アメリカ文学史へのアプローチ : 作品100選
著者 多田 敏男, 中山 喜代市, 谷口 義朗
発行年 1995‑03‑28
URL http://hdl.handle.net/10112/00020091
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章 アフロ・アメリカン文学奴隷制度廃止のために南北戦争は戦われたが、黒人の疎外された状況が改善 され、彼らに自由が保証されるまでには、さらになお1世紀を要したといわれ ている。
1920年代になってニューヨーク市マンハッタン島北部の黒人居住地区ハーレ ムに突如として芸術運動が起こり、ハーレム・ルネッサンスと呼ばれた。その 重要な指導者の一人がラングストン・ヒューズ(LangstonHughes, 1902‑67)で あった。彼はジャズやプルースといった音楽を愛好したが、彼の詩はそういっ た音楽的要素を帯びたものであり、そのなかにアメリカの黒人の喜怒哀楽をう たいあげた。その後しばらく黒人文学は振るわなかったが、新たに注目を浴び たのはリチャード・ライト(RichardWright, 1908‑60)の登場であり、『アメリカ の息子』(NativeSon, 1940)以下の作品で彼は黒人に関する諸問題を取り上げた。
そのような問題提起から彼の作品は一般に「抗議文学」として位置づけられて いる。
しかし彼に文学上のアドバイスを受けて作家活動に入ったラルフ・エリスン (Ralph Ellison, 1914‑94)になると、ライトの社会的な疎外の問題が内面のアイ デンテイティの確立という問題に変化し、扱われる人間は黒人であっても、そ の問題は黒人には限らない人間一般の問題を扱ったものといえよう。つまりそ れは、「抗議」ではなく「芸術」なのである。エリスンの『見えない人間』
(Invisible Man, 1952)が高く評価される所以である。同じように黒人文学を向上 させたのはジェイムズ・ボールドウィン(JamesBaldwin, 1924‑87)で『山に登 りて告げよ』(GoTell It on the Mountain, 1953)や、『ジョバンニの部屋』
(Giovanni's Room, 1956)、『もう一つの国』(AnotherCountry, 1962)などそれぞ れが特異なテーマを扱ったもので興味深い。
ついでながら、60年代に黒人の公民権運動が盛んになったが、その優れた指 導者キング牧師の「暴力なき抗議運動」やワシントン大行進における彼の感動 的な名演説"IHave a Dream"を忘れるべきではない。惜しむべきことは彼が 暗殺の非運に見舞われたことである。
上で述べた作家以外にも当然触れねばならない作家も多いが、なかでも、ゾ ラ・ニール・ハーストン(ZoraNeale Hurston, 1891‑196o)の影響を受けたアリ ス・ウォーカー(AliceWalker, 1944‑ )は「カラー・パープル』(ColorPurple, 1982)などで日本においても人気が高いし、 1993年にはトニ・モリスン(Toni Morrison, 1931‑)がノーベル文学賞を受賞して、これら黒人女性作家たちがま すます脚光を浴びつつあることを付け加えねばならない。
Richard Wright (1908‑60)
Born near Natchez, Mississippi, he lived in Memphis and Chicago before moving to New York in 1937. Lawd Today, a novel he was working on during this period, was published posthumously in 1963. His ftrst published volume was a collection of short
stories about Southern racism, ironically entitled Uncle Tom's Children (1938, enlarged edition 1940). The novel Native Son (1940) brought Wright widespread recognition.
In 1940 he left the USA to live in Mexico, and then in 1946 moved to Paris, where he remained for the rest of his life. His other novels are The Outsider(1953), chronicling a black intellectual's search for identity, Savage Holiday(1954) and The Long Dream (1958).
Eight Men, published posthumously in 1961, is a collection of short stories, radio plays, a novella, and an autobiography. Wright's non-fictional work includes Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), Black Boy (1945). American Hunger, a continuation of Black Boy, was published posthumously in 1977. He also published three books of social criticism inspired by his travels: Black Power (1954), about Africa, The Color Curtain 0956), about Asia, and Pagan Spain (1957). A collection of lectures on racial injustice, White Man, Listen!, appeared in 1957.
Native Son BRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNG!
An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room. A bed spring creaked. A woman's voice sang out impatiently:
"Bigger, shut that thing offi"
A surly grunt sounded above the tinny ring of metal. Naked feet swished dryly across the planks in the wooden floor and the clang ceased abruptly.
"Turn on the light, Bigger."
"Awright," came a sleepy mumble.
Light flooded the room and revealed a black boy standing in a narrow space between two iron beds, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands. From a bed to his right the woman spoke again:
"Buddy, get up from there! I got a big washing on my hands today and I want you-all out of here."
Another black boy rolled from bed and stood up. The woman also rose and stood in her nightgown.
"Turn your heads so I can dress," she said.
The two boys averted their eyes and gazed into a far corner of the room. The woman rushed out of her nightgown and put on a pair of step-ins. She turned to the bed from which she had risen and called:
"Vera! Get up from there!"
"What time is it, Ma?" asked a muffled, adolescent voice from beneath a quilt.
"Get up from there, I say!"
"O.K.,Ma."
A brown-skinned girl in a cotton gown got up and stretched her arms above her head and yawned. Sleepily, she sat on a chair and fumbled with her stockings.
The two boys kept their faces averted while their mother and sister put on enough clothes to keep them from feeling ashamed; and the mother and sister did the same while the boys dressed.
115
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~ A., (mamma)JZora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
Born in Florida, Hurston graduated from Howard University and studied anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. In New York City in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, she began publishing stories. Her first novel, Jonah '.s Gourd Vine, was published in 1934, followed by her best-known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937. Despite her fine early writings, Hurston fell into obscurity and poverty; she suffered a stroke in October 1959 and died in January 1960, to be buried in an unmarked grave at Fort Pierce, Florida.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.
So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet.
She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.
The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.
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James Baldwin (1924-87)
Born in Harlem, New York City. Throughout his difficult growing-up years, Baldwin endured much hostility from his fanatically religious stepfather, an experience that forms
the theme of many of Baldwin's works, including his collection of stories, Going to Meet the Man (1965). At age fourteen, Baldwin underwent a religious conversion, which led to an evangelical calling until he was seventeen. Disenchanted with America's treatment of its African American population, in 1948 Baldwin purchased a one-way ticket to France._Although he returned sporadically to the United States, and was active in the Civil Rights movement, he remained an expatriate until his death, In such powerful and elegant novels as Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Giovanni's Room (1955), and in such nonfiction as Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time 0963), Baldwin explores life at the margins of society and what it means to be black in America, Other works include if Beale Street Could Talk (1974), The Devtl Finds Work (1976), and Just Above My Head (1979),
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father, It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself, Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late, His earliest memories - which were in a way, his only memories - were of the hurry and brightness of Sunday mornings, They all rose together on that day;
his father, who did not have to go to work, and led them in prayer before breakfast;
his mother, who dressed up on that day, and looked almost young, with her hair straightened, and on her head the close-fitting white cap that was the uniform of holy women; his younger brother, Roy, who was silent that day because his father was home, Sarah, who wore a red ribbon in her hair that day, and was fondled by her father, And the baby, Ruth, who was dressed in pink and white, and rode in her mother's arms to church.
The church was not very far away, four blocks up Lenox Avenue, on a comer not far from the hospitaL It was to this hospital that his mother had gone when Roy, and Sarah, and Ruth were born, John did not remember very clearly the first time she had gone, to have Roy; folks said that he had cried and carried on the whole time his mother was away; he remembered only enough to be afraid every time her belly began to swell, knowing that each time the swelling began it would not end until she was taken from him, to come back with a stranger, Each time this happened she became a little more of a stranger herself
Ralph Ellison (1914-94)
Born in Oklahoma and named for Ralph Waldo Emerson as testimony to his parents' hope that their son would possess a literary sensibility, Ellison was reared to have both aesthetic and social concerns, At an early age Ellison accompanied his mother when
~ 16 ~ 7 7 0 • 7 j. I} 7J ✓ )(_~ 117 she worked on civil rights projects. By the time of his adolescence Ellison was a skilled cornet player, and he studied music at the Tuskegee Institute. Ellison later moved to New York City where he was befriended by Richard Wright, and, under his tutelage, became active in the Federal Writers' Project. Invisible Man (1952), Shadow and Act (1964), and Going to the Territory (1986) all reflect Ellison's concerns with African American consciousness, aesthetics, and music.
Invisible Man
It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was nai:ve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!
And yet I am no freak of nature, nor of history. I was in the cards, other things having been equal (or unequal) eighty-five years ago. I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed. About eighty-five years ago they were told that they were free, united with others of our country in everything pertaining to the common good, and, in everything social, separate like the fingers of the hand.
And they believed it. They exulted in it. They stayed in their place, worked hard, and brought up my father to do the same. But my grandfather is the one. He was an odd old guy, my grandfather, and I am told I take after him. It was he who caused the trouble. On his deathbed he called my father to him and said,
"Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open." They thought the old man had gone out of his mind.
He had been the meekest of men. The younger children were rushed from the room, the shades drawn and the flame of the lamp turned so low that it sputtered on the wick like the old man's breathing. "Learn it to the younguns," he whispered fiercely; then he died.
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Martin Luther
King, J~.
(1929-68)Martin Luther King, Jr., Baptist pastor in Montgomery, Ala., as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was a leading spokesman of American blacks for nonviolence in the civil rights movement. Stride Toward Freedom 0958) tells of the boycott he led against the Jim Crow buses of Montgomery, Strength To Love (1963) collects sermons, and Why We Can't Wait (1964) treats both the Birmingham demonstrations of 1963 and his larger views on civil rights. In 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. He was assassinated while planning a peaceful march.
"I Have a Dream"
I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal."
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we wil1 be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.
With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to
119 stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning "My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."
"We hold ... created equal." cf. "The Declaration of Independence" (1776). / "My country 'Tis of thee ... freedom ring." ~~ ~~OO!ilx "America" O)~hffl:O)li!x~olo
Alice Walker (1944- )
Born into a family of sharecroppers at Eatonton, Georgia, she was educated at Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College. Her first publications were two collections of poetry: Once: Poems (1968), which reflects her experience of the civil rights movement and her travels in Africa, and Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973), a tribute to those who struggle against racism and oppression. Later volumes are Good Night, Willte Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1979) and Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems (1984). Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), is the story of three generations of black tenant farmers from 1900 to the 1960s. A book of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973), explores the experience and heritage of black women, a theme to which Walker returns in a second collection, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (1981). The Color Purple (1982), an epistolary novel which won a Pulitzer Prize, centres on the life of Celie, a black woman who has been raped by the man she believed to be her father. Walker's other novels are Meridian (1977), about civil rights workers in the South during the 1960s, The Temple of My Familiar(1989) and Possessing the Secret of joy (1992), a harsh exploration of female circumcision. She has also published a biography of Langston Hughes for children (1974) and a volume of essays, In Search of My Mother's Garden: Womanist Prose (1983).
Tbe Color Purple Dear God,
I am fourteen years old. I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.
Last spring after little Lucious come I heard them fussing. He was pulling on her arm. She say It too soon, Fonso, I ain't well. Finally he leave her alone. A week go by, he pulling on her arm again. She say Naw, I ain't gonna. Can't you see I'm already half dead, an all of these chilren.
She went to visit her sister doctor over Macon. Left me to see after the others.
He never had a kine word to say to me. Just say You gonna do what your mammy wouldn't. First he put his thing up gainst my hip and sort of wiggle it around.
Then he grab hold my titties. Then he push his thing inside my pussy. When that hurt, I cry. He start to choke me, saying You better shut up and git used to it.
But I don't never git used to it. And now I feels sick every time I be the one to cook. My mama she fuss at me an look at me. She happy, cause he good to her now. But too sick to last long.
My mama dead. She die screaming and cussing. She scream at me. She cuss at me. I'm big. I can't move fast enough. By time I git back from the well, the water be warm. By time I git the tray ready the food be cold. By time I git all the children ready for school it be dinner time. He don't say nothing. He set there by the bed holding her hand an cryin, talking bout don't leave me, don't go.
She ast me bout the first one Whose it is? I say God's. I don't know no other man or what else to say. When I start to hurt and then my stomach start moving and then that little baby come out my pussy chewing on it fist you could have knock me over with a feather.
Don't nobody come see us.
She got sicker an sicker.
Finally she ast Where it is?
I say God took it.
He took it. He took it while I was sleeping. Kilt it out there in the woods. Kill this one too, if he can.
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Toni Morrison (1931- )
Born in the industrial town of Lorain, Ohio, Morrison claims to have grown up in an environment relatively free of discrimination. In 1953 she graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and went on to earn a Master's degree from Cornell University. She is presently a New Yorker. Morrison's innovative and lyrical fiction often integrates images from her rural upbringing with the sometimes disturbing realities of the minority urban experience. Her novels include Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987). She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
1be Bluest Eye
School has started, and Frieda and I get new brown stockings and cod-liver oil. Grown-ups talk in tired, edgy voices about Zick's Coal Company and take us along in the evening to the railroad tracks where we fill burlap sacks with the
121 tiny pieces of coal lying about. Later we walk home, glancing back to see the great carloads of slag being dumped, red hot and smoking, into the ravine that skirts the steel mill. The dying fire lights the sky with a dull orange glow. Frieda and I lag behind, staring at the patch of color surrounded by black. It is impossible not to feel a shiver when our feet leave the gravel path and sink into the dead grass in the field.
Our house is old, cold, and green. At night a kerosene lamp lights one large room. The others are braced in darkness, peopled by roaches and mice. Adults do not talk to us - they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information. When we trip and fall down they glance at us; if we cut or bruise ourselves, they ask us are we crazy. When we catch colds, they shake their heads in disgust at our lack of consideration. How, they ask us, do you expect anybody to get anything done if you all are sick? We cannot answer them. Our illness is treated with contempt, foul Black Draught, and castor oil that blunts our minds.
When, on a day after a trip to collect coal, I cough once, loudly, through bronchial tubes already packed tight with phlegm, my mother frowns. "Great Jesus. Get on in that bed. How many times do I have to tell you to wear something on your head? You must be the biggest fool in this town. Frieda? Get some rags and stuff that window."
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Norman Mailer J. D. Salinger
Richard Wright James Baldwin
123
第
1 7
章 女 性 作 家 た ちアメリカ文学には多くの女性作家の活躍がみられるが、例えば、ルイザ・メ イ・オルコット(LouisaMay Alcott, 1832‑88)の『若草物語』(LittleWomen, 1868‑ 69)などは誰もが知っている捨てがたい作品であるし、同じくニューイングラン
ドに育ってそのローカルカラーと象徴性に富んだ作品を書いた女性作家セア ラー・オーン・ジューエット(SarahOrne Jewett, 1849‑1909)の活躍も見落とせ ない。遅ればせながらここで、現代までの注目すべき女性作家をまとめておき たい。
19世紀から20世紀への変わり目に、アメリカ文学の主流が自然主義に傾いて いた頃、ニューヨークの上流社会の出身であるイーデイス・ウォートン(Edith Wharton, 1862‑1937)は、そういった主流とは別の作品を開拓していた。彼女は ヘンリー・ジェイムズの友人で、彼に師事し、同じように上流社会を心理的に 描いたが、ヘンリー・ジェイムズの世界とも違った彼女独自の世界を開拓して いた。
ケイト・ショパン(KateChopin, 1851‑1904)の『めざめ』(TbeAwakening, 1899) はいかにも彼女の主張、すなわち、自己解放、肉体や性への「めざめ」を 端的に示す最初の小説であるといえるが、男性支配の社会と戦う女性像を求め るフェミニスト運動のなかで、 1960年代末になって再評価された作品である。
ネプラスカ出身のウィラ・キャザー(WillaCather, 1873‑1947)はその地方の開 拓者の生活を、そしてやがてその健全性が、侵入してきたお金儲けの精神に敗 北していく状況を描いたとされる。南部出身の女性作家としては、エレン・グ ラスゴー(EllenGlasgow, 1874‑1945)を始めとして、キャサリン・アン・ポー ター(KatherineAnn Porter, 1890‑1980)、ユードラ・ウェルテイ(EudoraWelty, 1909‑)、カーソン・マッカラーズ(CarsonMccullers, 1917‑67)、フラナリー・
オコーナー(FlanneryO'Connor, 1925‑64)などに注目すべき作品が多い。
『大地』(TheGood Earth, 1931)において中国の農民を描き、 1938年にノーベ ル文学賞を受賞したパール・バック(PearlBuck, 1892‑1973)は異色作家といえ よう。今日では忘れ去られた感があるが、多産な作家であった。
戦前、戦後にかけて活躍し、『グループ』(TheGroup, 1963)で知られるメア リー・マッカーシー(MaryMcCarthy, 1912‑89)は北部出身で、彼女の小説は小 説を通じて彼女の世代の風俗が窺われる、一種の社会史としても評価されよう。
また、母と娘の確執、世代間の断絶などを描いた『彼ら』(them,1969)のほ か、多くの短篇小説で人気の高いジョイス・キャロル・オーツ(JoyceCarol Oates, 1938‑ )の活躍も忘れてはならないであろう。
Louisa May Alcott (1832‑88)
Alcott, daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the transcendentalist circle of Emerson and Thoreau. At sixteen she
published her first book, Flower Fables, and from an early age she worked to help support her family. Her first novel was Moods (1864). Little Women (1868-69) was an immediate success, and the family was at last economically secure. Her other novels include An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men (1871), and Under the Lilacs (1878).
Her last novel was Jo's Boys (1886), a sequel to Little Women. She died in Boston in 1888, only two days after her father.
Little Women
"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
"It's so dreadful to be poor!" sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.
"I don't think it's fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all," added little Amy, with an injured sniff.
"We've got father and mother and each other," said Beth, contentedly, from her corner.
The four young faces on which the firelight shone brightened at the cheerful words, but darkened again as Jo said sadly:
"We haven't got father, and shall not have him for a long time." She didn't say
"perhaps never", but each silently added it, thinking of father far away, where the fighting was.
Nobody spoke for a minute; then Meg said in an altered tone:
"You know the reason mother proposed not having any presents this Christmas was because it is going to be a hard winter for everyone; and she thinks we ought not to spend money for pleasure when our men are suffering so in the army. We can't do much, but we can make our little sacrifices, and ought to do it gladly. But I am afraid I don't"; and Meg shook her head, and she thought regretfully of all the pretty things she wanted.
"But I don't think the little we should spend would do any good. We've each got a dollar, and the army wouldn't be much helped by our giving that. I agree not to expect anything from mother or you, but I do want to buy Undine and Sintram for myself; I've wanted it so long," said Jo, who was a bookworm.
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Raised in the village of South Berwick, Maine, Jewett wrote fiction that frequently drew upon her rural experiences. A lifelong New Englander, Jewett died in the same house in which she was born. In the 1880s Jewett began a lifelong relationship with Annie Fields and together they established a literary center in Boston. Influenced by Harriet Beecher Stowe and the previous generation of women writers, Jewell's work combined a sensitivity to the rural environment with an interest in a female community
125
and sensibility. Jewell's books include Deephaven (1877), A Country Doctor(1884), A White Heron and Other Stories (1886), and the celebrated The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).
Tbe Country of the Pointed Firs
There was something about the coast town of Dunnet which made it seem more attractive than other maritime villages of eastern Maine. Perhaps it was the simple fact of acquaintance with that neighborhood which made it so attaching, and gave such interest to the rocky shore and dark woods, and the few houses which seemed to be securely wedged and tree-nailed in among the ledges by the Landing. These houses made the most of their seaward view, and there was a gayety and determined floweriness in their bits of garden ground; the small- paned high windows in the peaks of their steep gables were like knowing eyes that watched the harbor and the far sea-line beyond, or looked northward all along the shore and its background of spruces and balsam firs. When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person. The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.
After a first brief visit made two or three summers before in the course of a yachting cruise, a lover of Dunnet Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the centre of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told. One evening in June, a single passenger landed upon the steamboat wharf. The tide was high, there was a fine crowd of spectators, and the younger portion of the company followed her with subdued excitement up the narrow street of the salt-aired, white-clapboarded little town.
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Kate Chopin (1851-1904)
Born Kate O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri, to an Irish father and French mother, she moved to New Orleans following her marriage to Oscar Chopin. After the death of her mother and husband, she began to devote herself to writing. Her first novel, At Fault (1890), showed the influence of Guy de Maupassant. This was followed by two collections of short stories set among Creoles and Acadians in Louisiana, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), which helped establish her as a leading exponent of the 'local colour' school. She also contributed regularly to popular and literary magazines. Her best-known work, The Awakening, was published in 1899. Its sympathetic portrayal of a woman who rejects the constraints of marriage and
motherhood provoked hostile criticism. The book was banned from the library shelves in Chopin's home town of St. Louis, and following a reprint in 1906 went out of print for over 50 years. An increasing sensitivity to the particular problems of the female artist and a renewed interest on the part of publishers in women writers led to a reexamination and reappraisal of Chopin's work. Frequently anthologized today, Chopin now appears to hold a secure place within American literary history.
The Awakening
A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over:
"Allez vous-en! Allez vous--en! Sapristi! That's all right!"
He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood, unless it was the mocking-bird that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence.
Mr. Pontellier, unable to read his newspaper with any degree of comfort, arose with an expression and an exclamation of disgust. He walked down the gallery and across the narrow "bridges" which connected the Lebrun cottages one with the other. He had been seated before the door of the main house. The parrot and the mocking-bird were the property of Madame Lebrun, and they had the right to make all the noise they wished. Mr. Pontellier had the privilege of quitting their society when they ceased to be entertaining.
He stopped before the door of his own cottage, which was the fourth one from the main building and next to the last. Seating himself in a wicker rocker which was there, he once more applied himself to the task of reading the newspaper. The day was Sunday; the paper was a day old. The Sunday papers had not yet reached Grand Isle. He was already acquainted with the market reports, and he glanced restlessly over the editorials and bits of news which he had not had time to read before quitting New Orleans the day before.
Mr. Pontellier wore eye-glasses. He was a man of forty, of medium height and rather slender build; he stooped a little. His hair was brown and straight, parted on one side. His beard was neatly and closely trimmed.
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The first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, Wharton was born into the patrician world of New York society. She spent her formative years traveling between New York, Newport, and Europe, always accompanied by governesses and tutors. In 1885, at the
127 age of twenty-three, Edith Jones married Edward Wharton, a wealthy Bostonian who was thirteen years her senior. Although the marriage would fast twenty-eight years, the relationship was marked by long separations, mutual unhappiness, nervous illnesses, and finally divorce in 1913. Wharton published fifty texts in the course of her life, and also left numerous unpublished volumes. The Decoration of Houses (1897), Wharton's first book, dealt with her ideas concerning interior design. Her first short stories appeared in Scribner's Magazine, and these short pieces were quickly followed by longer volumes, including The Greater Inclination (1899), The Touchstone (1900), Crucial Instances (1901), The Valley of Decision (1902), Sanctuary (1903), and The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904). None of these works received a great deal of recognition until Wharton published The House of Mirth (1905). This was followed by Madame de Treymes (1907), Ethan Frame (1911), The Reef (1912), The Age of Innocence (1920), and Old New York (1924). Wharton's work also includes two war novels - The Marne (1918) and A Son at the Front (1923) - as well as the autobiographical The Writing of Fiction (1925) and A Backward Glance (1934). Wharton's indictment of the Gilded Age, her exploration of the conflict between tradition and social change, and her acknowledgment that the individual is essentially trapped by stronger exterior forces made hers a significant voice in the troubled canon of early modernism.
Ethan Frome
I had the story, bit by bit, .from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frame drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade: and you must have asked who he was.
It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the "natives" were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two. I had this from Harmon Gow, who had driven the stage from Bettsbridge to Starkfield in pre-trolley days and knew the chronicle of all the families on his line.
"He's looked that way ever since he had his smash-up; and that's twenty-four years ago come next February," Harmon threw out between reminiscent pauses.
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Willa Cather (1873-1947)
Born in rural Virginia, she moved with her family to Red Cloud, Nebraska, in 1883.
In an attempt to escape the conservatism of the small town, she moved to Lincoln in 1890 and the following year entered the University of Nebraska. After graduating, she moved to Pittsburgh to pursue a career in journalism. April Twilights, her only volume of poetry, appeared in 1903. Two years later she published The Troll Garden, a collection of short stories. She later reissued four of these stories and added four more in a collection entitled Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920).
When she was 32, Cather moved to New York City and joined the staff of McClure's Magazine. In 1912 her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, was published. She resigned from McClure's. Her second novel, 0 Pioneers!, appeared in 1913. She returned to the Southwest in the summer of 1915, and her novel of that year, The Song of the Lark, is partly set in the ancient cliff-dwellings of Walnut Canyon, Arizoqa. In her next novel, My Antonia (1918), she returns to the Nebraska of her childhood.
Her first popular success was One of ours (1922), which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her next novel, A Lost Lady (1923), deals with stages of the moral decline of a woman from a small Nebraska town. The Professor's House (1925) is set in a small Midwestern college and in New Mexico in the post-war years. My Mortal Enemy (1926) is set in New York and on the West Coast in the early 1900s. The New Mexico landscapes in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) reflect Cather's continuing love for the Southwest. Set in French Canada at the end of the 17th century, Shadows on the Rock (1931) won her the first Prix Femina Americaine in 1933. Her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave (1940), is the only one set in the Virginia of her grandmothers.
My
Antonia
I first heard of Antonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I traveled in the care of a
~ountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the "hands" on my father's old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to work for my grandfather. Jake's experience of the world was not much wider than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.
We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and grimy with each stage of the journey. Jake bought everything the newsboys offered him:
candy, oranges, brass collar buttons, a watch-charm, and for me a "Life of Jesse James," which I remember as one of the most satisfactory books I have ever read. Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a friendly passenger conductor, who knew all about the country to which we were going and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange for our confidence. He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been almost everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly the names of distant States and cities. He wore
129 the rings and pins and badges of different fraternal orders to which he belonged.
Even his cuff-buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk. Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from "across the water" whose destination was the same as ours.
"They can't any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she can say is 'We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.' She's not much older than you, twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she's as bright as a new dollar. Don't you want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She's got the pretty brown eyes, too!"
This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to
"Jesse James." Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to get diseases from foreigners.
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She's got = She has got = She has.Pearl Buck (1892-1973)
Born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, she was taken to China as a child by her parents, who were missionaries, and spent much of her life there, teaching at various universities.
Many of her works of fiction are set in China, including The Good Earth 0931), probably her best-known novel, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. An epic story about a peasant's relationship with the soil, it is the first in a trilogy called The House of Earth, of which the others are Sons 0932) and A House Divided (1935). Her first novel about Chinese life was East Wind, West Wind (1930). Subsequent novels about China include The Mother (1934), This Proud Heart 0938), Dragon Seed (1941) and Kinfolk 0949).
A prolific writer, Buck produced over 100 titles: novels, collections of stories, plays, screenplays, one book of verse, children's literature, biographies, two autobiographies, a cookbook, and works of nonfiction about the mentally retarded, her philanthropic activities, Russia and missionaries. She also translated and edited works by various Chinese writers. The biographies of her parents, 1be Exile (1936) and Fighting Angel:
Portrait of a Soul 0936), are considered classics. In 1938 she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
7be Good Earth
It was Wang Lung's marriage day. At first, opening his eyes in the blackness of the curtains about his bed, he could not think why the dawn seemed different from any other. The house was still except for the faint, gasping cough of his old father, whose room was opposite to his own across the middle room. Every
morning the old man's cough was the first sound to be heard. Wang Lung usually lay listening to it, and moved only when he heard it approaching nearer and when he heard the door of his father's room squeak upon its wooden hinges.
But this morning he did not wait. He sprang up and pushed aside the curtains of his bed. It was a dark, ruddy dawn, and through a small square hole of a window, where the tattered paper fluttered, a glimpse of bronze sky gleamed.
He went to the hole and tore the paper away.
'It is spring and I do not need this,' he muttered.
He was ashamed to say aloud that he wished the house to look neat on this day. The hole was barely large enough to admit his hand, and he thrust it out to feel of the air. A small soft wind blew gently from the east, a wind mild and murmurous and full of rain. It was a good omen. The fields needed rain for fruition. There would be no rain this day, but within a few days, if this wind continued, there would be water. It was good. Yesterday he had said to his father that if this brazen, glittering sunshine continued, the wheat could not fill in the ear. Now it was as if Heaven had chosen this day to wish him well. Earth would bear fruit.
Ellen Glasgow (1874-1945)
Glasgow was born in Richmond, Virginia. She published her first novel, The Descendant, in 1897, and her only volume of poetry, The Freeman, and Other Poems, in 1902. The economic and social conditions of the old agrarian South form the subject of a series of historical novels, beginning with The Voice of the People (1900) and including The Battle-Ground (1902), The Deliverance (1904), The Wheel of Life 0906), The Ancient Law (1908), The Romance of a Plain Man (1909) and The Miller of Old Church 0911).
Her next two novels, Virginia (1913) and Life and Gabriella 0916), examine the position of women in the modernization of the Old South. Her other novels include The Builders 0919), One Man in His Time 0922), Barren Ground 0925), The Romantic Comedians 0926), They Stooped to Folly 0929), The Sheltered Life 0932) and Vein of Iron 0935).
In 1941 she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for In This Our Life (1941), a study of the decay of an aristocratic Virginia family.
The Battle-Ground
Toward the close of an early summer afternoon, a little girl came running along the turnpike to where a boy stood wriggling his feet in the dust.
"Old Aunt Ailsey's come back," she panted, "an' she's conjured the tails off Sambo's sheep. I saw 'em hanging on her door!"
The boy received the news with derision. He buried one bare foot in the soft white sand and withdrew it with a jerk that powdered the blackberry vines beside
131 the way.
"Where's Virginia?" he asked shortly.
The little girl sat down in the tall grass by the roadside and shook her red curls from her eyes. She gave a breathless gasp, and began fanning herself with the flap of her white sunbonnet. A fine moisture shone on her bare neck and arms above her frock of sprigged chintz calico.
"She can't run a bit," she declared warmly, peering into the distance of the long white turnpike. "I'm a long ways ahead of her, and I gave her the start.
Zeke's with her."
"You can't run," the boy retorted. "I'd like to see a girl run, anyway." He straightened his legs and thrust his hands into his breeches pockets. "You can't run," he repeated.
The little girl flashed a clear defiance. From a pair of beaming hazel eyes she threw him a scornful challenge. "I bet I can beat you," she rejoined stoutly. Then as the boy's glance fell on her hair, her defiance waned. She put on her sunbonnet and drew it down over her brow. "I reckon I can run some," she finished uneasily.
The boy followed her movements with a candid stare. "You can't hide it," he taunted; "it shines right through everything. 0 Lord, ain't I glad my head's not red!"
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Porter was born in Indian Creek, Texas. Her first collection of stories, Flowering Judas, and Other Stories, was published in 1930. Hacienda: A Story of Mexico appeared in 1934. She received widespread critical acclaim for the volume Pale Horse, Pale Rider 0939), which consists of three short novels: 'Old Mortality', 'Noon Wine', and the title- piece, which tells of a short-lived love affair between a soldier and a young Southern newspaperwoman during the influenza epidemic of World War I.
She published two further collections of stories, 7be Leaning Tower, and Other Stories (1944) and 7be Old Order: Stories of the South 0944), as well as two volumes of essays, 7be Days Before 0952) and A Defense of Circe 0954). Her best-known work, Ship of Fools, appeared in 1962 after 20 years in the writing. A bitterly ironic novel, it is set on a German passenger ship sailing from Mexico to Germany in 1931, and explores the origin and potential of human evil through the allegorical use of characters as almost one-dimensional representatives of various national and moral types. 7be Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965) received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Collected F.ssays and Occasional Writings appeared in 1970. 7be Never-Ending Wrong (1977) is an account of the infamous Sacco-Vanzetti trial and execution. Her other works include 7be Itching Parrot (1942), Holiday (1962) and A Christmas Story 0967).
"Flowering Judas"
Braggioni sits heaped upon the edge of a straight-backed chair much too small for him, and sings to Laura in a furry, mournful voice. Laura has begun to find reasons for avoiding her own house until the latest possible moment, for Braggioni is there almost every night. No matter how late she is, he will be sitting there with a surly, waiting expression, pulling at his kinky yellow hair, thumbing the strings of his guitar, snarling a tune under his breath. Lupe the Indian maid meets Laura at the door, and says with a flicker of a glance towards the upper room,
"He waits."
Laura wishes to lie down, she is tired of her hairpins and the feel of her long tight sleeves, but she says to him, "Have you a new song for me this evening?" If he says yes, she asks him to sing it. If he says no, she remembers his favorite one, and asks him to sing it again. Lupe brings her a cup of chocolate and a plate of rice, and Laura eats at the small table under the lamp, first inviting Braggioni, whose answer is always the same: "I have eaten, and besides, chocolate thickens the voice."
Laura says, "Sing, then," and Braggioni heaves himself into song. He scratches the guitar familiarly as though it were a pet animal, and sings passionately off key, taking the high notes in a prolonged painful squeal. Laura, who haunts the markets listening to the ballad singers, and stops every day to hear the blind boy playing his reed-flute in Sixteenth of September Street, listens to Braggioni with pitiless courtesy, because she dares not smile at his miserable performance.
Nobody dares to smile at him. Braggioni is cruel to everyone, with a kind of specialized insolence, but he is so vain of his talents, and so sensitive to slights, it would require a cruelty and vanity greater than his own to lay a finger on the vast cureless wound of his self-esteem. It would require courage, too, for it is dangerous to offend him, and nobody has this courage.
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Eudora Welty (1909- )
Welty was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. In her richly poetic, stylized fiction, Welty admittedly attempts to capture the rhythms and spirit of her Southern heritage.
Welty attended Mississippi State College for Women, then graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1929. In 1931 Welty returned to Mississippi and five years later published
133 her first story, "The Death of a Traveling Salesman." Her works include Losing Battles (1970), The Optimist's Daughter (1972), Collected Stories (1980), and One Writer's Beginnings (1984), a memoir.
Delta Wedding
The nickname of the train was the Yellow Dog. Its real name was the Yazoo- Delta. It was a mixed train. The day was the 10th of September, 1923 - afternoon.
Laura McRaven, who was nine years old, was on her first journey alone. She was going up from Jackson to visit her mother's people, the Fairchilds, at their plantation named Shellmound, at Fairchilds, Mississippi. When she got there,
"Poor Laura, little motherless girl," they would all run out and say, for her mother had died in the winter and they had not seen Laura since the funeral. Her father had come as far as Yazoo City with her and put her on the Dog. Her cousin Dabney Fairchild, who was seventeen, was going to be married, but Laura could not be in the wedding for the reason that her mother was dead. Of these facts the one most persistent in Laura's mind was the most intimate one: that her age was nine.
In the passenger car every window was propped open with a stick of kindling wood. A breeze blew through, hot and then cool, fragrant of the woods and yellow flowers and of the train. The yellow butterflies flew in at any window, out at any other, and outdoors one of them could keep up with the train, which then seemed to be racing with a butterfly. Overhead a black lamp in which a circle of flowers had been cut out swung round and round on a chain as the car rocked from side to side, sending down dainty drifts of kerosene smell. The Dog was almost sure to reach Fairchilds before the lamp would be lighted by Mr.
Terry Black, the conductor, who had promised her father to watch out for her.
Laura had the seat facing the stove, but of course no fire was burning in it now.
She sat leaning at the window, the light and the sooty air trying to make her close her eyes. Her ticket to Fairchilds was stuck up in her Madge Evans straw hat, in imitation of the drummer across the aisle. Once the Dog stopped in the open fields and Laura saw the engineer, Mr. Doolittle, go out and pick some specially fine goldenrod there - for whom, she could not know. Then the long September cry rang from the thousand unseen locusts, urgent at the open windows of the train.
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