Benjamin Franklin and Nathaniel Hawthorne were both very important to America’s early literature. Franklin’s “Autobiography” and Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” represents the extremes of leaving home. Franklin makes accomplishing the American dream of the self-made man look easy. Hawthorne, however, revises and critiques that dream, showing the harsh realities of the real world. Franklin reveals his life story as a way to show the people of America that determination, hard work, and intelligence lead to success, while Hawthorne describes the harsh world waiting once youth and innocence are gone.
Benjamin Franklin and Robin, Hawthorne’s main character, leave home for different reasons. Franklin, in his autobiography, explains how he journeys to Philadelphia in search of a job and to start life on his own. Franklin wants independence and he knows he will find what he seeks. Franklin states, “I took it upon me to assert my Freedom” (194). Robin leaves his home with the idea of depending on his second cousin, dependence not independence. Robin journeys from his family’s country farm to the city in search of his kinsman, Major Molineux, with hopes that his kinsman will help him get started in life. Hawthorne writes, “The Major… had thrown out hints respecting the future establishment of one of them in life. It was therefore determined that Robin should profit by his kinsman’s generous intentions” (801). Franklin and Robin’s arrival to the new towns embody the two author’s feelings toward the idea of the self made man.
Franklin and Robin arrival to their new destinations are drastically different. Franklin arrives in Philadelphia during the day, hungry, and dirty. Franklin’s determination keeps him going. He buys bread to eat, cleans himself up, and sets out straight away to find himself a job. He finds one within short time, “I return’d to Bradford’s who gave me a little job to do for the present, and there I lodged and dieted” (198). Franklin represents his arrival in Philadelphia as brightly and easy as it could possibly be, the people are nice, it is beautiful day, and he finds exactly what he wants, when he wants it. Hawthorne sees Franklin’s story as an abomination of the real world. Hawthorne stages Robin’s arrival to town at night, symbolizing the darkness of the harsh world. Robin also encounters nothing but paltry inhabitants of the town as he searches for his kinsman. Robin feels no joy as he journeys through the town, and he even experiences fear at all of the strange things that he encounters.
When inquiring about the comparisons and contrasts between Melville’s Benito Cereno and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, Written by Himself, the following question almost inevitably arises: Can a work of fiction and an autobiography be compared at all? Indeed, the structure of the two stories differs greatly. Whereas Douglass’s Narrative adapts a typical pattern of autobiographies, i.e. a chronological order of birth, childhood memories, events that helped shape the narrator etc., Benito Cereno is based on a peculiar three-layered foundation of a central story recounting the main events, a deposition delineating the events prior to the first part, and an ending.
Waggoner, Hyatt H. “Nathaniel Hawthorne.” In Six American Novelists of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Richard Foster. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968.
Frederick Douglass. As authors, their books, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Narrative of the Life of
...n American Literature. By Henry Louis. Gates and Nellie Y. McKay. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. 387-452. Print.
The rugged frontiersman, the wealthy self-made entrepreneur, the stoic lone wolf; these are classic archetypes, embodiments of an enduring mythos-- American Masculinity. The doctrine of ideal manliness and its many incarnations have occupied a central place in American literature since colonial times. These representations that still exists in countless cultural iterations. The literary periods studied in this course were witness to writers that continually constructed and deconstructed the myths of paternal heroism and ideal masculinity. From Romanticism to Modernism authors, like James’s Fennimore Cooper, and F. Scott Fitzgerald helped to create the lore of American Manhood by investigating cultural notions gender and self that were emblematic of their time.
It was surprise to Samuel Clemens himself that the literary career actually brought him farthest down the path and also won him the most respect, since Twain had never held back his zealot for being a riverboat pilot, who even coined a river-related pen name. Nonetheless, Eugene O’Neill once commented, “Mark Twain is the true father of all American literature”, has truly spoke out for majority of Americans, whether they lived in the past or surviving in contemporary era (Fishkin 3). The greatest American satirist had employed exceptional humorous tactics to provoke in depth consideration of human nature and society issues revolved around it. American literature in return, owed sincere appreciation to its father for his phenomenal contributions.
He proposes that the author appears unsympathetic toward characters like Hester or Dimmesdale when they embody the ideals of a revolution. He backs this up by explaining that ideas of revolution, bloodshed and everything else it accompanies, was repulsive to Hawthorne, and likewise the author of the Custom House. He calls to light important examples of when the Custom House author portrayed a character in a negative light, in accompany with a situation where that character was seen to be emulating certain revolutionary ideals. Reynolds directly states, “Specifically, when Hester and Arthur battle to maintain or regain their rightful place in the social or spiritual order the narrator sympathizes with them; when they become revolutionary instead and attempt to overthrow an establish order, he becomes unsympathetic” (625). He makes this claim in connection with the above mentioned scaffold. This revolutionary device is something that is meant to degrade and humiliate Hester, but instead, given the author’s negative feelings towards these revolutionary ideals, he uses it as a physical and metaphorical way to elevate Hester. The connection is further validated by the background knowledge Reynolds provides. Not just in this example, but throughout the piece, Reynolds gives the reader an insight into how Hawthorne was influenced by these ideals. He mentions how
Lathrop, G. P., ed. "Hawthorne, Nathaniel." The Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature. Binghamton, New York: Vail-Ballou, 1962. 439-40. Print.
Within the debate on who is to be crowned the “Great American Novel,” a valid factor that may be taken into consideration is how ideals in culture become altered with an evolving environment, and therefore, the argument can be made on the behalf of The Great Gatsby to be considered for the title. Due to its more recent ideological concepts, the novel addresses American ideals that are not fully developed or addressed at all within The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These ideals can be boiled down to primarily two concepts: the fully-developed American dream of richness and upper-class goals, and consumerism in the industrialization of America. While Mark Twain’s piece touches on the “American dream” with Huck beginning the book off with $6,000
...ne Franklin, Philip F. Gura, and The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: Norton, 2007. Print.
One of the greatest classic novels in American history, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, lends itself to be an indispensible literary work that reinforces and challenges the core values and ideals that Benjamin Franklin expresses in his Autobiography. In the provided passage, the young Franklin arrives in Philadelphia in hopes of becoming a new self-made man and begins his journey with little money and few resources much like Gatsby. After arriving by boat, he tries to pay the people of the boat for his voyage but his payment is initially refused because he rowed the boat in order to get to Philadelphia. Franklin insists that they take his payment and says “A man is sometimes more generous when he has but a little money than when he has plenty, perhaps through fear of being thought to have but little.” Eager to make a good first impression on the people of Philadelphia, Franklin attempts to establish that he is of substantial wealth that he is capable of paying for his own fare even if it is not required. Upon walking into town, he becomes hungry and inquires a boy about the location of the nearest bakery. Franklin proceeds to walk into the bakery asking for a biscuit then discovers that they are not made in Philadelphia, so he asks for a three-penny loaf. Once again, he does not receive a three-penny loaf but instead is given “three great puffy rolls.” Surprised by the amount of bread he obtains for a few pennies, Franklin eats one of them and walks into a Quakers meeting-house. After sitting down for a short period of time, he falls asleep during the meeting but is kindly woken afterwards without a word of complaint. Ben Franklin’s account of his first day in Philadelphia is a success story of one man’s attempt to captur...
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale, “Young Goodman Brown,” is rich in symbolism, as this essay will amply illustrate.
Each character in the novel has their own interpretation of the ‘American Dream – the pursuit of happiness’ as they all lack happiness due to the careless nature of American society during the Jazz Age. The American Dreams seems almost non-existent to those whom haven’t already achieved it.
...nt of maturity. In addition, both authors think that matured readers in general are harder to persuade compared to younger readers (those at the of 16 to 18). This is why both Franklin and Douglass intentionally set their "rebellion stage" at the age of 17. This is to encourage the "less stable" teenage readers to dare do something different and to not compromise with normality. This less-stableness would enable these teenage readers to be more receptive to radical ideas. With this thought in mind and armed with Americans vulnerability in believing the rags-to-riches myth, Franklin and Douglass are able generated effective and persuasive narrations.With such effective writing prose, the authors created well-fabricate compositions which modeled upon the "rags-to-riches" chronology.These are the myths, Americans live by them and the country survives with them. Thus, it is the American Dream.
The American dream was a vision shared by the American people who desired their land to be improved and wealthier for every individual, with the opportunity for everyone in accordance to achievement. The dream is based on every individual working hard to become successful with an abundance of money, a nice house, two children and a high-quality job. In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the American dream symbolizes being free to come and go with the river, not to have restrictions, and to take pleasure in the wide-open Western edge. The dream’s beauty and liberty is depicted as a requirement for Huck, and for Jim who is a slave. The book shows that the American dream consequently turns out to be a celebration of freedom, for physical organization and rules, and also chauvinism of the Southern society in the slavery period. However, The Great Gatsby, which was written by Fitzgerald, is a figurative meditation on the 1920s breakdown of American dreams, in a period of unparalleled wealth and material surplus. Fitzgerald depicts the 1920s as a period of rotten moral and social value that is shown through America’s sarcasm, gluttony, and empty chase of enjoyment.