Modern and postmodern literature through constantly intertwining bear a number of differences with the first one aiming to find meaning in a chaotic world and the second trying to evade this meaning, mostly playfully, and being a parody of searching it.
While modernism is defined by rationality, transcendence, continuity, and depth, postmodernism is said to be characterized by irrationality, immanence, discontinuity or difference, surface (Gerhard Hoffman, 36). The depiction of the theme of love has always been vital regardless of the literary trend and modernism as well as postmodernism saw a number of literary works dedicated to immortal issues of love, death, and friendship.
Sherwood Anderson, a modernist, wrote a number of novels with love as the main theme, his “Adventure” being one of the stories which depict love very vividly. Robert Lee Frost is known for their presentation of rural life and raising important social and philosophical issues in his works. His poem “The Death of the Hired Man” lives the reader in thoughts over the matter of death. The modernist William Carlos Williams paid special attention to the depiction of ‘local’ themes using mostly plain language making his works readable for any kind of audience. His poem “This Is Just to Say”, though very small, reflects the style of the poet and strikes the reader with the simplicity of language. Though the three works by different writers bear almost nothing in common they are significant for American literature since each of them is connected with the concept of love inconspicuous at the first glance.
First of all, the meaning of love is realized through the story “Adventure” by Sherwood Anderson. This work is typical for modern American literature as what we may observe in it is the constant striving of the protagonist to find the meaning of her life, namely her love and her soul-mate. The story depicts the unrestrained desire of a woman to love and to be loved. One of the main aspects which are highlighted in the story is the significance of first love and its influence on the further life of a person if the relations were unsuccessful.
It is often the case that the first love turns out to be the only real feeling the person experienced, just like with the protagonist of the story “Adventure”, Alice, who fell in love with Ned Currie when she was sixteen and never in her life was able to have true feelings for another man. Once she met Will Hurley but her attempt to build relations with him failed since she understood that staying with him she was simply trying to feel the emptiness in her soul fearing to stay eventually alone: “It’s not him I want” she told herself; “I want to avoid being so much alone” (Nina Baym, 1435).
The practical value of this story lies in the fact that it tells what can happen if somebody is obsessed with the first true love and does not want any replacements. This obsession very often proves to be fatal and leads to the person’s spending the whole life solely. It has often been disputed whether it is better to spend the life with a person one does not love or to spend it alone. It seems more acceptable to stay with a person one respects, not necessarily loves than to live an empty life knowing only that somewhere there is a person one wants to be loved by. Alice lived her whole life in dreams that Ned Currie will come back and this led to nothing but disappointment.
Second, to mention is the poem “The Death of the Hired Man” by Robert Frost. Being a typical for modernism and the writer’s story representing rural life, the poem depicts the life of American people at the beginning of the 20th century together with a depiction of the values of the time described in it. The opening lines “Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table/Waiting for Warren” (Nina Baym, 1391) show the life of an American woman before gaining complete independence.
The issue of love is traced not so evidently as in the first story but still, it can be noticed that Mary loved her husband as every evening she was waiting for him to come back from work, just like this time “She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage/To meet him in the doorway with the news” (Nina Baym, 1391). Despite the fact that the poem deals more with Silas’s death, love to him on the part of Mary can be observed, though this is not the kind of love which Alice had to Ned Currie but love which people have to friends or those they know for a long time.
And finally, the poem “This Is Just to Say” by modernist William Carlos Williams reflects the evasion from meaning typical for modernist literature. The poem is small and contains twelve lines some of them consisting of the only word with an article. Nevertheless, the depiction of the theme of love is evident there and is realized by the simple line “Forgive me/they were delicious/so sweet/and so cold” (Nina Baym, 1472) which is the addressing to somebody the poet has feelings for and asking for forgiveness in the misdeed.
Thus, it can be stated that no matter how hard the writers tried to hide the concept of love in their works it can still be observed in most of them as a desire to have a love companion, a wish to return the old friend or a simple asking for forgiveness from a person one cares for.
Works Cited
Nina Baym. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1914 – 1945. Volume D, Seventh Edition. Norton & Company, 2007.
Gerhard Hoffmann. From Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of Postmodern American Fiction. Rodopi, 2005.