The Sorting Hat Goes to America
Feb. 18th, 2013 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerExigencies have forced me to read American classics again. Have I previously vented my spleen about American classics? By and large, American classics suck. Whoever tells you about "American optimism" has clearly not read any of the literature that we esteem classic, because it pretty much all makes Anna Karenina look cheerful and happy. Anna Karenina has people in it who are sometimes nice to each other! I defy you to find me an Edith Wharton or a Henry James book about which you can say the same thing.
Maybe the authors thought they were doing penance for their stupidly happy-go-lucky countrymen.
I was bemoaning this to the peanut gallery earlier, and we have come to a conclusion: it is because the writers of American classics are all Slytherin.
Okay, this is an exaggeration. Melville - it pains me to say this, because I feel a deep antipathy to Melville, which is more his fans’ fault than his, really, but what can you do - I think we have to put Melville in Gryffindor. He didn’t just write about whaling; he actually went on whaling voyages.
And Harriet Beecher Stowe is clearly a case of the rare Hufflepuff author. You could make a case that Stowe crusading Gryffindor, because she was very brave, but she was driven by a sentimental interest in helping everyone treat each other nicely and get along, not by the need to be brave.
But all the rest of them? Slytherin.
Edith Wharton was a child of privilege, quite pure-blooded enough for Slytherin, but more to the point I think she had to be Slytherin to write books so depressing and so clearly designed to be critically acclaimed. And the vision of society presented in her books is so small-minded and self-serving: everyone is in it to get what they can, and characters like Gertie Farish (in House of Mirth) who are actually kind and altruistic are presented as rather ridiculous.
Similar characters people the work of Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald (I like The Great Gatsby a lot, but so far I've found his other books unreadable because of this obnoxious attitude). Ditto Hemingway. Not Steinbeck, though. Gryffindor for Steinbeck?
Henry James has the privileged background again, and his books always exude this sort of horror at the unrefined plebeian air of the rest of us.
The peanut gallery wants to put Poe in Hufflepuff, on the grounds that he was pretty much a failure, but I think that's a total misreading of Hufflepuff. (Cedric Diggory, anyone?) His work show a strange and twisted soul bent on revenge, even if he was really pretty terrible at fulfilling his ambitions. Maybe he begged the Hat to put him in Slytherin, and it did, and he pretty much became the house failure?
Even Mark Twain! He was a man of action, especially in his youth, so you could go with Gryffindor, but also intensely cynical (and interested in making a buck), so Slytherin also works. An embittered, idealistic Slytherin? Is idealistic Slytherin a thing?
Maybe the authors thought they were doing penance for their stupidly happy-go-lucky countrymen.
I was bemoaning this to the peanut gallery earlier, and we have come to a conclusion: it is because the writers of American classics are all Slytherin.
Okay, this is an exaggeration. Melville - it pains me to say this, because I feel a deep antipathy to Melville, which is more his fans’ fault than his, really, but what can you do - I think we have to put Melville in Gryffindor. He didn’t just write about whaling; he actually went on whaling voyages.
And Harriet Beecher Stowe is clearly a case of the rare Hufflepuff author. You could make a case that Stowe crusading Gryffindor, because she was very brave, but she was driven by a sentimental interest in helping everyone treat each other nicely and get along, not by the need to be brave.
But all the rest of them? Slytherin.
Edith Wharton was a child of privilege, quite pure-blooded enough for Slytherin, but more to the point I think she had to be Slytherin to write books so depressing and so clearly designed to be critically acclaimed. And the vision of society presented in her books is so small-minded and self-serving: everyone is in it to get what they can, and characters like Gertie Farish (in House of Mirth) who are actually kind and altruistic are presented as rather ridiculous.
Similar characters people the work of Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald (I like The Great Gatsby a lot, but so far I've found his other books unreadable because of this obnoxious attitude). Ditto Hemingway. Not Steinbeck, though. Gryffindor for Steinbeck?
Henry James has the privileged background again, and his books always exude this sort of horror at the unrefined plebeian air of the rest of us.
The peanut gallery wants to put Poe in Hufflepuff, on the grounds that he was pretty much a failure, but I think that's a total misreading of Hufflepuff. (Cedric Diggory, anyone?) His work show a strange and twisted soul bent on revenge, even if he was really pretty terrible at fulfilling his ambitions. Maybe he begged the Hat to put him in Slytherin, and it did, and he pretty much became the house failure?
Even Mark Twain! He was a man of action, especially in his youth, so you could go with Gryffindor, but also intensely cynical (and interested in making a buck), so Slytherin also works. An embittered, idealistic Slytherin? Is idealistic Slytherin a thing?
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no subject
Date: 2013-02-19 03:57 am (UTC)(What, no Ravenclaw for Poe?! XD)
no subject
Date: 2013-02-19 04:43 am (UTC)I don't remember anything else about it. What makes Crane Slytherinish? Was he a mercenary writer? (Another Slytherin: Jack London. You don't have to be quite so excited about nature being red in tooth and claw, Jack!)
no subject
Date: 2013-02-19 04:54 am (UTC)But while he's mostly known for his novellas and short stories, he kind of considered himself more of a poet? Which I agree with, because I am not a fan of those, but I loooove his poetry which is all angry and bitter and homicidal. XD
e.g. - Intrigue (http://www.infoplease.com/t/lit/war-is-kind/28.html)
no subject
Date: 2013-02-19 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-19 05:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-20 01:06 am (UTC)And what about William Faulkner?
no subject
Date: 2013-02-20 02:08 am (UTC)Where would you put them?
no subject
Date: 2013-02-20 03:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-20 03:48 am (UTC)And I could see Hawthorne as a Ravenclaw - the kind who sequesters himself in a library and doesn't quite get other people.
no subject
Date: 2013-02-20 03:55 am (UTC)