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The American Claimant Theme in the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and Mark Twain

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The American Claimant Theme in the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and Mark Twain 1 % s The American Claimant Theme in the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and Mark Twain Holly Lynn Boren submitted for the PhD in English University College London ProQuest Number: U642278 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest U642278 Published by ProQuest LLC(2015). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract The notion of Americans laying claim to British titles and estates has been widely treated by authors on both sides of the Atlantic, a literary conceit often imagined as a legal phenomenon but seldom pursued beyond the pages of imaginative literature. This dissertation considers the aesthetic, psychological and historical resonance of the American 'claimant' theme in the published and abandoned work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and Mark Twain, with reference to other nineteenth- century authors who explored the same thematic ground. In Hawthorne's writing, the revolutionary's aspiration to transcend cultural determinism and establish a new cultural tradition frequently vies with the conservative enticement of the Old World's apparently timeless certainties and rich cultural heritage. In The American Claimant Marmscripts, The Elixir o f Life Manuscripts, English Notebooks and in Our Old Home, Hawthorne depicts and reveals the New World's crises of originality and identity. Similar dilemmas identified with the American condition would imaginatively engage both James ("A Passionate Pilgrim", The Sense o f the Past) and Twain (the Colonel Sellers fictions from The Gilded Age to The American Claimant, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Is Shakespeare Dead?: From My Autobiography) and persist as a recurrent trope of Anglo-American fiction. Travel is central to the claimant trope, and the trope in turn may be seen to shape many narratives of transatlantic journeys: Hawthorne's Otdr Old Home, James's The American Scene and Twain's The Innocents Abroad 2lxq considered in this context as 'claimant' narratives. The questions of cultural inheritance and legitimacy raised in these texts continue to resound in the heated contemporary debates surrounding the construction of national identities, multicultural studies and the traditional canon. The thesis interrogates the^intertextual relationships among^these work$ and considers the position of each in relation to the discourse and dynamics of national identity current in mid-to-late nineteenth-c^tury British and American culture. CONTENTS Page Preface 4 Chapter I INEXPERIENCE AND IDENTITY: THE ANOMALY OF THE AMERICAN CLAIMANT IN NATIONAL LITERARY DISCOURSE 11 Chapter II NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE'S HISTORICAL CORRECTNESS 32 Chapter III THE LITERARY LEGACY OF DELIA BACON: HAWTHORNE'S "RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN" UNVEILED 49 Chapter IV HAWTHORNE'S CLAIMANT FICTIONS 66 Chapter V CONSIDERATIONS OF CULTURAL INFLUENCE IN HENRY JAMES'S "A PASSIONATE PILGRIM" 89 Chapter VI HENRY JAMES AND THE DRAMA OF INHERITANCE 132 Chapter VII TRANSNATIONALISM AND THE ALIEN IN THE AMERICAN SCE\E 159 Chapter VIII CREATING AN AMERICAN 'CLASSIC: MARK TWAIN AND THE COLONEL SELLERS FICTIONS 203 Chapter IX NATION BUILDING. NATION LOOTING: CLAIMANTS & IMPOSTERS IN THE WORKS OF MARK TWAIN 251 Chapter X THEM AND US: BURLESQUES OF CULTURAL COMPARISON IN MARK TWAIN'S TRAVEL WRITING 286 Chapter XI DISPUTED IDENTITIES: THE AMERICAN CLAIMANT'S BID FOR CULTURAL DIFFERENCE 319 Sources consulted 337 Preface The odd persistence of the American claimant in nineteenth century fiction first came to my attention while reading for the MA in Anglo-American literary relations at University College London. The basic plot of an American protagonist who returns to the Old World to claim an inheritance superficially suggests a reactionary and sentimental fable. Such genealogical family dramas imply a search, contrary to civic sentiment in post-Revolutionary America, for confirmed privilege and priority. Claimant narratives were perhaps unsurprising when presented as a wish-fulfilling fantasy for popular magazines, but more curious when taken up in earnest by such major authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and Mark Twain, writers who self-consciously sought to assert and examine cultural difference. At first glance, the trope seems uneasily positioned in opposition to the century's dominant national discourse about establishing an emphatically American literature and cultural identity. Reviewing critical considerations of the American claimant fictions, I became aware of a common, seemingly extra- literary critical assumption about the authors of these works. Time and again, these narratives have served to reinforce anxious critical interrogations into the "divided loyalties" of their authors. It is a phrase which seems to privilege a national and political evaluation of canonical American authors, calling into question their allegiance to republican princples. Such studies as Marius Bewley's The Complex Fate: Hawthorne, Henry James and Some Other American Writers (1952), Howard Baetzhold's Twain and John Bull: The British Connection (1970) and Frederick Newberry's Hawthorne's Divided Loyalties: England and America in His Works (1987) are just a few of many critical texts which over the past fifty years have insistently identified as ambivalence about nationality what might perhaps more appropriately be seen as ambivalence about nationalism. Because the question of national loyalty seemed to me too reductive and divisive, I wanted to examine the literary career of the American claimant within the context of recent discussions about nationalism, evaluating the trope's participation in or resistance to an ongoing nationalist discourse. Such disparate works as Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, Jean-François Lyotard's "Notes on Legitimation" and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread o f Nationalism all privilege the role of language and literature in creating the conditions of culture for emerging, post-colonial societies. In this respect, these texts seem to affirm Percy Bysshe Shelley's early nineteenth-century assertion in A Defence o f Poetry (1840) that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" (1951, 583) and to reflect back upon even older discussions about mimesis and whether art merely imitates life, or whether, in certain instances, life may sometimes imitate art. In Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, the historian Eric Hob shawm challenges such exclusive emphasis on language and literature, asserting that language "was merely one, and not necessarily the primary way of distinguishing between cultural communities" (Hobsbawm 1990, 58-59). He is moreover sceptical of the concept that nationalism is an innate and necessary process in the development of a culture. "Nationalism," he maintains, "requires too much belief in what is patently not so." (12). Such scepticism is presumably what historical narratives responding to a nationalist discourse must attempt to subdue. I was curious to see how these recent contentions were supported or challenged by the literary experience of nineteenth- century America in general and by the American claimant plot in particular. What is the function of the obviously conflicted nationalist discourse manifested in the American claimant theme? In some respects, my inquiry attempts to respond to Said’s challenge to the "cultural intellectual": ...not to accept the politics of identity as given, but to show how all representations are constructed, for what purpose, by whom, and with what components (Said 1993, 380). My own Anglophone migration would seem in some ironic sense to confirm the contentions of Said and Benedict. As an American studying American literature in England, I am focusing on narratives reflecting a transnational experience which, in terms of cultural influence rather than genealogical inheritance, in some respects parallels my own. I acknowledge my own predisposition to cultural assumptions shaped by English literature as well as by American literature which engages with an experience of Europe and Great Britain. I was intrigued by the opportunity to study this thematic category of American literature at one remove from its national context but more generally within the arena of transnational cultural comparison, an exercise which hopefully has helped to generate less heat and more light than might otherwise have resulted. My own critical perspective remains one of responsiveness to the intertextual and cultural connections between authors and texts produced under varying social conditions and for different audiences, I am sceptical of the absolute value of any single critical theory or method. My study considers the historical, biographical and intertextual influences upon the primary texts taking up the theme of the American claimant and the cultural problems these works address and reflect. I have also focused on related travel literature in which the traveller is depicted as a type of cultural claimant, providing an occasion to consider and relate experiences
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