The Issue of Urban Isolation for American Romantic Writers: Centering on Irving, Hawthorne and Melville

Abstract

The issue of an individual’s isolation/alienation from his society is a favorite theme in modern literature. As the industrialization in America arose after the Civil War, this issue is prevalent after the late nineteenth century in realistic and natural novels. But this concern about human alienation in a modernizing/modernized society was also expressed in the works of the early nineteenth century. In this paper, Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” Hawthorne’s “Wakefield” and Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” are examined as the most conspicuous cases that show this theme.

The three are common in that they are at first submissive conformists and later try to escape from their reality. Both Rip and Wakefield escapes from their wives for twenty years. While Rip suffers from identity crisis as he returns to a changed democratic society, Wakefield disappears and returns at his own will without being in any perils or punishment. Bartleby is the most tragic figure of them as he isolates himself from his society because he believes that it is an immoral one where individual values are sacrificed by the urban ones of productivity and efficiency. Though he dies of despair, the lawyer-narrator who observes the scrivener’s tragic fate survives and revaluates the true human condition in an urban society.