Mark and the Knowledge: Social Stigma in Classic American Fiction

by Marjorie Pryse

The outcast banished by communal rejection; the scapegoat punished in ritual cleansing; the stigmatic branded and disfigured for his own special destiny; the exile isolated by his own convictions or his doubts-these are familiar figures in world literature who remain compelling. Marjorie Pryse observes the American novelist's abiding preoccupation with such individuals, whom she defines as marked characters, and demonstrates how they have come to occupy a central place in American fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Professor Pryse offers a systematic examination of four important texts- The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Light in August, and Invisible Man -in which she demonstrates the usefulness of examining marking as a process that has significantly affected American literature and culture. In describing the process of marking, she begins with the Puritans, for whom the path to self-knowledge lay in creation of a social symbolism-a system of marks and brands that allowed their American heirs to define themselves in terms of what they were not. She moves on to the American transcendentalists, who advocated withdrawal from society as a means to establishing a more principled relationship with it, and whose understanding of social stigma included from the first a metaphysical dimension. She characterizes the connection between the social and metaphysical isolation as "the transcendental imagination" of the American fiction writer. Professor Pryse concludes that the act of marking or stigmatizing, which history has shown to be so destructive to our social behavior, throws into relief the existence of those mysteries-and marks one way of determining what is American about our fiction. Marjorie Pryse is assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee.

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1979