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(2018
midterm assignment) Model Student Midterm answers 2018 #1: Long Essays (Index) |
LITR 4328 |
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Kyle W. Abshire
10/3/2018
Romance, a Driving Desire
Before signing up for this class I had never heard of American Renaissance
literature or seen a compiled list of these authors grouped together. I found
myself looking at the reading list and asking myself: What in the world does
Edgar Allan Poe have to do with Walt Whitman? To make things more confusing, the
term romanticism was introduced as interchangeable, for renaissance. In the
beginning, I was completely at a loss of what to expect from this class.
However, I have come to learn a lot about romanticism and its authors, many of
which I have read before but now have a deeper appreciation of their styles.
Gothic, sublime, Correspondence, and transcendence are all strong
characteristics of the romantic period. Through close inspection of course
material we will discuss how these themes shape stories into romantic pieces.
Often when reading poetry,
we expect that the full meaning of the poem won’t be immediately revealed to us.
It is not uncommon to need multiple read-throughs to fully understand the work’s
meaning. However, it is common for poetry to speak on multiple levels, with the
surface level being the most obvious. The person, place, or situation being
described is there for us to grasp but the lower level of the piece usually
takes more effort. The lower level is a hidden treasure, waiting for us to
uncover its knowledge. Walt Whitman’s, I Sing the Body Electric uses the
sublime to reach depth not possible in basic descriptions. On the surface,
Whitman is describing people. The entire work is basically a description of men
and women. However, he strives to find a deeper truth, than just the physical.
We can see this in the over-zealous way that he uses descriptions. “As I see my
soul reflected in Nature, / As I see through a mist, one with inexpressible
completeness, sanity, beauty, / See the bent head and arms folded over the
breast, the Female I see (Whitman 5). On the surface, he describes a woman, who
is maybe hunched over, folding her arms. However, digging deeper shows us that
the woman is almost inconsequential. He is not speaking about a woman, but more
likely all women, or all people. Whitman compares his own soul to that of
nature, immediately invoking a spiritual meaning and continues to describe a
woman with unbelievable attributes. The use of words like “inexpressible’ and
“completeness,” gives us the understanding that he is not talking with a
rational mind. Nothing and no one, is perfect, yet he describes this woman as
so. The sublime language that Whitman uses, takes us from a conversation about a
single woman and transforms it into a spiritual conversation about the entirety
of existence.
The sublime is a powerful tool in evoking deeper meaning,
in a literary piece. However, it is not the only tool. Gothic writing can
achieve the same effect, with a slightly different route. Gothic writing is
best characterized as dark or macabre. If the sublime uses over embellishments
to describe perfectness and beauty, gothic does the opposite. It often relies on
over describing darkness or unpleasantness to evoke a deeper feeling. Edgar
Allan Poe is famously renowned for being a gothic writer. One work of his uses
the gothic style to evoke feelings of love. Poe’s, Ligeia, depicts a man
who has lost his wife to illness, unhappily remarried, and now faces the death
of his second wife as well. “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 25). The main character’s second wife
has died, and he sits by her bedside mourning, while simultaneously remembering
his first wife. While he thinks of Ligeia, the corpse on the bed seems to be in
the process of reanimation. Poe has used an overwhelming sense of despair to
force the reader to feel for the character, beyond a basic understanding of his
situation. The character at this point seems to be going mad from loneliness.
His despair from losing Ligeia, is only magnified by the death of the lady
Rowena. Her love was only a place holder that consequently made the man’s
despair grow. At the death of the lady Rowena, he can only think of Ligeia.
However, this incredibly dark and twisted set of affairs does not make us
dislike the main character for using Rowena. It gives us a deeper understanding
for his desire to be reunited with his true love, Ligeia. The gothic forces a
feeling of uneasiness, on us and makes us experience things that we would rather
ignore.
Correspondence is used in romanticism to express one’s
deeper feelings, through their surroundings. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
uses correspondence to show us that the story is not about the small town or
Ichabod Crane, but really about desire. Ichabod’s sole motivation, in the story,
is to act upon his desire of love. He is caught in a love triangle, of sorts,
with a wealthy bachelorette and the local show off. The settings of nature
almost always seem to reflect Ichabod’s mood. We see this correspondence most
clearly when Ichabod rushes away from the party, after being rejected by the
wealthy woman. “It was the very witching time of night that Ichabod, heavy
hearted and crest-fallen, pursued his travels homewards, along the sides of the
lofty hills which rise above Tarry Town, and which he had traversed so cheerily
in the afternoon. The hour was as dismal as himself” (Irving 55). Nature is
directly mirroring Ichabod’s mood. Ichabod is scorned and upset, as he leaves
the party, and views the world as such. Not only are we told that the world has
taken a dark hue with Ichabod’s mood, but were also told that the same setting
was cheerful before the party, as he was cheerful that he might get to spend
time with his desired. The setting changes to reflect the mood of the character
because we are not experiencing a physical world, at least not wholly. We are
experiencing a world based on emotion. Ichabod’s emotions control nature, which
emphasizes to us that the story’s true objective is to express desire and
emotion, rather than tell a narrative.
This leads us to
transcendentalism. It is the last tool of romanticism that we will discuss.
Transcendentalism is a philosophical approach to viewing the world. Ralph Waldo
Emerson explains to us his view of the world in an essay titled Selections
from Nature. The essay discusses the world and its different forms. However,
it speaks of the physicality of the world, as a mistranslation of its
attributes. This is made resoundingly clear in the chapter accurately named,
Nature. “The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably
made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and
Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape” (Emerson 9).
Emerson is speaking about a large area of land and explains that some people may
own parts of the land, but none can own its beauty. Transcendentalism attempts
to transcend past the world that we see through social structures and see the
world as a spiritual place. A place of beauty that cannot be controlled by man.
As in every other tool of Romanticism, we have discussed, Transcendentalism
wants us to leave the world behind and enter one driven by the spirit or
emotion. A world not run by logic or reason, but one that takes place outside of
our control and pulls us with desire.
Romanticism is an incredibly diverse genre of literature. The writings span from
gothic scenes to transcendental essays. However, despite their differences, the
goals are all to similar. The sublime strives to evoke emotion through words and
over description. Whitman’s, I Sing the Body Electric expresses an over
the top form of beauty so well that we are forced out of an earthly realm and
into the ethereal. The Gothic style expresses unpleasantness so overwhelmingly
that the reader can not help but feel the deepest of emotions. Poe’s, Ligeia
takes us down a dark and deceitful path, with a mourning widower. Poe’s story
uses dark imagery to push us into an uncomfortable state of mind, so that we
become disheveled and closer to the character’s mindset. Therefore, we are much
more likely to connect and understand the stories emotion led conclusion.
Correspondence uses the surrounding world to reflect that of a character’s
feelings. Irving’s, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow depicts Ichabod Crane’s
surroundings based from his inner emotions. If we are only able to understand
the world through Ichabod’s emotions, we are not experiencing the physical
world. We are experiencing Ichabod’s emotional response to certain situations.
Lastly transcendentalism works to explain that we do not see the world for its
true worth. It strives to deconstruct the social weight that we have placed on
arbitrary agreements and explains that these agreements are far less valuable
than the spiritual significance of the world. Emerson’s, Selections from
Nature calls out our acceptance of agreements like land ownership and
explains that we can own land, but we cannot own that lands beauty. Romantic
writing strives to pull us from our default understanding of the world and
pushes us into an emotion filled spiritual world that cannot be summed up with
facts and figures, but changes with each person’s experience.
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