Evangeline
Lecture
Longfellow’s Evangeline breaks new ground in the epic
tradition by creating an epic hero who is both female and
democratic; previous epic heroes were typically male
aristocrats.
The Grand Dérangement of the Acadians took place in 1755. By the late 1830s, the passage of time and intervening events had made it a largely forgotten event, even among the descendents of the Acadians. Eventually somebody told a legend to Nathaniel Hawthorne about a young couple about to be married who were separated by the British and deported on separate ships. The young woman spent years searching for her beloved to be reunited with him. The story didn't have enough Puritans for Hawthorne's taste, so he forwarded the story to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow began to research the background of the story, and decided to write an epic poem about the couple and the wider events surrounding them. Writing an epic poem is an epic task; the poem was not published until November 1, 1847. "I had the fever a long time burning in my own brain before I let my hero take it. Longfellow said about writing it, "'Evangeline' is so easy for you to read, because it was so hard for me to write."
Meter and Structure
Evangeline is in many ways an experimental poem for an English poet. English epics have long used the heroic couplet, which is made up of iambic pentameter with stressed and unstressed syllables, and also with an AA, BB, CC rhyme scheme. Longfellow dug back through history and dusted off the dactylic hexameter familiar from Greek and Latin epics. It's mix of dactyls and spondees mean that its lines can be up to 17 syllables long. Longfellow also follows the ancients in basing his meter on long and short syllables rather than stressed vs unstressed.
There are parts of Evangeline that echo the Aeneid.
The eleventh and twelfth lines of Book III, "feror exsul in
altum Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis" are rendered
almost literally in Evangeline in the account of the departure
of the Acadians from Grand-Pre (Opening of Part the Second) :
"the freighted vessels departed, Bearing a nation with all its
household gods into exile." In a later passage in the idyll
Longfellow also follows Vergil when he writes: "Safely their
boat was moored; and scattered about on the green-sward, Tired
with their midnight toil, the weary travellers slumbered." (Cf.
Aeneid 3, 509-514).
Provehimur pelago vicina Ceraunia iuxta,
unde iter Italiam cursusque brevissimus undis.
Sol ruit interea et montes umbrantur opaci;
sternimur optatae gremio telluris ad undam,
sortiti remos, passimque in litore sicco
corpora curamus; fessos sopor inrigat artus.
Along the sea near Ceraunian;
whence is the way to Italy and the shortest voyage over the waves.
Meanwhile the sun sets and the hills lie in shade;
lap down near the water on the planet,
allotted the oars, and generally dry on the beach
the bodies of care; sleep bedews limbs.
Longfellow also follows the ancients in the structure of his
narrative, which goes back through the Aeneid to Homer:
Theme |
Source
|
Aeneid |
Evangeline |
Conflict |
Iliad |
Books 7-12 |
Part I |
Wandering |
Odyssey | Books 1-6 |
Part II |
The theme of the Iliad is conflict during the Trojan
War. The theme of the Odyssey is the wandering of
Odysseus in his search for home. Virgil models the Aeneid on
the earlier epics. His hero Aeneas wanders like Odysseus in
books 1-6, and fights like Achilles in books 7-12. In both
cases, Aeneas is both like and unlike the hero who preceded him.
Remember that Achilles is marked by his wrath and Odysseus by
his mental agility. Aeneas is marked by being pius Aeneas.
His preeminent quality is that he is loyal to his gods, his
nation, his family, his friends, and himself.
Evangeline too experiences conflict like Achilles when the
British expel the Acadians (Part I. 1-5). It's the reason that
Part I seems to drag on for so long; there's a structural
reason. She then experiences the wanderings of Odysseus when she
hunts for Gabriel (Part II. 1-5).
Neither the wrath of Achilles nor the cunning of Odysseus would
be suitable to a proper lady as envisioned by the 19th Century.
But the chief characteristic of Aeneas, being pius,
loyal, and steadfast, lend themselves quite well to a proper
lady who is also a hero. Pius Evangeline is loyal to
her lost love Gabriel beyond any reasonable expectation that she
might meet him again. Her search also takes on some of the
characteristics of the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius'; Golden
Ass, but Psyche must search for Cupid because she violated
their relationship, and he fled. Here the separation is more
analogous to Aeneas' exile from Troy because the Greeks
destroyed it.
Longfellow models his epic on the Aeneid in another
important way: the theme of nation founding. The Aeneid tells
how the Trojans and the Latins got together to produce the
Romans. That's what the fighting was about — Juno wanted to
prevent the creation of the Roman people and the founding of
Rome, almost from Book 1 line 4 through the end of Book 12. Evangeline
too is a nationalistic poem; the enemies of the Acadians were
also the enemies of the colonies in their war of independence.
Longfellow has to take liberties with history at this point —
the American colonists were fighting alongside the British in
what became known as the French-Indian war. The British had
owned Acadia for some time, but the French-speaking inhabitants
continued to side with the French, to supply them, and to launch
raids from their island on the English colonies. The British and
American colonists decided to end the problem by expelling all
the Acadians. Longfellow eliminates the American role in the
expulsion, as well as the Acadians' activities that resulted in
it. His goal is not to write history; it is to write an epic
that will encourage national identity. By this time, the
Louisiana Purchase had joined English speakers and French
speakers into one nation, but could they become one people? What
history had demonstrated in the Battle of New Orleans Longfellow
now wanted to create through his poem. Bringing back old
conflicts and resentments would not help. And his plan largely
worked. The poem was wildly popular throughout America for
decades. The Acadians down in Louisiana had to some extent lost
the memory of the expulsion of their ancestors; the poem Evangeline
gave them a sense of identity that comes down to today.
All's Well That Ends Well
So why end up in Philadelphia? To the mind of Louisianan, it
seems strange. What better place to have them reunited than
here? But that's until we think epically. Let's see . . . 10
years of the Trojan War, 10 years for Odysseus to return home,
for a total of 20 years. If we put the expulsion and wanderings
of Evangeline at 20 years, she and Gabriel would have met up in
Philadelphia in 1775, just in time for their steadfast love to
provide the mythic underpinnings for the birth of America. On
the other hand it's probably that Longfellow if referring to the
1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, so my theory is
probably wrong.
Virgil and Longfellow shared a purpose in their epics; to
aggrandize the role of their nations on the world stage. Great
nations need more than brute force to succeed. They need to
legitimate that greatness. The young United States consciously
copied Rome. Like Rome, the expelled their king and set up a
republic. They made the transition from being subjects of a king
to being citizens of a republic. They taught themselves
republican virtue by studying the history and legends of ancient
Rome. George Washington's favorite play was Cato; his
favorite Roman was Cincinnatus, a Roman senator given the power
of dictator who saved the city and immediately resigned his
position to return to his farm. Washington did this twice; after
the Revolutionary War, and after his second term as President.
Cincinnatus is a large part of the reason we have a President
today instead of a king. Our constitution is modeled on that of
Rome; Washington D.C. was built to look like Rome. Our currency
has Latin from Virgil inscribed on it. The ancient Roman goddess
Dea Libertas stands in the New York Harbor. Roma in
America est. Yet Americans today live in profound
ignorance of our roots. We think our constitution was created ex
nihilo by THE FOUNDERS or that it floated down from God in
some kind of divine inspiration. We've repudiated republican
virtue in favor of a deluded individualism that focuses only on
the self. We've funneled the bulk of our nation's wealth and
power to a few plutocrats because we've forgotten that that was
what ended the Roman Republic. We need to learn the lessons of
the Aeneid and Evangeline.
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