Level 4, Intermediate, Post 4, 'Theme Free Post 2'

- Comments: Ask students to leave a comment on your post + 3 of their classmates' posts.

- Word Count for post 4: 200 words

I will leave you  the beginning of a Critical Review that a classmate and me wrote some years ago, as a manner of example,

The Scarlet Letter as a biformous narrative: Characterization.

Hawthorne’s novel, ‘The Scarlet Letter’ can be said, inhabits ‘biformity’, a term which has been coined by Michael Kammen in his essay ‘Biformity: A Frame of Reference’. More particularly, the novel’s ‘biformity’ can be found in the construction of one of its main characters, Hester Prynne.

As a starting point, ‘Biformity’ can be shaped as an ambivalent state of two opposing philosophical and moral forces that, “Subject people to more extreme contrasts and abrupt changes during a lifetime or a generation than is normally the case with other great nations” (Kammen, 101) Moreover, ‘biformity’, is said to develop “a tension between newer and older human ways of acting and believing”. (Kammen, 99)

‘Biformity’ can also be explained through the creation of a national identity, a creation of a collided and contradictory identity, which furthers back in time to the creation of the Puritan collective. America`s first settlers are said to be contradictory as well, or, as a better term can encompass, America’s first settlers might possibly have lived in a ‘biformity’, or, as Kammen points out, to have lived in ‘extreme contrasts and abrupt changes during a lifetime’ (Kammen, 101).

Such are the contrasts that the national American character proposes, that ‘biformity’ falls into a further conceptualization concerned with its historical and philosophical implications, as Leo Marx points out: “The dialectical tendency of mind – the habit of seeing life as a collision of radical opposed forces and values – has been accentuated by certain special conditions of experience in America”. (Kammen, 107)

The character of American people, according to Marx, is said to have a dialectical tendency to see the conformation of life as a radical collision of opposed forces. Reality for American people is dialectical, in constant contradiction, and within this apparent struggle of opposing forces, the national character of America emerges.

Moreover, by highlighting the historical and geographical conditions of the first settlers in America, Kammen provides ‘biformity’ again, with a national character,

“In the United States, the human condition – which is everywhere paradoxical, to be sure – has been given unusual freedom to vacillate permissively between possible poles. Thus environment has been very efficacious because its very vastness and diversity have served to exacerbate and expand those contradictory tendencies inherent in the human condition”. (Kammen, 108)

As stated previously, Kammen really encapsulates ‘biformity’ within a national American character by acknowledging a freedom to vacillate between poles, at first sight, paradoxical, are also coherent with the national character of the puritan America, i.e., a human settlement imbued in a vast territory. (...)

References

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Wordsworth Editions Limited. 1992.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter: An authoritative text. Essays in Criticism and Scholarship, Third Edition. WW Norton and Company. 2005

Kammen, Michael. People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization. Knopf, New York. 1972.

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion. Harcourt, Inc. 1957.