American Romanticism /"Rappaccini's Daughter"

American Literature: American Romanticism Overview

AGENDA:
Today we will begin a 2 day lesson on Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" and then continue with the other stories you were asked to read over the break.

Our goal is to address the following questions tomorrow.

EQ: After close reading and analysis of the story, explore and evaluate the relevance of the following key ideas represented  in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 19c.short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” have for the modern reader?

1.    Ethics and science (responsibility of scientists) Thematic

2.    Relationship between creator/inventor and creations/invention Thematic

3.    Relationships among families and friends Character analysis

4.    Impact of obsessions on self and others Character analysis

5.    Allegorical inversion of the “Garden of Eden” Rhetorical strategy

But first, let's take a moment to do a QUICKWRITE on your first reactions to "Rappaccini's Daughter".  Post your responses on the blog (or use looseleaf paper period 9).  Five minutes, GO!


Now let's take a look at American Romantics who are considered anti-Transcendentalists (or the Dark Romantics) because of their fascination with evil, death and the supernatural.

http://www.brighthubeducation.com/high-school-english-lessons/6429-notes-on-american-romanticism-class-handout/

• Romanticism in American Literature brought us some of the world's greatest writers. Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving and Henry David Thoreau are still studied in classrooms throughout America and in Europe.

• Romanticism

  Romance describes strange lands and wonderful adventures. It allows the writer greater latitude to include the marvelous with the real. The romance may include the traditional hero with white hat on the white horse; the evil villain with the long black mustache; the lovely young woman in need of rescue, and the hairbreadth rescue itself. Romanticism as a movement began in the late 18th century, moved to England where it developed an emphasis in the glorification of nature, the supernatural, and the rebel—the individual against society. It spread to America in the early to mid 19th century and is represented in such writers as Hawthorne, Poe, and Cooper.

• American Romanticism

  In the 1830’s, America began to experience the impact of the Romantic Movement that was transforming European civilization. Like the European movement of which it was an offshoot, American Romanticism was in a broad sense a new attitude toward nature, humanity, and society that espoused individualism and freedom. Many trends characterized American Romanticism. Among the most important are the following:
  

  
  

  le

  • An impulse toward reform (temperance, women’s rights, abolition of slavery)
  • A celebration of individualism (Emerson, Thoreau)
  • A reverence for nature (Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau)
  • A concern with the impact of new technology (locomotive)
  • An idealization of women
  • A fascination with death and the supernatural (Hawthorne, Poe)

• Important Writers

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882): Self-Reliance
  • Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862): Walden, Civil Disobedience
  • Washington Irving (1783-1859): The Devil and Tom Walker, Rip Van Winkle Tales
  • Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849): The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, The Raven and many many more
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, Doctor Heidegger’s Experiment, Young Goodman Brown
   

   

  And finally, working with partners, find specific evidence in the text to back up one of the following Discussion Points (Claims) made about the short story. 

  Use the Conversation Roundtable template to  find text evidence.

  HMWK:  Correct your MP5 MC packets and hand in tomorrow during class.

  
  

  Analysis of "Rappaccini's Daughter"

  Discussion Points
  

  1. American Romanticism: The tenets of American Romanticism include the dangers of technology and a fascination with death and the supernatural. Rappaccini's unprioritized love for science and the supernatural aura surrounding Beatrice satisfy these aspects of American Romanticism.
  2. Characterization: "Rappaccini's Daughter" is a short story with no hero and no likable characters. Although we sympathize with Giovanni, his obsessive nature and unwillingness to listen to reason make him unlikeable. Beatrice endangers Giovanni's life. Rappaccini is a brilliant scientist but a lousy human. Pietro Baglioni appears to be the the voice of reason but acts treacherously to defeat his rival, as evidenced by his final comment and obvious jealousy.
  3. Allusions: References to the Garden of Eden, direct and indirect, abound.
  4. Symbolism: The poisonous plant and deteriorating statue in the center of the garden symbolize physical and moral corruption. The color purple, a hybrid color, symbolizes the mixing of ingredients and the mixing of good and evil in humans. Rappaccini's black clothing represents his diabolical nature.
  5. Setting and Mood: Hawthorne's physical description of the mansion and Giovanni's apartment help establish an ominous mood and foreshadows the story's tragic ending.
  6. Paradox: The controlling image of the story, the garden and Beatrice, is a paradox--a poisonous Eve and a poisonous Garden of Eden.
  7. Theme: Possible themes include the duality of human nature, the corrupting potential of science, lust, and jealousy.

  
  More resources:
  

  http://hawthorneinsalem.org/Literature/Hawthorne&Women/Rappaccini/Explorations.html 

   

  http://hawthorneinsalem.org/Literature/Hawthorne&Women/Rappaccini/MMD1230.html 

   

  http://www.mshogue.com/English_11/rappaccini.pdf 

   

  http://www.humanities360.com/index.php/nathaniel-hawthorne-rappaccinis-daughter-science-destroys-nature-mad-scientist-eden-garden-9226/

SPRING BREAK HOMEWORK/Nathaniel Hawthorne

AGENDA:

Pick up Young Goodman Brown and Other Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne

FOR HMWK OVER BREAK:
Read "Rappaccini's Daughter,"  "The Birthmark," and "Young Goodman Brown"
Work on AP Practice packet for Mon. 4/21

Today discuss passages and ideas from "Civil Disobedience"

REMINDER:  Papers are due tomorrow!

More Civil Disobedience

Agenda:

Review end of Walden.

Working with a partner, examine one of the paragraphs of "Civil Disobedience" and respond to the questions.


http://edsitement.neh.gov/launchpad-henry-david-thoreaus-essay-civil-disobedience

What is the Role of Civil Disobedience today?

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/lessons_plans/what-is-the-role-of-civil-disobedience-today/ 

More about Walden:

http://thoreau.eserver.org/waldenxp.html 

http://thoreau.eserver.org/jimmy.html

Conclusion and Civil Disobedience

  AGENDA:

In groups go over questions for "Solitude" and "Higher Laws"

Discuss paper topics.  Fill out an index card with your name and topic and thesis statement.

HWK: Read "Conclusion" and "Civil Disobedience" for discussion tomorrow.

"Solitude"

1. According to his comments in this chapter, was Thoreau lonely at the pond? Why or why not?
2. What does Thoreau mean by the following comments:
   1. "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude" (p. 128).
   2. "I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls" (p. 129).
3. Who are the "old settler" and "elderly dame" (p. 130) whom Thoreau describes as being among his favorite visitors at the pond? 

"Higher Laws"

Throughout Walden Thoreau expresses affection for and delight in the physical details of nature. In this chapter, however, he seems to reject the value of physical nature: "Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overc ome" (p. 207). The conflict between physical and spiritual priorities is a main theme of this chapter.

1. What value does Thoreau think that physical activities such as hunting and fishing have (pp. 197­201; see also pp. 266­67)?
2. What d oes Thoreau think is the danger of sensuality, and what solution to that problem does he suggest (pp. 205­9)? How convincing do you find his solution to be, and why?

 

Higher Laws:

 

• Thoreau admits that, lately, he's wondered whether fishing is somehow inhumane. He's already given up hunting and eating meat, since he believes animals suffer and feel pain.
• He goes on to wonder whether it isn't the meat-eating part, so much as the way we eat that is the issue. Thoreau believes that people should only eat to sustain their animal existence. Savoring the deliciousness of food is just a distraction from higher intellectual pursuits. This guy wouldn't have lasted a day in Italy, that's for sure.
• The chapter ends with a scene featuring a hypothetical man named John Farmer, whose only way to a higher spiritual state is to basically watch what he eats, which Thoreau implies is at least the first step toward self-respect.

Major Themes of Civil Disobedience

The right to resistance
Thoreau affirms the absolute right of individuals to withdraw their support from a government whose policies are immoral or unjust. He takes issue with the brand of moral philosophy that weighs the possible consequences of civil disobedience against the seriousness of the injustice. The methods of resistance Thoreau condones in his essay are pacifist and rely principally on economic pressure; for example, withholding taxes in order to drain the State of its resources and hence its ability to continue its unjust policies. The ultimate goal of civil disobedience is not to undermine democracy but to reinforce its core values of liberty and respect for the individual. Individual conscience and morality
Only an individual can have and exercise a conscience. By definition, both the State and corporations are impersonal, amoral entities that are nonetheless composed of individuals. "It has been truly said, that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience." An individual has a right and an obligation to "do at any time" what he deems right, to exercise his own conscience by refusing involvement or complicity in a government that enforces unjust policies. Civil disobedience is a necessary expression of individual conscience and morality, an attempt to reconfigure the relationship between the individual and the State by making the latter more equitable and less burdensome in its treatment of the former. While supportive of democratic principles, Thoreau does not believe in settling questions of fundamental moral importance by majority opinion. Limited government
The most ideal form of government is one which exercises the least power and control over its citizens. Thoreau believes that government is an inherently intrusive force that stifles the creative enterprise of the people. His avowed faith in ordinary citizens stands in contrast to the entrenchment of an elite political class that Thoreau perceives as incompetent and ineffectual. His libertarian leanings are, however, tempered with limited support for some government initiatives, such as public education and highway maintenance. Democracy is not the last stage in the evolution of the State, as there is still greater room to recognize the freedom and rights of the individual. Thoreau pushes this line of thinking to its logical limit by envisioning a society in which government is eliminated altogether because men have the capacity to be self-regulating and independent.

Reading and Sounds

AGENDA:

For your papers:

Transcendentalism in the Modern World
http://trancendentalism.weebly.com/modern-transcendentalism.html 

http://prezi.com/pjyjiqbvgnas/transcendentalism-in-modern-society/ 

http://modern-transcendentalism.wikispaces.com/Transcendentalist+Views+Of+Contemporary+Americans 

http://ahshonorsamlit.blogspot.com/2009/12/is-it-possible-to-be-transcendentalist.html

With a partner, read and discuss the following summaries and analysis.  Post your responses to the questions on the handout on the blog today!

HMWK: Read "Solitude" and "Higher Laws" for Monday.  Begin to work on your papers.

KEY POINTS:


 "Reading"

• Thoreau encourages reading, although he admits that even he had trouble finishing his copy of Homer's Iliad while he was farming.
• According to Thoreau, reading ancient Greek authors such as Homer and Aeschylus  in the original Greek is crucial to a real education. It requires a kind of slow, intense process of reading that trashy books just don't.
• Real literature is closest to life, he says, and it is essential to bringing out man's intellectual potential.
• Thoreau proposes that the entire village become a university – why should learning be confined to just a few students at university? Working together, the entire village could collectively generate wisdom, and ultimately a better life.

"Sounds"

Chapter Four "Sounds"
Summary:
Thoreau reminds the reader that focusing only on books neglects a more universal language. It is important to always be alert and to see all of life. That first summer at Walden, Thoreau didn't read books and he was not always occupied hoeing his beans. Some days, he would sit on his doorstep from dawn till noon, amid the trees and the birds, always smiling and answering their trills with chuckles. This taught him about contemplation, valued by Eastern philosophers. He lived in the moment and though his townsmen would have thought him idle, he was living as naturally as the birds and flowers.
He found every aspect of his life to be a "pleasant pastime" and promises that if people pay close enough attention to what they are doing, they will never be bored. On days when he cleaned his house, Thoreau enjoyed getting up early, putting all his furniture outside, and scrubbing the floor with sand from the beach, finishing by the time the townspeople woke up in the morning. He was happy to see his furniture outside among plants and animals, like a part of nature.
Thoreau now describes the location of his house, on the side of a hill overlooking the pond at the edge of the woods, and the plants which surround it -- sand-cherry, whose "scarcely palatable" berries he tasted in May and sumach, whose berries grew so heavy in August that they broke the plant's limbs. On one afternoon, he sits at his window, watching a hawk, pigeons, and a mink in the woods. He can also hear the train on the Fitchburg Railroad, located a hundred yards south of his cabin, next to the pond. He uses its tracks to walk to the village.
Summer and winter, Thoreau can hear the locomotive whistle and he imagines it making merchants' announcements about their goods. He compares the train to a comet and suggests that men have so harnessed nature in making it they are almost a "new race" worthy of inhabiting the earth. In an extended metaphor, he talks about the "iron horse," awakened early in the morning and flying about the country even until midnight. Its actions are amazing and unwearied but not at all heroic. The railroad has so influenced life in the towns that people measure time by the train's coming and going, and life goes on at a faster speed than before, "railroad-fashion." Thoreau describes man's creation of the railroad as "a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside."
There is bravery and enterprise to be found in commerce. Writing on the morning of a snowstorm, Thoreau says he is more affected by the men who work despite the weather and long hours than by men in battle at Buena Vista. Smelling the goods from distant parts on the freight train as it goes past, Thoreau is made to feel like a citizen of the world. He smells and sees sails, who rips tell stories of storms at sea, that will be made into paper; rags of all different types of cloth that will become paper of one color on which "true" stories will be advertised; salt fish, "the strong New England and commercial scent;" Spanish cowhides, with tails still intact, to be made into glue; and molasses and brandy on its way to Vermont. From the opposite direction, coming down from the Green Mountains, are carloads of cattle and sheep, which makes Thoreau imagine sheepdogs barking back in the mountains, looking for them.
When the train passes, he is once again alone. On some Sundays, he hears church bells from surrounding towns, depending on which way the wind is blowing, made magical by their passage through the woods. In the evenings, he sometimes hears cows or once, boys whose singing sounded like a cow, which Thoreau liked because it connected them to nature. At almost exactly seven thirty every evening in the summer, the whippoorwills would sing for half an hour. Later in the night, the screech owls, whom Thoreau likens to ghosts of humans lamenting their deaths, cry, as do the hooting owls, whose melancholy "hoo" reminds Thoreau of ghouls but nonetheless is pleasant to his ears. Owls, he says, should do the "idiotic and maniacal hooting for men."
Late at night, he hears distant wagons going over bridges, baying dogs, perhaps another cow, and along Walden's "Stygian lake," bullfrogs, whom he imagines passing a cup in a medieval banquet under the surface of the lake, bellowing "troonk." Though he never heard a cock's crow from his cabin, he suggests that the rooster (whom he calls "cockerel") be naturalized, so that his call would call everyone to awakeness. But in his cabin, Thoreau had no "domestic sounds," no roosters, cats, dogs, or even rats in the walls. Instead, his sounds are squirrels, whippoorwills, owls, loons, and foxes. Instead, nature reaches right up to his door. He doesn't have to worry about digging a path through the front yard in a snowstorm because he has "no front yard,--and no path to the civilized world!"
Analysis:
In his first chapter, Thoreau proposed to explore his connection to nature and to portray human beings as part of a continuum of nature, rather than a separate, dominating force they were thought to be during the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. In this chapter, Thoreau contrasts two disparate views of humankind through his description of the sounds he hears in the forest. While the passing of the locomotive is just as regular as the sunrise in Thoreau's world at Walden, the juxtaposition of these two daily occurrences illustrates the inescapable effects of the Industrial Revolution on the natural world.
Thoreau uses hyperbole in his descriptions of the locomotive, likening it to a mythological dragon or winged horse, and calling it heroic. His effusive and overblown descriptions of the locomotive are deliberately excessive. They serve to parody his nineteenth-century contemporaries who worship technological progress, like those people he says profess to do everything "railroad-fashion." In saying that these people have created fate in the form of the railroad, Thoreau is not praising them. Rather, he is illustrating the irony in their actions -- in creating the railroad as a way to make their lives easier, people have created something which ultimately controls them.
In contrast with the railroad, Thoreau depicts the sounds which emanate from nature. That he is "more alone than ever" after the railroad passes by is not a bad thing. Thoreau, in his recorded observations of nature, proves the proposition he makes at the beginning of the chapter -- that intelligent people can avoid boredom by close attention to their environment and actions. Just by listening closely to the changing wrought on them by the woods through which they pass, Thoreau can turn the echo of church bells into magic. He uses simile -- "as the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest" -- and personification -- "the natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence" -- to emphasize the strength of the link between himself, as a human being, and nature.
Thoreau's embrace of nature and criticism of the influences of human technology must not be read as a whole-sale dismissal of human culture and civilization. One of his most creative original moves in these two chapters, as in Walden as a whole, is to link literature and nature as natural, noble phenomena. Though Thoreau spends much of the summer sitting on his doorstep, watching and listening to nature, rather than reading, he is not rejecting literature in doing so. Rather, keeping his eyes open to nature is the natural progression of the deliberate attention he pays to books. He makes allusions to classical mythology -- calling Walden Stygian, or like the river Styx, and naming the locomotive Atropos, the name of one of the three Fates -- and to English literature -- describing the screech owl's scream "Ben Jonsonian," a reference to seventeenth century poet Ben Jonson.

Walden Quotes

AGENDA:
 At four tables, discuss "Where I Lived and What I lived For"

HMWK: Read "Reading" and "Sounds"


 Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. (Where I Lived)

http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2361393-walden

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/walden/quotes.html

http://thoreau.eserver.org/quotes.html

Thoreau and Walden

Thoreau and Walden

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/thoreau/walden/chapter18.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhP7PKoRmmY 

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/164015-1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOB99UtD2YE 

‎HMWK: Read "Where I Lived and What I Lived For" in WALDEN