well, and religious commitment has played a major
role in this issue.
Identity as a product of one’s relationship with
the Almighty aside, temporal matters persist nev-
ertheless. As geography, racial identity, and religious
fervor organized cultures into nation states that
legitimized themselves across Europe, people began
to focus on their immediate surroundings in order
to establish a more stable sense of self. Enter Wil-
liam Shakespeare, whose examination of British
(and greater European) court life in many of his
plays closely inspects not merely how we have come
to occupy our places in society, but the economic,
political, cultural, and social repercussions of the
manner in which we have arranged ourselves. That
is, the army of Rome or God aside, identity can also
be derived from one’s societal position. In the 17th
century, however, the poet John Donne, called this
entire social framework into question with his own
metaphysical take on existence and identity.
As the Renaissance, during which Shakespeare
and Donne wrote, ushered in various scientific and
technological innovations, the speed of life increased,
and this acceleration eventually resulted in the
Industrial Revolution of the early 19th century. The
romantic period, led by William Wordsworth,
sought to counter this movement grounded in com-
mercialism, doing so by harkening back to simpler
times, places, and lifestyles. The rebellion against
ever-expanding industrialization romanticized the
simplicity of yesteryear, and in favoring the rustic
cottage over urban bustle, reactionary romantics
promoted an identity based on the pastoral and the
past—an identity, they maintained, that was worth
resurrecting.
Romanticism in the United States prospered
as well, as authors looked to the past to answer a
fundamental question plaguing the new nation:
Just what—who—is an American? Unlike Britons,
whose country had demonstrated sovereignty for
more than half the years since Christ, Americans
had problematic issues with which to contend: They
were, after all, a nation born of Great Britain but
liberated with the help of France; a place rooted in
equality, yet devoted to slavery and class divides; and
a state inspired by a yearning for religious freedom
that already sported a less-than-tolerant record on
tolerance. These early obstacles to a cohesive iden-
tity demanded consideration, and the country’s early
literary endeavors did not disappoint. Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s interest in history facilitated his own
approach to this enigma, producing introspective
tales such as The house^ oF^ the seven GabLes, and
Herman Melville’s fictive microcosms endeav-
ored to inspect the American identity as well
(Moby-dick, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” biLLy
budd, saiLor, and Benito Cereno come readily to
mind). The romantic mindset also fostered the
American transcendentalist movement, which radi-
cally challenged contemporary religious thought by
proclaiming that divinity presided in each and every
person.
But times change, and violent conflict and its
pursuant debilitating recessions tend to alter the
way a citizenry views itself. Therefore, transcenden-
talism, with all its hope and possibility, gave way to
the prostitute- and drunkard-ridden slums of the
realists Stephen Crane (The open boat and The
red badGe oF couraGe) and Theodore Dreiser
(An aMerican traGedy and sister carrie) and
the harsh reality of 19th-century London we find
in Charles Dickens. In a few deft literary strokes,
humans went from Gods to insignificant specks.
War, however, need not always precipitate humil-
ity. Whereas the Civil War rattled America’s literary
girders, the interwar period of the 20th century
inspired the dynamism and innovation of the mod-
ern period. T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda
Doolittle), Langston Hughes, Robinson Jeffers,
and others rewrote national myths, questioning the
very notion of patriotic allegiance itself. Coping
with a dramatically and rapidly changing world left
them eager for new ways to artistically express an
ever-morphing self they sought to articulate. Hence,
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway seems lost
in both his adopted home on the eastern seaboard
and back in his native Midwest in The Great
Gatsby, thereby anticipating J. D. Salinger’s The
catcher in the rye, in which Holden Caulfield
ambles, stupefied, through a New York City that,
while geographically holding true to his home, nev-
ertheless seems odd, off—different. In The sound
and the Fury, William Faulkner’s Compsons
and McCaslins even seem out of place in their own54 identity