Discrimination and American Literature

My last post was on racism. There were some other thoughts that I wanted to bring up, but I had become rather long winded. Perhaps this post will be shorter, but I can never tell. Hopefully it is, because I am just taking a study break at the library right now.

American literature is about finding identity. From the very beginning, a significant percentage of writers and works have had that theme. A lot of this quest for identity has to do with forming a recognizable literary presence that was not overshadowed by the great writers of England. For a long time, American writing largely was seen as an imitation of English literature. Many times this was true, but a lot of the issue with creating an independent and American literary form was due to the unresolved question of who or what is an American?

Personally, I believe that the advent of the transcendentalist movement was where American literature became independent. This is why I consider Walt Whitman to be the founding father of American literature. Sure, he was preceded by Emerson and a few other transcendentalists, but Whitman was the first to really write about America in a literal and physical way. He was more than just a philosopher. He came out and defined what America should stand for.

Whitman preached a gospel of universal brotherhood. We all share a common bond. He promoted racial equality, and in the aftermath of the Civil War, he longingly wrote words to heal a wounded nation.

Whitman wrote of the beauty and humanity in everyone. He loved everyone. He wanted everyone to get along and see the positive qualities of each other. He snubbed no one, shunned no one. They all were equal to him, and they all were a part of him and his writing. He loved America, and he wanted America to love America.

Whitman was a poet who saw the divisions in the land that he loved, and I believe that was one of the driving reasons for his poetry. He tried very hard to bring everyone as equals. I do not feel I need to explain this any more, because if you read his works, this is all very clear. I just want to say that I see his pain in a divided nation, a nation that claimed freedom and equality yet turned on itself because it did not practice what it preached.

Now remember that Whitman was an early poet, from before the time that blacks were even considered fully human (yet he considered them fully human).

After Whitman, a lot of writers pop up searching for American identity as well as personal identity. There are regionalist writers who try to express the beauty of their area of the country, showing their own unique identity. This largely happened during a period after the Civil War when the country was having a hard time seeing itself as a homogenous entity. However, these displays of local flavor are what has come to define America, especially what we tend to refer to as "small town America." Here we see more of the American identity being clarified.

Entering the 1900s, a lot of American literature becomes centered on discrimination and acceptance. The Harlem Renaissance centers around the African-American and their search for equal standing in all aspects of American society. The feminist movement pops up. There are a lot of writers from ethnic minorities, gender minorities, sexual minorities, etc. Each of them wants to write their page in the history of America, to paint there picture on the canvas of American identity just like the regionalists before them.

African-Americans struggle against the superiority complex of the dominant whites. Gays and lesbians seek amnesty in a straight culture. Native Americans will not sit by and be ignored and undervalued any more. Mexican-Americans want to show that they are talented at more than just grunt work. Outspoken poets cry out for freedom and equality. The underprivileged and underrepresented strive to show the world that they are just as good as everyone else.

This is the story of modern American literature, and it all started way back with Walt Whitman. So many authors drew inspiration as well as courage from him. Take a survey class in American literature, and more than likely you will be just as apalled by the inequality as I am. History classes will try to make it all look like we are being progressive, but the truth is that no matter what we do or how we change, we always seem to be mistreating some minority somehow.