25 April 2008

The Flowering of the Individual, Part I

Rise of mass individualism empowers previously muted voices

Ralph Ellison (© AP Images)

(The following article is taken from the U.S. Department of State publication, USA Literature in Brief.)

The Flowering of the Individual
By Kathryn VanSpanckeren

The Great Depression of the 1930s had virtually destroyed the American economy. World War II revived it. The United States became a major force on the world stage, and post-World War II Americans enjoyed unprecedented personal prosperity and individual freedom.

Expanded higher education and the spread of television throughout America after World War II made it possible for ordinary people to obtain information on their own and to become more sophisticated. A glut of consumer conveniences and access to large, attractive suburban houses made middle-class families more autonomous. Widespread theories of Freudian psychology emphasized the origins and the importance of the individual mind. The birth control "pill" liberated women from rigid subservience to biological norms. For the first time in human history, many ordinary people could lead vastly satisfying lives and assert their personal worth.

The rise of mass individualism – as well as the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s – empowered previously muted voices. Writers asserted their deepest inner nature, as well as personal experience, and the importance of the individual experience implied the importance of the group to which it was linked. Homosexuals, feminists, and other marginalized voices proclaimed their stories. Jewish American and black American writers found wide audiences for their variations of the American dream, or nightmare. Writers of Protestant background, such as John Cheever and John Updike, discussed the impact of postwar culture on lives like theirs. Some modern and contemporary writers are still placed within older traditions, such as realism. Some may be described as classicists, others as experimental, stylistically influenced by the ephemera of mass culture, or by philosophies such as existentialism or socialism. Many are more easily grouped according to ethnic background or region. However, on the whole, modern writers always lay claim to the worth of the individual identity.

SYLVIA PLATH (1932-1963)

Sylvia Plath lived an outwardly exemplary life, attending Smith College on scholarship, graduating first in her class, and winning a Fulbright grant to Cambridge University in England. There she met her charismatic husband-to-be, poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had two children and settled in a country house in England.

Beneath the fairy-tale success festered unresolved psychological problems evoked in her highly readable novel The Bell Jar (1963). Some of these problems were personal, while others arose from her sense of repressive attitudes toward women in the 1950s. Among these were the beliefs – shared by many women themselves – that women should not show anger or ambitiously pursue a career, and instead find fulfillment in tending their husbands and children. Professionally successful women like Plath felt that they lived a contradiction. Plath's storybook life crumbled when she and Hughes separated and she cared for the young children in a London apartment during a winter of extreme cold. Ill, isolated, and in despair, Plath worked against the clock to produce a series of stunning poems before she committed suicide by gassing herself in her kitchen. These poems were collected in the volume Ariel (1965), two years after her death. The poet Robert Lowell, who wrote the introduction, noted her poetry's rapid development from the time she had attended his poetry classes in 1958.

Plath's early poetry is well crafted and traditional, but her late poems exhibit a desperate bravura and proto-feminist cry of anguish. In "The Applicant" (1966), Plath exposes the emptiness in the current role of wife (who is reduced to an inanimate "it"):

A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook.
It can talk, talk, talk.

ALLEN GINSBERG (1926-1997)

The "Beat poets" emerged in the 1950s. The term "beat" variously suggests musical downbeats, as in jazz; angelical beatitude or blessedness; and “beat up” – tired or hurt. The Beats (beatniks) were inspired by jazz, Eastern religion, and the wandering life. These were all depicted in the famous novel by Jack Kerouac On the Road, a sensation when it was published in l957. An account of a 1947 cross-country car trip, the novel was written in three hectic weeks on a single roll of paper in what Kerouac called "spontaneous bop prose." The wild, improvisational style, hipster-mystic characters, and rejection of authority and convention fired the imaginations of young readers and helped usher in the freewheeling counterculture of the 1960s. Most of the important Beats migrated to San Francisco from America's East Coast, gaining their initial national recognition in California. The charismatic Allen Ginsberg became the group's chief spokesman. The son of a poet father and an eccentric mother committed to Communism, Ginsberg attended Columbia University, where he became fast friends with fellow students Kerouac (1922-1969) and William Burroughs (1914-1997), whose violent, nightmarish novels about the underworld of heroin addiction include The Naked Lunch (1959). These three were the nucleus of the Beat movement.

Beat poetry is oral, repetitive, and immensely effective in readings, largely because it developed out of poetry readings in "underground" clubs. Some might correctly see it as a great-grandparent of the rap music that became prevalent in the 1990s. Beat poetry was the most anti-establishment form of literature in the United States, but beneath its shocking words lies a love of country. The poetry is a cry of pain and rage at what the poets see as the loss of America's innocence and the tragic waste of its human and material resources.

Poems like Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1956) revolutionized traditional poetry.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night ...

Saul Bellow (© AP Images)

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (1911-1983)

Tennessee Williams, a native of Mississippi, was one of the more complex individuals on the American literary scene of the mid-20th century. His work focused on disturbed emotions within families – most of them southern. He was known for incantatory repetitions, a poetic southern diction, weird gothic settings, and Freudian exploration of human emotion. One of the first American writers to live openly as a homosexual, Williams explained that the longings of his tormented characters expressed their loneliness. His characters live and suffer intensely.

Williams wrote more than 20 full-length dramas, many of them autobiographical. He reached his peak relatively early in his career – in the 1940s – with The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1949). None of the works that followed over the next two decades and more reached the level of success and richness of those two pieces.

EUDORA WELTY (1909-2001)

Born in Mississippi to a well-to-do family of transplanted northerners, Eudora Welty was guided by novelists Robert Penn Warren and Katherine Anne Porter. Porter, in fact, wrote an introduction to Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green (1941). Welty modeled her nuanced work on Porter, but the younger woman was more interested in the comic and grotesque. Like fellow southern writer Flannery O'Connor, Welty often took subnormal, eccentric, or exceptional characters for subjects.

Despite violence in her work, Welty's wit was essentially humane and affirmative. Her collections of stories include The Wide Net (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), The Bride of the Innisfallen (1955), and Moon Lake (1980). Welty also wrote novels such as Delta Wedding (1946), which is focused on a plantation family in modern times, and The Optimist's Daughter (1972).

RALPH ELLISON 1914-1994

Ralph Ellison was a Midwesterner, born in Oklahoma, who studied at Tuskegee Institute in the southern United States. He had one of the strangest careers in American letters – consisting of one highly acclaimed book and little more.

The novel is Invisible Man (1952), the story of a black man who lives a subterranean existence in a cellar brightly illuminated by electricity stolen from a utility company. The book recounts his grotesque, disenchanting experiences. When he wins a scholarship to an all-black college, he is humiliated by whites; when he gets to the college, he witnesses the school's president spurning black American concerns. Life is corrupt outside college, too. For example, even religion is no consolation: A preacher turns out to be a criminal. The novel indicts society for failing to provide its citizens – black and white – with viable ideals and institutions for realizing them. It embodies a powerful racial theme because the "invisible man" is invisible not in himself but because others, blinded by prejudice, cannot see him for who he is.

SAUL BELLOW (1915-2005)

Born in Canada and raised in Chicago, Saul Bellow was of Russian-Jewish background. In college, he studied anthropology and sociology, which greatly influenced his writing. He once expressed a profound debt to the American realist novelist Theodore Dreiser for his openness to a wide range of experience and his emotional engagement with it. Highly respected, Bellow received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.

Bellow's early, somewhat grim existentialist novels include Dangling Man (1944), a Kafkaesque study of a man waiting to be drafted into the army, and The Victim (1947), about relations between Jews and Gentiles. In the 1950s, his vision became more comic: He used a series of energetic and adventurous first-person narrators in The Adventures of Augie March (1953) – the study of a Huck Finn-like urban entrepreneur who becomes a black marketeer in Europe – and in Henderson the Rain King (1959), a brilliant and exuberant serio-comic novel about a middle-aged millionaire whose unsatisfied ambitions drive him to Africa. Bellow's later works include Herzog (1964), about the troubled life of a neurotic English professor who specializes in the idea of the romantic self; Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970); Humboldt's Gift (1975); and the autobiographical The Dean's December (1982). Bellow's Seize the Day (1956) is a brilliant novella centered on a failed businessman, Tommy Wilhelm, who is so consumed by feelings of inadequacy that he becomes totally inadequate – a failure with women, jobs, machines, and the commodities market, where he loses all his money. Wilhelm is an example of the schlemiel of Jewish folklore – one to whom unlucky things inevitably happen.

JOHN CHEEVER (1915-2005)

John Cheever often has been called a “novelist of manners.” He is also known for his elegant, suggestive short stories, which scrutinize the New York business world through its effects on the businessmen, their wives, children, and friends.

A wry melancholy and never quite quenched but seemingly hopeless desire for passion or metaphysical certainty lurks in the shadows of Cheever's finely drawn, Chekhovian tales, collected in The Way Some People Live (1943), The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1958), Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1961), The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964), and The World of Apples (1973). His titles reveal his characteristic nonchalance, playfulness, and irreverence, and hint at his subject matter.

Cheever also published several novels – The Wapshot Scandal (1964), Bullet Park (1969), and Falconer (1977) – the last of which was largely autobiographical.

[Kathryn VanSpanckeren, professor of English at the University of Tampa, has lectured in American literature widely abroad, and is former director of the Fulbright-sponsored Summer Institute in American Literature for international scholars. Her publications include poetry and scholarship. She received her Bachelors degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Ph.D. from Harvard University.]