(2017 midterm assignment) Model Student Midterm answers 2017 #1: Long Essays (Index)

LITR 4328 American Renaissance

Rebecca Dyda

Intensifying the Romantic through the gothic and the sublime.

My experience in the American Renaissance has been a rather intriguing one. When starting the class, I knew of the Romantic genre, but I did not know much. I was excited to see authors that I had seen before such as Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe, and terms that I had seen before such as the Sublime and the gothic. In order to understand these terms, you must first understand Romanticism. Romanticism is very complex, but one way to remember Romanticism is that it tends to take ordinary things, such as nature, and intensifies it. In my opinion, this exact principle seems to be the base to both of our terms the gothic and the sublime.

The gothic resembles Romanticism in that it takes normal things, such as castles, woods, etc., and makes them into dark and unsettling forces. When looking at the term definition on our course site, I found that there many characteristics that made up the gothic genre. These characteristics were haunted houses, castles, woods, mazes, labyrinths, closed doors, secret passages, light and dark interplay with shades of gray or blood-red colors, fair and dark ladies, twinning, doubling, and doppelgangers, repressed fears and desires, death and decay, bad-boy Byronic hero, spectral or grotesque figures, lurid symbols, and creepy or startling sounds such as creaks, screams, and groans. All of these characteristics are intensified in our readings and portrayed as something more than what they essentially are in real life. A good example of the gothic was found in our text the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The story starts out as a relatively romantic story in the town of Sleepy Hollow about our main characters Ichabod Crane, Katrina Van Tassel, and Brom Bones. Towards the end, the story takes a dark turn when the main character Ichabod Crane ends up in the woods being chased by a headless horseman. It is at this moment where we see the gothic take over; it transforms the woods from a patch of trees into a dark world filled with creepy sounds and grotesque figures.

We also see the gothic come into play in Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia. For instance, in the work, he describes an abbey that he plans to purchase. He describes the building with words such as gloomy, dreary, savage, and decay. Here, Poe deliberately turns a home that may seem normal to others and intensifies it in a way that comes off dark and unsettling. This adds to the gothic setting of the story and appeals to our interests in things that are dark and unsettling.

Another idea that intensifies thoughts and feelings in Romantic literature is the term sublime. The term sublime is described as beauty mixed with terror, danger, threat—usually on a grand or elevated scale. This was used in Ralph Waldo Emerson piece titled Nature. He uses this idea throughout his work. For instance, in paragraph 12 he says, “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky without having any occurrence of a special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear”. In this text, he describes how he is glad to the brink of fear while walking through and actually seeing the view of nature. This is where we see the sublime come into play. He is happy to enjoy the beauty of nature to the point where it scares him. Emerson could have just commented on how the nature around him was beautiful, but instead, he takes it one notch further and describes it as a beauty that is terrifying. Emerson does this so we can see and understand the beauty of nature the way he does.

We also see the sublime come into play in Maria Susanna Cummins work called The Lamplighter. In the story, a young girl is in an abusive home and a man named Trueman Flint gave her a cat as a companion. When describing her love for the cat, Gerty says that “no words can tell”. This shows that the love that she has for the cat is so big that no words could describe it. The author could have just said that Gerty loved the cat, but instead she enhanced the feeling into something bigger than the character could grasp. Intensifying her love for the cat in such a way that appeals our emotions. Most of us can read this and think of an animal, or someone in our lives that we have loved this much.  This is when the text is no longer words and becomes something more to the reader. 

          So why exactly do these authors decide to use ideas such as the sublime and the gothic as a way to intensify certain aspects of ordinary, everyday life? To answer that, you have to look within yourself. Why do you go see a scary movie, like to visit creepy houses, or look out at the sunset? In my opinion, it gives me a thrill that I can’t quite explain. It’s always been a question that I could never fully answer for myself and still to this day I cannot give you a complete answer. I just know that it is something that is gratifying in ways that I can never fully comprehend. This, in turn, is why the sublime and the gothic work; they bring these thoughts and questions to light in the characters that express them.