Coming of Age in America: Classic American Literature of the 19th Century

Catalog description

At the start of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne is punished by the Puritans of Boston for having a child out of wedlock. She is forced to stand in the town square wearing a dress with a scarlet A on it. As she endures the stares of the crowd around her, Hester thinks back to her past life in England. It will be seven years before she comes to terms with this moment and still longer before she gains full perspective on her life. In her struggle, Hester is like a series of figures in the classic coming-of-age novel, who go from a period in their lives when their perspectives are limited to a time when their experiences lead them to a much deeper self-awareness of who they are in relation to the world at large. In varying degrees, this struggle is one we all go through. This course will trace the history of coming-of-age literature in 19th- century America, generation by generation, from the pre- Civil War years, through the Civil War, to the prosperous 1880s and 1890s and the turn of the 20th century. The kind of personal education that lies at the heart of these books is captured by the narrator of Moby Dick, when he observes, “A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” In addition to Hawthorne, the authors we will study include Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. In a country that divided over slavery and had to overcome its Puritan origins, the novels we study reflect the conflicts of American society whether rooted in race, class, or the role of women. What unites these books is that, in the end, the self-awareness of their central figures takes on a life of its own. By the time we last see them, they know who they are. Varieties of Mysticism in the Middle Ages