Acculturation/Self/Otherness: Immigrant echoes in American literature

Contemporary American literary studies often emphasize the works of modern immigrant and minority writers to the exclusion of earlier American authors. These writers focus narrative attention on the definition of Self in terms of Other. Their voices tell of the conflicts surrounding immigration and acculturation, which infuses the prose with associated tension and ambiguity. In Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez writes about feelings of otherness that he experienced while growing up as second-generation Mexican American. In The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston relates her feelings of otherness through the "talk-story," an ancient Chinese form. By viewing Hunger of Memory and The Woman Warrior as contemporary examples of conflicts associated with acculturation, Self, and otherness, coupled with Andrew Delbanco's and Werner Sollors's theories about American culture, this study explores the writing of four American writers: Gershom Bulkeley, Cotton Mather, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James.;The study first examines the writings of Gershom Bulkeley, a second-generation Puritan who meshes allegiance and religion within a patriarchal framework and lays bare the elements of conflict and otherness found throughout American literature. It next considers Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, through which Mather, a third-generation American, becomes an active participant in the immigration process. The study then explores the interconnectedness of Self, otherness, and American identity in its discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Finally, it investigates Henry James's The Golden Bowl, a novel in which his American characters in Europe subsume and reformulate the Self in terms of New World otherness while reversing the direction of travel.;The retelling of similar experiences by divergent writers reiterates a fundamental fact about American literature. The expression of American cultural identity emerges from immigration and its vestiges which recur symbolically across generations. For this reason we must look to core American writers, learn from their prose, and include their works in the study of the acculturative experience.