journal for Apess

"Apess, a Pequot, used his position as a Methodist preacher to reach white audiences, both in speech and in print. Although he defended the virtues of native oral traditions, he was acutely aware of the damage inflicted by a written historical record devoted entirely to the victors' version of events."
http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/kislak/print/williamapes.html


"Assemble all nations together in your imagination, and then let the whites be seated among them, and then let us look for the whites, and I doubt not it would be hard finding them; for to the rest of the nations they are still but a handful. Now suppose these skins were put together, and each skin had its national crimes written upon it - which skin do you think would have the greatest? I will ask one question more. Can you charge the Indians with robbing a nation almost of their whole continent, and murdering their women and children, and then robbing the remainder of their lawful rights, that nature and God require them to have? And to cap the climax, rob another nation to till their grounds and welter out their days under the lash with hunger and fatigue under the scorching rays of a burning sun?" (Apess, p. 1054-55).

How eloquent and succinct that is. It makes the entire argument for not only the Indian but also the African case against the white settlers of the United States who claim racial and cultural superiority and entitlement to the land and toil of others.
Apess has the clarity of vision and skill in expression that we saw in Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, the ability to master rhetorical expression and rise above adversity to become a powerful voice for the oppressed and dispossessed. As a minister and believer, he is well versed in Christian teaching, and he is able to frame his appeal in religious terms in a way that there is no arguing with. His argument is so straightforward and so just that there is isn't much to say about it. He asks how can you claim to be a Christian and treat the Indians as you have done. He is also very generous in his willingness to put the past aside and continue forward on a different course. One of the interesting points that he makes, continuing along the racial lines in the passage quoted above, is that Jesus was more similar in appearance and racial characteristics to those the white man deems inferior than to the white man himself; that Christ himself was a man of color.

Journal for Irving

"The story of Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving is about a man, a country who is longing to be free. Rip Van Winkle also depicts the life of a town before and after "liberty." Rip Van Winkle's character portrays the society of America as it was seen by England at the time, as lazy and unproductive, "rather starve on a penny than work for a pound." (128) England is represented by Rip's wife, Dame Van Winkle, orderly and productive, "Everything he said or did was sure to produce a torrent of household eloquence." (128) The villagers stand for the American society in general and how it changed after becoming a free country."
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1861369/brief_analysis_of_rip_van_winkle.html?cat=2



I have read that Rip Van Winkle was Washington Irving's attempt to lend respectability and credibility to American literature in the eyes of European, and especially English, readers. He was interested in folklore and wanted to establish a folklore for the new American nation in order to give it a cultural pedigree. "Rip Van Winkle" is based on a German folktale called Peter Klaus, which also features a character who falls asleep for twenty years. Much has been said about the symbolism in the story, with dame Van Winkle representing tyrannical Britain and Rip being the freedom-loving American. But, as others have pointed out, if Rip is to represent America, he hardly embodies the qualities that America values. He is a lazy and timid man who prefers to escape his responsibilities.

"His fences were continually falling to pieces; his cow would either go astray, or go among the cabbages; weeds were sure to grow quicker in his fields than anywhere else; the rain always made a point of setting in just as he had some outdoor work to do. So that though his patrimonial estate had dwindled away under his management, acre by acre, until there was little more left than a mere patch of Indian corn and potatoes, yet it was the worst conditioned farm in the neighborhood." (Norton, p. 955)

Meanwhile he is "obsequious and conciliating abroad" (p.954) and always willing to help his neighbors mend their broken fences and even cheerfully running errands for other men's wives. Dame Van Winkle is the stereotypical folk tale shrew, but it is hard not to sympathize with her. As for Rip symbolizing the American desire for freedom, there is this:
"Rip, in fact, was no politician; the changes of states and empires made but little impression on him." (p.964). In short Rip is simply happy that his wife is dead, and he has arrived at a carefree retirement that he has done nothing to earn. An endearing good-natured fellow, perhaps, but American folk hero?

Henry David Thoreau

"one of his first memories was of staying awake at night "looking through the stars to see if I could see God behind them." One might say he never stopped looking into nature for ultimate Truth."http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/thoreau/

I thought this was a very interesting quote about Henry David Thoreau; it is an image that captures the unflinching and piercing quality of his gaze and the depth of his thinking when contemplating the big truths about man and God and justice and duty that he examines in his essay "Resistance to Civil Government."

In this essay he is taking the principles and ideals laid out in his friend Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance" and applying them very passionately to a practical matter. He makes the argument that principled people have not only a right, but a duty to resist a government that is guilty of immoral acts. The immoral acts which concern him in this essay are the war on Mexico, and the issue of slavery, which in fact are very closely related, as the war is understood by him and others as an attempt to expand the territory in which slavery is tolerated. He lays out a very carefully constructed and scathing condemnation of the machinations that the government uses to justify and promote its evil deeds. But he makes it clear that if the citizens would stand up for what they profess to believe the government would be powerless to subvert the will of the people. There is so much that could be quoted from this essay as examples of the powerful and uncompromising exhortation for people to stand up for what is true and right. I really like this description of the timid, passive citizen, which is so apt today as well:

"There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves to be children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-current of a patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret." (p. 1861)

Journal for Emerson

"It contains the most solid statement of one of Emerson's repeating themes, the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Reliance

Reading Emerson's 1841 essay, "Self-Reliance", one is struck by how seminal his message was in the shaping of American culture and identity. The idea of individualism as an American ideal is commonplace today, almost a worn out cliche. We live in an age of corporate brands with global reach,celebrity worship and self-help "gurus" to teach us how to approach every situation, yet we adhere to our sense of uniqueness, of being self-made and self-defined.

Often this sought-for sense of a unique and independent self in a homogenized world is expressed in the most trivial and self-indulgent ways, such as customizing our Starbucks coffee order (soy milk, half-decaf!) What Emerson is calling for, however, is the opposite of this kind of delusional self-aggrandizement. He demands a very rigorous and thoughtful dedication to essential truths that we can discover within ourselves. When he says "I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency" (p.1169) he is not urging us to dye our hair pink!

So great is the influence of Emerson's ideas on our culture that everyone is acquainted with certain phrases from this essay - ("To be great is to be misunderstood." "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"). I think the danger of a superficial interpretation of this message is that it can lead to arrogance, irresponsibility and anti-intellectualism. To read him carefully is to realize that what he is preaching is anything but easy and self-indulgent:

"Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense wit the popular code. If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day." (p. 1174)

Journal for Jacobs

"Jacobs criticized the religion of the Southern United States as being un-Christian and as emphasizing the value of money ("If I am going to hell, bury my money with me," says a particularly brutal and uneducated slaveholder). She described another slaveholder with, "He boasted the name and standing of a Christian, though Satan never had a truer follower." Jacobs argued that these men were not exceptions to the general rule." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Ann_Jacobs


"The 'bill of sale!' Those words struck me like a blow. So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York! The bill of sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion. It may hereafter prove a useful document to antiquaries, who are seeking to measure the progress of civilization in the United States." (Jacobs, p. 1828)


Harriet Jacobs's searing account of her life in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is suffused with a quiet fury that is bitter, ironic and mostly under the surface. When describing the relentless sexual aggressiveness of the master it is heartbreaking to see the shame felt by the young victim, a shame she carries with her into freedom. Her endurance and resolve when hiding seven years in her grandmother's attic crawl place is unimaginable. We feel the anger seething beneath the entire narrative, but when it comes to the "Bill of Sale" section quoted above, the rage breaks through the sorrow and blazes on the surface.

There are numerous instances of broken contracts in this story. Her grandmother is left free by her dying master as a child, but they are captured on their passage north (during the Revolutionary War) and sold back into slavery. Her grandmother works at night baking crackers and saves her money to buy back her children, but the mistress borrows her life savings and never pays her back. Harriet is denied the covenant of marriage by her jealous and abusive master. But the Bill of Sale that finally ends her bondage symbolizes all the cruelty and oppression and hypocrisy of the institution of slavery in a society that professes to be Christian and democratic.

Journal for Douglass

"Douglass served as an adviser to President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and fought for the adoption of constitutional amendments that guaranteed voting rights and other civil liberties for blacks. Douglass provided a powerful voice for human rights during this period of American history and is still revered today for his contributions against racial injustice."
http://www.history.rochester.edu/class/douglass/home.html


Abraham Lincoln could not have been more fortunate in his adviser. We learned from "Lies My Teacher Told Me" that Abraham Lincoln came slowly to his commitment to the abolition of slavery. Frederick Douglass's ability to speak so powerfully about the subject must have had a lot do with it.
The exposition of the evil of slavery is not what astonishes the twenty first century reader of Frederick Douglass's "Narrative of the Life." What is astonishing is the intelligence, the courage, the strength, and the eloquence of the man himself. As a young boy he is taken to Baltimore to serve another master. His new mistress treats him kindly and starts teaching the child to read. When the master discovers this he is furious with his wife and takes her to task in front of the boy. The young boy hears the master explaining to his wife that slaves would not remain slaves if they were taught to read. The ten year old Douglass takes this unintentional revelation as the key to his liberation and grasps it with all the strength of his spirit. He teaches himself to read by lengthening his errands and cunningly enlists the help of some white boys he has befriended. He is profuse in his gratitude to these boys, with whom he shared affection.He continues his self-education with the same resourcefulness and perseverance and in this way he acquires a mastery over the written word that is impressive centuries later.
Nowhere is the intelligence of the voice, the incisive analysis of the institution, and the intricate multiplicity of his themes so brilliantly displayed as in the following paragraph, where he has been sent to be "broken" by Edward Covey.

"Mr. Covey had acquired a very high reputation for breaking young slaves, and this reputation was of immense value to him. It enabled him to get his farm tilled with much less expense to himself than he could have had it done with out such a reputation. Some slaveholders thought it not much loss to allow Mr. Covey to have their slaves one year, for the sake of training to which they were subjected, without any other compensation. He could hire young help with great ease, in consequence of this reputation. Added to the natural good qualities of Mr. Covey, he was a professor of religion - a pious soul - a member and class-leader in the Methodist Church. All of this added weight to his reputation as a "nigger-breaker." I was aware of all the facts, having been acquainted with them by a young man who had lived there. I nevertheless made the change gladly; for I was sure of getting enough to eat, which is not the smallest consideration to a hungry man." (Douglass, p. 2097.)

Journal for Poe

"The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literacy pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction

"I know not how it was - but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable doom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible." p 1553

The opening of "The Fall of the House of Usher" is ironic in the way that it distances itself from the typical Dark Romantic tale. The narrator is saying, in effect, I know there are a lot of stories where there is a poetic sort of thrill in a creepy atmosphere like the one I am describing, but this is not one of those stories, believe me. He then goes on to employ every traditional element of the gothic story: the decaying mansion, the dark corridors and secret passages, ghosts, mysterious sounds, deep secrets, ancestral curses, a bloody demise on a stormy night under a full moon. He heightens the horror of the story by distancing himself from the mere conventions of horror. He gives his story a cloak of believability by referring to the pleasures of terrifying fiction, and preparing us for something truly horrible. He likens it to the "bitter lapse into common life" (p.1553) after an opium-induced dream, whereas in fact, of course, it is clearly nothing of the sort. This itself has become a convention of horror fiction. The narrator is one who is well-versed in the genre and acknowledges its pleasures, but is still wholly unprepared for the horrors that await him. He tries to explain away the shudder the appearance of the place induces in him, by saying that a different arrangement of the particulars of the scene would probably have a completely different effect. This way he makes us feel that we are in the hands of a rational narrator.

Journal for Hawthorne

"The Minister's Black Veil" by Nathaniel Hawthorne

"A few shook their sagacious heads, intimating that they could penetrate the mystery; while one or two affirmed that there was no mystery at all, but only that Mr. Hooper's eyes were so weakened by the midnight lamp, as to require a shade."

"The obvious meaning of ["The Minister's Black Veil"] will be found to smother its insinuated one. The moral put into the mouth of the dying minister will be supposed to convey the true import of the narrative; and that a crime of dark dye (having reference to the "young lady") has been committed, is a point which only minds congenial with that of the author will perceive."

http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-120253/Narrative-suppression-sin-secrecy-and.html

Upon first reading "The Minister's Black Veil" I got the impression that the story was really about the reaction of the Puritan townspeople to the minister's veil, and the power of group perceptions in a homogeneous population who is anxious to appear pious. There were things that were puzzling in the story, but I didn't stop to think about them, taking the minister's own explanation for his veil at face value.

Hawthorne says it is a parable, and I decided it must be a symbolic treatment of the consciousness of sin and guilt and the secrets that all humans harbor, especially New England Calvinists in the nineteenth century. But the article containing the above quote made me reread the story and pay attention to the details that belie the minister's own purported motives. The article writer's thesis is that the narrator of the story is seeking to conceal the real crime of the minister by generalizing it and treating his penance as a symbol for the sins of all of us. The assertion is based on a claim by Poe to have discovered that the minister's sin was a sexual transgression with the young lady whose funeral is held the afternoon of the day Hooper first appears veiled. A second reading revealed much that was at odds with the simple explanation that the minister gives for his decision to don a veil. Almost everything that the writer of the article mentions is something I had noted as odd, but I didn't dwell on.I was reacting to the discrepancies in the narrative the same way that the townspeople were, by ignoring them. The footnote at the beginning relating the story of a real -life minister seems curiously gratuitous at first. The narrator's account is full of oddities. He tells us that Hooper was supposed to have changed places with a minister from another parish, but that minister had canceled because he was to officiate at a funeral. But Hooper himself was due to conduct a funeral, so he had just as much reason to cancel. If the parishioners are such fools to be afraid of a mere piece of cloth, why does his reflected image cause such terror in Hooper himself? If he is trying to make a simple point about the sin in everyone's heart, why persist for a lifetime in a symbolic act whose impact was felt at once?

There is much in the story to suggest that the "parable" about the sins of all of us is hiding something that has to do with the young lady of the funeral. His sorrow at the young lady's funeral is "tender and heart-dissolving," but there is no such sentiment associated with his loss of Elizabeth, who is described very unromantically as his "plighted wife". The bride at the wedding is conflated by the minister's presence with the dead woman of the funeral.

In a broader sense the story can be seen as a parable about language itself, and the fact that any revealing is also of necessity at the same time a concealing. The quote from the story, about some people attributing the veil to the minister's problems with his eyes, is interesting when we look at the narrative itself as a veil covering the minister's very particular secret sin. The "sagacious" ones are making excuses for the minister, just as the whole story is serving as an elaborate obfuscation.