Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter Fifth Edition. New York: Norton, 1999.

American Literature, 1820-1865

Gender differences in literary knowledge were more obvious than regional differences, for at least into the middle of the century efforts were made to censor the / reading of girls and young women. 410

and even in the next generation Emily Dickinson read fiction against her father’s wishes. 410

Early calls for the existence of an American literature were altered by the popularity in the United States of Sir Walter Scott, first as the author of widely read poems such as The Lady of the Lake, then, decisively, as a historical novelist. After 1814, when he published Waverly anonymously, Scott produced a new novel almost every year. Until the secret authorship was revealed in 1826, the novels were ascribed to “The author of Waverly” or, by reviewers, to “the Great Unknown.” In the United States, where a new novel by the author of Waverly was almost a national event, literary critics and aspiring novelists instantly saw the appeal of Scott’s use of historical settings and his creating imagined scenes in which real historical people intermingled with fictional characters. Scott’s example not only made the novel a respectable, even elevated, genre, it had much to do with redirecting the literary efforts of ambitious Americans from epic poetry to prose fiction. 410

Scott marks shift from poetry to prose / esp. historical novels / in American fiction

From adolescence Hawthorne was steeped in Scott . . . 411

Before the midcentury, when every up-to-date American read Dickens, every literate American read Scott, and all appeals for the creation of a great American literature were infused with the knowledge that Scott had invented an infinitely adaptable genre of historical fiction. 411

Washington Irving, beloved by ordinary readers and by most of his fellow writers, was the central American literary figure between 1809 and 1859. 411

Despite the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803 and the vast southwest from Mexico in 1848 . . . 414

Through almost all the century, American printers routinely pirated English writers, paying nothing to Sir Walter Scott or Charles Dickens or later writers for their novels, which were rushed into print and sold very cheaply; but American writers suffered, because if they were to receive royalties, their books had to be priced above the prices charged for works of the most famous British writers. 416

In Amherst, Emily Dickinson out-Thoreaued Thoreau in her resolute privacy, idiosyncracies, and individuality. 417

Despite such powerful individualists, it seemed to some of the writers that Americans, even while deluding themselves that they were the most self-reliant populace in the world, were systematically selling out their individualities. Emerson sounded the alarm: “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. 417

Thoreau repeatedly satirized America as a nation of joiners that tried to force every newcomer “to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society”: to Thoreau, members of the Odd Fellows and other social organizations were simply not odd enough, not individual enough. 417

All the major writers found themselves at odds with the dominant religion of their time, a Protestant Christianity that exerted practical control over what could be printed in books and magazines. 418

This church, Emerson said, acted “as if God were dead.” Whitman, bred as a Quaker, was even more bitter toward all Protestant churches: “The churches are one vast lie; the people do not believe them, and they do not believe themselves.” Still, the writers all came from Protestant backgrounds in which Calvinism was more or less watered down (less so in the cases of Melville and Dickinson), and they knew their theology. 418

Awareness of the faction of religious ecstasy was not at issue. Emerson, for instance, showed in The Over-Soul a clinical sense of the varieties of religious experience, the “varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always mingles with the universal soul.” Similarly, Thoreau acknowledged the validity of the “second birth and peculiar religious experience” available to the “solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord” but felt that any religious denomination in America would pervert that mystical experience into something available only under its auspices and in accordance with its particular doctrines. 418

By the end of the Civil War many native-born American whites shared Stowe’s profound nostalgia for the days before the railroads, before the influx of Catholics, before the even more alien influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, few of whom spoke English and many of whom were not Christian at all. 420

The major writers of the period lived with the anguishing paradox that the most idealistic nation in the world was implicated in continuing national sins: the near-genocide of the American Indians (whole tribes in colonial times had already become, in Melville’s erroneous phrase for the Massachusetts Pequots, as extinct as the ancient Medes), the enslavement of blacks, and (partly a by-product of slavery) the staged “Executive’s War” against Mexico, started by President Polk before being declared by Congress. Emerson was an exception, but most writers were silent about the successive removal of eastern Indian tribes to less desirable lands west of the Mississippi River, as legislated by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. American destiny plainly required a little practical callousness, most whites felt, in a secular version of the colonial notion that God had willed the extirpation of the American Indian. The imperialistic Mexican War was so gaudily exotic—and so distant—that only a small minority of American writers voiced more than perfunctory opposition; an exception was Thoreau, who spent a night in the Concord jail in symbolic protest against being taxed to support the war. 420

Lincoln was not wholly teasing if in fact he called Stowe “the little woman had started the big war.” 421

and Douglass’s oratory had revealed to many white Northerners a sense of the evils of slavery and the humanness of those of another race (or of mixed races). 421

In the young country, Emerson’s fellow writers fervently shared his conviction that “nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. 423