REGENERATING THE AMERICAN SOUL. WATER AND THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE
Panel Chairs :
Ramón Espejo Romero (Universidad de Sevilla)
Alfonso Ceballos Muñoz (Universidad de Cádiz)
During the scene at the forest between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter , a murmur of water accompanies them. It is the brook which Pearl refuses to cross in order to join her mother until the latter has placed the scarlet letter back on her bosom. Meanwhile, Hiawatha, in H. W. Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha , constructed a canoe which pretty much symbolized his own self, and with it sailed down the river of life. Another river, the East River, which separates Manhattan from Brooklyn, served the poetic persona in Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" as the ideal setting for a complex reflection upon time, immortality and artistic creation. Nantucket, the old New England whaling port, was used in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as a metaphor of the self-reliant man, so deeply into the sea, a Transcendentalist haven of individualism, that clams are said to adhere to the furniture inside houses. Ishmael, the most untypical of sailors and the only one who survived the maelstrom in which the rest of the crew of the Pequod perished, starts the novel hinting at the fascination which bodies of water, large or small, have always exercised upon men. It was the very fascination which took Thoreau to qualify his morning baths in Walden pond as "religious exercises" and to insist ever so much on the purity of such a pond.
The above are only examples of the significant role of water for the writers of the American Renaissance. We could regard such a period as the baptism of American literature, a rite implying water and purification at once. The American Renaissance was, among other things, a search for purity and spiritual renewal at a time when old values were regarded as inadequate and new ones (unbounded faith in material and technological progress) as unacceptable. Water thus becomes the perfect physical embodiment of such mental attitudes. This panel invites scholars to delve into the different aspects involved in the used of water by writers connected with the American Renaissance, whether the most practical, as the nearly ecological concern which Thoreau felt about the environmental consequences of draining Walden, or the more specifically literary ones, such as the complex symbolic role played by the sea in Melville's Moby-Dick .
Suggested topics:
- What is the role of bodies of inland water (rivers, lakes, ponds) in the literature of the American Renaissance?
- What kinds of water symbolism do we find in the literature of this period and how is its language colored by water?
-Are the writers of the American Renaissance concerned over the uses of water and the beginnings of the overexploitation of water resources?
- What was the role of waterways in major historical trends of the period (westward expansion, the displacement of Native Americans, the controversy over slavery and fugitive slaves, the establishment of new cities near bodies of water)?
- What was the way in which Americans were defining themselves in relation to the sea, both at a national level and an individual one? Connected with this, what was the state of transatlantic relations and with Europe in particular?
- Was water and the human body a connection frequently exploited by these writers?