6+5 of study guide

  • Chapter 9 is "The Leech" (99). The purpose of this title is to symbolize Chillingworth. He has an evil, mysterious, and dark side to him, like a blood-sucking leech. 


Similes

  • In Chapter 10 Chillingworth actions towards Dimmesdale, "He now dug into the poor clergyman's heart, like a miner searching for gold . . . like a sexton delving into a grave" (Hawthorne 103). This demonstrates Chillingworth's desperation to find out if Dimmesdale is the adulterer.

  • The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp.

Romanticism 1800-1860

  • Valued feelings, intuition, idealism and inductive reasoning

  • Placed faith in inner experience and the power of the imagination

  • Went looking for and wrote about unspoiled nature as a path to spirituality

Prominent authors included:

  • Washington Irving – Rip Van Winkle, Legend of Sleepy Hallow

  • Emily Dickinson – poet “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”

  • Edgar Allan Poe – The Fall of the House of Usher

  • Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter

  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – poet “A Psalm of Life,” “Tide Rises, Tide Falls”

Transcendentalism (aka – The American Renaissance) 1840-1860

  • Everything in the world, including human beings, is a reflection of the Divine Soul

  • People can use their intuition to behold God’s spirit revealed in nature or in their own souls

  • Self-reliance and individualism must outweigh external authority and we shouldn’t conform to that which is around us

Prominent authors included:

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson (from Nature)

  • Henry David Thoreau (Walden, Life in the Woods/from Walden and from Civil-Disobedience)

Realism (1850-1900)

  • Civil War times

  • Feelings of disillusionment 

  • Common subjects included rapidly growing cities, factories replacing farmlands, poor factory workers, corrupt politicians.

  • Authors wrote about everyday life and ordinary people as realistically as possible, less about plot and more about the characters

Prominent authors included:

  • Ambrose Bierce (“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”)

  • Kate Chopin (“A Pair of Silk Stockings”)

Notable works

  • Spirituals (“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Go Down Moses”)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 “A Psalm of Life”

  • “A Psalm of Life,” was written after Longfellow’s wife and unborn child died.

  • Summary - The poem is meant to be an inspiration for Longfellow and others to overcome the misfortune of the past and to live in the present - do something with your life. Instead of being filled with grief and sorrow, live enthusiastically, take action, and leave your mark on the world.

  • Theme – Life and hope, seize the day, live in the here and now.

“Tide Rises, Tide Falls”

  • Summary - tells the tale of a “traveler” who arrives at a shore, hurries to a nearby town, and never returns the way they came. The poem can be read as an extended metaphor for the reason behind human life and the mystery of death—something the poem presents as inevitable, and final (everyone dies – it’s one of the few guarantees in life)

  • Life is short. The repetition of the "the tide rises, the tide falls" expresses the poems theme because of the continuous motion of the sea continuously wiping away the past.

  • The mood is sad and somber because it’s ultimately about death.

  • The tide is a metaphor for the renewal of life as well as the loss of life

Ralph Waldo Emerson

He was the first major American literary and intellectual figure to widely explore, write seriously about, and seek to broaden the domestic audience for Asian and Middle Eastern works, giving many their first exposure to non-Western culture.

from Nature

  • Nature expresses Emerson's belief that each individual must develop a personal understanding of the universe. Emerson makes clear in the Introduction that men should break away from reliance on secondhand information, upon the wisdom of the past, upon inherited and institutionalized knowledge.

  • Theme - lose yourself in nature! It is only by, in Emerson's words, becoming a "transparent eye-ball" in the forest that we can really understand anything at all.

  • Main idea in the first part – we get excited by things in nature, like shining stars, they surround us, but it doesn’t mean we can reach out and touch them to get a better look. This is not only true of the stars, nature surrounds us everywhere, but it also seems distant and inaccessible.

Henry David Thoreau

He was good friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and saw him as a mentor. After leaving Walden, Thoreau even lived in the Emerson house, taking care of his family while Emerson was in Europe building his writing career.

from Walden

  • Life in the Woods/from Walden was inspired from Thoreau’s own two-year adventure of living in a small cabin near Walden Pond on Emerson’s eleven acres.

  • While inspired by his time, there were differences, Thoreau spent two-years in “solitude” while in Walden the narrator only spends one year. Walden discusses what Thoreau experiences as well as his thoughts on the meaning of life (the theme of the piece).

  • Another theme is self-reliance, and simplicity over “Progress.”

  • Thoreau set out to contemplate life and to find out man's role in the world.

  • Thoreau’s house when he first moves in is unfinished, without insulation or inside walls that would provide protection from New England’s harsh winters

from Civil-Disobedience

  • Thoreau's basic premise is that a higher law than civil law demands the obedience of the individual. Human law and government are subordinate. In cases where the two are at odds with one another, the individual must follow his conscience and, if necessary, disregard human law.

  • The government must end its unjust actions to earn the right to collect taxes from its citizens. As long as the government commits unjust actions, he continued, conscientious