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(2016
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2016 #3: Web Highlights |
LITR 4328 |
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Kimberly Hall
September 28, 2016
The Romantic Hero(ine)
Looking through all of the previous model assignments, I was excited to
see all of the pieces about Byronic heroes; they are, in my opinion, some of the
most interesting characters in fiction, and it’s hard to not get attached to
someone who deliberately breaks the mold of what a hero is supposed to be. But
when I read Mariah Glidden’s research post titled “The Byronic Heroine”, it
really struck a chord with me. After all, a renaissance is a time of progress,
but women in this period were often not afforded the right to be the kind of
rebel-without-a-cause that men were, which makes mold-breaking heroines somewhat
hard to come by.
Velma Laborde elaborates on the surprising lack of progress in their
short essay titled “The Woman of Sleepy Hollow”, wherein they write about
Katrina Van Tassel being “chosen as the symbol of America’s change” in
Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow. I found the essay itself a fantastic read, and I thought their
interpretation of Katrina as a “contradiction between the old and new America”
to be spot-on. Katrina and the other women of Sleepy Hollow were young, modern,
and ready to learn, but their only teacher is run out of town because, as
Laborde put it, “Not all of America is ready” for that.
Similarly, Valerie Mead’s research paper titled “The Negative Perception
of Strong Female Characters in American Renaissance Literature” thoroughly
elaborates on some assertive, independent female characters who are viewed
negatively for “demonstrating much different attitudes, beliefs, and patterns of
behavior than their female peers”. I agree that this speaks to the times at
which these stories were written, but I also appreciated that they put so much
emphasis on the fact that these assertive women were viewed as undesirable for
acting in a way that was “socially deviant and...outside their designated gender
roles”, as this is something that women in literature today still struggle with,
and for demonstrating how the authors tended to directly compare them to more
‘ideal’ women in order to emphasize their negative perception.
After reading so much about how these strong women were viewed so
negatively, I breathed a sigh of relief when I went back to read Glidden’s “The
Byronic Heroine” again. While she did not go into great detail, it was
refreshing to see someone write about dark, brooding, socially-deviant female
characters with a more positive spin. Glidden specifically mentions Ligeia from
Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia and Cora
Munro from James Fenimore Cooper’s The
Last of the Mohicans as heroines exhibiting Byronic traits, and I can name
some more contemporary examples off the top of my head, like Jessica Jones from
the Marvel comic ‘Alias’ (and her subsequent self-titled Netflix show), Morgana
from the TV series Merlin, and
Katniss Everdeen from the Hunger Games
series.
I love Byronic heroes, and I probably always will. We’ve had great,
lengthy discussions of the melancholy male heroes of the Romantic period in
class, which I appreciate. After reading through some of these essays, I feel
even more strongly that it is time to let Byronic women shine; after all, dark
and brooding women are just as lovable as dark and brooding men, and deserve
just as much recognition.
