08-07-2013, 12:21 AM
I would like to emend my previous post, which undoubtedly oversimplifies the ambivalences concerning sexuality with which our culture is rife. All I guess I was trying to say is that it does not seem to me that -- pace the influence of Milton or Pilgrim's Progress in early US literature and excepting the short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne or the works of Melville -- pride has never been the object of outright condemnation in our politico-cultural imaginaire as are other kinds of individual behavior deemed reprehensible. If anything, pride is supposed to be heroic. US culture has, alongside the puritanical, a strong strain of Romanticism running through it.