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(2015
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2015 #2a: Short Essay (Favorite Passage) |
LITR 4328 |
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Sarah Hurt
The Lamplighter, More than just a bestseller
Out of everything we have read so far the
Lamplighter, captured some of the
best and worst parts of the American Renaissance for me. The novel and its
popularity, was made possible due to the rising literacy rate and printing
techniques that were becoming less costly. I found it very interesting to read
the section in the introduction where Nathaniel Hawthorne complains about the
quality of popular literature, and if you took out the slam against women, it
could easily be something that you could read from a frustrated author nowadays
due to the rise in eBook and independently published novel sales that are having
a similar effect on popular books today.
While some people in class obviously were offended by the
religious (specifically Christian compared to a more generic spirituality idea
as seen in Emerson’s Nature)
undertones of this novel and more specifically the other novel we compared this
one to (The Wide, Wide World), I saw
this as a further connection to the desire for spirituality during the time
period. While this novel does aim more at a Christian idea of spirituality and
thus sticks with the tradition of the time period, the ideas regarding finding
God or a higher being through nature is still there. Gerty, who has no
connection to the Christian God through teaching (like Sunday school), reasons
out that someone more powerful than a human much exist because after being
locked in the attic she falls asleep “wondering who lit the star” that seemed to
speak to her on a spiritual level.
Gerty’s story also has elements of a romantic narrative
in that she is on a journey of spiritual and familial growth. Her ponderings
regarding the figurative lamplighter in the sky are her first steps in her
spiritual journey towards faith and by going to live with Trueman she is
starting to build a bond with the man who will become part of her family. Some
of the American Renaissance themes can easily be overlooked if someone were to
choose to not even consider the work seriously due to the almost overly familiar
themes. This work exemplifies the way that at one time works by someone who was
not a white male were not even thought of as possible important literature is
now being reexamined and receiving a new level of importance as something
written by a woman during a past time period.
However, as much as I do enjoy picking out the elements
of American Renaissance literature in the
Lamplighter, I have to admit that it features some of the things that I
don’t particularly like about some forms of literature, specifically the extreme
nature that Romantic rhetoric can take on. While I can enjoy some elements of
Romantic rhetoric such as allusions to mythology, I tend to get tired of the
extremes and superlatives. Especially when they contradict themselves in the
same paragraph. One example of this in the
Lamplighter would be the lines “no
one noticed the little girl, for no one in the world cared for her” in paragraph
2, followed in the same paragraph with “the poor little thing was told, a dozen
times a-day, that she was the worst-looking child in the world, and the
worst-behaved”. Either no one notices her at all or someone (Nan Grant) is
noticing her a lot, all I know is that I felt that by toning down all of these
extremes and superlatives the author might be easier to take seriously.
