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(2018
midterm assignment) Model Student Midterm answers 2018 #1: Long Essays (Index) |
LITR 4328 |
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Rudy Rios
October 6, 2018
Hand in Hand: Two Crucial Elements of the American Renaissance
The Sublime and the Gothic are cousins who join hands and wrap their arms around
the reader. While the former is often word-play that revels in elation,
serendipity, and grandiosity, the latter tends to lean toward the startling, the
haunted, and the interplay of darkness and light. One can best see and
feel the grandeur of the American Renaissance by walking with these two cousins
along the ridges of the Appalachians mountains in the dawning and gloaming of
the day.
The American Renaissance, the 40-year period just prior to the Civil War, marks
the arrival of the American Author to the world stage (White). Authors
like Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson exchanged
knights and castles for Indians and pioneers (White). Thus, it would seem
that America’s lack of nobility and castles renders its Romantic Renaissance
unique and similar; unique in its setting and similar in its language.
As to the setting and language of the Gothic in American Romantics, we find that
forests, churches, and graveyards supply the necessary components for setting
while macabre, and expansive language unites them to the European style.
Washington Irving his work The Legend of Sleepy Hollow does not place his
characters into old castles for there were none. Rather, Irving uses a
dark portrayal of nature to instill a sense of fear in the romantic reader: “In
the centre of the road stood an enormous tulip-tree … Its limbs were gnarled and fantastic,
large enough to form trunks for ordinary trees, twisting
down almost to the earth, and rising
again into the air” (Texts 56). The words “gnarled” and “fantastic”
are used to produce feelings of foreboding and dread. In the stead of
castles, American Romance authors employ bridges and school houses: “The old
country wives … maintain to this day that Ichabod was spirited away by supernatural means
… The bridge became more than
ever an object of superstitious awe; … The schoolhouse
being deserted soon fell to decay”
(69). Hence, the American Gothic authors use many of the same words as
their European kin: gnarled, supernatural, awe, and decay: But they
change the setting from the vast, boggy morasses of Germany for the dark forests
and decaying houses of the Americas.
As to the setting and language of the sublime, we find that the setting, though
not as grand as Shelley’s descriptions of Mount Blanc, is firmly set in nature
with words that show “beauty mixed with terror, danger, threat—usually on a
grand or elevated scale” (Sublime). Ralph Waldo Emerson uses the language
of the romantics for his treatment of the sublime. In two passages of Selection
from Nature Emerson uses the setting of nature to precede his implications
of the sublime. In paragraph six of the supplied text, Emerson uses the
word sublime directly: “One might think the atmosphere [nature] was made
transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual
presence of the sublime.” He leaves here not doubt of his romanticism.
In a second passage he uses a subtler approach: “… in snow puddles, at twilight,
under a clouded sky… I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the
brink of fear.” Emerson’s use of two extreme states mixed into one moment
reveals the romantic use of the sublime.
Edgar Allan Poe in his work The Fall of The House of Usher reveals
himself the near superlative of American Romance in his use of the sublime and
the gothic. Like Emerson, Poe does not mind supplying the reader with the
words gothic or sublime directly: “There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening
of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the
imagination could torture into aught of the sublime,”
and “… I entered the Gothic archway
of the hall.” And though he uses these words antithetically and descriptively
(respectively), he is seeding these terms into reader’s thought. His rooms are
“very large and lofty,” and his windows are “long, narrow, and pointed” (8).
His emotions are a mix of “feeling half of pity, and half of awe” (9).
These two, the gothic and the sublime meet often. Here is one such
meeting:
“…the lofty and enshrouded figure
of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood
upon her white robes, and the evidence of some
bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated
frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to
and fro upon the threshold—then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily
inward upon the person of her brother, and
in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse …”
(43).
In this passage fear, death, the grotesque, and the extreme of emotion drive
home the presence of the sublime and gothic.
Hence, the American Romantic Renaissance walk on the lofty places of literature
hand in hand with the gothic and the sublime. American authors used the
same sweeping language of the European romantics: the extremes of emotions, the
grandness of nature, horror of grotesque in deep and dark places. Yet,
they employ these literary devices in a uniquely American setting.
Although the American Renaissance occurs after the European Romantic period it
is fair to say that it is none the less majestic.
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