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LITR 4328: American Renaissance  |
Final Exam Essays 2015 Sample answers
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Joshua Van Horn
05/11/2015
American Renaissance: Moving Past the “Here and Now”
Coming into American Renaissance I was vaguely familiar with the material
we would cover. I had previously studied some of the writings and concepts, but
my understanding of them was limited. After taking this course, I have come to
understand in greater depth the particular works of the writers that we have
studied, the historical background of the American Renaissance, and the broader
themes that run throughout the Romantic Movement.
Though I had understood that romanticism contrasted with realism, what
really put things in perspective for me was Dr. White’s notion that the Romantic
is “the long ago and far away rather than the here and now” (Romance link). The
literature of the period, though it sometimes focuses on everyday life,
emphasizes realities that are intangible, sensed through a combination of
emotion and intellect. Among my favorite of the Romantic writers, and perhaps
the writer who gives the clearest definitions of the values of the period is
Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his essay,
Nature, Emerson describes many of the sentiments that are figuratively
expressed by other writers of the time. As one can imagine by the title of the
essay, Emerson makes a priority out of nature, a sentiment that is found
throughout all Romantic literature. Speaking of nature, Emerson writes “one
might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man,
in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime” (Emerson 6).
Here, Emerson describes three ideas that define the Romantic Movement—love of
nature, the sublime, and the notion that the physical world contains traces of
something otherworldly. In the following paragraphs I will focus on what I have
learned in regards to these three concepts.
I
felt it was necessary to first touch on Emerson, however, because even though I
was aware of his ideas before taking this class, I did not realize how his
essays offer a sort of justification of the concepts found throughout the other
works of the period. While this
particular instance is just one example, close to every concept found within the
romantic period, from individualism to the importance of imagination, can be
traced back to a definition of the concept within Emerson’s writings. In
addition to this, learning about Emerson’s connection to other writers of the
period—Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, and Hawthorne—I began to understand the
importance of Emerson’s work to the period. In many ways, it seems as though
Emerson placed a foundation on which romanticism could evolve, a notion, which
before the course, I was unfamiliar with.
While I was aware of Emerson’s, and other transcendentalists’, reverence
for nature before taking the course, I did not understand that this appreciation
carried over to other writers of the era. One example of the love of nature
existing in the writings of one of Emerson’s contemporaries can be found in
Susan B. Warner’s, The Wide Wide World.
When Warner’s protagonist, Ellen, comes across a collection of waterfalls,
Warner writes, “when there, everything was forgotten in delight. It was a wild
little place” (11.127). This idea runs parallel with Emerson writing, “in the
woods, is perpetual youth” (12). Both writings express an idea that nature is a
source of childlike joy, as well as a setting that is distinct from the here and
now. Within nature, though it is a part of everyday life, one can transcend
day-to-day existence. Warner’s writing mirrors Emerson’s, and is just one of the
many examples of how Emerson influenced the period. From what I gathered in the
course, the reason this theme continued to persist was for a couple of reasons.
First, I learned that the American Renaissance followed the enlightenment, so
the glorification of nature can be seen as a reclaiming of things divine while
maintaining a focus on the natural world. Secondly, I also learned that the
Romantic period corresponded with an increase in urbanization, which prompted
desires for things that were now lost, in this case the countryside. Both of
these things resulted in a desire for a closer relationship with nature. Through
taking the course, I learned about the importance of nature for the period, and
to a greater degree, I also learned what was responsible for that trend.
The second concept that I have become more familiar with upon completion
of the course is the notion of the sublime. As mentioned earlier, Emerson
suggests that within nature one can experience the sublime—a feeling of “beauty
mixed with terror”. Before this course, I had never learned of this concept in
relation to the period. However, it is found throughout all of the writings of
the era, including those whose writings most differ from the style of Emerson.
Edgar Allen Poe, in Ligeia, writes of
seeing his lover begin to rise from the dead: “amazement now struggled in my
bosom with the profound awe” (Poe 24). Here, the sublime is found within the
gothic. Terror is mixed with pleasure. Though Emerson is focused on the
cultivation of a better future, and Poe is mourning over the past, both men make
use of the sublime, once again demonstrating Emerson’s broad reach over the
genre.
While there are too many things to go into concerning what I have learned
in this course, as I have already mentioned, the overarching theme that I walk
away with is that Romantic literature is about “somewhere else” rather than the
“here and now”. Romanticism often does something interesting though in that it
uses the “here and now” to recall the “somewhere else”. In the case of nature,
and the sublime, the natural world serves as an imperfect reflection of the
ideal world. This is an idea that I have learned is rooted in Emerson’s
transcendentalism, and that goes back even further to Plato’s theory of ideas
(transcendentalism link). Nonetheless, wherever the idea was birthed,
Romanticism is about looking past the here and now and into something else—be
that the past, the future or the transcendent.
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