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(2015
midterm assignment) Model Student Midterm answers 2015 #1: Long Essays (Index) |
LITR 4328 |
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Rachel Morris
6 March 2015
The American Renaissance: Full of
Pleasant Surprises
I entered this course without a clear
idea of what the American Renaissance was. I did, however, have a firm grasp on
what the renaissance was in Europe: a time of rebirth, great art, and the growth
of the sciences. I came to the conclusion that these would be the kinds of
themes I encountered when reading texts from the era of the American
Renaissance. However, I was a little off in my early assessment. What I have
learned is that the American Renaissance is less like the European renaissance,
and more like the Romantic era in British literature. This era of American
Romanticism began several of the conventions still in use today. What I learned
was that American Romanticism has some very unique features that I had not
encountered in the romantic style before.
When I studied British Romanticism I encountered the way
romantic writers interacted with and idealized the natural world. What I did not
expect to find was the unique ways American Romanticism approaches idealizing
nature. What surprised me was how in “I Sing the Body Electric,” Walt Whitman
idealizes the human body as a part of the natural world. Whitman, as I learned,
elevated the things people encounter in the everyday. In this poem he writes,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth
them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to
them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge
of the soul.
He seeks to “discorrupt” the bodies of those he loves,
indicating that the body, as a part of nature, is as worthy of being admired as
the trees and the sky. This can be further evidenced when tied to his poem,
“There Was a Child Went Forth,” in which, not only does he idealize the
innocence of childhood, as I expected of romantic poetry, but also ties this
innocence in as absorbing the natural world that surrounds the child, taking it
in as a part of himself. The poem says,
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white
and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,
And the Third-month lambs and the sow's pink-faint
litter, and the mare's foal and the cow's calf…
By absorbing the nature around him, the child becomes a
part of it as well. Whitman’s poems show that the human body, as a part of
nature, is ideal as well.
Another facet of American Romanticism I did not expect to
encounter was the Gothic, especially in the unique way American Romanticism uses
it. Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” is a perfect example of the Gothic. In this poem,
the descriptions Poe makes align with the traditional color scheme of the
gothic; He describes Ligeia as being like marble, a hearkening to her
whiteness, her eyes “the most brilliant
of black,” referring to her darkness, and when Rowena drinks a glass of wine, he
sees, “… fall within the
goblet, as if from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room, three or
four large drops of a
brilliant and ruby colored fluid.” These colors, white, black, and red, all
contribute to the Gothic in the poem. An example of American Gothic I did not
expect was found in James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Last of the Mochicans.” As
America does not have Castles and ruins, as are traditional in Gothic
Literature, the American Renaissance writers used the wilderness as their Gothic
setting. In chapter 5 of “The Last of the Mohicans” Cooper uses the forest in
the same way other Gothic writers use haunted castles,
“Glancing
his eyes around, with a vain effort to pierce the gloom that was
thickening beneath the leaf arches of the forest, he felt as if, cut off
from human aid, his unresisting companions [Cora & Alice] would soon lie at the
entire mercy of those barbarous enemies, who, like beasts of prey, only waited
till the gathering darkness might render their blows more fatally
certain. His awakened imagination, deluded by the deceptive light, converted
each waving bush, or the fragment of some fallen tree, into human forms, and
twenty times he fancied he could distinguish the horrid visages of his lurking
foes, peering from their hiding places, in never ceasing watchfulness of the
movements of his party.”
Here the forest arches
function as the ceiling or halls of a castle, penning the protagonists in, and
the “horrid visages of his lurking foes,” parallel the haunting ghosts of the
traditional Gothic tale.
One new term I learned was correspondence. While we did
not discuss it in class, I did encounter it in reading the model assignments for
the web highlights assignment. When I saw it in the terms list I thought it
referred to communication by letter, or over a distance, but in her essay,
Melissa King defines it as being when the character projects their emotions onto
nature. It can also be the reverse however, being how the environment affects
the mood of the character. She uses the example of Ichabod Crane in The Legend
of Sleepy Hollow; Crane has gloomy thoughts, influencing how he sees the world
around him as gloomy, and conjures thoughts of ghosts. When I understood what
this term meant, I began to realize I had already seen it in other novels, not
only in the texts we read in class, but also In others, such as Jane Eyre, which
I had just read for another class. It is also present in Rip Van Winkle. When he
believes he will find escape from his pestering wife by going into the woods, he
takes comfort “In a long ramble of the kind on a fine autumnal day…” The fine
day reflects Van Winkle’s hope of escaping his wife. I have also realized that I
have even used correspondence in my personal writing; in the story I am writing
the character has been captured, and awakes to a dreary rainy day through the
bars of her prison cell.
One of the challenges I face in this course is in
analyzing the poetry, which is something I have always struggled with. I can
appreciate the beauty of a poem, whether read aloud or not, but often have
difficulty in extracting deeper meaning from it. This appears to be particularly
true of American Renaissance poetry; I find it beautiful, but have difficulty
analyzing it, specifically, Emily Dickinson’s peculiar punctuations. In some
research I was doing, I encountered her poem “Death in the Opposite House.” I
had trouble extract any meaning but the obvious one because her use of dashes
kept me from forming complete thoughts out of the fragments, much as the poem we
read in class, “Wild Nights,” did. However, as I had been instructed, I began to
think of the purpose for the dashes and came to the conclusion that, as she put
them there intentionally, perhaps the purpose was to disrupt the reader’s
thinking. Through using the ways I have learned to look at American Renaissance
poetry, I have begun to hone the ability of interpreting poetry.
I have learned much about American Renaissance literature
so far. As I understand it, the American Renaissance
is still a rebirth; it is the birth
of a new chapter in American literature, where authors pushed the boundaries of
what is traditional, and adapted conventions to meet the needs and uses of an
American writer. Knowing what I know now, it makes me wish I had focused on
American literature so much sooner. Up till now my passion has been for British
literature, but understanding now the techniques and richness of American
literature, and the heritage it passes on, have kindled a new appreciation for
the literature of my own country.
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