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(2015
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2015 #2b: Short Essay (Favorite Term) |
LITR 4328 |
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Karin Cooper
It Feels Good to Think of Children
"I just had a baby last summer". Reading the previous sentence makes you say
"awww, baby", this factor of the sentimental feeling one gets when thinking
about children is something the writers in the American Romantic Period did not
shy away from. The innocence of children is used in literature as a positive
sentimental tool. It is a nice way to remember the past, and adults often think
fondly of their childhoods, and try to preserve the innocence of the children
that are in their own lives. Childhood innocence is something I was not
expecting to learn about in a American Renaissance class. However within the
first couple weeks it was brought up as one of the themes you might find in
Romantic literature. It is nice to think of innocence, to think about something
that is not yet corrupted. This theme that is frequently found in literature of
the American Renaissance period is still strong today, and I would even say
embedded in our culture now, in literature, as well as in society in general.
Children have a level of absorption that they enter into in their play that it
seems adults have lost. This is part of the fascination with child like
innocence, and part of why people are often nostalgic about being a child. Walt
Whitman in "There Was a Child Went Forth" does an excellent job of showing the
level of absorption that children immerse themselves in as they live their
everyday lives. The boy in Whitman's poem is a wonderful example of this: "And
the first object he look'd upon, that object he became," (Whitman Line 2). The
boy in Whitman's poem becomes every object he observed. Every child at some
point can become absorbed with that intensity in their play, and then one day
the child stops playing pretend, and realizes the pretend world of the child's
imagination is not real. Once this realization happens one can never go back to
that feeling, and that same intense play. Some adults can even remember the day
that happened when they could not just play pretend the same way anymore.
This is not the only aspect of childhood that you find in American Romantic
Literature, in addition to the different, and cherished way that children
experience the world, in literature you find example of the need to protect
children, so they are always taken care of. In James Fenimore Cooper's
The Last of The Mohicans, Alice,
although almost not a child any more, still has many aspects of the child-like
innocence that abounds in Romantic Literature. Cooper throughout the book gives
many indications that he wants Alice to still be thought of as a child: "If he
has been my father's enemy, I like him still less!" exclaimed the now really
anxious girl" (Cooper 2.6). Here Alice is referring to her father's enemy
because a child would not yet think of someone being her enemy for she is still
under her father's rule. It is enough for her to dislike someone on that base
alone because she still defers to her father's judgment instead of using her
own. One may think this is just because she is a woman. Women were still
considered a part of their father's household until they were married. However I
do not believe this is the case, because Cora who is also unmarried does not
behave in this way. In that same sentence Alice is also referred to as a girl
rather than a woman. Cooper wants the reader to consider Alice an example of
child-like innocence which must be protected. This complements her being the
fair lady in the Gothic dark lady/fair lady theme that Cooper also has going on
in The Last of the Mohicans, but that
is for another paper.
Although Whitman and Cooper were two very different writers in the American
Renaissance period, they both uphold the same theme of child- like innocence in
their work. I had never really noticed the references to children in literature
up until this point. I never thought thinking children were blameless and
innocent would be done enough to be noticed, but it is done, it is consistent.
Children were considered innocent in literature then, and still are now. Not
only are children considered innocent, people enjoy reading about the innocence
of children. It feels good, it
brings nostalgic, and sentimental feelings, and it brings up the desire to
protect and preserve the children in the story, or poem being read. There is
just something special about children that continues to strike a chord with us
even as it did almost two hundred years ago.
