Reference no: EM133229915

Week 3: Mark Twain, Henry James, and Emma Lazarus

Mark Twain

In 1873, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day. The novel, Twain's first, portrays the United States as a nation consumed by greed and corruption, a land of get-rich-quick schemes, rampant speculation, and bribery. Twain and Warner filled their pages with Americans- from country villagers to big-city dwellers-who were caught up in the fantasy of making an easy fortune, willing to sacrifice their scruples for the sake of material success. The book revealed an age that too easily mistook gilding for gold.

The period encompassing the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth witnessed an influx of immigrants to America, questions about racial equality and racial violence, anxiety about shifting gender roles, and concerns about the accumulation and concentration of wealth.

As part of our unit on the development of realism in American literature, we cannot forget two of the founding fathers of the genre, Twain and James. Twain's commentary on Fenimore Cooper and on Romantic fiction is still fresh and funny , and this essay is as close as we can come to a forthright statement by Twain about the Realism that he supposedly championed. We can see in this comic piece that Twain's "realism" is reactive, a rejection of the extravagances and illusions of Romantic narrative, and that Twain's mode defines itself by what it isn't at least as much as by what it is.

Henry James

William Dean Howells may have been the "dean" of American letters, but Henry James was known as "the master." As an author of serious realist fiction, he was unparalleled at the turn of the century. He took realism to new levels-describing psychological states as intricately as other realists described the physical world-and serves as an essential link between nineteenth-century realism and twentieth-century modernism. James places greater emphasis on the inner reality, on "life" as mediated through the mind. He insists on "the power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern" and also contends that "Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue."

James is often mentioned as one of the pioneers of cosmopolitan fiction, narratives about people who live and think in international ways, escaping from the supposed parochialism of national identity. Does Daisy Miller offer any cautions about that frame of mind, about the possible dangers of forgetting where one comes from and forgetting the prevailing values and temperament of one's own place?

Emma Lazarus

Of the Lazarus selections in NAAL, "The New Colossus" should ring a bell with you the most, thanks to lessons about the Statue of Liberty back in elementary school. Did you know who wrote that poem found at the Statue of Liberty? What does the full sonnet make you feel now that you've read it?