Home and homelessness in the American imaginatio

This dissertation examines the themes of home and homelessness in the American imagination by focusing on literature as an expression of a cultural psychology. Beginning with an analysis of the Puritan frontier imagination, which initiated a cultural psychology characterized by the search for home, it is suggested that early in American cultural history home creation became associated with self-creation, because for the Puritans the transformation of the wilderness meant the fulfillment of their role as chosen redeemers.;An exploration of the archetypal figure of the self-made man as he is represented by Franklin, Emerson, Jay Gatsby and Willy Loman suggests that the Puritan mission to create the New Jerusalem became a Secularized psychology that treats the self as a frontier to be conquered by the individual will. While Franklin and Emerson reflect the optimism of this quest, Gatsby and Loman dramatize the tragic attempt to make a home by relying solely on a psychology of self-creation where homelessness ironically appears as home.;An interpretation of four short stories by Hawthorne develops this tragic attempt by suggesting that the American soul's search for home, while a necessity, nonetheless remains an insoluble problems. Hawthorne's characters ardently search for home, revealing the American soul's deep desire for a homecoming, but they act out this search pathologically. For Hawthorne, the frontier of the self opens into a dark landscape which reveals the shadow side of the self-made man, who becomes in Hawthorne's stories a lost, wandering, homeless soul unable to negotiate a return home or the departure from an imprisoning home.;The conclusion mentions that home is central to the formation of the American identity. The special challenge of the American imagination has been to imagine a homecoming for the soul, but the psychology that evolved out of secular Puritanism reveals that homelessness characterizes much of the cultural psychology of America.