LITR 4232 American Renaissance 2012 Student Midterm Samples 3. Web Highlights: Review at least 3 posts from course website's Model Assignments (4-6 paragraphs)

Andy Feith

Taking the Web Review on its own Terms

My favorite sentence from Eric Cherrie’s short essay “The Fall of the House of Winkle” is “The ability nature has to destroy what people know is both gothic and sublime.” After Rip Van Winkle’s twenty year sleep, his house is deserted and desolate. Nature, given enough time, destroys everything we humans build up. Nothing is permanent; everything decays. There is real suffering in that fact, and I appreciate that EC has identified it. It’s some of the reason why the gothic and the sublime are associated with an element of terror.

          When I read Rip Van Winkle, I am more amused than horrified at Rip’s strange predicament, but EC’s short essay makes me realize that to actually experience what Rip goes through would be traumatic. “Home”, to me, is such a comfort and a sense of security; to come home one day and find it unoccupied and in severe disrepair would probably provoke me to tears. “Where are the people who live here, who know me, who love me? And what the hell happened to my house?” (That’s what I imagine myself thinking, anyway). I wonder if the gothic and the sublime have somewhat lost their power today, when “nature” in the United States has largely been subdued and relegated to a few small safe spaces (like national parks), and Native Americans, who used to function as the fearsome “other” and were associated with unconquered nature, are largely confined to reservations.

          Matt Chavez in the short essay “Whitman on Sublimity” also notes the power of nature in American romanticism; he goes as far as to say that “If there is one lesson that the Romantics taught, this lesson is [the] importance of nature, as home, as teacher, as man’s reflection”. He finds in “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” a depiction of two ways of perceiving nature: one may, like Whitman (or Emerson, for that matter) feel an inner sense of harmony  and communion with nature, or like the “learn’d astronomer”, one may study it as an object, separate from one’s self. The astronomer gains respect and adulation for quantifying the heavens. (Wendell Berry, an agrarian writer from the later 20^th century ‘til today, has a similar distaste for quantifying nature. To roughly paraphrase him from memory, “Some things that are essential and valuable to human life are unquantifiable)”. For romantics like Whitman, nature, like the soul, like God, is beyond human comprehension. It is “more to experience than to understand” (MC).

          Brittany Fletcher’s “My Gothic is Your Gothic” is notable for showing a few different usages of the gothic, including a personal anecdote of her own. She defines the gothic as existing “to help build suspense or… a dark tone.” That definition is a bit broad for my taste; I could put just about every horror movie from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” to “Saw 17” in that box. For me, the gothic is most associated with certain images: a decrepit mansion illuminated by thunder, or a red beating heart under the floorboards in a darkened room. BF examines an excerpt from “The Fall of the House of Usher” in which correspondence heightens the feeling of gothic fear, and I’d probably add correspondence as a common technique associated with “the gothic.” In the darkness of the night, windows, towers, and trees can be distorted by the imagination and made into menacing monsters; this is another common technique. My feelings on the gothic are like what one supreme court justice said about pornography: I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.