anomalous and responsible for a person in his situation” (1165). The white savior narrative: Alive, well, and in perfect juxtaposition with the slave narrative.

 

 

 

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While Poe’s stories undoubtedly indulge in those classic “creepy” elements everyone looks for in horror tales — misty, gloomy nights; resurrected dead; ghosts; old, decaying mansions; and blood — I cannot help but suspect that beneath those gimmicks (likely used, at least in part, to lure in the public and make a living), Poe was trying to get at something a little deeper. Beyond all the undead, the ghosts, and the monsters, the true “horror” in these stories appears to lie in terrifying truths of human nature and society. 

One more obvious social commentary struck me forcefully: I could not read “The Masque of the Red Death” without shuddering at its seemingly prophetic parallels to 2020. The “happy and dauntless” Prince Prospero (I mean, just the name…) and his “thousand friends” might easily represent the wealthy and the “prosperous” who, upon getting the early intel on a worldwide pandemic, jetted off to their second house in Malibu with their influencer friend group for a year-long “COVID party.” The “Masque” motif evoked some N-95 images for me, too. The clock — striking ominously on the hour — consistently elicited apprehension and even dread among the party-goers, despite their best efforts to feign that everything was fine; they looked to one another with uneasy smiles as if to say, We’re okay, right? Nothing, not even the Red Death, can touch us in this ivory tower… right?

Just as in Poe’s story, COVID-19 went after even the most affluent — pandemics are not classist. The Red Death showed up at Prince Prospero’s party and ruined the fun. While everyone likes to fear the ghastly threat in a bloody mask, who is really the “monster” in this story? The facts of life in themselves — disease and misfortune — or the complexes of those who deceive themselves into thinking that status, wealth, and a good party will protect them? 

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Despite the density of the texts, I found myself engrossed in the artful, meaningfully layered sentences of Emerson’s “Nature” and “The American Scholar.” Perhaps his language — undoubtedly intended to exemplify the pure, naturally allegorical poetry of which Emerson speaks — was enough to draw me in. I suppose my admiration and hungry acceptance of Emerson’s every word serves as evidence of his claim to channeling a “divine Spirit” through natural language. In fact, I doubt it was any mistake to preface the denser, more abstract philosophical theories with a sort of subtle instruction as how to read it — artfully grooming his reader to approach what superficially presents as any other intellectual philosophical text with fresh eyes and the power of their own creativity; the image of some Spirit lurking beneath the words also lurking in the readers’ own minds. 

In addressing the significance of books, Emerson suggests that we accord them so much authority and wisdom because we, ourselves, delight in reading our own thoughts in a voice recorded hundreds of years earlier. I admit I myself fell prey to such a phenomenon in reading this very text. However, certainly I emerged with a few qualms: Beyond the obvious social conditions of his time period, I find peculiar Emerson’s interspersed racist references to Indigenous peoples; for, these “savages” of which he speaks sort of seem to embody that lifestyle, that perspective to which he aspires! Unfortunately for the writer, such contradictions might limit Emerson’s authority in representing the independent “Man Thinking.” Here, within Emerson’s own pages, lies evidence of society’s corruption of man’s vocabulary and, therefore, thought and action against which he so fervently cautions. 

I also have trouble reconciling the entirety of “Nature” and the first ten pages of “The American Scholar” with Emerson’s engagement in American politics and apparent promotion of the patriotic “individualism” which, if you ask me, has nothing to do with the sort of individualism of which Emerson speaks. He lost me on the last page. 

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In the final chapters of his novel, Cooper attempts to tie up loose ends not only of plot, but also of messages sent by Cooper himself through his characters and, presumably, to his readers. 

While the author naturally transmits his ideas and motifs through his characters and their various interactions, I could not help but draw a chief connection between Cooper and his, arguably, principal character: Hawkeye assumes the role of narrator in describing the landscapes at length and consistently “setting the scene” for his companions, as well as to the reader on an implicit level. Hawkeye appears to realize Cooper’s perception of himself as the author of this novel: A white man bridging the divide between the “civilized,” ignorant white Americans of his time and the mysterious, “savage” indigenous peoples. Cooper presumably views himself as a sort of intermediary, a “double agent” nobly giving voice to that misunderstood and overlooked “other” while maintaining his own authority and rapport with his fellow Americans by virtue of his own “pure white blood.” 

Of course, Hawkeye’s purpose evaporates in the absence of Cora, Magua, and Uncas. Cooper mobilizes these three characters as instruments for the forceful delivery and appeal of his ultimate attitudes regarding interracial interactions: Cora, as a mixed race woman, quite literally symbolizes the phenomenon in itself. Further, Cora, Magua, and Uncas’ fates seem to suggest the danger that lies inherently, according to Cooper, in the “mixing” of races — as well as the book’s broader conviction in the inevitability of Indigenous peoples’ extinction following their interactions with white people. Naturally, this notion proves nuanced in Cora’s strong character and mysterious, yet undeniable, beauty: While Cooper certainly determines the consequences of interracial procreation as destructive and “inevitably” fatal — as demonstrated by the tragic deaths of Cora and the two Indigenous men who dare engage with their attractions to her — one can only guess at the meaning of Cooper’s characterization of its very representation (Cora) as powerfully desirable. Perhaps the notion — in all of its perceived dangerous novelty and erotic — terrifies and fascinates him so that he cannot fathom its endurance in a world of his own limited awareness.