Tahir, America!

I learned many things this stimulating semester, but these can be condensed into ten of the most enlightening. Concerning American literature, I learned that Hawthorne is actually a great author. In high school, I despised this man, and abhorred The Scarlett Letter so much so that I did not read it through till the end, and passed that test on my own wits. But his short stories were my favorite of the whole semester! Interesting to see how my outlook on Hawthorne has changed so drastically. I also learned that Alcott wrote under a pseudonym, and that the name she used was a man's. I didn't think that women had to fear rejection by the public in her time, but I suppose they still did so since she employed the use of a pseudonym. I learned that the Gothic movement, if it can be called that, arose in response to the replacement of the Enlightenment's rational, orderly world-view with the shaky and suspicious universe that came into being during the late eighteenth century. I also learned that Thoreau's mother did his laundry every weekend when he lived in supposed seclusion at Walden, and that apparently this was normal for men of this time period. That is suprising. Have men always been babied? Perhaps the most important thing I learned was that guilt is something that is completely different from remorse, and how to differentiate between the two feelings. Both of these feelings produce different types of works of literature.
One of the things I learned about America was how big of an impact the Puritans actually made on our nation, and how the repercussions of their way of thinking can even be seen today. I didn't think they were so important to our nation's history, besides signing the Mayflower Compact. I learned that Benjamin Franklin was perhaps our country's first "rational man," and that his method of viewing the world has shaped our identity as well. To my shock, Walt Whitman was arrested for homosexual tendencies in New Orleans, one of the most homosexual cities in the world; I suppose people couldn't flaunt their sexuality as openly back then as they do now. That is strange to me since I've always thought New Orleans was a racy, liberal city. I learned that the early American people feared nature and viewed it as dark, and that gradually this changed to a love of the wild that can be seen in later works by Thoreau and Whitman. I learned that Moby Dick is one of the best books ever and that we all should read it one day.
How has my perspective changed? I used to sort of believe that American literature wasn't up to par with, say, European literature, but this is most definitely not the case. That was a foolish, half-formed notion in my mind that I'm glad has faded away. I suppose I appreciate America more. For though some of the Puritan way of thinking is still seen in our conscious today, we have still changed so much from their era. We will constantly keep on changing and forming new identities, which I find reassuring, since the way we are viewing the world right now is causing nothing but problems for everyone.