American Characters - Dickenson

Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems (1858-1955)

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Study Guide | Suggested Poems | For Further Reading | Discussion Questions

Study Guide (1992) for Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems

Written by Virginia Johnson, Chair, Division of English and Foreign Languages, North Idaho College

That Emily Dickinson is an intriguing character is clear from the varied descriptions of her. She has been called everything from "the partially cracked poetess from Amherst" to "one of the greatest lyric poets of all time", from "a little homekeeping person" to "the female (Marquis de) Sade", from "the belle of Amherst" (her own term for her fourteen-year- old self) to "the greatest of women poets" and "the best American poet."

That she is an expressly American character is clear from her roots. Emily Dickinson was born to Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830. Her brother, Austin, was born in 1829, and her sister, Lavinia (Vinnie) in 1833. Edward Dickinson, a descendant of Puritans who had been in the country since the mid-seventeenth century, was an attorney who eventually took his son into his practice, treasurer of Amherst College for nearly five decades, and for several brief terms a representative to the state legislature and Congress. He was evidently a strict, unsympathetic, uncommunicative man. And though dedicated to his family and determined that they should live in the Dickinson Homestead established by his father, he had little interest in his daughters' intellectual development. Still, he had a powerful influence on Emily, and when he died, she chose to dress always in immaculate white, her color of mourning.

Mrs. Dickinson was traditional homebody who was cared for by Emily and Vinnie from the time of Edward's death in 1874 until her own death in 1882. Vinnie, who, like Emily, never married, apparently tended to most of the domestic duties, leaving Emily free for her artistic pursuits. Next door to the Dickinson Homestead lived Austin and his wife, Sue, who became Emily's best friend, her confidante, and a key audience for her writing.

Though Emily's formal education was limited, it was excellent. He attended Amherst Academy from 1840-1847, and spent 1847-48 at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary. While at the Seminary, Emily was exposed to continuous religious influences, with frequent revival meetings and a curriculum based on the Bible and orthodox Trinitarian belief. The girls at the Academy were divided into three groups: those who were professed Christians, those who "had hope," and those "without hope." Emily belonged to this third group. She left the seminary, homesick and ill with the flu, but unconverted to church membership. She also resisted the Great Revival of 1850 in Amherst, even after her stiff-necked father finally succumbed. At nineteen, Emily wrote to her friend Abiah Root:

You are growing wiser than I am, and nipping in the bud fancies which I let blossom-perchance to bear no fruit, or if plucked, I may find it better. The shore is safer, Abiah, but I love to buffet the sea- I can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but oh, I love the danger!

Her life-long struggle with and defiance of God, her "wrestling with faith', was thus established early.

One particularly intriguing aspect of Emily Dickinson's character is her reclusiveness. Her recorded travels outside of Amherst are few-visits to relatives in Boston, Cambridge, Springfield, and Washington, D.C. Twice, in 1864 and 1865, she visited Boston for eye treatments. (The only known photograph of Emily Dickinson shows that she, like her mother and Vinnie, was slightly wall-eyed. And her mother, Vinnie, and Austin also suffered from eye troubles.) The frightening eye disease may have been severe enough to threaten blindness, and after she returned home from the treatments, she became increasingly more reclusive. Her decision to stay always at home has caused much conjecture about her: was she a shy, awkward, half-crazy spinster spurned in romance? Or was she such a sensitive, gifted, intelligent woman that an uneventful life was necessary for her art? Was she, rather than Thoreau, the artist who carried out the doctrine of self-sufficient individualism by really living it?

The question of her romantic interests has prompted even more conjecture about her. Probably we will never know the details about any love interests she had. However, several men—besides her father and brother—played a role in her life. The first was Ben Newton, one of her father's law students, who shared an interest in poetry with Emily and who corresponded with her until his death in 1853. She referred to him in her letters as her "Tutor." He may have been replaced in this role by her most well-known correspondent and critic, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whom Emily chose as her "Preceptor" after reading one of his essays in The Atlantic Monthly. Her relationship with him was almost certainly platonic, and except for his two visits to her in Amherst, it was carried out through letters only. It was Higginson who introduced Emily to Helen Hunt Jackson, a then-famous writer, who encouraged Emily to publish her poems. Despite this encouragement, Emily published only seven poems-anonymously-during her lifetime.

Another man who affected Emily Dickinson was Charles Wadsworth, a married paster with whom she corresponded from 1855 until he died in 1882. Like Higginson, he visited her twice at her home. After the second visit, he moved to San Francisco with his family. The next year, 1862, Emily wrote 366 poems; in fact, two-thirds of her nearly 2000 poems were written between 1858 and 1866.

The man who most clearly was romantically involved with Emily Dickinson was Judge Otis Phillips Lord. She probably met him in the 1840's of 1850's, when he was associated in the Whig party with Edward Dickinson. Drafts of her love letters to him date from 1878, a year after his wife died. Though Emily referred to herself in one letter as "Emily....Lord," the couple postponed marriage, primarily because Emily felt duty-bound to care for her ailing mother. Lord died of a stroke in 1884.

One pattern prevails in all these relationships: Emily Dickinson's attractions to men were maintained always at a distance or through separation.

In 1883, Emily's beloved nephew, Gib Dickinson, 8, died of dysentery. His death left the whole family grief-stricken, but Emily seems to have suffered exceptionally. She may have already been in the early stages of Bright's disease, a wasting kidney disease. Her weakness from the disease was increased by her grief. In May 1886, she wrote to her cousins Louisa and Fanny Norcross:

Little Cousins,

Called Back.

Emily

She died a few days later, at the age of fifty-five. Higginson, who attended the funeral, described her appearance: "She....looked 30, not a gray hair or wrinkle, & perfect peace on the beautiful brow."

After Emily's death, Vinnie was astonished to discover a locked box that contained 1775 of Emily's poems. She apparently then became obsessed with having her sister's poetry published. She asked her sister-in-law, Sue, to help, and then she turned to Mabel Lommis Todd, a family friend, who edited both the poems and Emily's letters. The letters were later also edited by Thomas H. Johnson (in 1958) into three volumes containing nearly 10,000 letters. Johnson, who edited Final Harvest, also edited (in 1955) three volumes of Emily's poems "with variant readings compared with all known manuscripts."

In a gift to a friend, Emily once enclosed a note that said merely, "Area-no Test of Depth." That might serve as a comment on Emily Dickinson and her writing. No other American writer has been so isolated (with the possible exception of J. D. Salinger). No other poet of the English language has said less about social or political events. She told Higginson, "My business is Circumference." One critic suggests that for Emily this notion came from an image of a "sphere of which the center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.... (Dickinson) expanded it into a symbol for all that is outside. Her center is the inquiring mind whose business is circumference, intent upon exploring the whole infinity of the universe that lies before her." The ambitiousness of her "business" is made even more startling when one considers another of her observations from another letter: "The Bible dealt with the Centre, not with the Circumference." A recent biographer of Dickinson's maintains that Emily was indeed attempting to do something the Bible did not-she was using language to expose what she conceived as God's tyranny, developing a poetic voice that would "counter God's attempts to dominate us."

Emily Dickinson's use of language is one of her major contributions to American literature. She used quite ordinary poetic forms-the rhythms common to English hymns. The ordinariness of the forms is reflected in the well-known contention that people can sing most of her poems to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas. But in those forms she condensed meaning and created riddling ellipses, thereby inventing a new means of poetic expression.

If Thoreau is generous, even careless with words, Emily Dickinson is parsimonious. Words mattered greatly to her. She wrote to one friend that words were "mighty" and that "sometimes I write one, and look at his outlines until he glows as no sapphire." In her second letter to Higginson, who had apparently asked her about her friends, she said, "For several years, my Lexicon-was my only companion." However, not everyone can respond in kind to her experimentation. Readers are often left felling very ambiguous about her poetry: they can't understand her very well, but they are sure that she is a superior artist. And they agree that although she is frustratingly cryptic at times, she nevertheless meets some deep need in them.

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Suggested poems for discussion; numbers are from Final Harvest

• #7, "I Never lost as much but twice"
• #11, "Success is counted sweetest"
• #23, "These are the days when Birds come back"
• #28, "A Wounded Deer-leaps highest"
• #35, "How many times these low feet staggered"
• #46, "I taste a liquor never brewed"
• #47, "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers"
• #49, "She sweeps with many-colored Brooms"
• #54, "I like a look of Agony"
• #58, "Wild Nights-Wild Nights!"
• #63, "Hope' is the thing with feathers"
• #66, "There's a certain Slant of light"
• #78, "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"
• #85, "I'm Nobody! Who are you?
• #95, "The Soul selects her own Society"
• #112, "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church"
• #114, "I cannot dance upon my Toes"
• #116, "A bird came down the Walk"
• #112, "After great pain, a formal feeling comes"
• #126, "I dreaded that first Robin, so"
• #154, "What Soft-Cherubic Creatures"
• #168, "Much Madness is divinest Sense"
• #172, "This is my letter to the World"
• #177, "I died for Beauty—but was scarce"
• #184, "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died"
• #209, "I started Early—Took my Dog"
• #243, "I like to see it lap the Miles"
• #262, "The Brain-is wider than the Sky"
• #265,"I cannot live with You"
• #270,"I dwell in Possibility"
• #290,"Because I could not stop for Death"
• #307,"My Life had stood-a Loaded Gun"
• #357,"The Poets light but Lamps"
• #389,"A narrow Fellow in the Grass"
• #427,"Tell all the Truth but tell it slant"
• #447,"A word is dead"
• #446,"There is no Frigate like a Book"
• #508,"A Route of Evanescence"
• #542,"Apparently with no surprise"
• #563,"My life closed twice before its close"

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For Further Reading

By Emily Dickinson

(Dates are original publication dates.)

• The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. 3 Vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958.
• The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Harvard, 1960)

About Emily Dickinson

• Johnson, Thomas H. Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography (Harvard, 1955)
• Leyda, Jay. The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (Yale, 1960)
• Martin, Jay. Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865-1914. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1967.
• Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson (Addison-Wesley, 1988)

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Discussion Questions for Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems

1. Emily Dickinson experienced death close at hand many times in her life. In fact, it was common for the women during the 1800's to sit in "watches" with dying friends and relatives. Her father, her mother, her nephew, Bowles, Wadsworth, Lord, Helen Hunt Jackson, all died in the last few years of Emily's life. Furthermore, she experienced many separations from friends and family over the years. Therefore, it is not surprising that the theme of loss would appear in several of her poems. Discuss this theme as you see it dealt with in her poetry.
2. The varied opinions about Emily Dickinson as a character are most often based on her varied "voices" in her poems. She may appear to be a child, reveling in the wonders of nature; or a lover, caught up in passionate thought; or a bitter, even defiant questioner of god and his dealings with humankind; or a pessimistic commentator on death; or a poet describing her art. Which "voices" do you hear in her poetry? How does she vary those voices in speaking to you?
3. Admittedly, many of her poems are quite difficult to understand. Can you put your finger on just what makes them so tough to decipher? What strategies have you used in trying to understand them? Discuss these with the other members of your discussion group.
4. According to her sister, Emily Dickinson's retirement from society was "only a happen." That is, it was a slow process, the result not of a sudden decision, but of many small, separate decisions. Nonetheless, she never did marry nor have children. Consequently, her only "descendants" are her readers. Now, over a century after her death, how do you-as her descendant/reader-respond to her writing? Do you feel that she is speaking directly to you? Or not? How does she create this effect on you?
5. One of her most famous poems is #172, "This is my letter to the World/That never wrote to Me----." Now we all have a chance to write to Emily Dickinson. What would you say in a letter to her?
6. One critic maintains that three of the strongest currents of mid-nineteenth century New England "came to a confluence in her poetry: the Puritan tradition in which she was nurtured; the Yankee or, more broadly, American humor that was just coming out of the ground; and the spiritual unrest.... which was everywhere melting the frost of custom." Where, if anywhere, in the poems you have read do you see evidence of these currents?
7. In another of her poems, #270, Dickinson begins "I dwell in Possibility-/A fairer House than Prose-." As we week to discover what her poems "mean," we might consider that she is just "dwelling in Possibility," perhaps more thinking out loud, examining an idea, than she is asserting anything in particular. Do you see this as a way to approach her poems? With which poems might this approach work?
8. Obviously, words were important to Emily Dickinson. She referred to them as "Playmates" and commented on their "lovely wiles," yet they were "mighty." They were indeed her source of power-the power to create. And it is her words that have assured her immortality. Discuss your own reactions to her choice of words in any one poem.
9. The poems on the reading list are arranged not only numerically but also chronologically. Emily did not actually date all of her poems and drafts, but Thomas H. Johnson added the dates based on his research: he noted that her handwriting changed from year to year; he traced those variations in her letters, which were dated; then he matched the letters with the poems. In some cases, poems were included in the letters, so they were easy to date. Given that this may not be a foolproof method, can you see any contrasts in the approaches to subjects that Dickinson makes over the years? For instance, does her attitude toward death change as you progress through the poems? How about her comments on nature? Other topics?
10. Do you think that Emily Dickinson's works are an expression of a life lived or a life repressed? Explain.

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American Characters - Hemingway

Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1923-1938)

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Study Guide | Suggested Stories | For Further Reading | Discussion Questions

Study Guide (1992) for The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

Written by Scott Samuelson, Chair, English Department, Ricks College, Rexburg, Idaho

In Hemingway, personality competes with prose. Few American authors have cultivated their media image, their private mystique, like Ernest Hemingway. The Hemingway presence and celebrity depend, of course, on his roles as war hero, big game hunter, deep sea fisherman, aficionado of bull fighting, husband of four wives, and cavorter with the famous and rich. Ironically these guises tend to shadow Hemingway's work as a writer but serve to qualify him as an American character. And after the image hype, it is refreshing to return to the fiction, to see the hero—victims that permeate his writing and ring, in some ways, more true than the life of their creator.

But even in returning to the fiction we may be victims of our preconceptions of the man. For example, in our time of growing gender consciousness we may find Hemingway's cultivated machismo insensitive and offensive. But again, that machismo seems more present in the man than in the stories. Stories like "Hills Like White Elephants" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" present gender issues in complex terms. While it is true that, like their creator, the heroes of much of Hemingway's fiction tend to be deep sea fishermen, big game hunters, and men at war, their roles are not more important than their humanity.

Notwithstanding our reservations about Hemingway, he remains one of the clearest fictional voices of our century. His characters' existential integrity strikes us as honest; at its best, his spare prose is finely crafted, wonderfully understated, chiseled and pure.

Hemingway did not come easily to his famous terse style. Though he read widely and composed stories in high school, his prose apprenticeship took him a long time. He turned down a chance to go to college to become a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. He left that job to serve in Italy in the first World War as an ambulance driver. Wounded, he returned home in 1919 and continued writing. As a reporter for the Kansas City Star he began to learn a thrifty, blunt style. In Europe in the 1920s he worked as a correspondent for the Toronto Star, writing human-interest accounts that helped him sharpen his skills of observation and set them in succinct prose. While he was learning from journalism the principles of short, impact-strong sentences, he experimented with various fictional approaches. In Paris in the twenties Hemingway became a member of Gertrude Stein's "lost generation." Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound tutored Hemingway; F. Scott Fitzgerald was a friend. Between 1923 and 1938 he published forty-nine short stories which are among the best any American has produced.

Of course, he was also writing novels, the best of which are The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952), for which he earned the Pulitzer Prize. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. After living in Cuba for many years and making numerous trips to Africa and Europe, he settled in Ketchum, Idaho, where he took his own life in 1961. Islands in the Stream (1970) and The Garden of Eden (1986) have been published posthumously.

Like many writers, Hemingway linked his personal experiences and transformed them through the genius of his imagination to universal fiction. The so-called Nick Adams stories chronicle the life of an adolescent who faces the complexities and contradictions of an adult world and is animated by the hurts and shocks he encounters. Hemingway eventually published sixteen stories with Nick Adams as the protagonist. (Eight others have been published posthumously, and half a dozen other stories published in Hemingway's lifetime had nameless or differently named protagonists that could be placed in the Nick Adams chronology.)

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Suggested Stories: The following are suggested stories for discussion.

• "Indian Camp"
• "The Killers"
• "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"
• "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"
• "Hills Like White Elephants"
• "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."

“INDIAN CAMP” and “THE KILLERS”: These two stories illustrate Nick's initiation, his developing sense of evil in the world. In "Indian Camp," Hemingway's fourth story, written in Paris in 1924, Nick accompanies his medical doctor-father to perform a Caesarean delivery in an Indian camp. After the baby is delivered under difficult circumstances, the mother's husband kills himself.

Like many Hemingway stories, "Indian Camp" is fraught with contrasts and apparent contradictions. For example, the doctor-father is easy to fault because he arrives without proper medical tools, ignores his patient's pain, considers the husband's suffering too late, and subjects his son to trauma. On the other hand, he does save two lives and initiates his son into the mysteries of birth and life. The climax of the story is the return of the doctor-father with his son in a boat; Nick's simple questions of his father are profound. His father's answers are honest and show abiding love.

The contrasts in the story reach even further: the Indian camp may represent the dark, primitive, irrational side of life and the doctor may represent the civilized, scientific, secure, rational side. Uncle George may represent the treacherous white man, the father of the baby, or perhaps he is only a bystander, irritable because he has been bitten by the Indian woman. Is the husband the opposite of an ideal Indian brave because he takes his own life, or is he courageous, dying by his own hand in order to lay guilt on Uncle George? The husband's suicide may be seen either as an act of cowardly weakness or of courage.

The final assertion—"he felt quite sure he would never die"—many have taken to be ironic. Others say it shows that Nick realizes his father's love. Still others look at the entire sentence as qualifiers—that only under these circumstances could Nick feel that he would never die. Given the circumstances of Hemingway's death thirty-four years after the story was written, the assertion teems with irony.

In "The Killers," another Nick Adams story usually considered a tale of initiation; Nick is without a father to answer his questions. In it, two killers come to Henry's lunchroom to kill Ole Anderson, an ex-boxer. When Anderson does not come, the killers leave and Nick goes to tell Anderson, who does nothing.

A strong sense of theatricality pervades the story, ranging from the extensive use of dialogue, the vaudevillian tenor of the killers' dialogue, and what one critic has called the comic-tragic edge along which Nick is painfully stretched.

The story illustrates the notion of discrepancy. One discrepancy is that people no longer act as individuals but have become agents of other people; the murderers act for a "friend" in their mechanized, efficient way of killing. Even Ole refuses to defend himself, having sacrificed his individuality to become a victim. Much else in the story does not follow: Nick mistakes Mrs. Bell for Mrs. Hirsh because the boarding house is called Mrs. Hirsh's, but Mrs. Bell runs it. Henry's lunchroom was once a saloon, and now it is run by George. The clock is twenty minutes fast. The killers' coats do not fit. They take each other’s orders. No one calls the police. The story seems small-town though it is set in a suburb of Chicago.

“THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO” and “THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF FRANCIS MACOMBER”: Two other well-known and much discussed stores are often seen as initiation stories, but of a more tragic shade. "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," both set in Africa, chronicle the deaths of their protagonists at important points of personal realization.

In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" Harry suffers from gangrene and cannot be treated because he and his wife and their hunting party are stuck in the wild. Harry remembers and assesses his past as a writer and wishes for time to write more stories, to be true to his talent. As with almost all Hemingway stories, discussion can center on the extent to which the story is autobiographical. Are Harry's indictments of his selling his writing talent for his wife's money, and the kind of life it will secure, a projection of Hemingway's guilt?

The story's structure can be studied in terms of the relationship of the italicized past—the stories Harry has saved to write—with the present when Harry tries to come to terms with his impending death. This process can be seen as a ritual of avoidance or as a means of self-knowledge, depending on how readers choose to see Harry's struggle.

In "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" the protagonist moves from cowardice to courage, but at the moment of exhilarated bravery, as he is charged by a wounded buffalo, his wife shoots and kills him.

Discussion of this story can profitably center on Mrs. Macomber's complexity and motivation. According to Hemingway's own assessment of the story, Margot Macomber is a "bitch for the full course," a woman who kills her husband because he becomes his own man in realizing his courage. Others have suggested that she is more complex than Hemingway himself realized. She may have aimed at the buffalo trying to save her husband. Or possibly she was neither trying to kill him nor save him but merely trying to save herself by shooting well and rejoining the society of her hunter-lovers.

Discussions of Mrs. Macomber's complexity and motivation must take into consideration Wilson's character and role. One view sees him as the great white hunter, wise and courageous; another reading doubts his credibility.

The question this story raises is one fundamental to Hemingway criticism: can or should supposed authorial intention outweigh contrary evidence in a story? The stereotypes of infallible white hunter and irredeemable bitch-wife exist in other Hemingway stories. Does their presence there mean they exist in this story? Or may this story run counter to the stereotype and portray Wilson as other than infallible and Mrs. Macomber as other than a villain?

"HILLS LIKE WHITE ELEPHANTS" and "A CLEAN, WELL-LIGHTED PLACE": Two stories set in Spain illustrate through dialogue and narrative omission the lonely existential decisions and longing for meaning that Hemingway's protagonists inevitably face.

In "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" two waiters discuss an old, deaf customer and offer their divided opinions about his life, his attempted suicide, and the meaning of life. This quiet story demands intense concentration, especially regarding dialogue: who is speaking when, and what does he mean? On a less technical, more thematic note, the story's essential theme seems to invoke the yearning for faith. Does the story, in portraying a man who longs to find but cannot find anything to believe in ("nada" means "nothing" in Spanish), finally say that there are no grounds for faith, or does it suggest that, however modestly, there is something to believe in--relationships, the individual, consciousness, art?

In "Hills Like White Elephants" a couple debates whether the woman should have an abortion. The essential question of the story portrays the open-ended but volatile demand for action--will she give in and have the abortion or will she choose to have the baby? The setting and symbols of the story and their relationship to the conflict of the story is a rich area for exploration. The cafe sits at a railroad junction with views alternately barren and fecund. The curtain into the bar may symbolize barriers or a rosary.

Another profitable way to approach the story is to discuss the couple's characters and language. Do the man and woman really speak the same language? Do they understand each other? The woman's comment about the hills shows her creativity. One critic suggests that the term "white elephants" metaphorically represents the inner conflict, for it not only means an annoyingly useless gift; it may also be a possession of great value, a rarity in nature to be considered sacred and precious, revered and protected.

Hemingway's stories often portray a desperate, tenacious love of life, though many seem preoccupied, as Hemingway was himself, with death.

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For Further Reading

By Ernest Hemingway (Dates are original publication date.)

• The Sun Also Rises (1926)
• A Farewell to Arms (1929)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1939)
• The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
• A Moveable Feast (1964)
• Selected Letters, 1917-1961. Edited by Carlos Baker. New York: Scribners, 1981.

About Ernest Hemingway

• Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (Scribners, 1969)
• Benson, Jackson, ed. The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1975.
• Flora, Joseph M. Ernest Hemingway: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1989.
• Smith, Paul. A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Hall, 1989)
• Scafella, Frank, ed., Hemingway: Essays of Reassessment (Oxford, 1991)

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Discussion Questions for Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

1. What "American characters"—in both the individual and the cultural senses—do you find in Hemingway's short stories?
2. Appraise your preconceptions of Hemingway. To what degree do you think your notions of the man colored your views of the fiction? As you turned (or returned) to the short stories and tried to divorce past judgements or prejudices from present reading, what did you discover?
3. In "The Art of the Short Story" Hemingway said, "A few things I have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave out or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff is that you, not your editors, omit." As you read Hemingway's short stories, what has he left out? Why has he included what he has included? Do you always agree with his choices?
4. One critic has suggested that "every Hemingway story is tragic." Do you find a sense of inevitable doom in all of the stories? Is there any qualifying or mitigating force in the presence of unkind fate?
5. Hemingway has been described as a rustic moralist, a non-intellectual reporter known for his practicality and resilience. What morals does he argue for, stand for? Is his a morality of mere survival, or is there something more?
6. One critic has pointed out that Hemingway's virile writing masks an aesthetic sensibility of great delicacy. Explore instances in Hemingway's short fiction where potent, brawny themes and style are juxtaposed with exquisite, sensitive themes and style.
7. Hemingway's stories are often seen as tales of initiation. The symbolic journey includes trials and helpers, flights and returns. Do you see Hemingway's characters completing the symbolic journey with a knowledge or power they lacked at the outset?
8. Discuss the role of physical action in Hemingway's short fiction. One critic has asserted that "physical action is unimportant insofar as the actions reveal the psychological underpinnings of the story." Do you agree that psychology is more important than action in the stories?
9. One critic points out that Hemingway was extremely dependent on women throughout his life and that dependence stems directly from his "androgynous" parents who gave him a "conflicting definition of manhood" to live with. From the short fiction, try to reconstruct the complexity of Hemingway's view of manhood and the relationship of the sexes.
10. One critic suggests that "none of Hemingway's characters is definite" because Hemingway himself is anxious about being misidentified and projects that anxiety onto every character. Thus, a character like Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls is both an altruistic political martyr and a suicidal coward. What protagonists in Hemingway's short fiction illustrate this complexity?
11. Is "The Killers" Nick Adams' story or is it Ole Anderson's?
12. "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" contains two prominent symbols—the mountain and the leopard frozen on it. How do they function in the story? Does Harry come to an understanding of himself at the end of the story? How do these symbols help answer the previous question?

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American Characters - Hurston

ZORA NEALE HURSTON: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

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Study Guide | For Further Reading | Discussion Questions

Study Guide (1992) for Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Written by Terry Engebretsen, Assistant Professor of English, Idaho State University, Pocatello, Idaho

"Time and place have had their say," Hurston tells us in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. About the time, Hurston remained secretive, telling readers simply that she did "get born." About the place, however, and about the significance of growing up in Eatonville, Florida, Hurston was never secretive.

Certainly Eatonville in the early years of this century was anything but typical of Black communities in America. The only incorporated all Black town in the U.S., Eatonville demonstrated to Hurston on a daily basis that Blacks could be independent, self-governing, successful, and in control. In Eatonville, race problems remained at one remove from Hurston's experience. Of course, Eatonville was not paradise; just beyond the town boundaries lay the white world that influenced, for good or bad, life in Eatonville. But race relations in Eatonville seemed different from race relations in other southern black communities. Equally important to Hurston, her mother fought to give her the freedom to "look white folks right in the face" and set out for the horizon; she never discouraged Hurston's storytelling and inventiveness, even in the face of her grandmother's repeated predictions that Zora's lying and sassiness would lead to nothing but sorrow.

In Eatonville, the spirituals, tales, and speech rhythms of Black folk culture formed the very atmosphere that gave Hurston life, and she experienced that culture with few reminders that the white community (and educated Blacks, for that matter) looked down on it as inferior or, at best, primitive. But to Hurston, Br'er Rabbit and Sis Chicken, John and Old Master, and the lying session on Joe Clark's store porch remained expressions of a dynamic culture. And when, after a long struggle to educate herself, Hurston graduated from Barnard College in anthropology, Black folk culture became her vocation. Working under the supervision of noted anthropologist Franz Boas, Hurston set off to collect Black folk tales in southern timber camps, jook joints, and store porches and to study voodoo in New Orleans and Haiti. Eventually she published the results of her field work in Mules and Men (1934).

Mules and Men, a hybrid creature, half folklore collection and half novel, reflects an important tension in Hurston's life between anthropology and art. It is not surprising, then, that after Mules and Men Hurston turned to more purely literary uses of her folk material, although she returned temporarily to anthropology with Tell My Horse (1938). In her literary work, Hurston was part of the Harlem Renaissance, a collection of novelists, poets, dramatists, painters, sculptors, dancers and composers. These artists attempted to demonstrate that Blacks could produce works of art equal to those of any other culture. Through their work, these artists hoped to address what was then called the "Race Problem," although they never agreed on how best to serve both politics and art. Hurston contributed to the Harlem Renaissance by demonstrating the power of Black folk culture and language. In her short stories and novels, as well as in her staging of "authentic" Black musicals, Black folklore and lifestyle showed its power and dignity to the world.

Hurston's most famous and best novel is Their Eyes Were Watching God, which Blyden Jackson calls "one of the finest novels written by an American Black." Written in Haiti while she was doing fieldwork, it "embalmed," Hurston claimed, all her passion for her recently abandoned lover. More importantly, the work combines two central themes from Hurston's life: her search for independence and fulfillment and her love for Black folk culture.

The first of these themes is reflected throughout the novel in Janie Crawford's search for freedom and fulfillment. Having married Logan Killicks because her grandmother wants Janie to have the security and stability that had been unavailable to black women under slavery, Janie learns that she seeks more from life than the conventional "protection" that Logan offers. To find that "more," Janie leaves Logan for Joe Starks, but she finds that Joe too is unable to provide what she needs. After he becomes mayor of Eatonville, Joe demands that Janie behave only in ways he considers appropriate to the mayor's wife; he insists that Janie separate herself from the things and the people she loves. In her final marriage, to Tea Cake Woods, Janie finally finds both the freedom and the fulfillment that she has been seeking. The lesson that a Black woman can carve out for herself such an existence is what Janie brings back with her to Eatonville after Tea Cake's death. The novel's positive and sympathetic treatment of a woman's struggles for freedom and fulfillment makes this work important; its celebration of black women's struggles for fulfillment makes it a groundbreaking work. Only in the past three decades have Black women writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara taken Hurston's example to heart in their treatment of Black women's experience.

Equally important is Hurston's use of black folk culture. Much of the beauty of the novel's language comes from Hurston's reproduction of the idioms and the figures of southern Black speech. Characters speak in the folk idioms—"Gal, it's too good! you switches a mean fanny round in a kitchen"and Hurston herself incorporates the rhythms and idioms of black speech in her descriptions—"Old Nanny sat there rocking Janie like an infant and thinking back and back. Mind-pictures brought feelings, and feelings dragged out dramas from the hollows of her heart." Hurston also celebrates the lying contests, the storytelling, and the folk humor, as in the stories about Matt Bonner's yellow mule and the funeral the town gives for the mule. On a deeper level, folk culture patterns help structure the work. John Callahan has recently demonstrated that the interplay of voices in Their Eyes Were Watching God grow out of the African-American call and response tradition. As the novel progresses, the voices reflect the growing intimacy of thought and feeling between Janie and her friend Phoebe and between Janie and the narrator. In her treatment of black folk culture, Hurston succeeds in demonstrating its inventiveness and importance. Gone are the bumbling, foot-shuffling incompetents. Gone are the kindly paternal whites who protect the Blacks. And largely gone are the vicious racists (the novel does acknowledge the realities of race relations in the 1930s, but those race problems never become the driving force of the novel). Rather, Their Eyes Were Watching God looks at black life on its own terms, with an eye to its beauty and vitality.

Hurston's success in Their Eyes Were Watching God comes largely from her ability to tie these two strands of her work together so intimately. Janie's struggles for independence and love can only succeed, the work suggests, when Janie can quit languishing on the high seat where everyone tries to place her and become an active participant in Black folk culture. In Janie's affirmation of both herself and her culture, Their Eyes Were Watching God clearly made a difference.

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For Further Reading

By Zora Neale Hurston

(Dates are original publication date.)

• Mules and Men (1935)
• Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
• I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (1979)

About Zora Neale Hurston

• Callahan, John F. "'Mah tongue Is in Mah Friend's Mouf': The Rhetoric of Intimacy and Immensity in Their Eyes Were Watching God." In the African-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction, 115-149. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
• Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977. (Hemenway's biography is still the standard source for information about Hurston's life.)
• Howard, Lillie P. Zora Neale Hurston. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980. (Howard's work provides a brief assessment of Hurston's life and of her works.)
• Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. (Still a useful general introduction to the Harlem Renaissance.)
• Walker, Alice. "Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View." In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, pp. 83-92. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.

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Discussion Questions for Their Eyes Were Watching God

1. What "American characters"--in both the individual and the cultural senses--do you find in Their Eyes Were Watching God?
2. Early in the novel, Janie experiences a moment of awakening while lying under a pear tree. Versions of that pear tree image form an important motif in the novel. What does the image mean? What uses does Hurston make of the image in other parts of the novel?
3. Hurston incorporates a number of folk tales into Their Eyes Were Watching God. What function does this folk material serve in the novel?
4. The novel presents and tests at least three different understandings of marriage. Explain these different understandings. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each?
5. One critic has argued that Their Eyes Were Watching God has an "awkward" structure because Janie is forced to narrate to Phoebe events with which Phoebe must already be familiar. Is the structure of the novel a problem? What positive purpose does Janie's narrating events with which Phoebe must already be familiar serve in the novel?
6. How does the language of the narrator reflect a growing sense of intimacy with Janie?
7. Janie's ability to become a full participant in black folk culture makes it possible for her to find the freedom she seeks. In what ways does the folk culture help Janie succeed in her search?
8. Hurston's novel fails to confront explicitly the problem of black/white relations. Yet Hurston dramatizes the many ways in which racial tensions surface within the black community. What evidence of this racial tension do you find? What were the reasons for these tensions? How does Hurston's treatment of prejudices among blacks contribute to the theme of the novel? In what ways do white/black relations enter the novel?
9. Alice Walker has observed that one of Hurston's most attractive features is her "racial health—a sense of Black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings." From your reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God how do you understand Hurston's attitude toward race?
10. For some years now Their Eyes Were Watching God has been growing in popularity. What features of the work, in your opinion, have made this novel an enduring classic? What about the novel makes it appeal to readers today?
11. Traditionally readers think of works by men when they think of American classics. Might there also be a distinctly female American classic? Although Hurston and Dickinson come from different times and very different cultures, do they share a female perspective that sets them apart from the male writers you have read so far? How would you characterize that female perspective, if you see one?
12. Twain and Hurston both draw on folk culture in their novels. What important similarities and differences do you see in their use of folk culture materials?

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American Characters - Thoreau

HENRY DAVID THOREAU: Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)

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Study Guide | Suggested Chapters | For Further Reading | Discussion Questions

Study Guide (1992) for Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Written by David Barber, Associate Professor of English, University of Idaho

About the time that Huck Finn and Jim were floating down the Mississippi in search of a home, Henry David Thoreau build a cabin on the shore of a small lake and lived there alone for two years. Walden describes the experiment and explains its motives.

Thoreau is certainly a "character," the kind that will never win a popularity contest. His faults and the thorny aspects of his personality leave him vulnerable to criticism by those who dislike his character, ideas, or life-style. He has been called hypocrite, egomaniac, sponger, snob, fraud, misogynist, prig, and woods-burner, accused of "sneaking" back from his cabin at Walden Pond to Concord for dinner, and condemned for leaving jail, when protesting the poll-tax, because some one paid the tax. However valid or invalid these charges are, the main point is that people still care about Thoreau and his influence. For example, in a Chicago Tribune column in late 1991, Jon Margolis writes that "Thoreau was a snob, a fraud, something of a fool and a pernicious influence on the life of the mind in America." But Margolis also admits that "Thoreau was a decent, educated, hard-working person, and no one who writes can be anything but awed by the way he did it."

Walden is a difficult book. It is full of outrageous exaggerations and teasing paradoxes. Thoreau loves words, uses them beautifully, but at times loves their twists and turns excessively and uses too many of them, in paragraphs that threaten never to end. His philosophical reflections often begin clearly but end in unresolved complexity; and a little later he may turn around and express an opposing view. ("A foolish consistency," wrote his friend and mentor Emerson, "is the hobgoblin of little minds.") Thoreau's descriptions of ponds and woods, beans and woodchucks, ice and rain, winter and spring, are vivid but may go on too long and lose some of their effect.

Add to these qualities Thoreau's controversial opinions and ways of living, and it's easy to see why readers so often get furious with him. He challenges our ways of living, so of course he makes us mad. But because he confronts us at the core of our lives—our goals and our relations to others, society, nature, and God—people keep reading him. We don't ignore him because he highlights certain areas of our lives whose importance has only increased since he died in 1862.

A lifelong bachelor, Thoreau is the father, or at least uncle, of several modern ways of thinking and acting (and therefore, of course, the fierce enemy of some other ways). These are some major areas of Thoreau's importance:

Civil rights: Thoreau's ideas influenced Mahatma Ghandi in India and found American applications in the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. In his own time he supported John Brown. During the Vietnam War a pamphlet circulated which quoted parts of his famous essay, "Civil Disobedience" (or "Resistance to Civil Government"), substituting the Vietnamese for the Mexican war; Thoreau's protest of 1848 applied aptly in 1968.

Conservation and concern for the environment: Thoreau's amazing sensitivity to the details of physical world and to the whole world as a living organism has taught many how to observe nature and how to value it. No one could observe the natural world more perceptively than Thoreau. He knew that we need nature ("In wildness is the preservation of the world:), and he knew that we could destroy it.

Social and political criticism: In his critique of the social and economic values which doom so many to "lives of quiet desperation," and of the silly, destructive ways in which society acts, Thoreau is a major critic of American life. He tries to get us to reconsider the nature of democracy, the effects of technological change, and, most of all, our communal goals and values.

The philosophy of individualism: Thoreau's firm faith in the individual's ability to find a meaningful life, if only one looks independently and self-reliantly, has inspired generations. Thoreau is nowhere so "American" as when he affirms the power and autonomy of the single person.

At its worst (or ours) Walden may put us to sleep, but at its best it wakes us up—and for Thoreau, being fully awake is what living means. E. B. White made the ultimate comment on Walden, as far as 20th-century readers are concerned. Walden, he wrote, "gains a little each year as the world loses ground." The reason, of course, is that Walden tells us how the world, or individuals in it, might recover some of that lost ground. The vehicle of Thoreau's advice is his account of living at the lake, from which vantage point he could see the world more clearly.

He chose a place away from neighbors but within a couple of miles of his hometown, Concord, Massachusetts. Becoming a hermit was clearly not his intent; he relished visitors (up to a point) and often walked into town. He wanted to test his idea that the key to living a full life was to simplify it.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

(Evidently it worked, for Thoreau's state of mind through the months of his dying, fifteen years after he left Walden, was peaceful, contented, and accepting.)

Walden is also a book about America. Thoreau wrote about himself because, as he said, he knew no one else so well; but he wrote to his countrymen, about their way of living and "whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is." It was probably not accidental, though he says it was, that he moved into his cabin on the Fourth of July. The experiment itself was not just a commentary on American life; it was a new version of the whole American experiment, a new kind of Declaration of Independence.

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Suggested Chapters:

Because reading all of Walden might be too much in a two-week period, here is a plan for reading some of Walden. The capitalized chapters are the ones on which the group discussion may wish to focus.

"ECONOMY" By far the longest (and most difficult) section in the book, this chapter is essential to read, despite its difficulty, because it explains Thoreau's basic beliefs about how to live, and because he tells us the story of how he got started at Walden.

"WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR" Thoreau describes the setting of his cabin; then he reflects on the ideas of possession, work, wakeful living, and reality, all in relation to the purpose of his experiment.

"READING" This chapter begins by defending the classics, starting with Homer, and ends with an appeal for the American village to take on the role of patron of the arts and liberal education.

"SOUNDS" Reading is an indoor activity; this chapter balances it by pointing outside the cabin to the sounds of nature and of humans: the railroad, for instance, which leads Thoreau to some unexpectedly positive comments about commerce.

"SOLITUDE" This chapter discusses the delights of being alone; solitude, Thoreau says, is his best companion.

"VISITORS" Nevertheless, Thoreau was no hermit, kept three chairs in his cabin, and claims to have had together under his roof "25 or 30 souls, with their bodies." This chapter discusses notable visitors.

"THE BEAN-FIELD" This delightful chapter is a discourse on farming, on using the land, on hearing the town's silly military displays from afar (with special reference to the Mexican War); but mainly it is about beans, their cultivation and care. "I was determined to know beans," he says (reversing the expression: "You don't know beans!).

"THE VILLAGE" This short chapter makes it clear that Thoreau went often into Concord, though he is equally as interested in how dark it could be coming home at night. He also refers to his famous night in jail, offering a brief explanation of why he refused to pay the poll-tax and of why he did not make a more extensive protest. (But to get a full discussion of this well known event you have to read the essay "Civil Disobedience," also known as "Resistance to Civil Government.”)

"THE PONDS" Thoreau may have placed this chapter in the middle of Walden in order to emphasize the pond's symbolic centrality in the book. In any case, you can see why he chose to live there from his loving description of Walden and other lakes in the area. How much more beautiful than our lives . . . are they!"

"BAKER FARM" This chapter meditates on the immigrant family who live at Baker farm, who came to America, Thoreau believes, because they wanted the coffee, tea, and meat that they could get here. Thoreau fells, however, that "the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these (coffee, tea, and meat)."

"HIGHER LAWS" You will enjoy, perhaps even agree with, Thoreau's comments on fishing, hunting, vegetarianism, and eating generally. He is exploring a tension between "an animal in us" and a "higher nature" which is pure and therefore at odds with "this slimy beastly life, eating and drinking."

"BRUTE NEIGHBORS" Forget the "hermit/poet" dialogue and concentrate on the glorious descriptions of animals. Thoreau is not worried about slime vs. purity in this chapter, and the descriptions themselves have the purity and clarity of crystal.

"HOUSE WARMING" You will like this chapter if you are interested in Thoreau's cabin and how he got it ready for the winter. Though he spent two years at the lake, Thoreau presents his experience as the cycle of a single year. We are now in late autumn and into winter.

"FORMER INHABITANTS; AND WINTER VISITORS" The title explains the chapter well enough.

"WINTER ANIMALS" This chapter describes Thoreau's "brute neighbors" almost as memorably as the chapter "Brute Neighbors."

"THE POND IN WINTER" Thoreau describes the winter qualities of Walden and its ice. He also develops his concern about the bottom of Walden. Walden's bottom seems to symbolize for Thoreau the hard foundation of reality, the ultimate truth about life. Most readers agree that Thoreau believes there is such a symbolic bottom, even though it was "long lost" before he fathomed it.

"SPRING" Thoreau exults: "Walden was dead and is alive again." This chapter offers us much to think about, notably in the section where he meditates on "the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad." His observations of the thawing sand lead him to the conclusion that "this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature." It is a striking example of Thoreau's faith in universal wholeness.

"CONCLUSION" Thoreau sums up: he tells why he left the lake and what he gained from his experience there. He also has much to say about the individual and society (this chapter contains the famous "different drummer: statement), about living well, about finding the truth. And he ends with the wonderful story, one of his "wake up!" pitches, of "the strong and beautiful bug." We too can enjoy a "beautiful and winged life." But we have to be alert to the possibilities: "Only that day dawns to which we are awake."

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For Further Reading

By Henry David Thoreau

(Dates are original publication dates.)

• Journal (1906, 1992)
• The Maine Woods (1864)
• "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849)
• "Life Without Principle" (1863)
• "Slavery in Massachusetts" (1854)

About Henry David Thoreau

• Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution to Renaissance (Cambridge, 1986)
• Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography (Knopf, 1965)
• Myerson, Joel, ed., Critical Essays on Thoreau's "Walden" (Hall, 1988)
• Paul, Sherman. The Shores of America: Thoreau's Inward Exploration (Univ. of Illinois, 1958)
• The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Princeton, 1971-; ongoing project, the standard edition of Thoreau; volumes completed to date include Walden and most of the journals)

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Discussion Questions on Thoreau and Walden

1. What "American characters" -- in both the individual and the cultural senses -- do you find in Walden?
2. Consider what you knew and thought about Thoreau and his Walden experiment before starting your reading. What were your ideas, attitudes, and images relating to Thoreau and Walden?
3. And now, after your reading, how have these ideas, attitudes, and images changed?
4. What is Thoreau saying, in "Economy," about the "necessaries" of life, those things that we need to have? What are those necessary things? And what happens after one gets them? What is the next step?
5. Thoreau is a very funny writer, although you have to be alert to his humor to get it. He loves word play, such as using the same word in different contexts, which change the meaning. (For example, "It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or to the county jail". He also loves humorous comparisons, of animals to people, for example, or of his life to the lives of others. Thoreau enjoys making fun of people and social groups; nor does he spare himself. Of course, there is always a serious point lurking somewhere nearby; for example, his playful account of his "enterprises" and "business" is also a satire on the business goals that drive most Americans. His playful description in "The Bean-Field" of the sounds of the Concord guns, sharp attacks of the Mexican war. What other examples of word play, satire, humorous description, or other forms of humor, do you find?
6. What do you think of Thoreau's economics? For one thing, he regrets the division of labor which makes specialists of people and narrows their abilities and sense of life's wholeness. For another, he says, "the cost of thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it." Acting on this principle, he decides that it is cheaper for him to walk 30 miles than to spend the time to earn the money to buy a ticket to take the train the same distance. He also considers that buying a house is a waste. Is such thinking applicable in our time?
7. Do you think Thoreau misrepresents his situation at Walden Pond by not mentioning that he built his cabin, with Ralph Waldo Emerson's permission, on Emerson's land?
8. Why does Thoreau make so much of the images of dawn, sunrise, and morning? What attitudes do they carry?
9. There are many, many passages that we could profitably examine in detail, though we might not agree on what they mean. One such rather notorious passage occurs at the end of "Spring" Thoreau's reflections on a dead horse. What do you make of this passage? What is Thoreau trying to say? Do you agree with him?
10. Find a similar passage of your own, and interesting one, preferably controversial or unclear to you. Find out if the other members of the discussion group interpret it the same way you do.
11. Imagine that you met Henry Thoreau some time after the publication of Walden. What would you want to ask him? What would you want to tell him? If you want, bring him into the 21st century and tell him how the world has and has not changed since his time.
12. In your own words, how does Thoreau explain his reasons for going to Walden, and for leaving it? How does he justify his experiment? He seems to think it was successful enough. Do you agree?

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American Characters - Twain

MARK TWAIN: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

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Study Guide | For Further Reading | Discussion Questions

Study Guide (1992) for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Written by Jack Siemsen, Assistant Professor of English, Albertson College, Caldwell, Idaho

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a great American novel. It manifests this greatness on several levels -- in its extraordinary cast of fully realized characters, in its precise rendering of a child's perspective on the world, in its careful attention to the different rhythms and cadences of our regional dialects, and in its extraordinary capacity to find humor (and perhaps even hope) in a world largely populated by hypocrites, frauds, criminals, fools, preachers, judges, parents, and other sometimes well-intentioned but misguided types. But even more significant, the greatness of this novel lies in its honest attempt to survey the American landscape and to identify the salient features of our national character, both as it existed before the war, the time of Twain's story, and as it appears from the sober perspective of post-war America, when Twain actually wrote his masterpiece. Huckleberry Finn (1884) tells the story (during the 1840s) of our nation's struggle to reconcile the high ideals articulated by our founding fathers (tolerance, justice, opportunity, and freedom), with the actual behavior Twain so consistently encountered in the people of this country -- or what Twain eventually came to describe as "the damned human race."

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835 in Missouri, Mark Twain received most of his early education wandering the banks of the Mississippi River. The central meeting point for travelers moving across the continent, the river supplied the young Clemens with an endless parade of representative American characters and scenes. Migrants, revivalists, circus troupes, gamblers, con men, prostitutes, frontiersmen, missionaries, and river men regularly passed before the young boy's eyes. It is here he first formed his appreciation for the American characters who would eventually appear in his newspaper stories and later in his fiction; it was along the river and in the town of Hannibal that he heard the stories and encountered the mannerisms that shaped his imagination and awakened his desire to see the world. Years later, referring to his short time as a river boat pilot, Twain acknowledged his deep debt to the river when he remarked, "In that brief, sharp schooling, I got personally and familiarly acquainted with about all the different types of human nature....When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before -- met him on the river."

Trained as a printer, Clemens began in Hannibal working on his brother's paper (1851-53), made his way eastward working on newspapers in St. Louis, New York City, and Philadelphia, and eventually joined his brother again in the Nevada Territory. It was in Nevada; while writing sketches for local papers, that Clemens began signing his pieces Mark Twain (a riverboat term signifying two fathoms deep). Twain's first national success, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1865), launched his career and led to a long series of pieces collected during extensive travels through the West, Hawaii, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and the Holy Land. Twain eventually returned to New York, met and married his wife Olivia, and moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where he produced most of his better known work, including The Gilded Age (1873), Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1880), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894). His later years were marked by a series of financial setbacks and the deaths of a daughter, his brother, his sister Pamela, and finally his wife. Mark Twain died April 21, 1910.

In writing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain returned to the banks of the Mississippi River and the world of his childhood. There, through the character of Huck, Twain told the story of a young boy's adventures as he sought to escape the terror of his mad father and the confinements of a "proper" upbringing. Trapped between these two extremes -- the savage and the civilized -- Huck feigns his own death and is figuratively reborn during his journey with Jim down the river in search of freedom. Huck's quest for a better place, a kind of promised land free from the cruelty and oppression of St. Petersburg, forms the backdrop against which Twain dramatizes Huck's painful but hilarious initiation into the hard realities of the supposedly civilized adult world. Each time Huck leaves the natural world of the river, which functions as a kind of sanctuary for Huck and Jim, and goes ashore he is reintroduced into that adult world, as characterized by the fraud of the King and the Duke, the stupid brutality of local justice in the senseless murder of Boggs and the subsequent cowardice of the town, and the thin veneer of aristocratic culture used to mask the mindless savagery of the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons.

Huck's initiation from boy into man, from naive idealist in search of a just and humane world to a young man on the verge of despair over the cruel nature of human society, reenacts one of the quintessential American experiences. That pattern is woven into the fabric of this nation's history. It is the experience of our Pilgrim ancestors who fled the oppression of a decadent, civilized Europe in search of a new world, a better place founded upon high ideals, a "City upon a Hill," only to discover the hard realities of a New England winter and their own limitations. This experience is repeated in Henry David Thoreau's decision to move to Walden Pond in search of a new kind of life, one free from the corrosive influences of the traditional, the conventional, the socially acceptable ways of established society. But unlike Thoreau, who returns to society to tell his story, Twain's Huck rejects the civilized world of adulthood and, like so many Americans before and since, lights out for the territories in search of yet another place. That Huck will find a place commensurate with his dream of freedom and natural goodness is unlikely, for the America he is searching for is not a place but rather an idea, or an ideal, which cannot be realized on the concrete plane of human experience. Huck's willingness to continue his quest, however, is more important than its inevitable failure. For it is in the search itself that American experience is most fully embodied; it is in the expectation, not in the fulfillment, that we locate our hope and discover the will to continue.

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For Further Reading

If publication information is not given, texts are available in several editions. Dates are original publication date.

• Roughing It (1872)
• The Innocents Abroad (1869)
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
• The Mysterious Stranger (1916)
• Letters (several editions available)

About Mark Twain

• Andrews, Kenneth R. Nook Farm: Mark Twain's Hartford Circle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950.
• Branch, Edgar Marquess, et al. Mark Twain's Letters. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
• Hill, Hamlin. Mark Twain: God’s Fool (Harper & Row, 1973)
• Kaplan, Justin. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (Simon & Schuster, 1966)
• Tanner, Tony. The Reign of Wonder. (ch. 10). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
• Wagenknecht, Edward. Mark Twain: The Man and His Work. 3rd Ed. (Oklahoma, 1971)
  

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Discussion questions for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

1. Twain begins his novel with two short statements, a "Notice" threatening death to anyone who would treat his story as serious literature and an "Explanatory" note describing the care he has taken with the various dialects in the novel. What seems to be the purpose of these two, almost contradictory, signals to the reader? What conditions do they impose on the reader?
2. At the end of the novel, Jim reveals to Huck that the dead man found in the floating house was Huck's father. What possible reasons might Jim have for not revealing this fact to Huck at the time it was discovered?
3. Although the setting for the novel is just prior to the Civil War, Twain actually wrote the book after the war. How does the novel describe the various social and historical forces leading to the war?
4. Some readers regard Huck's apology to Jim in Chapter 15 as the turning point in the novel. What does Huck come to understand at this point, and how does it shape his attitude throughout the rest of the book?
5. The sunken riverboat in chapters 12 and 13 is named the Walter Scott. Why do you think Twain gave the boat that name?
6. Does Colonel Sherburn's denunciation of the mob represent Twain's opinion of people in general? If so, does this justify Sherburn's killing of Boggs?
7. The central symbol of the novel is the river. Discuss how the river functions as a structuring principle for the novel, what the river represents, and how it both facilitates and frustrates Huck's escape to freedom.
8. What are we to make of the fact that, at the end of the novel, Tom gives Jim forty dollars for the inconvenience he endured while in prison? What further is to be made of the fact that Jim "was pleased most to death" by Tom's generosity?
9. What, if anything, has Huck learned from his adventures?
10. At various points in recent history, Twain's novel has been banned. The reasons for this vary, ranging from Huck's poor manners and unsanitary habits to the portrayal of racist language and attitudes. Discuss how and why this book makes some people uncomfortable and whether or not there is any justification for withholding it from young people.
11. List the various names and identities that Huck takes on during the course of the novel. Why do you suppose he has so many?

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