The role in Nature in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Devil and Tom Walker”

Dark Nature (Tom)—swamp—black woodsman

Pleasant? (Rip)—forest/mountains—dwarves/Hudson/Dutchmen

Nature as Other world—in opposition to the human world/civilization

Nature as projection of main character/protagonist? 

Change in ideology from the Puritanical fear of natural world as “devil’s playground” and “howling wilderness”  pagan/scary/in need of “taming” or “spiritual cleansing”

The world/nature is fallen—original sin—lion eats the lamb

Edward Hicks “Peaceable Kingdom” – new view of American land as place where humans and natural world will be reconciled in freedom and liberty

Puritans view natural world as fallen valley of tears, howling wilderness, material world dominated by Satan (Native Americans are savage, not Christian, not saved, children of the devil)

Antagonistic tradition in American thought between the human and natural worlds

This ideology is starting to come unraveled as a result of Romantic “revolution” in which Nature becomes a outward sign of universal spirit that “moves through all thinking things/all objects of all thought and rolls through all things” (Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”)—urban technological society (Industrial Revolution which moved the folk from peasants to proletarians) is dehumanizing humankind—need to seek union with nature to regain sense of spirit and humanity

Tom Walker’s nature is still that scary place the pilgrims hated and feared

Rip’s nature is a refuge, escape from a disordered, materialistic world that dehumanizes and when he returns, he comes back to a kindler, gentler civilization (that is “free” as Natural beings should be—the natural philosophy implicit in the “Declaration of Independence”—“all men created free”—endowed by “Nature’s God” with “certain inalienable rights”)

Jennie A. Brownscombe “The First Thanksgiving in Plymouth” (1914)

Pious pilgrims reproducing civilization in wilderness—tablecloth—Native Americans at end of the table or naked sitting on ground (new to them)

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Puritan Dilemma—burden of repression/narrow-mindedness/election vs damnation/unknowable God

Repression—focus on the taboo (breast exposure madness?)—drugs, alcohol, prostitution, gambling—pleasures are dangerous (pleasure as pleasure is unacceptable) (horror movies sex scenes—primordial repression)

Calvinism—religious doctrine based upon predestination (God has determined from before time who will be saved and damned—the elect and the reprobate)

Punitive society—prison planet—lock people up—

“The Minister’s Black Veil”

Twice-Told Tales—popular oral legends, stories that Hawthorne is retelling in elite literary from

Episodes

I.                   Introduction of Minister with black veil outside church (as described by sexton, et al)

II.                 Sermon and post-sermon discussion by husband and wife

III.              Funeral—vision of Minister walking with dead woman

IV.             Wedding—Minister runs out of ceremony—Earth too had on its black veil (natural world as material/nonspiritual—Puritanic dichotomy of Nature and Spirit)

V.                Reaction of Town (boy’s trick, communal dread, let’s do something about this

VI.             Meeting with Elizabeth (doesn’t go well)

VII.           Time Passes—continues to wear creepy veil no one wants to discuss with him

VIII.        Death Scene—we expect to see face revealed, but don’t get it