(2013 midterm assignment) Index to Sample Student Midterm answers 2013 #1: Long Essay

LITR 4232 American Renaissance

Mickey Thames

Truth, Justice, and The American Way—American Romanticism and How We Think

    Mundane, boring, mediocre, everyday, and common. These are all words that do not describe American Romanticism. How do you then, describe a literary movement, and even worse, tell people why it is important? You start little, and you start familiar.

The Gothic is easiest starting point for understanding that big fuzzy concept known as Romanticism. There isn’t an interesting person alive who is not familiar with the Gothic. Often known today as macabre, or horror, the Gothic is life with the contrast set to max, and everything in black and white (and red). It is life with all the little unnecessary bits thrown to the wind, concerned only with the highest of highs and lowest of lows, the deepest of desires, and the most crushing of loss. It is teenage emotions, given ink and paper, spun into tapestries of love and loss. Edgar Allan Poe, in his famous Ligeia, artfully creates for the reader the very image of woman perfected. Her skin is as marble, her mind an immense thing, and her passion for him outshining even his own for her. His desire for her is made evident by his description of her marble (white) skin, and dark, inky (black) hair. This is not mere love, no, it is the most stupendous love that has ever been! At least until she dies. Then the other half of the Gothic comes to the fore, the deepness of loss. Such is Poe so affected by Ligeia’s death, that her spectre haunts his second wife, the much less dark, and therefore much less exciting, Rowena. Oh, for a love that transcends even death, such was the desire that was there! This is the Gothic, the black and the white (and red), the desire and the loss. This is the excitement of life turned up high, stripped of all the little boring bits.

If Poe’s Gothic seems a tad too dark, then that makes it an easy move to the Gothic present in James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans. Instead of black and white, we move to the Gothic’s other color, red; and one cannot get any more red than in Cooper’s tale of Native Americans, mountain men, and all their merry adventures. Whether it is the handsome, noble savages of Uncas and Chingachgook or the dark, charismatic Magua, the Native Americans in Mohicans give the ready a heavy dose of the hot, bubbling emotion coursing through men of all colors. Even white Hawkeye, through his numerous murders (all in self defense of course) spills enough red to be considered amongst them. But where the Gothic excites, the sublime awes. And Mohicans has more than enough of the sublime, or the idea of extreme beauty tinged with danger or fear. Romanticism abounds with it, starting with the beautiful Glens Falls, a real place on the Hudson River in New York. The huge forbidding river spans before the reader, hiding large rocks and secret hiding spots. To view the river from these spots makes a few of the characters cry from the beauty, but also from the very real danger of being swept away.

It is this fear, this idea of being swept away in the awe and power of a sight, that defines the sublime. The sublime is defined in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, most notably his essay Nature. In it, as evidence by the title, he tells men to behold the stars, and marvel at their ever present  magnificence. To Emerson, no man can look upon Nature and not see the sublime constantly. Surrounding us, supporting us, crashing down and around upon us, and springing back again, anew, when men look to tamp it down. It is the natural vistas, Emerson argues, that true happiness lies. He says that the years strip away while he walks amongst the trees and brooks, making him feel as he did when he was a boy. This childlike state in Nature is a portion of the third idea of Romanticism, known as transcendence. To transcend, according to Emerson in Nature, was to move beyond the bounds of a singular way of thought, and to rise above normal restrictions on human thought, usually through communion with Nature. This idea of moving upward, toward higher understanding, was in reaction to events happening in history. As people were moving West, Emerson wanted people to remember not just to move outward, but upward as well. The West was a wild and vast wilderness, full of Native Americans and creatures. It served as a way of taming that frontier in the minds of people, by imagining it was welcoming them into its arms. While it may have been a far cry from the real thing, it nonetheless stuck in the minds of everyone who ever moved, or thought about moving West. It was this great migration that helped to shape a large part of the American way of thinking. Our identities as Americans are highly influenced by this time of rapid expansion, as our love of the rugged individual bravely looking out on the sublime landscape of North America, living a life of excitement and danger comes from this era of literature.