Search for Innocence in American Modernism
American Literature from its very beginning has been centered around a theme of innocence. The Puritans wrote about abandoning the corruption of Europe to find innocence in a new world. The Romantics saw innocence and power in nature and often wrote of escaping from civilization to return to nature. After the Civil War, however, the innocence of the nation is challenged. The Realists focused on the loss of innocence and in Naturalist works innocence is mostly gone. During these periods of American Literature it seems almost as if a hole was being dug, a sort of emptying of innocence, and after World War I the Modernists called this hole the wasteland Many Modernist works focus on
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Secondly, a return to innocence is almost like a return to virtue. The example of this that comes most readily to mind is the complete turn around of Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. It is remembering that the world really can be a place filled with beauty and wonder, virtue and meaning, and then acting so as to belong to that world, rather than the world of the wasteland.
What does it mean to belong to the world of the wasteland?
Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. (Eliot, 1448)
"Son of man" refers to "Ezekiel II, I" where God directs Ezekiel to stand. The inhabitants of the wasteland are fallen and unenlightened, their personalities and world fragmented. There is no love in the wasteland, only alienation. The couple in "Hills Like White Elephants" find themselves unable to communicate, as is shown by their meaningless and shallow conversations and their inability to understand one another when they do say anything meaningful. This lack of communication is also displayed in the following lines of The Wasteland:
My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are
In Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Francie Nolan and her family struggle with many economical and emotional hardships in Brooklyn in the early 1900's. Her mother, Katie, and her father, Johnny, marry and have children at an extremely young age, causing their family's fate to be doomed right from the start. Francie, the older of the two children, has her mother's hard-work ethic, and her father's sentimentality and imagination. Through Francie's fear, humiliation, compassion, sorrow, pride, and disillusionment throughout the novel, she becomes the strong, intelligent woman she is. Francie is a sum of her family's suffering and experiences. With every incident, she loses some of her innocence.
D.H Lawrence’s The Rocking Horse Winner and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies view children as easily manipulated figures. D.H. Lawrence’s short story demonstrates how easily children, Paul, can be influenced into believing that money and luck indicate one’s level of happiness. William Golding’s novel tries to show that all children are evil and have savage impulses. A common theme in both of these works is that children create their own downfall and loss of innocence.
Often, we as humans tend to separate ourselves from stories and myths. If a story is fictitious, we immediately dismiss any possibility of relating and learning from it. However, some archetypal events and themes observed in literature may be far more real than we wish to admit. The loss of innocence is one such archetype. Despite having broad definition, the effects of the loss of innocence are narrow. Commonly, an innocent or ignorant individual experiences an event or realization causing a shift towards experience and knowledge. Archetypes are present in Roman and Greek myths, and are still used today, sometimes unknowingly, in stories, songs, and poems. This is likely because it is a reflection of events in our own lives, to a certain
Themes in literary works are central, recurring ideas or messages that allow us to understand more deeply about the characters. It is a perception about life or human nature that is often shared with the reader. In The Catcher in the Rye, there are several themes that can be found in the words and actions of the narrator, Holden Caulfield. The dominating theme in this novel is the preservation of innocence, especially of children. We can see this throughout the novel, as Holden strives to preserve innocence in himself and others.
"All things truly wicked start from an innocence,” states Ernest Hemingway on his view of innocence. Innocence, what every youth possesses, is more accurately described as a state of unknowing but not ignorance- which connotation suggests a blissfully positive view of the world. Most youth are protected from the harsh realities of the adult world. Therefore they are able to maintain their state of innocence. While innocence normally wanes over time, sometimes innocence can be abruptly taken away. Some of the characters in Truman Capotes In Cold Blood lost their innocence due to the traumatic events they experienced in childhood and adulthood while some had none to begin with.
Characters lose their innocence throughout American literature. What exactly does “losing their innocence” mean? Losing one’s innocence can be seen as a character maturing. A character may lose his/her innocence in ways including the viewing of a traumatic event, especially one that will scar his/her life forever. Losing one’s innocence can also be caused by losing one’s trust in someone whom he/she once trusted, catching a glimpse into the “real world”, or performing an act of immorality. The recurring theme of loss of innocence, as seen throughout American literature and reality, can affect a person and the people around him/her both negatively and positively. As a result, the audience can see the character mature through losing hope of dreams, becoming an outcast of society, gaining a new perspective of ideas, or gaining confidence. Negative and positive effects falling onto characters as a result of a loss of innocence can be found in works such as The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, and The Hunger Games; this theme can also be seen in real life through the effects of children exposed to violent video games.
In A Separate Peace, John Knowles carries the theme of the inevitable loss of innocence throughout the entire novel. Several characters in the novel sustain both positive and negative changes, resulting from the change of the peaceful summer sessions at Devon to the reality of World War II. While some characters embrace their development through their loss of innocence, others are at war with themselves trying to preserve that innocence.
In J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye, Holden Caulfield, a seventeen-year-old boy, transitions from childhood to adulthood. The death of Holden’s little brother signifies the beginning his loss of innocence and growth of maturity. As he enters adulthood, Holden views society differently from his peers by characterizing most of his peers and adults he meets as “phonies.” Thus, Holden takes the impossible challenge of preserving the innocence in children because he wants to prevent children from experiencing the corruption in society. The Catcher In The Rye embodies Holden’s struggle to preserve the innocence of children and reveals the inevitability of and the necessity of encountering the harsh realities of life.
In today’s society people argue about whether it’s right or wrong to dress young children up in “adult looking clothes”. We produce TV shows that promote children to put on makeup, fake eyelashes and fake teeth from the ages of four all the way up to the age of twelve and even further than that age. Some of us even loved the show Toddlers and Tiaras, which celebrated phoniness and lack of innocence on and off the camera. In this show young girls were depicted as acting like older, maturer, looking young women, who compete in beauty pageants. However, during this pageant stricken era, we have to realize that young childlike innocence has vanished. Although Holden Caulfield is a fictional character, he would not stand for these kinds of
In many ways, people lose their innocence. The novel, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton’s main characters are the Socs and the Greasers. The novel shows us a lot of examples of loss of innocence between them. Also in the song, “Nothing Gold” by Stevie Wonder described the sense of innocence pretty well. In the novel and the song, we can find a lot of examples of loss of innocence which is shown through losing someone or something so special and problems people have to face.
As a child, Harper Lee’s father took part in the Scottsboro boys case as a lawyer. This event in her life inspired her to write To Kill a Mockingbird, which takes place in Maycomb, Alabama during the Great Depression. Her father, like Scout’s, was a lawyer in the case. In her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee foreshadows a loss of innocence through the significance of snow, the white camellia, and the mockingbird.
Romanticism is the mindset that the choices one makes ultimately result in the outcome of life. With every choice someone makes, they mold their life until eventually time runs out for them and the options one chooses shapes their death. An example of romanticism and how man is responsible for his actions is the article, “Death of an Innocent”. The story tells of the self-discovery/ self-reliance of Christopher McCandless. He enters the Alaskan wild with only a 10 pound bag of rice.
Innocence is blindness. To be innocent is to be unaware of important parts of a situation. When someone is innocent to a problematic situation or crisis, they do not have enough knowledge to form an opinion that could help find a solution. As a result, that person becomes problematic if they attempt to help find a solution. People are always biased to the knowledge they have, whether it is true or false, a lot or a little.
It's New York City in the 1870s, a society ruled by expectations and propriety, where a hint of immorality can bring scandal and ruin. This is an America every bit as Victorian as her contemporary England. Into this world arrives Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), a woman who has spent much of her life in Europe and is now escaping from a disastrous marriage. Her initial adult meeting with Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is sedate - he is engaged to her cousin May (Winona Ryder) - but there is a subtle fire smouldering from the first glance. From that point on, Archer's dilemma becomes painfully clear - proceed with what society deems proper and marry the rather vapid May, or allow his heart and passions to carry him far from
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton is a book that gave the word “love” many other meanings, such as impossible, meaningless and incomplete. There were many unbearable obstacles that Countess Ellen Olenska, one of the main characters, had to face because of love. She was treated badly by many people and always longed for love but never obtained it. With everyone cursing her, betraying her and hurting her, there was one person who was always there for her. Newland Archer wasn’t only sympathetic towards her; he also began to fall in love with her. The love she always wanted. He was the man who truly cared for her and always helped her make decisions. Out of all the selfish people in New York who