American writers and their literary contributions

Chopin Twain Etc

Change in America Through Turn of the Century Literature

The America which entered into the 20th century would be one in constant flux. In the century since its birth, the nation had established itself as an independent body with progressive dreams and deep cultural rifts. These would unfold into the Civil War and its attendant implications regarding America's struggle for a unified identity. The literature which paints a portrait of this struggle during the late 19th and early 20th century shows that America's future would in many ways only be colored by further splintering of individual and cultural tendencies.

This is clear in a consideration of Kate Chopin's the Storm, for instance, which in 1898, became one of the earliest indicators of the cultural discontent facing the American woman. A story that parallels the extramarital affair between a woman and an estranged former lover with the threat and manifestation of an aggressive cloudburst, the Storm boldly explores the natural, even healthy impulse for a woman to achieve her own sexual identity. Using the storm metaphor in order to explore the almost instinctual quality of her sexual encounter, the quiet building of her sexual needs within the confines of her marriage and the role which the hierarchical structure of the traditional family plays on defining her sexuality, Chopin renders Calixta an archetypal female, surrendering happily to the internal divide between fidelity and nature.

When first she encounters Alcee, we are immediately struck by an apparent complexity to an undefined relationship. H arrives on her property riding a horse just ahead of the storm. He appears as almost heroic in this presentation. From as the author chooses only to very subtly allude to the nature of the history between these two, there is a resonant sense of mystery about the character. When the narrator notes that Calixta has not seen him for some time, she frames it in terms of her marriage, specifying that since that time they had never been alone in one another's presence.

This vague but foretelling choice of words is paired with a similarly disassociated anticipation of the storm, at least for Calixta. Working on a sewing project, Calixta "was greatly occupied and did not notice the approaching storm." (Chopin, II) Certainly, there can be no mistaking the significance of her distraction. Devoted to the domestic duties so often associated with socially dispensed gender roles, the protagonist is not outwardly aware that she has some aching desire brewing within. This is a demonstration of one aspect of America that was clearly changing in this time, with women increasingly noting that the American identity had to that point failed to take in the female perspective.

Indeed, so many were excluded from the early forging of America's identity that is was a fact of mere inevitability that soon a burgeoning undercurrent of unheard voices would find the light of day. This is the basic premise which we may interpret from E.A. Robinson's Mr. Flood's Party, which offers a solitary subject indicative for many of the often cruel and exclusive American experience. The extension of capitalist selfishness seems to be the character of Eban Flood, whose titular party is celebrated betwixt himself, a jug and a darkened road. The clincher of this poem tells that "there was nothing the town below/where strangers would have shut the many doors/That many friends had opened long ago." (Robinson, ln. 51-53) Here, we are given a picture of an American dream lapsed and disappeared, perhaps in reaction to a culture with little -- for so many -- resembling the early promise of the union.

Quite certainly, the satirical tone of Twain's work underscores the sentiment of this broken promise. In Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," plot action and thematic impetus are mutually driven by protagonists who exist on the fringe of social convention, creating a dynamic form of protest that is as much shaped by the need for individual freedom as by the intent to withdraw from the objectionable mores of a sick society. This is a distinctly American mode of resistance, with Huck Finn serving as perhaps the first archetypal rebel of our literary tradition. Huck is the quintessentially alienated and isolated youth whose goals and pursuits are unclear but whose philosophical objections to his environmental conditions are quite pronounced through thought and action. As perhaps the work most directly identified with the antebellum era tradition of social commentary, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" depicts a desiccated south-land, an undercurrent of accepted racial disharmony and a character whose instincts give him over to unwitting critique of both. Herein is composed a character who captures the internal conflict that would identify America on its path to Civil War.

In Twain's work, Huck emerges as a figure whose behavior and ideology are stimulated by a discomfort with the circumstances constraining him. Though painted as a portrait of one young man, the adventures which give the novel its title are actually a series of events wherein Huck brazenly flouts the standards which had given the pre-Civil War delta its cultural outlook. His flight to freedom is guided by the juxtaposed but equally inapt incarcerations which he endured both at the pious hands of the Widow Douglas and the abusive hands of his drunken father. Certainly, his staged death and his river-raft escape here would be explicit forms of active protest to the church-going morality of the former and the violent authority of the latter. In both, we see the religious and militaristic devices of patronage that would be America's alternating calling cards.

But on a more poignant scale, the novel centers on Huck's companionship to Jim. The fugitive slave partners with Huck on his excursion and the two become a crucial support system to one another, demonstrating Twain's disregard for the senseless separation between blacks and whites. On the run and out of contact with mainstream southern society through most of their journey, the two forge a meaningful friendship which is enabled by their distance from the severely enforced subjugation of blacks. Twain's protest is embodied in his complete dismissal of the inequality which was considered a manifestation of natural law to its advocates.

It is from this impulse which the work derives its pointedly American identity. Amid the backdrop of the farms, deltas and woods of a rural nation which is very much in our past, the work is carried by descriptive attention to the delicacies, family-structures and habitations of Southern life. Given over to a quaint and often charming simplicity of lifestyle, Twain's vision and his chosen exploration of the unrefined southern dialect both conjure an America which has been relegated only to literary account since abolition. By contrast to this mode of rebellion, T.S. Eliot's the Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock shows a figure whose resistance to the cold mores of America would be a profound romanticizing of individuality. As the narrator, Prufrock is a conflicted character, suggestive of what Eliot thinks of the condition of each man.