Social Tension As a Creative Necessity in the Fiction of Hawthorne, James, and Joyce
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1988 Lessons of the Masters: Social Tension as a Creative Necessity in the Fiction of Hawthorne, James, and Joyce. Craig Arthur Milliman Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Milliman, Craig Arthur, "Lessons of the Masters: Social Tension as a Creative Necessity in the Fiction of Hawthorne, James, and Joyce." (1988). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 4660. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/4660 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 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University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Z eeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 8917830 Lessons of the masters: Social tension as a creative necessity in the fiction of Hawthorne, James, and Joyce Milliman, Craig Arthur, Ph.D. The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical Col., 1988 UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Aibor, MI 48106 Lessons of the Masters: Social Tension as a Creative Necessity in the Fiction of Hawthorne, James, and Joyce A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Craig A. Milliman^. B.A., Empire State College, 1983 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1985 M.F.A., Louisiana State University, 1987 December, 1988 CONTENTS Introduction .............................................. 1 The Allegory of Art in The ScarletLe t t e r ............. 36 Henry James and the Vanishing Esthete.................. 101 Between Scylla and Charybdis: Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom as the Poles of the Dialectic.................... 186 Conclusion................................................247 N o t e s ......................................................261 Bibliography ............................................ 270 i i ABSTRACT; A study of talented characters reveals that three of the most influential novelists in English dealt with the often disabling image of the artist they had inherited from their Romantic forebears by insisting on dialectical tension between the artist and society as essential to the creation of literary art. The various talented characters in Hawthorne's short fiction, such as Aylmer, Rappaccini, Oberon, the Canterbury poet, the portrait painter of "The Prophetic Pictures," the woodcarver Drowne, and Owen Warland, fail to create art unless they retain certain links with their societies of origin. This tension between artist and society appears as an extended allegory in The Scarlet Letter, in which Roger Chillingworth represents the talented individual severed from his society, Arthur Dimmesdale represents the talented individual immersed in his society, and Hester Prynne represents Hawthorne's ideal artist. The same dialectic operates in Henry James's shorter works, such as "The Lesson of the Master," "The Author of Beltraffio," and "The Next Time," as well as in two of James's novels, Roderick Hudson, and The Tragic Muse. In James Joyce's two most widely read novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus's systematic rejection of family, country, and church marks him as the sterile "artist" who has severed his connections with his society of origin, and Leopold Bloom's economic concerns mark him as the talented individual immersed in his society and rendered sterile by that immersion. The artistic failure of characters who are either isolated from society or immersed in it, along with the success of characters who can strike a balance between isolation and immersion, indicates that all three of these writers consistently rejected the various stereotypes of the isolated artist which were the legacy of the Romantics. Introduction In the modern West the literary artist is often thought of as one who stands apart from society, and a great many thinkers— philosophers, poets, novelists, and psychologists— have written a great many words on the apparent separation of the artist from the social mainstream. Plato would have banned poets from his ideal state, which, as Maurice Beebe reminds us, he probably would not have done "if by his time the poet had not already established himself as an antisocial type inimical to accepted authority," and poets from Blake through Pound to Ginsberg have rejected— often vehemently— the socio-political structures of their 1 times. The Ktlnstlerroman, often a description of the process the artist must pass through in order to reject society, to free the imagination from the potentially crippling effects of socialization, has become an impor tant fictional genre since its emergence in late eighteenth century Germany. The image of the literary artist as inevitably existing outside the mainstream of society is so firmly entrenched in modern thought that we can easily forget that the image itself, despite Beebe's reading of Plato, has not always been in fashion. Before the Romantic 1 movement the writer often held a public position, either official or unofficial. Few of us would categorize a courtier such as Chaucer, for example, as a man turning away from the world, nor would we suggest that Shake speare, who wrote— very quickly, with no waiting around for the muse— for the popular stage, whose works give few clues to his personal philosophy, who engaged frequently in lawsuits, and who, like Henry James's Henry St. George, retired when he had enough money, was in any way removed from the social and economic concerns of his day. Sir Philip Sidney, the embodiment of the masculine ideal of the English Renaissance, and Sir John Suckling, a caricature of it, had little trouble fitting poetry into full social, political and military lives. Dryden functioned as an occasional poet, writing tributes to both Cromwell and Charles II, and serving as both poet laureate and historiographer royal. His contemporary, Milton, actively promoted and defended the Puritan revolution with his pen, while in America Puritan poets such as Michael wigglesworth and Anne Bradstreet continued to expand and embellish the ideology of the New Jerusalem. In the eighteenth century, such writers as Defoe, Swift, Pope, and Addison and Steele fought public battles of wits in print, often with political ends, and across the Atlantic Benjamin Franklin, one of the most active political figures of his day, secularized Puritan mores with his Autobiogra phy. Neither these writers nor their audiences consi dered them creatures alien to their societies, but rather integral parts of them. In the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens spent his entire working life as an insurance executive, and William Carlos Williams worked tirelessly as a physician, jotting down notes and lines of poetry in the brief intervals between patients. Though all of these writers used their art to reconcile their own creative drives with the world as they found it, though all in effect stepped onstage through the act of writing and thereby assumed a new position relative to their societies, none of them wanted to separate himself from the social mainstream, nor was any one of them perceived as an exile by his contemporaries. Freud and others have postulated that artistic genius springs from mental illness (an extreme form of alienation), hardly a new idea because poets throughout history have often been considered mad. But Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950 that the development, in the early nineteenth century, of a "more elaborate psy chology and a stricter and more literal view of mental and emotional normality" led to a narrower, more literal 2 view of the poet as mad. Charles Lamb refuted this misconception in "The Sanity of True Genius" when he asserted that at its root lies the inability of ordinary men to see what the poet sees: "men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the 3 poet. But the true poet dreams being awake." And eighty years later, George Bernard Shaw added his refutation in his review of Nordauer's Degeneration.