The Song Of Hiawatha And The Construction Of American National Literature

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was once a household name in nineteenth-century America, and also the first American poet who enjoyed the international reputation because of his great contribution to American national literature. This scholarly poet devoted his entire life to the construction of American national literature, not only by consciously establishing the theoretical stance of American national literature, but also by translating numerous poems from ten different European languages with his gifted language ability, which had laid a foundation for the renovation of American literature in accordance with the European literary tradition. His world-famous piece The Song of Hiawatha is a classic work which perfectly integrated the localization of both the subject matter and the artistic form, and deserved to be called a gem of American national literature in the nineteenth century.After the Independent War, American national pride eagerly called for an American national literature distinguished from British one. But at that time American writers confronted with many problems in the development of American literature itself. First, was American language able to express a kind of American literature which was totally different from British one? Second, nationality was the crucial element of national literature, while the nationality of American literature firstly depended upon the localization of literary subject matters. In this aspect, American writers were faced with challenges and difficulties. Washington Irving once noticed, not without regret, that what American writers need was the creating materials with American features, and James Fenimore Cooper was also caught in the embarrassment and self inferiority because American writers dealt with fewer local subjects than their British fellows. In the discussion of how to build up American national literature, insightful intellects led by Walt Channing advocated an attractive opinion that it could be a solution to turn to Indian oral literary traditions to construct the American national literature. During the chaos of controversies, some writers just silently cultivated in the literary field with ambitions in mind. By 1820s, Irving and Cooper had already earned worldwide reputation for American literature. However, it was not difficult for us to find that the shadow of British literature had been casting upon American literature. This predicament encountered by American literature was not partially relieved until the publication of Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha in 1855.Longfellow maintained that only by combining splendid elements in European literary traditions with American literary elements themselves harmoniously could America manage to establish an independent American literary tradition to surpass that of Britain. Aiming to achieve this goal, Longfellow translated a vast number of European poems. Thus, he built up a platform of European poetry that American poets could refer to. In addition, Longfellow spared no effort to promote the notion of cultivating international cultural horizons to more and more American authors. Among all the successors, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were no doubt the most extraordinary, because of whom this notion was inherited by far more American writers as a long-lived lighthouse in the long journey of creating American national literature tradition. In his commencement speech "Native writers in our country" he put forward a visionary idea of creating American national literature by adopting Indian subjects. While in another essay titled "Literary spirits of our country", Longfellow thought about American national literature in a much deeper way. According to Longfellow, the unique natural conditions make it possible for America to develop its own national literature. His claim for subject localization represents the opinions of literary nationalists in the long post-Revolution period. Besides, those works written by Cooper, Parkman and Longfellow which had gained huge success turned out to prove that subject localization was the only way to construct American national literature. Longfellow's theoretical appeal and creating consciousness, undoubtedly arises from his strong sense of mission to set up American national literature.According to The Cambridge History of American Literature, Longfellow was confronted with some problems regarding language genealogy when constructing American national literature, whose solutions involved aspects of language and history. However, The Song of Hiawatha perfectly connected these two fields. That was to say, with respect to language, The Song of Hiawatha employed some Indian vocabulary; while as for history The Song of Hiawatha adopted Indian materials, even though, the aspects mentioned above can't fully cover all the values that The Song of Hiawatha has during the process of American national literature development. In reality, this work made vital contributions to the poetry of American national literature, especially in thematic and artistic localization.The writing materials of The Song of Hiawatha was originally drawn from famous works written by American historian Henry R. Schoolcraft in nineteenth century, namely History and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (1851-1857) and Algic Researches (1839). Based on Schoolcraft's research on Indian culture and his collection of Indian myths and legends, Longfellow represented the five great achievements of Indian civilization, by portraying Hiawatha, the hero of Indian culture as the main character, and panoramically displayed various aspects in Indian culture, including Indian religions, courtesies and values. According to the interpretation of The Song of Hiawatha by Ojibwa Indians, it was certain that this piece of work made undeniable contributions to the preservation of Indian civilization in English. The important value of Indian culture to The Song of Hiawatha was that it lent it the original and unique writing material. The Indian subjects endowed The Song of Hiawatha with a local feature, which suggested that Indian culture was a special resource of American national literature.Though it was a monumental epitaph of Indians, The Song of Hiawatha had its own deficiencies. At the end of the poem, Longfellow arranged those characters to accept the instructions from Christian missionaries and reached an agreement with those colonists landing on the new continent. We understand that this shortcoming is more than Longfellow's personal prejudice. In America, writers were strongly dominated by the ideology of the Whites, either the white writers during the colonial period, or James Fenimore Cooper who rose to fame in 1820s for his The Leatherstocking Tales series, or even the authors after 1850s like Mark Twain, Ernest Miller Hemingway, and William Faulkner. On the issue of how to treat the Indians, they shared the same position. Though they were writers, they were whites in the first place. Under the control of cultural filtering mechanism in America, Longfellow modified those Indians as the weak who yielded to the white willingly. Serving as a representative speaker for Indian history, Longfellow made full use of his freedom to write about Indian history selectively. American white writers tended to treat Indians in dual attitudes, and scholars like Longfellow who was equipped with an international cultural perspective couldn't overcome his identity limitation as an American white. In other words, his poems inevitably indicated the Indian controversy appearing in American literature.In the aspect of poetic artistry, truly as The Cambridge History of American Literature puts it, the Indian vocabulary successfully resolved the language problems that puzzled Longfellow. But, from our perspective, what really made The Song of Hiawatha differentiate from British poems was more than that. It mainly lied in Longfellow's creative employment of oral traditions in Indian and European literatures, as well as the myths and legends of Indians. He not only transplanted and reconstructed the characters in Indian myths and legends, but also learned from the Indian art of narration, including the emergence of narrator, super narrative structure, linear narrative sequence, three-twist repetition, triangular relationship between characters and the timing of the legends, etc. Referring to the way Homeric Epics and Klevala structured the plot, Longfellow arranged the "N-shaped" (tortuous) life experience to be the specific clue throughout the poem, and integrated the twenty-two independent narrative sections into an organized body. Uniquely and technically, Longfellow merged Indian terms and the quotations from European epic together perfectly, and created a series of patterns and pattern systems, and consequently innovated the language of English poetry. In terms of form, the most outstanding trait of The Song of Hiawatha was its parallel structure. As for us, we believe that the criticism towards Longfellow from critics in nineteenth century was flimsy. The critics accused him of plagiarizing the parallel syntax of Klevala. But the researches demonstrated that Longfellow was exposed to many aspects of influence, such as the parallel structures of Biblical hymns and Homeric Epics. However, what actually struck a chord in him was likely to be the parallel structure which constantly appeared in Klevala and Indian poems. The parallel structure was the fundamental form of the oral literature, and a number of parallel structures were undoubtedly an indispensible factor that contributed to the uniqueness of the form of The Song of Hiawatha. Deeply rooted in The Song of Hiawatha, the oral traditional factor of Indian and European literature made the poem blossom dazzlingly and thus realized the localization of poetic artistry, which totally refreshed the readers who were accustomed to read British and British American poems. Therefore, it is an important method for Longfellow to borrow creatively from the oral traditions of Indian and European literature in order to endow his poem an authentic sense of America.American literature is a historical concept. Considering the process of the construction of this concept and the development of American literature itself, American literature is a notion with strong epochal character. It is also an idea with mammoth controversy. As is perfectly proved by T. S. Eliot, the localization of American literature is a historical process, and the attitude towards the native characteristic of American literature varies from generation to generation. As far as we are concerned, it is of no use to attempt to find a fully satisfactory definition for American literature. Instead, evaluating the changing character of American literature dynamically in the stream of time and history will be a wiser alternative. In T. S. Eliot's opinion, the sense of America is always variable, thus the local character of American literature is also changing with the time. The national character of later era replaces that of the earlier era. From Cooper to Twain, the sense of nationality in American national literature experienced vast changes, which first manifested in the change of subjects. In the ages of Cooper and Longfellow, subjects related to Indians were always embraced by American writers for national literature. However, when the American Civil War broke out, the Indian issues silently gave way to the Black issues, rising to become the primary concern of Americans. Accordingly, in the field of American national literature, subjects of the Black took the place of those of Indians. Longfellow committed himself to the construction of American literature in response to his era, and definitely made extraordinary contributions to it. The masterpiece The Song of Hiawatha, by Longfellow with a strong ambition and enthusiasm, undeniably deserved to be regarded as the gem of the American national literature in nineteenth century. This poem intensively displayed Longfellow's ideal about how to establish American national literature. That was to integrate European literary traditions with native literary elements of American. Only by drawing materials from America itself could authors create works rich in American features. This notion was inherited by American writers from generation to generation, and greatly benefited those who absorbed it. In summary, Longfellow's contribution to American national literature not only lay in the actual compositions, but also in the macroscopic strategies.Americans have been long frustrated by the deeply-rooted cultural inferiority since the Independent War. What Longfellow brought to Americans is pride upon pride by his diligent and persistent creation, upgrading achievements, artistic techniques that go beyond British poets and worldwide reputation. The late-coming cultural confidence was of great importance to the Americans who were striving to build an independent American culture. Longfellow's contributions to American literature and even American civilization endured the trial of time. Although Longfellow has been embarrassingly neglected in contemporary American academia, the conscience of literature will by no means allow the oblivion of such an eminent poet who once made prominent dedications to the establishment of American national literature.