LITR 4231 Early American Literature

Final Exam Essays 2014 assignment Sample answers for Essay 2b: Periods

Jonathon Anderson

“The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through”

It seems that most courses tend to focus on one topic or point in time. So far at UHCL I’ve taken Literary Genres and Perspectives (which focused on the elements of literary criticism), Victorian Literature, and American Realism. At first glance, Early American Literature seems like a similar undertaking, and considering the commentary offered by some previous students on other approaches to “Early American” texts, it may be similar for many professors (Rochelle Latouche’s Evolution of American Literature, Native Misconceptions, Jillian Norris’s Exploring the Unknown in American Literature). Compared to a roster of readings that may span fifty or sixty years, the audacity of proposing to start with a text written in 1492 at the exact moment of the creation of an American literature (if we define American literature as the intellectual meeting point between European culture and the preexisting culture of the Americas) and then traverse roughly 300 years of social and intellectual development is mindboggling even if we confine ourselves to a limited geographical area.

The only other courses I’ve ever encountered with as large a chronological scope are Music History I and II (ancient Greece to the Middle Ages and then the Renaissance to the Modern era) and a Western World Literature course that started with Gilgamesh and ended with the Renaissance. In both of these instances, the concept of the historical period is used to organize the work of the hundreds (or even thousands) of individual artists into more manageable groupings. As the “Periods” webpage explains, by understanding the basic trends in aesthetic taste, the patterns of intellectual thought, and cultural values at certain points in time, we can more easily talk to each other about the idiosyncrasies of individual artists as well as the sometimes elusive steps in the evolution of the arts and culture up to and including the present day.

However, this can threaten to be counterproductive to efforts to see continuity in history. Once we learn the “rules” for a period, we can make the mistake of only evaluating works by our preconceived notion of what they should be instead of using those “rules” as one among many tools that are helpful in decoding the unique intellectual singularity that each artist represents. The idea of periods of time during which only one script is possible can even make historical development seem like a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions as representatives of the Renaissance overthrow the Middle Ages or the Romantics discard the Enlightenment. Upon closer investigation, though, historical development reveals itself as less a cycle of upheaval and rejection and more an evolution in which new ideas are transformations of previous ideas and new translucent layers of meaning are applied like a fresh varnish. For the early 19^th century German thinker Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, reality is a continual becoming or evolution. "The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through,” says Hegel, “and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant's existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom” (7). Although we might not accept completely the comparison (as I don’t), since we don’t tend to think of each successive historical period as an improvement over the last, it does clear the way for the useful concept of the bud, blossom, and fruit as “moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole.”[1]

A very cool idea Dr. White uses to aid us in building our thumbnail-sketch understanding of historical periods and how they overlap each other is the inclusion of representative music, art, and architecture. A brief look at Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony will show both how this can accelerate the learning process and how ideas are adapted and transformed through time in Hegel’s process of continual becoming. One of the most easily recognizable features of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the opening:

Playing just the rhythm of the opening measures, many people will identify it as Beethoven’s Symphony, but this musical gesture was also present in the work of Beethoven’s precursors of the preceding Classical period, Haydn (Beethoven’s one-time mentor) and Mozart (Beethoven’s piano idol and popular inspiration) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._5_(Beethoven)). Beethoven adapted and transformed the music he grew up with, utilizing the musical material in a way that layered a sense of Romantic intensity and drama over his source material. Nearly one hundred years later, late Romantic composer Gustav Mahler confronted the problem of the reputation of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony head-on in his Fifth Symphony, which reimagines Beethoven’s beginning as a Funeral March:

^{The first few measures of Mahler’s 5th Symphony, featuring solo trumpet. (Score source: International Music Score Library Project)}

^{The end of the introduction to the first movement.}

Although the overall effect is broadly similar in all four cases, each composer is simultaneously drawing on a continuous historical tradition and transforming that tradition according to his aesthetic taste, patterns of intellectual thought, and cultural values.

Similarly, we can see a nexus of traditions in Sor Juana’s “You Men.” The earmarks of Renaissance style (especially Classical references) commingle with an appeal to logic and reasoning that will become characteristic of the Enlightenment in these stanzas:

Presumptuous beyond belief,
you'd have the woman you pursue
be Thais when you're courting her, [courtesan of Alexander the Great]
Lucretia once she falls to you. [Roman victim of rape & suicide]       20

For plain default of common sense,
could any action be so queer
as oneself to cloud the mirror,
then complain that it's not clear?         24

We would not be out of line also to see a continuation of Christian medievalism (although again transformed) in the overall moral conviction of her theme. Anne Bradstreet complicates conventional domestic themes with evidence of Classical learning and a humanist perspective.

Although Jonathan Edwards’s famous Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God seems a complete break with any sense of Renaissance culture (except perhaps in the demonstration and documentation of thorough knowledge of Scripture) and looks forward to the Gothic atmosphere of Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, Edwards’s Note on Sarah Pierpont could easily be interpreted as a link between an endearingly domestic poem like Bradstreet’s “To my Dear and Loving Husband” and the early professions of love between Charlotte and Montraville in Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple. We can even connect Edwards to the Enlightenment through his Personal Narrative, “Of the Rainbow,” and “Of Insects.” While the style of the Personal Narrative seems a wonderful anticipation of Romantic intimacy with nature and the self, the interest in the carefully observed documentation of intellectual and social development seems of a piece with Franklin’s sometimes funny and often ironic Autobiography.

A look at the transition or intermingling of Enlightenment and Romantic culture would be severely lacking if we did not account for Thomas Paine, whose works are essentially a synthesis of Enlightenment reasoning and Romantic individuality. In Common Sense and The Crisis, he builds arguments logically that are calculated to appeal to the emotions, and he proclaims the tenets of Deism in The Age of Reason without concern for anyone else’s refutation or dissent.  It’s interesting to note that Anne Bradstreet had already arrived at one of the most characteristic designations of the Deists for God around a hundred years earlier in her “Verses upon the Burning of Our House,” writing “Thou hast a house on high erect / Fram'd by that mighty Architect.”

The culmination of our semester was a pair of contrasting novels that exemplify transitional traits. Both feature details that are familiar in the Gothic tradition, which can be understood as the reciprocal or photographic negative to the Enlightenment world of reason and order. In Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, as Lauren Weatherly explains in “A Gothic America: the Early Years,” the author’s project is to “‘scare’ young girls.” The story documents our heroine’s journey further and further from the Enlightenment world of safety, structure, and predictability to an inverted Gothic world of suffering and chaos. I liked what Veronica Ramirez said about Edgar Huntly being the “gateway” between the Enlightenment and the Romantic eras (“Edgar Huntly: The All-Encompassing Early American Novel”). Charles Brockden Brown, himself a product of Enlightenment society, systematically robs his title character of all the accoutrements of Enlightenment society as he subjects him to many of the same horrors and uncertainties that we saw in Mary Rowlandson’s and Mary Jemison’s captivity narratives.

By the end of the semester, we have traveled approximately 300 years through the American wilderness. We’ve seen it transformed into the frontier, into superstitious villages, into havens of intellectual hope, and again into the wilderness of early modernity. We’ve seen new layers of meaning settle down on top of the original struggles of the early settlers, as the experiences of each succeeding generation enrich and redefine the culture where “one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all [cultural] moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole.”

Works Cited

Weiss, Frederick. “Introduction: The Philosophy of Hegel.” Hegel: The Essential Writings. Ed. J.N. Findlay. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. 1 – 18. Print.