History, Literature and New Historicism

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History, Literature and New Historicism

• By using Concept Map and two Examples

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Outline

• Concept Map
• Marked with D by Toni Harrison
• Young Goodman Brown

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Concept Map Draft
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Concept Map Draft (2)
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Toni Harrison (1937-)

• Always uses rhyme like to use puns and silence,
  too.
• Born to a working-class family in Leeds, UK. His
  father, Harry, is a baker, and his mother,
  Florence Horner Harrison, a housewife.
• Two elements that separate him from his family
• Goes to an elite school in 1948
• Becoming a poet

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Marked with D1

• When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an
  oven
• Not unlike those he fuelled all his life,
• I thought of his cataracts ablaze with Heaven
• And radiant with the sight of his dead wife,
• Light streaming from his mouth to shape her name,
  
• not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie. 2
  
• I thought how his cold tongue burst into flame
• But only literally, which makes me sorry,
• Sorry for his sake theres no Heaven to reach.
• I get it all from Earth my daily bread 3
• But he hungered for release from mortal speech
• That kept him down, the tongue that weighed him
  down.

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Marked with D (2)

• The bakers man that no one will see rise 4
• And England made to feel like some dull oaf
• Is smoke, enough to sting one persons eyes
• And ash (not unlike flour) for one small loaf.
• Note
• 1 D means dough, how a baker is marked by his
  products. See the next page for the original
  nursery rhyme.
• 2 Florrie, an intimate term of address for his
  wife.
• 3 A variation of the Lords Prayer.
• 4 rise 1) to rise to heaven, 2) rise with
  yeast.

See how 1) the red rhyming words imply ironies
and constraints in a workers life 2) the blue
words, spaces for resistance by the speaker or
the workers themselves.
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The nursery rhyme

• Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man! Bake me a
  cake just as fast as you can.
• Pat it and prick it and mark it with "B."Put it
  in the oven for baby and me,
• For baby and me, for baby and me.
• (a Flash version)
• Merry and lively as it is, this rhyme supports to
  bourgeois ideology of taking the working classs
  labor for granted.

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Questions

• Textbook Chapter 2 p. 247
• Is the culture described in this poem similar to
  ours?
• How is our reading of this poem shaped by our
  history, and our class? (e.g. Ariel, who can
  flame magically Richard, who goes to Heaven to
  join Elise?)

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Young Goodman Brown

• 1. Traditionally has been read as an examination
  of crises of faith, morality, and/or
  psychosexuality (the visit to the forest as a
  sexual experience).

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Young Goodman Brown

• 2. New Historicist grounds the story in the late
  17th- and early 18th-century documents about
  witchcraft to which Hawthorne had access.
• (Ref. textbook 251 The puritans 1) escaped
  oppression for religious freedom 2) hated
  gaiety, parties, beautiful clothes, and alcoholic
  beverages. ? proved to be wrong by contemporary
  historians.)
• ? The documents from which Hawthorne worked,
  especially those involving how you tell a saint
  from a witch or any other sinner, limit the scope
  of Hawthorne's investigation into Brown's (or his
  own) psyche to that made possible by the language
  and content of the Puritan documents.

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Young Goodman Brown

• 3. Cultural Materialist reading of Gender
  construction and transgression
• 1830s was a critical decade of change. Young
  Goodman Brown, probably written no earlier than
  the initial years of the decade and published
  anonymously in 1835, chronicles Hawthorne's
  observations about the anxieties caused by such
  discrepancies between ideology and behavior
  (Kiel)

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Views of Women

• Puritans -- feared that love of spouse could
  rival and interfere with love of Christ. Heritage
  of Her Own, ed. Nancy F. Cott and

• women, thought to be morally superior to men,
  were entrusted with preparing children for
  Christian salvation.
• Passion-less Sexless

• both periods sometimes confuse sex with
• going to the devil
• 2. the nineteenth-century ideology of separate
  spheres
• 3. clear boundaries between male/female,
• public/private, and work/home were blurred

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Questions

• Textbook Chapter 2 p. 247
• How is the story to be compared with Rip Van
  Winkle?

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References

• Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown' Early
  Nineteenth-Century and Puritan Constructions of
  Gender James C. Keil. The New England
  Quarterly, Vol. LXIX, No. 1, March, 1996, pp.
  33-55. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism, Vol.
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