American Fictions (Modern Library) - Softcover

Hardwick, Elizabeth

 
9780375754821: American Fictions (Modern Library)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0375754822 ISBN 13: 9780375754821
Verlag: Modern Library, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Fifty years of literary criticism by the acclaimed critic covers the works of Hawthorne, Dreiser, Melville, Wharton, James, Stein, Plath, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, and Cheever, among many other American authors.

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Aus dem Klappentext

s Edwin Denby, Clement Greenburg, and Pauline Kael transformed the nature of criticism in the fields of dance, art, and film, respectively, Hardwick has redefined the possibilities of the literary essay."
--The New Yorker

A brilliant tour of a century American writers, from the novels of Melville, Wharton and James to the fictions of Margaret Fuller, Sylvia Plath and Norman Mailer. Twenty-five years ago, Elizabeth Hardwick's now classic essay "Seduction and Betrayal" helped pioneer the study of women in fiction, both as writers and as characters. American Fictions gathers fro the first time Hardwick's portraits of America's greatest writers. Many of these pieces double as individual reminiscences about close friends, including Mary McCarthy, Katherine Anne Porter and Edmund Wilson. Hardwick has achieved a permanent place in American letters for her sharp and elegant style. Her

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Seduction and Betrayal

Seduction may be baneful, even tragic, but the seducer at his work is essentially comic. It is a question whether there is such a thing as seduction when the affections play a part; and yet this is a murky matter because of the way affections, even those of tenderness and concern, have a tendency to diminish and augment, to transform themselves under the influence of experience, satisfaction, or disappointment. The seducer as a type, or as an archetype, hardly touches upon any of our deep feelings unless there is some exaggeration in him, something complicated and tangled and mysteriously compelling about a nature that has come to define itself through the mere fact of sex. For the most part the word "seduction" indicates effort of a persevering, thoughtful sort. When it is successful we naturally look about for a lack of resolution and resistance in the object; guile and insistence are clever at uncovering pockets of complicity. A seduction is the very opposite of the abrupt, which is, of course, rape.

The most interesting seducers are actually rapists; for instance, Don Giovanni and Lovelace. Their whole character is trapped in the moil of domination and they drudge on, never satisfied, never resting, mythically hungry. The fact that the two characters mentioned are gentlemen gives a stinging complication to their obsessions. Ritual comes naturally to them and birth bestows rights and blurs cruelties. What we may feel is a misplaced elaboration of desire in a gentleman would be in a man of less imagination and of inferior social and personal decoration simply coarse or criminal. In the common man, excessive demand for sex is repulsive. Gentlemen merely run the risk of being ridiculous. To have in Ispagna alone, mille e tre, is a most exhausting dedication, and also quite funny.

The danger of ridicule must, in literature, be circumvented if the man is to retain force, magnetism, spirit. (Dignity is scarcely at stake, since it is the mark of a gentleman to look upon dignity as a quality given and once given the last to crumble.) When the Don in Mozart's opera is found in the first scene dragging Donna Anna about, rushing into her bedroom like a burglar, we know that he is a complete fool. ("How can I believe a nobleman guilty of such a crime?" Don Ottavio, another fool, asks.) It is only when the Don murders Donna Anna's father, the Commendatore, that he is redeemed as a character, a creation. He who was a fool has suddenly become sinister, evil, damned; the attention immediately shifts from the victim, the assaulted, sobbing woman, back to the great violator himself. The Don still does not have motive and we cannot understand his raging pursuits, yet we see how complete is his will, his defiance, how devastating his empty energy. The Don will ultimately have, in the opera, a cruel, useless courage in living out his nature to its very end.

In the waste of sensuality, boredom, compulsion, the Don never shows love or pity for the women. That we soon accept, aesthetically, as the frame of the plot of his existence; we are then free to go the next step with him. We accept that he is saved from being a fop by his equal lack of pity for himself. There is nothing self-protective in the Don. If he had called upon the favors of some higher nobility to intercede for him, he would be contemptible in every part of his nature. As it is, he is awful, trapped in his own being. His "extensive sentiments" and his "tutte quante" are a malignant growth which he, either by the charms of his character or the weakness of women, wishes to present as a caprice, a temperament, a disposition perfected by a fantast.

Donna Elvira's fascination with the Don makes her a more interesting person than Donna Anna, who is, after the murder and perhaps before, only interested in her father, a totemic figure well-dressed in stone. We do not know whether to call Donna Elvira's attraction under the name of love; perhaps, yes. She herself gives hints of some liking for exorbitance, and her love is scarcely put to the test of endurance because the Don gives her such a short tenure as his betrothed--three days in Burgos.

It is a lack in the Don that he doesn't understand the way Donna Elvira's passion for him makes him a more seductive and profound lover because she is interesting and complicated herself. It does not occur to him that she is an ornament his tawdry soul can well use. Instead he runs around in the shadows of her infatuation, inanely whispering, "poverina, poverina." But nothing indeed prepares us for his inexplicably ferocious jest in falsely reawakening Elvira's love only to pass his cloak to his lowly servant, Leporello, and command him to make love to her. The Don sinks here into the depths of coarse, personal dramaturgy. His invention has run out, his labors have exhausted his plotting imagination--and his own delight in the unworthy caper almost destroys him as a character. He would have returned to his condition of fool, if it were not that he is saved again by the indestructible romantic concentration of Donna Elvira. She is soon again pitying him, and by this eternal flaming of hers the Don is rescued from inane buffoonery and restored once more to his interestingly sinister shape.

The illicit, as R. P. Blackmur writes in his extraordinary essay on Madame Bovary, and its identification with the romantic, the beautiful, and the interesting, lies at the very center of the dramatic action in the novel form. "The more lawful the society, as we say the more bourgeois the society, the more universal is the temptation to the illicit per se, and the stronger the impulse to identify it if not with life itself at least with the beauty of life." For us now, the illicit has become a psychological rather than a moral drama. We ask ourselves how the delinquent ones feel about their seductions, adulteries, betrayals, and it is by the quality of their feelings that our moral judgments are formed. If they suffer and grieve and regret, they can be forgiven and even supported. If they boast or fall into an inner carelessness, what they are doing or have done can seem to be wrong. Love, even of the briefest span, is a powerful detergent, but "destructiveness" is a moral stain. In novelistic relations, where the pain inflicted is only upon the feelings of another person, everything is blurred. It is hard to know when rights have been exceeded or when obligations are adamantine.

In The Scarlet Letter, has Hester Prynne been betrayed by the Reverend Dimmesdale? If the matter lies only inside her own feelings, perhaps we would have to say that she is beyond betrayal. Betrayal is not what she herself feels, not the way her experience shapes itself in her mind and feelings. Love, the birth of Pearl, her illegitimate child, her prison term for adultery, her sentence to wear the letter A on her breast, the insufficient courage of her lover, Dimmesdale--what provocation, what abandonment. And yet these visitations, these
punishments, are embraced by Hester like fate. They are the revelations out of which prophecy is made, and so they come to her, not
as depressing clouds of consequence, but as opportunities for self-knowledge, for a strange and striking stardom.

Dimmesdale, on the other hand, is stunned by the illicit. It corrupts the air around him; he cannot breathe because of his sin. Thinness, pallor, trembling, wasting, heartsickness: such are the words that define his state. He feels his transgression more vividly than anything else in his life. He takes society's attitude toward his adultery with Hester and, thus outcast in his own being, he becomes the betrayed person, almost the betrayed woman. D. H. Lawrence's idea that the "greatest triumph an American woman can have is the triumph of seducing a man,...

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Verlag
Modern Library
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375754822
ISBN 13 
9780375754821
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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