BR

I am reading The Blithedale Romance with my juniors and seniors
this semester. Coverdale narrates as if he is intoxicated with wine
throughout the novel. We cannot trust his version of the tale. This
is my favorite book with many beautiful and impressive scenes in
each chapter. The whole novel is full of verbal tableaux vivants.

Tom's beautiful book from New England

A beautiful gift came from Maine. Tom's first book Wallace Nutting and
the Invention of Old America (Yale UP) arrived from the U.S. I am so
proud of my friend who wrote such a beautiful art-history book!

Henry James, THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

"He was certainly fastidious and critical; he was probably irritable. His sensibility had governed him -- possibly governed him too much; it had made him impatient of vulgar troubles and had led him to live by himself, in a sorted, sifted, arranged world, thinking about art and beauty and history. He had consulted his taste in everything -- his taste alone perhaps, as a sick man consciously incurable consults at last only his lawyer; that was what made him so different from every one else." (Vol. I, XXIV) This was how Isabel fell into the labyrinth of beauty and love cautiously schemed by Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond. Reading James is like following the entangled web of densely layered languages. The text is so finely woven.

The Divinity School Library

The Divinity School Archives hold a good Unitarian collection. I spent this afternoon going through William Ellery Channing papers. It was amusing to look at his letters to Elizabeth Parmer Peabody. -- Most of his letters are short. E. P. P must have sent many long letters to the minister she adored.

Daughters of The Puritans

Louisa May Alcott
Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli
Dorothy Lynde Dix
Mary Lowell Ware
Lydia Maria Child










Seth Curtis Beach, Daughters of the Puritans (Cambridge, U. S. A.: The Universty Press, 1905).






It is such a quaint book with a beautiful cover as it's shown on the photo. Curtis includes the following writers as the "daughters of the Puritans": Catharine Maria Sedgwick, 1789-1867; Mary Lovell Ware, 1798-1849; Lydia Maria Child, 1802-1880; Dorothea Lynde Dix, 1802-1887; Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 1810-1850; Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1811-1896; Louisa May Alcott, 1832-1888.






Catharine Maria Sedwick

Hilda and Miriam

Students in my class, young and pretty, look definitely like Hilda, the spotless dove-like white heroine in The Marble Faun. Many of them, however, detest this frail passive New England girl and prefer Miriam, the enigmatic dark heroine. They don't like the plot that the saintly dove on the Virgin's Tower ended up as the "household saint" in Kenyon's and her fireside back in New England. They say, "She never learned anything even after spending precious time overseas." The last presenter concluded that Miriam and Donatello were the couple in pursuit of truth, whereas Hilda and Kenyon were just realistic and conventional. She said the latter two never got into the domain of truth because Hilda did not admit or never committed "sin" and prevented Kenyon to think deep. If American "innocence" was one of the themes of the text, this innocence, in fact, could mean "ignorance." Two New Englanders went back to America to start a "home" leaving their artistic energies as well as a romantic idealistic pursuite of truth behind in Europe. -- What a fantastic cultural critic Hawthorne was! Was America such a prosaic place without romantic elements in his time? It probably was so at least for Hawtohrne -- it is ironic Hawthorne never was able to regain his artistic energy back to complete another work after he went back to US from Europe.

We 'll read another book on the similar theme, "Americans in Italy," The Portrait of a Lady in the fall semester. James certainly was fascinated with Hawthorne's white heroine (dove). Isabel Archer is a bookish girl and isn't afraid of looking into "blackness" in spite of her dove quality. It will be interesting to see how James develops the white heroine in his novel.

I have a wonderful group of sutdents this year in my seminar.

Miriam's pessimistic worldview in The Marble Faun

"The chasm was merely one of the orifices of that pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere. The firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm. A footstep, a little heavier than ordinary, will serve and we must step very daintily, not to break through the crust, at any moment. " (The Marble Faun, XVIII)
So Miriam says. If one's present happiness in any sort is made up with such a "thin crust," we really need to be careful to handle. You don't want your loved ones to leave you without telling you any words. -- We'll finish reading this text tomorrow in my class. Let's see how the final presentation and discussion go.

The Marble Faun

"Sin has educated Donatello, and elevated him. Is sin, then -- which we deem such a dreadful blackness in the Universe -- is it, like Sorrow, merely an element of human education, through which we struggle to a higher and purer state than we could otherwise have attained. Did Adam fall, that we might ultimately rise to a far loftier Paradise than his?" (Hawhthorne, The Marble Faun) This is a problematic comment on the theme of the Fortunate fall stated by Kenyon, one of the four protagonists in the novel. I enjoy such discussions in this novel on romantic unions of two young couples in an Italian setting. I find the work intellectually involving.