Final essay questions

Due: Friday, Dec. 12 at 4 p.m.

Choose one of the following questions and write a 5-7 page paper. You may write on Moby-Dick, Washington Square, Pudd’nhead Wilson, or The Awakening. You should feel free to devise your own topic, as long as you run it by me first. Because some of these topics were ones we touched on in class, be sure to include evidence other than/in addition to those passages we discussed together.

1. Track and analyze an element of Melville’s religious imagery in Moby-Dick. You might focus on a single character’s spiritual development over time (Ahab, Queequeg, Starbuck); a singe set of religious images (such as the Jonah story or resurrection images); or compare scenes of worship, literal or figurative.

2. Analyze an example of “passive action” in either The Awakening or Washington Square. What kind of action, for example, is Catherine’s refusal to decide or Edna’s drifting out to sea? How do those central “events” fit with larger questions of agency in the novels?

3. Discuss an example of an “awakening” in one of the four novels. Prime examples would be the revelations experienced by Captain Ahab, Catherine Sloper, Tom Driscoll, or Edna Pontellier, but you may choose a secondary character as well. What do these characters awake from? The awakenings do not necessarily turn out well for the characters in a conventional sense; why not? If you choose this essay be sure not to focus on plot summary but to make a particular argument about the nature of the awakening.

4. Analyze financial imagery in Washington Square. How do issues of actual finances (inheritance, fortune-hunting) relate to the various images of investment, gambling, and profit?

5. Analyze the role of internationalism in any of the four novels. Moby-Dick, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and The Awakening all focus not just on racial or ethnic difference, but on national difference. How do these authors use characters from other nations (or, in the case of Chopin’s Creoles, “foreigners” who live within U.S. national borders and American culture)? What does it mean to be “American” in the face of other languages, cultures, and national ideals?

6. Washington Square is a novel with a resolutely constrained setting, except for Catherine’s year-long journey to Europe with her father. Analyze James’s use of setting, and the ways that the characters themselves use physical setting, from an alpine peak to a public park to a parlor, strategically.

7. Roxy’s baby-switching and Tom’s subsequent adoption seem raise questions not only about race, but kinship in Pudd’nhead Wilson. What does it mean to be a parent or a son in this novel? Does Twin privilege biological definitions of kinship, or does he define kinship in another way? How do the characters themselves define their family relationships?

8. Many of the characters in Washington Square imagine themselves as literary characters or as participating in a literary plot; why? How do characters’ literary imaginations affect their actions in the novel? What is it like to be a character? If one imagines oneself or one’s companions as characters, what are the implications for larger ideas of personhood?

9. Examine ideas of childhood, children and childbearing in The Awakening. Edna Pontellier’s children seem to be an afterthought, while Mme. Ratignole’s children and pregnancy seem largely to provide symbolic definition of her own idealized womanhood. What role do these marginalized children play? What is the relationship between actual children and the various symbolic images of childhood and rebirth in the novel?

James, The Art of Fiction

For Tuesday's class: please read this essay, linked below. Print it out to bring to class.

Henry James, "The Art of Fiction" (1884).

Moby-Dick close reading assignment

This assignment is due Friday, November 14 at 4 p.m.

Please write a 2-page close reading on one of the following passages from Moby-Dick. If you prefer, you may choose your own passage; if you go this route, please include a printout of the passage with your paper.

In your close reading, focus on Melville's choice of specific words, images, and metaphors. Look up vocabulary and allusions that you're not certain of. Although your primary task is to examine and analyze this passage in detail, you should give some sense of the context of this passage in the larger novel, and connect the themes of this passage to the larger set of themes that we have discussed in class. Before you begin, you should go back and re-read the chapter surrounding your passage. You do not need to include a traditional introduction and conclusion for this paper.

1) Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane* was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade -- owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times -- this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me. (Chapter 4, pp. 36-37)
*Counterpane: a bedspread

2) But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous -- why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows -- a colorless, all- color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues -- every stately or lovely emblazoning -- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge -- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino Whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt? (chapter 42; p. 165)

3) It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert. 'Speak, thou vast and venerable head,' muttered Ahab, 'which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest.
That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed -- while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!' (Chapter 70, p. 249)

4) Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion -- most seen here at the equator -- denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.

Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven.

Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were ye of old Ahab's close-coiled woe! But so have I seen little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.

Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel -- forbidding -- now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop. (Chapter 123; p. 405)

Moby-Dick discussion questions

Please use the comments section to post a discussion question for this Thursday's class.

Your question should raise an issue from this week's reading (anything after chapter 50). It should set out a topic and raise a question that might spark an interesting conversation in class. Don't just pose a broad, open-ended question ("what does the whale symbolize?"), but give a bit of background and context, preferably pointing us toward a specific scene, passage, character, or set of images. Your question should probably be at least a couple of sentences long.

Please post your comment no later than Wednesday at midnight.

In order to post a comment with a name attached, you need to have a google account. If you don't have one, you can post anonymously--but be sure to put your name in your comment.

Concord trip!

Here are the photos from our splendid day in Concord.  Thanks to Kristen C. for contributing her photographic skills!

In front of the Old Manse


And at Walden Pond


Walden Pond
Everyone fit inside the replica of Thoreau's cabin:


Tara and Thoreau holding hands in front of the cabin



The actual site of Thoreau's cabin:





Along the trail






This guy was either a really bad kayaker or was practicing his rolls.


Lunch overlooking the Old Manse and the Old North Bridge


The Old Manse (home of Hawthorne and Emerson)




Views from the Old North Bridge




Orchard House (home of the Alcotts)


The Wayside (home of the Alcotts and the Hawthornes)


In the shops
The T-shirt gallery:




"Scrabble" figurines (this is the mouse that hung out with Jo March in the attic while she wrote. The mouse is not a major character in Little Women.) (Please ignore my ghostly image taking the picture with my cell phone.)


Little Women sachet dolls. Just below this shot is a freaky doll with working eyelids that costs several hundred dollars.

Field trip details

We're off to Concord this Sunday, October 19! The bus will leave from the Duffy parking lot at 11 A.M. Plan to be there a few minutes early. Don't be late, or the bus will leave without you!

The forecast is for cool weather, and we will be outside almost the entire time. Dress in warm layers and wear shoes appropriate for walking on potentially muddy trails.

You should bring something to eat and drink for lunch. We'll stop to eat at around 1:00.

The subsidized fee for Orchard house is $4. Please bring the money to class on Thursday (although if you forget I can collect it on the field trip). The English Dept. will cover anyone who is uncertain about their ability to pay.


Our approximate schedule:

Depart Stonehill: 11:00

Walden Pond: 12:00-1:30. We will walk the trail around the pond, view the replica of Thoreau's house, and visit the original site of the house.



The Old Manse and The Old North Bridge: 1:30-2:30. The Old Manse was inhabited by both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Old North Bridge was the site of the first shots of the American Revolution. If time permits, we may stop at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery to see the graves of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and others.





Orchard House: 3:00-4:00. Home of the Alcotts. We will take a tour of the house, and see the neighboring homes of Hawthorne and Emerson.


Depart Concord: 4:00. Return to Stonehill by 5:00.

Paper topics for Hawthorne and Crafts

Due: Friday, October 24, 4 p.m., Cushing-Martin 134

Choose one of the following topics and write a 5-7 page paper. You may also devise your own topic, as long as you clear it with me first.

1) Analyze the garden in The House of the Seven Gables. Hawthorne describes it as, among other things, a new Eden; an antidote to the crumbling house; a locus of magic and imagination. Choose one set of images to discuss in detail.

2) Discuss the role of the townspeople in The House of the Seven Gables. Why is this “haunted” house set in the midst of a bustling town and not on a lonely hill in the middle of nowhere? What contrasts is Hawthorne drawing? You might examine specific characters like the cookie-buying little boy, the man on the train, or Uncle Venner; or you might consider the town itself as a character.

3) Analyze the role of Hawthorne’s narrator(s) in Seven Gables. His third-person narrator often speaks in a personal voice, and with a tone that veers from melodramatic to mocking. Who do we imagine the narrator to be, and why does Hawthorne choose such a distinctive style? How could we compare his narrator to the other major storyteller in the novel, Holgrave, who takes over an entire chapter as narrator, and mesmerizes Phoebe in the process? What is the meaning of narration for Hawthorne?

5) Choose one or more houses to examine in either The House of the Seven Gables or The Bondwoman’s Narrative. How do different architectural forms (cottages, mansions, ruins, slave quarters) shape the experiences of the characters? What correspondences can you find between the physical structures of the houses and other sorts of structures: narrative/plot structure; psychological states; systems of secrets and knowledge, etc.? Do not attempt to account for all architectural examples, but choose one major or a few more minor cases to study in detail.

6) Analyze the role of doubles, doppelgangers, and repetitions in either Seven Gables or Bondwoman. You might choose doubled characters, doubled events, doubled settings, doubled structures. Why do the authors create these doubles? Why are doppelgangers (the German word for a ghostly double of a living person) so creepy? What do they tell us about the status of past and present? In Crafts’s case, what might doubling have to do with the conditions of slavery?

7) Discuss Hannah’s changing attitudes toward ghosts and the supernatural in The Bondwoman’s Narrative. For most of the novel, she exhibits skepticism toward the supernatural, but towards the end of the novel she grows more superstitious. Why does she undergo this transformation?

8) Analyze the role of marriage in The Bondwoman’s Narrative. Hannah seems to reject the idea of marriage for most of the novel; her impending marriage to a field slave sends her running for freedom; and her sudden happy marriage closes the novel. How do we interpret her attitude toward marriage? What does marriage represent for her, and how is it connected to issues of slavery and freedom? Why is she so repulsed by marriage to a fellow slave?

9) Perform a reading of the “happy ending” in either novel. Why do things fall into place so suddenly in both novels? Why don’t Hawthorne and Crafts devote more time to these major plot twists? To what extent are these endings really happy, and how do the novels define that happiness? Some might read the happy ending might as a conservative narrative move—a retreat to the familiar. Do you agree?

10) How does The Bondwoman’s Narrative use and revise The House of the Seven Gables? Be sure not to just list similarities and differences, but to analyze particular plot elements, characters, settings, or techniques in detail. Why might Crafts have been drawn to Hawthorne’s story? What themes do the stories have in common, and how/why does Crafts apply them to the context of her fictionalized slave narrative?

Godey's Lady's Book

Godey's Lady's Book was a women's magazine published from 1830-1878. It included poems and short stories by prominent writers, articles, illustrations, fashion-plates (colored images of women in the fashionable dress of the moment), and sewing patterns.

You can browse the issues from 1850 here:
http://www.history.rochester.edu/godeys/

You can look at samples from throughout the 1850s here:
http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/godey/contents.html

A few specific examples:

"The Nest at Home"


Poem: "The Orphans"

Poem: "Love"

Fashion-plate:


Wedding fashion-plate:

Mark Twain on James Fenimore Cooper

For those of you with a Cooper hangover, check out this humorous 1895 essay by Mark Twain. Sample sentiments:

"Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record."

"A favorite [trick] was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of the moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was his broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on, but that wouldn’t satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can’t do it, go and borrow one. "

The full essay is here:
"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"

Essay topics on Foster and Cooper

Due: Friday, September 26, 4 p.m., Cushing-Martin 134

Assignment: Write a 3-4 page critical essay on one of the following topics. You may also come up with your own topic, but you must clear it with me first. Be sure to ground your essay in close readings and specific quotations and evidence, and to lay out a well-defined argument.

Since this first essay is a short one, I expect you to limit the scope of your evidence by choosing just one or two scenes/passages/characters to analyze. Do not answer every question posed below; you should narrow these essay topics to fit your own interests. While you should place your close readings in a broader context, do not try to analyze the entire novel. It is better to write a detailed analysis of just a few passages than to generalize.

1) Analyze the role of parent-child relationships in either The Coquette or The Last of the Mohicans. In both novels, parents of the major female characters are either dead or absent for much of the novel. Why do the authors make this choice? Who, if anyone, serves as surrogate parents, and what does that tell us about the depiction of women and children? What stable parent-child relationships serve as a foil for the absent parents? In both novels, as well, we have the death of a child or children: what purpose do those deaths serve?

2) Discuss friendship as a theme in either The Coquette or The Last of the Mohicans. What social purpose do friends serve, and how is that different than lovers, spouses, or parents? In considering the significance of friendship, does it matter that the friends depicted are usually of the same sex, but not always of the same race, nation, or social class? You may wish to consider a pair of friends (such as Hawkeye and Chingachgook, Heyward and Uncas, Eliza and Lucy, Eliza and Julia, etc.).

3) Analyze the role of one or more minor characters in The Coquette: Julia Granby, Mrs. Richman, Mrs. Wharton, Mr. Wharton, Mr. Haly, or even the silent recipients Charles Deighton and Mr. Selby.

4) How does Foster use literary allusions and maxims or proverbs? Discuss the role of novels and/or other forms of literature in The Coquette. This novel is made up of private documents (letters); how do these letters function in relation to the published documents and public language that they sometimes cite?

5) Choose one or two examples of disguises in The Last of the Mohicans and analyze their function in the novel. Hawk-eye calls Magua “a lying and deceitful varlet” (114), but he and his allies use disguise and deceit repeatedly in their battle with the Hurons. What does it signify when white characters imitate Native dress or culture? Or when characters dress like animals? How is Hawk-eye’s integration into/appropriation of Native American dress and culture differ from, say, David Gamut’s?

6) Select a set of images of vision or veiling to analyze in The Last of the Mohicans. The novel gives us sharpshooters and veiled women; observant scouts and blind bumblers; hidden caves and highly visible hilltops. Choose one or two characters or a single set of images to unpack. Which characters have the best vision (literally or figuratively), and why? How do Cooper’s characters strategically employ their own visibility?

7) “What have such as I, who am a warrior of the wilderness, though a man without a cross, to do with books!” (117). Hawk-eye proclaims his “book” to be nature itself. How does Cooper use images of reading in relation to the natural world? How does nature function as a symbolic space? Who can and cannot read the language of the environment? Does the ability to read actual books have any value in this world?

Thomas Cole paintings

These works were painted by Thomas Cole (1801-1848) in the years immediately after The Last of the Mohicans was published in 1826 (with the exception of the last painting, which is from the 1840s). The first four paintings all depict scenes from the novel. Click on a painting to see a larger version.

Consider these questions:
1) How does Cole depict the relationship of the land to the humans? Although the scenes that these paintings depict take place at the end of the novel--in Thursday's reading--to what extent can you identify particular characters or any particular dynamic between characters? How does he depict American Indians vs. white characters?

2) How would you compare Cole's aesthetic to Cooper's? Despite the different artistic modes, what similarities might we identify in the ways they depict the American landscape? What feelings and emotions do you derive from Cole's paintings? What impression of America and its land and culture do you think he wants to impart?

3) Pay attention to Cole's use of color, shading, and light/dark. What techniques and patterns do you see? What objects does he choose to depict?

"Scene from 'The Last of the Mohicans':
Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Tanemund" (1827)

"Landscape Scene from 'The Last of the Mohicans'" (1827)

"Landscape with Figures:
A Scene from 'The Last of the Mohicans'" (1826)

"Indian Sacrifice" (1827)

"Indian at Sunset" (1845-47)