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LITR 4232 American
Renaissance 2010 Student Midterm Samples 2. Short essay (4-6 paragraphs) on 1 of 2 options (or combinations as inspired) :
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Andy Feith
The Scaffolding of Romance
I’m going to write about “romance”
as a term, because though I didn’t do all of the assigned reading, I managed to
work my way through all of the selections from
Last of the
Mohicans and
Wide, Wide World,
and it’s easy to point out how they conform to the standards of the romance
genre.
I’d tell someone unfamiliar
with the literary definition of “romance” that a romance needn’t necessarily be
a love story
a la Twilight or
mass-market paperbacks; rather, “romance” is synonymous with “adventure” or
“quest.” White’s writes that in a romance, “the action usually begins with a
problem of separation or conflict. Characters are separated from each other… or
a need arises to rescue someone.” These are far and away the most dominant plot
elements in both
The Last of the Mohicans
(LotM) and
Wide, Wide World (WWW). Much of LotM is an
extended chase; its object is to recover the damsels Alice and Cora. And Ellen’s
separation from her mother sets off a long string of emotional struggles.
Thinking of
Star Wars
as a romance is helpful when I’m trying to define the term. I also particularly
like Craig White’s generalization that “Most Hollywood movies are romances, but
some “independent movies” involve tragedy.” Romances involve unambiguously “bad”
or “good” characters; viewers of
Star Wars have no trouble
deciding how to feel about Darth Vader, for example. Likewise, LotM
characterizes Magua as dark-skinned and demonic. Hawkeye calls him an “imp” and
“like a black snake”; the narrator describes him as having “malignant, fierce,
and savage features”. WWW may not have any “villains” quite as unambiguously
evil as Magua, but Miss Alice is just as unambiguously characterized as good.
Her manners and her living quarters are immaculate and refined, and she is
always offering a smile and a listening ear to Ellen (who herself is portrayed
as superhumanly devoted to her mother. Yet another extreme characterization).
White also states that romances typically end with transcendence, or “rising
above it all” or a “happily ever after.” Here I have an unresolved question: How
does this differ from the way a comedy typically ends? White says that a comedy
involves “restored unity.” Perhaps a key distinguishing factor between comedies
and romances is that a romance tends to involve a more serious plotline, often
with life and death on the line, whereas comedies don’t usually invoke those
feelings of serious danger.
Reading White’s definition of romance feels a
little bit like peeking behind the curtain at the man who controls the Wizard of
Oz. Or like Whitman’s learn’d astronomer dissecting the stars.
I love Star Wars, and I love the Wizard of Oz, but
it’s a bit of a jolt to recognize how perfectly they conform to White’s
definition of a romance. But I suppose the best romances draw you in, hook your
emotions and make you sympathize with the protagonists to such a degree that you
don’t notice the formulaic scaffolding. Now that I’ve had my eyes opened, so to
speak, I think I’ll have a bit less tolerance for romances. I’ll still enjoy
them, but I’ll definitely make sure to see a good, nuanced independent film now
and then too.
