When discussing the moneyed elite of society, we often do not make differentiations between the groups within the “one-percent.” Evident in The Great Gatsby, this stratification is a driving force of friction between the wealthy. At the turn of the century, individuals from humble origins acquired massive fortunes through a variety of enterprises. Jay Gatsby was a member of this “new money elite.” Even though their fortunes often paralleled those who came from wealthy families, they were often not welcomed by the “old money” elite, men like Tom Buchanan.

The tensions between Jay and Tom, which is caused by this social stratification, is based on historical reality. In the PBS documentary “The Gilded Age,” Caroline Astor, a daughter of “old money” who threw elaborate parties, often publicly feuded with “new money” elites, most notably the Vanderbilt family. As evidenced in The Great Gatsby, “old money” elites perceived themselves to be culturally superior to those of “new money” because their family traditions valued upper-class values and they did not have to work to keep their wealth. They saw “new money” as something morally wrong and corrupt. When Nick asked Tom about where he heard of Gatsby being a “bootlegger,” Tom replied, “I didn’t hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know.”

In Looking Backward: 2000-1887, Edward Bellamy proposes some radical changes to society to promote equity among the citizens of the United States. Bellamy realized the radicalism of his ideas and attempted to soften his tone by appealing to some aspects of nineteenth-century elite society. One group of people largely missing from the novel, except for a brief description towards the end, is women. While Bellamy credits his utopian society with creating economic equality between men and women, his nineteenth-century ideas of gender taint his view of the role of women in the “advanced” nation.

Dr. Leete, who represents the voice of Bellamy, explains to Julian everyone is assigned a task based on what occupation best applies to them. Dr. Leete states, “Women being inferior in strength to men, and further disqualified industrially in special ways, the kinds of occupation reserved for them, and the conditions under which they pursue them, have reference to these facts” (151). This statement from Dr. Leete reflects a nineteenth-century belief in the fragility of womanhood, where women could not perform the same laborious tasks as men. In the year 2000, an assumed inequality between the sexes still exists.

In the utopian society, the highest respected women are wives and not mothers, not single women who excel at their jobs. “For the rest, so far is marriage from being an interference with a woman’s career,” Dr. Leete informs Julian, “that the higher positions in the feminine army of industry are intrusted only to women who have been both wives and mothers, as they alone fully represent their sex” (153). The society still values motherhood and domesticity as the most important function for women. While the women achieved economic equality, it appears there societal equality is still lacking. This problem may stem from Bellamy’s firm belief that the driving force of inequality is economic in nature.

One of the most prominent themes in The Red Badge of Courage is the realities of war. Early in the book, Henry romanticizes war and sees battle as a “Greeklike struggle,” which accurately depicts how many soldiers during the first few months of the American Civil War viewed battles. However, like Henry, these men quickly realized the brutality and misery of army life and fighting. Many men began to question their place in the world.

Throughout the novel, Crane refers to people by their characteristics and the armies by their colors not by their names. This suggests that the world cares very little for the individual. This is most telling when Henry flees into the woods and sees the corpses of a “man in blue” covered in ants and slowly decaying. This scene forces Henry to really reevaluate his position in the natural world. Henry concerns himself so much with attaining individual glory that this realization shakes him to his core and alters how he perceives war. The violence depicted by Crane in the latter half of the novel reinforces the theme that the natural world is indifferent to the plight of the individual.

Last class, we discussed the characteristic of piety associated with womanhood during the nineteenth and this relationship factors prominently in the book. Often, the women in the book are presented as morally superior to their male counterparts and while they never directly control a situation, they can influence the decisions of the men around them. Mrs. Shelby throughout the novel opposes many of her husband’s decisions on a moral ground. She raises objections to the selling of Tom and even helps Eliza escape before being taken away by Haley.

Mary Bird, through moral suasion, convinces her husband to help the escaped slave Eliza, even though he recently helped pass a fugitive slave law in the Senate. Mary struggled to understand how any “Christian legislation” could pass a law like the Fugitive Slave Act (97). Even though Mary never maintained the authority to make the decision on the fate of Eliza, her persuasion forced her husband to morally reflect and offer assistance to the fugitive slave Eliza.

There is also a certain level of connection between the women that crosses racial barriers. Eliza, when she first meets Mary Bird, pleads by asking if she had ever lost a child. Because of her past experiences, Mary relates to the suffering of Eliza and offers her aid. Finding these cross-racial connections must have been important to Stowe because a majority of her audience would have been upper-middle class white women.

In my History of the Adirondacks course, we explored many of the topics that Cooper discusses in his book. One of the most prominent was the relationship between the state and the individual and how the two understood conservation. It is difficult to find a character in the novel more connected to the wilderness than Natty Bumppo. He believes a person should only take what is necessary to survive from the wild and that no real hunter would break this code. However, throughout the story, we see Natty conflicting with laws, often supported by Judge Temple, that are designed to preserve the wilderness, as is the case with the deer Natty killed out of season.

The way Natty reacts to these laws is very similar to how Adirondack locals dealt with a rising state authority in their region. They believed people who exploited the land, like Dick Jones and to a certain degree Billy Kirby, as the real threat to the preservation. However, these locals, like Natty, were the ones the state targeted. The state targeted primarily those of lower social standing, like Natty, and allowed men like Dick, who had connections, to exploit natural resources. With this in mind, how does class affect the ways an individual views nature and the ways the state interact with them in the novel?

Judge Temple represents a unique challenge to this question. Clearly, he is well connected and comes from a considerable amount of wealth. While he often engages in destructive behavior, as with the pigeon hunt, he does have a deep appreciation for the wild and often tries to protect it. Even though he engages in the pigeon hunt, he does feel a certain level of guilt for engaging in the hunt. Does he represent the United States at the time of the novel’s publication? He certainly is a complex portrayal of an American dealing with a rapidly “civilizing” and changing nation.

While “A Dialogue Between an Englishman and an Indian,” represents a minority view, it does highlight the power of colonialism through education. Deemed the “great permanent problem,” by President Chester A. Arthur, the question of the place of American Indians in British North America and eventually the United States often dominated policy. In Ebony and Ivy, Craig Wilder argues colonial and American officials sought to answer this question with assimilation. “A Dialogue” focuses on the benefits for both Indians and whites if the Englishman actively tried to teach the American Indians the habits of civilization.

Throughout “A Dialogue,” the Indian admits his people are “uncultivated and unpolished,” but argues the Englishmen have the ability to refine “his people” through education (7). The Indian in “A Dialogue” is the living embodiment of the success of civilizing the “savage” with schooling. The Indian in the short work convinces the Englishman of the benefits of improving American Indians and making them “good members of society” (8). However, what is indirectly argued, is being a good member of society required American Indians to abandon their traditional lifestyle and embrace the Anglo-culture of the people around them. Dartmouth College sought to ordain American Indians as ministers for them to cast off their Native roots and return to their tribes to teach other Indians to embrace assimilation.

While it becomes clear Mary Rowlandson’s views of civilization and savagery become more blurred as the book progresses, she easily draws distinctions between the two early in her account of her captivity. In her book White Trash, which examines class in US history, Nancy Isenberg argues early European settlers in British North America thought civilization could only exist when people made proper and complete use of the land. In this light, she states, the word “waste” connoted very negative images of savagery. Throughout the first third of the book, Rowlandson notes the “wasteful” lifestyle of her American Indian captors, which she often uses to describe the savagery of her captors (10).

Her depiction of “Praying Indians” exemplifies her early accounts of the difference between savagery and civilization. Whereas the dress of some American Indians later on in the book causes the lines of savage and civilized to be a blur, her initial comments on “Praying Indians” demonstrates how she believed an American Indian could never truly embrace European notions of civilization. “Praying Indians” was a term applied to American Indians in the 17^th century who embraced Christianity and organized small villages of like-minded American Indians. In this respect, becoming Christian and following the Puritan model of the close village, the “Praying Indians” represented to many settlers the ability to “civilize” the “savage.” However, in the first third of the book, she is very critical of these people and often depicts them as vicious killers who value guns more than life (16, 67). However, as she begins to blur civilization and savagery, she is often still skeptical of the “Praying Indians.” This might stem from her inability to reconcile with a God who would offer salvation to American Indians.