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LITR 4232: American Renaissance  |
Final Exam Essays 2013 Sample answers for
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Mickey Thames
Romantic Sentiments in a Realistic
World
Throughout the course, we’ve seen the Romantic
occur just about everywhere, and it has usually pervaded the text. The setting
is Romantic, beautiful and lovely all around, along with it’s stylistic
tendencies. It was easy to do both, as they fed off of each other. But as
America progressed closer to the Civil War, the settings begin to change. While
people still long for the elevated language of the Romantic, we start to see the
settings become firmly placed in the here and now. The dirty and gritty come
into intimate contact with the idealistic visions, and we get stories such as
the Personal Memoirs of John N. Seguin and Louisa May Alcott’s
Hospital Sketches; stories that combine stylistic tendencies of the Romantic
with unavoidable situations of the Realistic.
When reading
Personal Memoirs of John N. Seguin,
it is kind of jarring. Here we are, expecting a Romantic view of a war for
independence from an evil government. It seems that Juan Seguin was looking for
that too, as he describes the “Many
a noble heart [that] grasped the sword in the defence of the liberty of Texas,
cheerfully pouring out their blood for our cause.”
The military of
the time is mostly fighting with guns at this point, but cannons and muskets are
not Romantic. Swords and cheerful giving of lives in defense of a beautiful
cause are Romantic. He also describes it as-
[1] “The tokens of
esteem, arid evidences of trust and confidence, repeatedly bestowed upon me by
the Supreme Magistrate, General Rusk, and other dignitaries of the Republic [of
Texas], could not fail to arouse against me much invidious and malignant
feeling. The jealousy evinced against
me by several officers of the companies... who were already beginning to
work their
dark intrigues against the
native [Mexican-American]
families, whose only crime was, that
they owned large tracts of land and desirable property.”
So
when Seguin gets into the political machinations of the board of San Antonio,
forcing him to take back lawfully given buildings from a friend, we are pulled
out of a world of beautiful revolution into a gritty, all too Realistic
reflection of the political reality of the war. The jealousy and dark intrigues,
Gothic images of evil, are too quickly turned into human jockeying for influence
on a state in the midst of war. Seguin from this point on is Realistic,
describing how men framed and betrayed him after San Antonio was taken, and his
eventual retreat into exile has dishonored him. His individual honor, at always
doing the right thing, has not uplifted him here, it has betrayed him. We see in
Seguin’s memoirs the notions of Romantic, notions of truth, and justice, and
honor, begin to work in opposite direction for the protagonists. If Seguin had
been a bit more willing to play the game of politics, to play with the Realistic
world of survival of the fittest, he might have emerged with his public honor
intact.
Contrasting this change from Romantic to Realistic is
Hospital Sketches
by Louisa May Alcott. In her accounts she manages to blend
Romantic sentimentality with the efficient lists and comparisons of Realistic
writings. She first relates how her entire family wears “rose colored glasses”,
including herself when she announces that she is joining the nurses. She then
follows that romantic sentiment with a smart listing of her clothes whilst on
the train, including a
“cavernous black bonnet and fuzzy brown coat, with a hair-brush, a pair of
rubbers, two books, and a bag of ginger-bread distorting the pockets of the
same;” the very accurate, detailed, and down to earth description
of her outfit reflects the journey on the boring train ride there. Though the
journey on a train mimics the traditional Romantic use of journey motifs, this
train is taking her to some terrible place, not carrying her from one. In this,
she subverts the Romantic notion while simultaneously using it. She continues
the mixing of the terms when she describes her fellow employees in terms of a “another
goblin who frequently appeared to me,”
when referring to the
attendant. This is probably romantic only in Alcott’s use of humor, but
it’s still a use of the grotesque visualization of a human, another aspect of
the Gothic and Romantic. The last major usage of the Romantic in the essay is
Alcott’s description of the “moonlight
shining on the spire opposite, or the gleam of some vessel floating, like a
white-winged sea-gull, down the broad Potomac[river in District of Columbia],
whose fullest flow can never wash away the red stain of the land.”
The symbolic washing away not only suggests a new life, it must also
consider the death of another. The death is the Romantic language of the
narrative, as the rest of the piece is in difficult and hard hitting detail,
with Alcott going from watching the symbolic Potamac, full of the promise of new
life, to telling a man he was going to die as “Dr.
P. [said]: "Tell him he must die;"[ it] is a cruelly hard thing to do.”
Alcott’s piece can be said to be a death knell for Romantic language’s heyday,
as it is published midway through the Civil War, an event that would usher in
age of American Realism. It is difficult to write poetry about the beauty of
sacrifice and war when
blood keeps
making you drop your pencil. So did the idealism of Romance slip away when the
blood of the real washed over it.
1865 flag of the USA