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Literaturwissenschaft

Nottingham University, Nottingham

2018

Charlotte V. ©
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SURVIVAL AS A FEATURE OF AMERICAN PEOPLE DNA

Survival is a feature of all animals in the world, the main purpose of the life. They can develop special characteristics in order to be more adapted to the world, these adaptations are being developed over long periods of time (The Rosen Publishing Group) and the process of change is called evolution.

As part of living beings, humans also have the capacity of adapting themselves to distinctive situations and not only with the environment but also with other people. Over the years, distinctive groups of people who have different thoughts have had to live and survive together, for example Arabs and Jews have responded to the new conditions of living together in Jerusalem (Roman and Weingrod, 3) This examples can be translated to the history of America, as other countries have had many difficulties based on the multiple multiculturalism in the country, but nowadays they have been solved and this country is, without any doubt, one of the most powerful and cosmopolitan countries in the world.

Thanks to the adverse conditions that American people had suffered they have develop the ability or the survival feature of adapting themselves to challenging environments, both mental and physical, and this ability has lead America to be a powerful and strong country.

This statement can be proved by American literature, with books as The Scarlet Letter, Ceremony and The Narrative of Frederick Douglass. In the scarlet letter, it is seen that the main characters must survive from solid religion impositions. In Ceremony, the character attempts to contend with the reality of a mixed cultural landscape in a way that allows Native American culture to persist.

Finally, In The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, it is showed how a man from another race survives from masters and reaches the freedom.

The Scarlett letter tells the story of a young lady called Hester who migrated from England to America in order to discover The New World and to be free of religious impositions that England had being suffering during those decades. Although Hester was married with a recognised doctor, she fell in love with the priest of the village where she lived and get pregnant.

However, religion was above love, ant the puritan society condemned Hester for committing adultery. Since then, Hester needed to adapt herself to a new life where everyone were society insulted and scape from her According to Jon “Hawthorne’s searing example of Hester Prynne embodies what then was society’s use of punishment by Humiliation” She attempted to live her life as a normal person, ignoring insults and humiliations and trying not to speak with the people in the village but she never renounce to love. “From the intense consciousness of being the object of severe and universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length relieved, by discerning on the outskirts of the crowd a figure which irresistibly took possession of her thoughts.”1 Although she was ridiculed, she kept having the same thoughts and she never regretted about what she has done, because she thought that the Letter was a proof not of her shame but of the religious society’s shame.

She learnt to live and to accept the norms that the religion imposed to her, and respecting the society in which she was living, and due to this she managed to survive in the environment in which everyone thought that she was a sinner and deserved to be killed.


Another analysed book which represents survival attitudes is Ceremony, which narrates the history of a man called Tayo, who has been prisoner of the Japanese during the Second Wold War, he returned to his village in America but being sick with malaria, that is the first survival exposure that Tayo experienced.

But beyond that experience, the real survival topic concerned the preservation of the Indian culture, while the contact with white cultures is largely destructive, so Tayo needs to prevail the Native tradition, which is based in myths and storytelling. When he was sick, apart from going to the hospital, he experienced a ritual consisting on a curative ceremony that defeats the afflictions, despair.

However, the white culture destructiveness started in school where teachers develop in children completely different view of science and nature, understanding that the tradition of storytelling was not real and true resent a completely different view of science and nature, so Indian children do not want to prevail their culture anymore because they thought it was wrong and antique.

Accoring to David “Tayo realizes that the knowledge acquired there is essential to his understanding of the forces at work in the world. His ability to incorporate this understanding into a framework that is both traditional and adaptable is crucial not just for his survival but for everyone's.”3So Tayo realizes that the combination of both cultures and the right use of them was the point to let people from different cultures live n the same place, as well as respecting both traditions.


The last proof of survival but different type of it, is shown in The Narrative of Frederick Douglass. The book tells the story of how a slave managed to escape from slavery to become a free man in America. Until the end of the American Civil War, Slavery was legal in most of the states of South America.

During his stage living in Auld’s household for about seven years, he was taught how to read and write even thought it was severely forbidden to teach the alphabet to a slave. It was in that moment, when he realised how he could be empowered enough to reach freedom, by knowledge.

He realized that the slaveholders promoted the ignorance on their slaves, so that slaves come to believe that they cannot be independent. White men imposed them the double consciousness which means that the slaves look at themselves through the eyes of a racist white society.

N the other hand, Douglass was focused on the knowledge as his only way to escape from the slave world. “The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced to slavery."5.


To conclude, the idea of survival has been always presented in America history as well as in its literature. The feature of adapting yourself in challenging environments and conditions is shown by Hester in The Scarlet Letter; though she was considered a sinner and she was not well treated by the puritan society, she got used to accept the religion and live her life as normal as she could, this feature is also seen in Tayo’s thought of preserving both cultures, the Indian and the white one in order to allow his village to survive living together, respecting both, the tradition and the newness.

And the last developed behavioural is shown in The Narrative of Frederick Douglass where a slave reaches freedom in a racist society by learning how to read and write in order to survive. America has evolved, and showed that people have learnt to survive, and adapt themselves in challenging contexts as racism, strict religion and the attempt to destroy a culture, that is why, nowadays, America is one of the most powerful and strong countries.


Brilliant, Jon A. “The Modern Day Scarlet Letter: A Critical Analysis of Modern Probation Conditions.” Duke Law Journal, vol. 1989, no. 5, 1989, pp. 1357. JSTOR, JSTOR, .

Douglass, Frederick, and William L. Garrison. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Wortley, near Leeds: Printed by Joseph Barker, 1846. Print.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Signet Classic, 1988

Marmon Silko, Leslie. Ceremony. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

David A. Rice. "Witchery, Indigenous Resistance, and Urban Space in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony." Studies in American Indian Literatures 17, no. 4 (2005): 114-143. (accessed May 11, 2018).

Romann, Michael and Weingrod, Alex. Living Together Separately: Arabs and Jews in Contemporary Jerusalem. Princeton University Press, 2014. Pp 3


1Hawthorne, Nathaniel,. The Scarlet Letter. New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Signet Classic, 1988.

2Leslie Marmon Silko. Ceremony. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

3Leslie Marmon Silko. Ceremony. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

4Douglass, Frederick, and William L. Garrison. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Wortley, near Leeds: Printed by Joseph Barker, 1846. Print.

5Douglass, Frederick, and William L. Garrison. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Wortley, near Leeds: Printed by Joseph Barker, 1846. Print.

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