"It Was like a Dream of Hell": Gantian Dreams Deferred

In the turn-of-the-century America in which Thomas Wolfe grew up, citizens became more and more attracted to and convinced of the (so-called) American Dream, thanks in part to the successes of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller who acquired great wealth from humble beginnings. Popularized in the nineteenth-century novels of Horatio Alger Jr., the rags-to-riches phenomenon became ingrained in the minds of many Americans who believed that, through hard work and determination, they could achieve prosperity. Born just two years after Wolfe, Langston Hughes recognized not only this promise of a dream but also its relative inaccessibility to his peers, primarily because of race. Hughes was a key figure in the Renaissance, gaining acclamation for black art in the 1920s; however, as time went on, he noticed how little had changed for the African Americans' overall situation in the country. In 1951 Hughes published the poem Harlem (also known as A Dream Deferred) in Montage of a Dream Deferred and made famous his comment that postponed and unrealized dreams lead to pain and devastation: What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore--And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over--Like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? Wolfe's first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, recounts another version of Hughes's Dream Deferred. Gant family's tale takes place long before 1951, and Altamont is a long trip from Harlem, but Wolfe captures the essence of Hughes's poem through the fictional version of his family and their failed dreams. It would be difficult to discuss failed dreams in the South without beginning with its ultimate failure--the Civil War. This tragic war holds much significance for almost all southern literature and for Wolfe in particular. Secession was John C. Calhoun's and eleven states' colossal dream of independence and the right to govern as they saw fit without being stifled by the federal government. Though the fight to keep slavery is a stain on southern history, the war symbolized much more for its soldiers and their families. By the end of it, the South's dream was destroyed and the land left desecrated by General Sherman's troops. In the introduction to Thomas Wolfe's Civil War, David Madden explains, Northerners generally think of the Civil War as consisting of a series of battles. Southerners, on the other bloody hand, remember the South's defeat in war and suffering in Reconstruction (1-2). experience of the war for Southerners parallels a shame and defeat that the entire Union would not experience until Vietnam. While the rest of the country packed up and moved on, the South could not: The war has been the central experience in the history of the South--the long-developing cause, the bloody agony of battle, and the lingering Lost Cause aftereffects (Madden 2). For Wolfe, the effects of the Civil War on his family and homeland are directly evident in works such as Chickamauga and The Four Lost Men. Just six paragraphs into Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe begins to describe W. O. Gant: How this boy stood by the roadside near his mother's farm, and saw the dusty Rebels march past on their way to Gettysburg, how his cold eyes darkened he heard the name of Virginia ... (4). By opening the novel and his description of Gant with his memory of watching Rebel soldiers, Wolfe underscores the war's influence on his saga. In The Web of Earth, Wolfe's novella affording his mother an extended voice, Eliza Gant offers more concrete evidence of the war's effect. First, she recalls an experience much like W.O.'s: when I was a big girl four years old and remembered everything--that the Yankees began to come through there, and didn't I hear them, didn't I see them with my own eyes, the villains (80). …