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(2016
midterm assignment) Model Student Midterm answers 2016 #1: Long Essays (Index) |
LITR 4328 |
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Grant
Law
September 26, 2016
The American Renaissance: The Formation of the American Literary Canon
At the beginning of this semester, the exact details of the American
Renaissance were foreign to me. I had already been familiar with the paramount
figures of the time such as Poe, Whitman, and Thoreau, but other than that the
expansive catalog of the American Renaissance had remained untouched by me. What
surprised me was the themes that were heavily explored during the British
Romantic movement were tackled over the seas with their American counterparts.
Topics such as the sublime, nature, and individualism had found homes in the
West in the pages of a new wave of thinkers such as Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and James Fenimore Cooper. With the Gothic tone of Poe and the
free-verse aura of Whitman, American literature found a place in the literary
world for the first time during the American Renaissance.
British Romanticism already viewed nature as an immaculate force that
allowed an individual escape from the mundanity of the city. The same can be
found in American Romanticism and Transcendentalism during that time. However,
the view of nature is different from its European counterparts. In Walt
Whitman’s There Was a Child Went Forth,
Whitman utilizes nature as a component of the individual and not an aesthetic
idealization saw in British Romanticism:
“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, / And the noisy brood of the barnyard or by the mire of the
pond-side, / And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there, and
the beautiful curious liquid, / And the water-plants with their graceful flat
heads, all became part of him.” (Whitman 5-10)
Whitman infused nature into the child allowing him and nature to become
contingent upon each other which reflects beauty inward and outward towards the
world. The aesthetic idealization is not in sight of nature but the
participation of it. Through the help of nature, the sublime transforms man into
a particle of God.
Another American author during the Renaissance that highlighted the role of
nature was Ralph Waldo Emerson. With a profound sense of spiritualism and
heightened consciousness, Emerson founded the Transcendental school of thought
which influenced many of the writers during that period including Whitman.
Emersonian Transcendentalism brought the concept of the interconnectivity of man
and nature into the literary community believing that it was through nature man
could become part of God, all things passed through man: “I become a transparent
eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate
through me; I am part or particle of God.” (Emmerson). In this excerpt from
Nature, Emmerson explores the core
topics of the Transcendental movement and establishes the interconnectivity that
allows man and nature to ascend into the realm of heaven.
The text I had trouble connecting to the most was James Fenimore Cooper’s
The Last of the Mohicans. Combining
elements of both the Romantic and Gothic, Fenimore detailed the life Native
American tribes and their taming of nature. However, this is not to say that
Fenimore refrained from the traditional depiction of Native Americans as
savages. Magua becomes a trope within the text due to his drunkenness and lack
of reliability which results in a clash between the traveling party of the
Munros and the Delaware Indians. Painted as a historical novel, this captivity
narrative presents false representations of the era and romanticizes figures
from dominant Western culture over the savage Native Americans. Fenimore
furthers the idea of Western cultures victory over the Delaware Indians with
Tamenund’s final words closing out the novel, “Go, children of the Lenape, the
anger of the Manitou is not done. Why should Tamenund stay? The pale faces are
masters of the earth, and the time of the red men has not yet come again.”
(Cooper 33.48). This implies that the “pale faces”, white people, took the land
from Tamenund’s people and transformed their once proud territory into a
civilized society that directly opposes the Native American philosophy. It is an
inverse of the Romantic notion of nature as an idealized aesthetic of beauty
allowing an individual to escape society, but in Cooper’s case, Western society
imposes itself on the Native American’s land.
One
of the most distinct characteristics, which is a term we had discussed heavily
in class, of the American Renaissance is the element of the Gothic. Made famous
by Edgar Allan Poe, the Gothic allowed the darker parts of the mind and world to
be explored. In doing so, a representation of the base human emotions such as
fear and anxiety came into the discussion among the American literary community.
Poe had created a language of despair in his work that evoked the sublime in a
new and haunting way. Through this dark undertone, Poe created the motif of the
light and dark lady. Seen prominently in Ligeia, the two forces of relief and
inspiration had inflicted Poe with the greatest joy and sadness. Whereas light
and dark were used as forces of good and evil in the outside world, Poe uses
light and dark as forces within man: “And again I sunk into visions of
Ligeia—and again, (what marvel that I shudder while I write,) again there
reached my ears a low sob from the region of the ebony bed. But why shall I
minutely detail the unspeakable horrors of that night?” (Poe). Ligeia had become
a figure of both adulation and fear which drove the narrator away from her in
the first place. The concept of desire and isolation found a new home in the
realm of the Gothic and all of its haunting imagery.
So far this class has been an insightful learning experience for me. The
American Renaissance was a time of creativity and prolific voices which
established American literature in the global canon for the first time. With the
new expressions of the Romantic and Gothic movements, various writers such as
Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau experimented with form and technique
resulting in refreshing literature. Now I have the opportunity to read authors
such as James Fenimore Cooper and Emily Dickinson whom I had might never read.
This class broadens my view of the early formation of the rich literary canon of
America that started during the American Renaissance.
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