(2016 midterm assignment) Model Student Midterm answers 2016 #1: Long Essays (Index)

LITR 4328 American Renaissance

Ali Judd

The Romanticism Outside of Romance

          Coming into this course, I already considered myself pretty familiar with the American Renaissance period and Romantic literature. I have always loved classic literature, and a lot of my favorite writers and poets happened to all be from this particular period of American history. Poe has always been a favorite of mine, and I have also long admired Whitman, in addition to the Fireside Poets. However, I never connected these people in my head as all being Romantic figures. There were also several other figures who I had never realized were Romantic, such as Washington Irving, whose stories I read when I was much younger. It was very interesting to me to finally connect all these writers together, and begin to see certain similarities among all of their work.

          One thing that I had not considered as being part of Romanticism was the Gothic. Romanticism is largely focused on taking the ordinary and exaggerating or intensifying it. I think the gothic of American literature (wilderness gothic) really portrays this idea well; it takes something ordinary, in this case the wilderness, and embellishes and intensifies it to make it dark, forbidding, or macabre.

          Another aspect of Romanticism that I had not connected to that period was transcendentalism. The name itself contains the word “transcend,” which means to rise above or go beyond. This is strongly related to the Romantic concept of portraying things differently than how they are, so it made sense how they meshed together. However, I noticed that transcendentalism seems to have aspects of both Romanticism and Realism. In Emerson’s Nature, the natural world is described as immensely beautiful, and how man and nature have a spiritual relationship with one another. This is a very Romantic way of thinking. However, Emerson is not trying to make nature seem more beautiful than it is; instead he says that nature is such an incredible thing because the reality of it is actually beautiful. This is where you find an aspect of Realism in transcendentalism. 

          The last, and most intriguing, aspect of Romanticism I had not before considered was the concept of the sublime. I was familiar with the term, but not very familiar with the meaning of it or how it related to literature and Romanticism. Exploring the sublime in literature was extremely interesting to me. It really is such a unique concept that cannot be matched by anything else. The duality of pleasure and pain, or of beauty and fear, is often eloquently described in Romantic literature. Poe showed this duality well in Ligeia. When Poe’s character sees the reanimated corpse of his lover, Rowena, he is both amazed and terrified at the sight of her. This wonder paired with fear is a brilliant example of the sublime in a gothic context.

          Emerson also describes the sublime as an aspect of nature. At one point in Nature, he describes himself as being “glad to the brink of fear” due to the amazing things that he is experiencing around him. This is sublime, because he is describing being so overjoyed by nature that he actually becomes afraid. However, this fear is not the same type of disgust or horror described by Poe. Instead, it is a fear in the sense of being completely overwhelmed or awestruck by the things that he sees and by the spiritual connection he experiences while immersed in nature.

          So far, this class has shown me aspects of Romanticism that I had not considered as being part of the movement. Along with this, I have also learned how to notice these concepts in different texts, which makes it very interesting to see just how much Romanticism still exists and how it strongly influenced current literature. I hope to continue my exploration of these beautiful concepts and be familiar enough with them to find glimpses of them in other texts that I read.