(2018 midterm assignment) Model Student Midterm answers 2018 #1: Long Essays (Index)

LITR 4328 American Renaissance

Kristina Koontz

Contradiction is Beautiful: The Complexities of Romanticism

I’ve never really considered myself a romantic before this course. I love to learn. I love to break things down to study them. I love to question. I love to analyze. I need proof of something, something tangible and able to be replicated and proven by multiple sources that says, “this is so.” Such a scientific mindset is antithetical to the idea of the romantic, for the romantic is all about experiencing something rather than understanding it. Science, to the romantic mind, slowly kills imagination by picking everything apart. And yet, just through the first few weeks of this course, I must understand that I am romantic.

When I first entered this class I had assumed I had a working understanding of the idea of romanticism: romance. Love. Kisses. Shakespearean love sonnets. The kind of stuff that usually makes me gag. Romance, I was startled and relieved to discover, is hardly just about love; it can be, but romanticism is a complex nuance of a dozen concepts and terms I knew, had heard of, or had a vague comprehension of but lacked a word to describe it – sentimental stereotyping for example, such as that found in Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow” when the messenger comes to deliver the invitation. If you had given me the definition of it before the course, I would’ve known what was being described but would not know the term for it. The only reason I had assumed that romance was just love at all was due to modern pop culture’s spin on it. Disney. Corny hallmark films. Books. TV shows.

“Romance” (the modern take on the romance narrative at least) is everywhere. On looking back to these sources after learning the terms “romance narrative” and “romanticism” I can see that the understanding of both has been heavily watered down from its previously complex weave down to “get the girl/get the guy” which, knowing what the romance narrative really is, is kind of offensive. Romanticism in the original definition can expand to the love of an ideal or goal (idealism) or love of the past (nostalgia) or love of nature (pastoralism). As an idealist – a feminist, a clean-power supporter, and an equal rights supporter – that does technically make me a romantic. I wish for the world to be ideal and for outcomes to be ideal. To find out that each of my outlooks is and was “romantic” was an unexpected discovery, and it links to a previous class I took a few semesters ago that focused on the “pastoral utopia” and utopias in general, and the romantic notion of character desire, either broad and philosophical or simple and practical are lessons taught to me in previous creative writing courses – the more in-depth, and the more contradiction there is, the better.

Emotion is an important aspect of the romantic style. While romantics like Emerson focus on the awe and wonder, the gothic style of writing, exemplified at its finest through the works of Poe and Dickinson, focuses intently on the horror, the melancholy, the fear, and the dark unknown only dimly illuminated to the human mind, with mortality often as a key focus. Dickinson’s “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain” and Poe’s “Ligeia” (or any of his works, really) gets caught up in the darkness and bleakness of life. It is because of reading so many of Poe’s works – Anabel Lee, Cask of Amontillado, Mask of the Red Death – that I had misconstrued “gothic” with “horror.” But the darkness is only one face of the gothic style. Ligeia was the first truly “gothic” story I had read by Poe where there was a distinct difference of dark and light, such as the contrast of the fair-haired Lady Rowena to snapping dark beauty with pale skin, Lady Ligeia. Gothic is about the symbolic interweaving of dark and light – I’d been so absorbed in the dark that I’d stumbled right past the light until reading “Ligiea”, an ironic thing since, upon reflection, I use that gothic melding of light and dark in my own work frequently, prose and poetry, through character design and through scene settings. I thought I was just being clever with all the symbolism I was using in designs (I think of myself more as a realism writer when it comes to scene settings) but apparently even symbolism is a romantic thing.

On another spectrum, the sublime, encapsulated best by Emerson in his essay “Nature”, is an entire concept that encompasses a peculiar event in the human mind where fear and awe mingle, or when one is exposed to something so incredible that thought becomes mute. Emerson, Irving, and even Poe romanticize nature, a trope common for romantic writers that merges pastoralism with nostalgia, but in that romanticization is the sublime. I’d thought sublime was naturally entangled with religion, and to an extent that’s correct – the 2^nd Great Awakening took place during this period, meaning a surge in religious focus and fervor – but the phrase isn’t completely wrapped up in religion. In works like “Wide, Wide World” the religious tone of sublime is there blatantly, for example, but sublime can be more subdued or more poetic than that. Emerson, I think, describes sublime best: “glad to the point of fear.” It seemed a little odd to me at first, but looking back I have experienced this myself – you don’t need to be religious to feel the sublime. Whenever I see a band of dark storm clouds coming in, white lightning flashing in their depths, it’s scary, but it’s also weirdly pretty. You kind of want to stay on your patio or in the street and just watch it, but your brain knows “No, idiot, go inside. You can admire it from safety.” The same thing goes for a tornado. They’re absolutely terrifying, especially the big ones, but that coiling of wind is hypnotically beautiful even as it wreaks destruction wherever it goes and screams like a speeding freight train. Adding religion to such a moment would only make it more profound to a romantic.

Sublime can just be about pure wonder as well, again encapsulated by Emerson. You don’t have to be afraid to experience the sublime. He describes this wonder best through his description of the night sky. “If the starts should appear for one night in a thousand years, how men might believe and adore!” There is a religious undercurrent to that statement, which is typical of the time, but it is not necessary to be religious to appreciate beauty. That’s just something the human brain does – it likes pretty things. Every single time I go out to McDonald Observatory and attend a “star party” I get that “whoa!” kind of sublime. The sky out there is so different from the sky here in Houston – it’s like the sky got its hands on a glitter gun and went wild with it. I don’t even listen to the tour guide lecture. I just want to sit back, stare, and appreciate because I can’t do that here, and I think in that regard Emerson’s statement rings truest – you appreciate something when you aren’t exposed to it all the time; that’s part of the sublime, being rare. Emerson even says that because people are exposed to the night sky all the time they’ve lost that sense of wonder and reverence we used to have for it. In the same vein, the sky around the Observatory wouldn’t be sublime if we could see that everywhere – the sublime can only be appreciated sporadically for it to have the full kick to it. This feeling of fear and awe or pure wonder is something I want to better utilize in my writing as it’s a reaction I’ve undergone personally but never really been able to write in.

As a writer, and someone who wants to be a good writer, it is important for me to study previous writing styles and understand the various terms. This course has inspired me to improve my work after better elaborating and re-defining terms and concepts I thought I knew by forcing me to understand I had made assumptions. Learning that I echo many romantic-period styles and concepts was somewhat jarring but, in hindsight, something I want to better embrace.