LITR 4328: American Renaissance

Model Assignments Final Exam Essays 2018 (final exam assignment) Sample answers for C3. Literature and History

Tim Doherty

History and the American Renaissance

I seriously considered majoring in History before deciding to pursue Literature. So when historical events left their impression on American Romanticism, I got excited. As it turns out, much of that history is disturbing. It is no wonder to me that Gothicism and darkness became so representative of Romanticism. Dark times darken the arts. From slave narratives to the Great Emancipator to the founding fathers, history defined the American Renaissance.

Despite a lifelong interest in history, the setting of Frederick Douglass’s narrative in Maryland rattled me. Maryland did not appear in my mental list of Southern states. However, slavery was legal in the state until 1864 despite Maryland’s reluctance to secede. Lincoln needed border states like Maryland and Delaware to remain in the Union no matter the cost.[1] This was the first of several history lessons I learned reading Douglass’s first-hand account of slavery before reading another eye-opening slave narrative.

Harriet Jacobs’s story exposed the dark, sexual dynamics and genealogical blasphemy of American slavery. A moment stands out in my memory from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as the brutal keystone of the tale:

“I once saw two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister. When I saw them embracing each other, and heard their joyous laughter, I turned sadly away from the lovely sight. I saw the inevitable blight that would fall on the little slave’s heart. I knew how soon her laughter would be changed to sighs. The fair child grew up to a be a still fairer woman. From childhood to womanhood her pathway was blooming with flowers, and overarched by a sunny sky… …How had those years dealt with her slave sister, the little playmate of her childhood? She, also, was very beautiful; but the flowers and sunshine of love were not for her. She drank the cup of sin, and shame, and misery, whereof her persecuted race are compelled to drink.”

These two paragraphs perfectly exemplify Romantic themes of good and evil, light and dark, innocence and sin. As soon as that first sentence ends, two stories diverge. One story is the fairy tale of little white girls’ dreams, the other the nightmare of little slave girls’ waking reality. Jacobs’s voice may be the most important in the course for the multiple layers of oppression through which it had to rise to be heard and the crucible through which Jacobs fought to tell her tale. History classes tend to tell aggregated stories, devaluing the personal anecdote to paint the broad strokes in the time allotted. Maybe that should change. Maybe some history needs to be personal.

History is populated by characters large and small. The character of Abraham Lincoln I’ve got in my mind is a century and a half old. How did stories of Honest Abe begin? And how accurate are they? Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of Abraham Lincoln is fascinating to read. There is a boyish enthusiasm in his writing that helps to illustrate how Lincoln was seen by a certain segment of society. And you begin to realize, as you read it, that Hawthorne, in these few paragraphs, is not reinforcing the Lincoln mythos. He is creating it.

Did a Romanticized version of Lincoln, written by the writers of the Romantic era, become the historical reality? Or was Lincoln really that amazing? How many of our nation’s formative figureheads are remembered as cartoons? Romanticism certainly exists outside the chronological confines of this course, especially in politics.

One wonders whether Thomas Jefferson foresaw a day when “all men” could literally mean all men, regardless of the man’s color. Thomas Jefferson died a slave owner. But if you ignore the biography of the man and simply appreciate the wording of the Declaration of Independence, a prophetic quality of foresight seems evident. This document might have been based in the Enlightenment philosophy of Locke, but it might also be the founding document of the American Renaissance. Evident in the gothic and the transcendental, we begin to wonder, as a nation, if we can be better.

Why did it take nearly a hundred years for a country founded on the idea of freedom to officially outlaw slavery? Why did it take another hundred years for those freed African Americans to be granted basic civil rights under the laws of that nation? Historical literacy leads to dark revelations. The burden of angry questions with no easy answer is a side-effect of learning about the past. Those of us who choose to study literature cannot help but learn about the past and, hopefully, help our communities avoid the repetition of past mistakes.