LITR 4232 American
Renaissance
Sample Midterm Answers 2004
·
Part 2. Essay
Assignment: Discuss how American authors use one or more elements of Romanticism to represent the challenges and realities of American history, the American landscape, and / or the American people.
· Refer to three or more texts from our course readings. (Feel free to refer briefly to authors beyond the course, but not required.)
· Concentrate on one or two aspects from objective 2 or elsewhere: the romance narrative, the gothic, the sublime, Transcendentalism, or combinations.
· Compare and contrast authors and texts with each other. (Don't treat texts in isolation—make them talk to each other!)
· Conclude strongly: What have you learned about Romanticism or its elements and / or about the USA?
Romanticism, before moving onto American soil, centered on Europe’s castles, old cities, and other dark places their structured cities placed before them. However, when it moved to America, there were no castles, no old cities, no dark alleyways to produce these romantic novels. So, the American writers moved it to the forest and to the surrounding nature that now was America’s castles.
One of the first American writers, Washington Irving, had his stories teeming with the romantic part of nature, both the sublime and the gothic. Both Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow dealt with nature in contrasting ways. In Rip Van Winkle, the mountains surrounding his town were writ in a sublime fashion. These precipices were majestic and beautiful, but could bring bad weather at any point. These mountains were structured and elegant, but were the source of Rip’s twenty year slumber. These mountains brought both pleasure and pain to those who surround it. In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, however, nature became a very gothic force. The forest was dark, and full of evil. The main antagonist is a creature who dwells in these forests itself. So, it becomes haven for evil and darkness, even more espouses its gothic ways. When Ichabod Crane takes his fateful journey through the forest, he encounters “gnarled, fantastic trees,” a stream that had “a cavernous gloom thrown over it,” and other dark features that the forest displayed. This gothic forest was the main antagonist in this book, and became one for many American writers after Irving. Nature, to Irving, was sublime and gothic, and romanticizes both aspects well. The eventual “Americanized” romance is starting to spread.
Another writer, James Fenimore Cooper, also used the forest as a place of both sublime and gothic elements. This was best displayed in The Last of the Mohicans. In it, the forest can be a place of haven and one of gloom. An example would be when Hawk-eye led his group into his secret hiding place. This area was surrounded by dark and mysterious areas. However, all of this darkness led to a sanctuary for them during that time. Cooper masterfully led his reader through the fear of where Hawkeye was taking them to the pleasure of knowing that they have reached a haven. Cooper also uses the gothic element by his use of color, which he used by his inclusion of the three major races during that time. The whites portrayed (Hawkeye, Alice, etc.) were seen as pure and good, the bulk of Indians portrayed (Excluding Chingacook and Uncas) were displayed as passionate, almost blood-thirsty people. Finally, the only African-American portrayed (Cora) was not seen as evil, but was very headstrong and the total opposite of the white people she was surrounded with. Cooper maintained a sense of gothic styling through the dark forest and his mixing of races, but also had some moments were the nature surrounding his characters became sublime. One of the strongest points of this was when Hawkeye and his party climbed the mountain and observed the nature below them. Although they went through hell to reach that point, Cooper really illustrated through his words how beautiful the area was around them. The pleasure and pain aspect is key in the formation of sublime writing. Cooper, just as Irving before him, mixed the forest into something that is both scary and beautiful at the same time. The American romantic novel was fully realized.
Finally, Frederick Douglass uses the sea as something that is sublime in his work. This comes from the first passage of the 2002 student answers from the identify and signify quotations. This passage uses romanticism, and both elements of the gothic and the sublime. First of all, the romantic aspects of this piece are paramount to his work. The sea and the boats were a sense of freedom to him, and the language that he uses to describe them, like “noble bay,” and “lofty banks.” By observing the sea, Douglass had a sense of freedom that he did not feel before. This brings the reader to the sublime aspects of this work. He mixes the pleasure of watching the ships, which “affected [him] powerfully,” with the pain of being “left of the hottest hells of unending slavery.” This experience of both pain and pleasure typically personified the sublime writings, and is done very well in Douglass’ work. The use of the gothic style is evident, by his interplay of the light of the ships to the darkness of slavery. These boats became “freedom’s swiftwinged angels,” all of these boats were “ever white,” and Douglass wanted to be “under [it’s] protecting wing.” These all bring up the elements of light, while the darkness of slavery (“Bloody whip, “bands of iron,” “born a man, of whom to make a brute,” and “Hell of slavery”) encased Douglass into just staring and hoping. Douglass, like Cooper and Irving before him, mixes nature into something both scary and beautiful at the same time.
In conclusion, the age of romanticism did not die in Europe’s castle, it’s dark, decrepit cities, but was reborn in the wilderness and surrounded nature of America. Cooper, Douglass, Irving, and many other American writers realized this, and used it to make a new age of romanticism. [JL]
Cooper is one to use wilderness gothic. Racial warfare is occurring in the wilderness, so Cooper really darkens the descriptions of the forest. He describes the wilderness with images of darkness, seclusion, shadows of trees, rippling streams and silence (15). Personification is frequently used to personify the forest such as “the forest…appeared to swallow up the living mass” (15). Cooper also describes Magua with racial phrases such as the “dark hand of the savage” with dark symbolizing evil and mystery. The descriptions of the wilderness seems to be parallel to or a metaphor for the racial warfare.
Like Cooper, Irving uses wilderness gothic in Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, but Irving uses it for purposes solely for entertainment and pleasure to keep the reader spooked with superstition and allusions of the wilderness. According to a 2004 poetry presentation by Jessica Lightle, “As Irving describes individual character traits, scenery, and history of the town…, he counters his work to create a pleasant atmosphere by mixing in bits of the supernatural.” Irving seems to get so elaborate that the wilderness scene becomes almost desirable, which would actually make it a bit sublime. For the most part, however, the supernatural makes his writing very gothic.
Cooper’s work is very representative of historical struggles just as Jacob’s and Douglass’s slave narratives. Their descriptions are used to represent their dark experiences but, more specifically, is directed to their master or mistress when “under the influence of slavery.” Although their experiences are real, the reader can still capture a glimpse or a feeling of the gothic. Just as in “The Jealous Mistress,” the way in which Jacobs’ mistress watched over her in “the dead of the night” and sometimes “whispered” in her ear which on occasion would “startle” Jacobs (1967). Her sort of gothic experience gives her a feeling of entrapment and fear.
Douglass’s narrative is like Jacobs in its realism, but his use of the gothic is much more evident and less limited. He described how Mrs. Auld, once a kind a tranquil woman, became “red with rage” and her voice became “harsh and horrid transforming from an “angelic face to a demon” (1838). Unlike Cooper who represents skin color of races other than white as mysterious and gothic, Douglass and Cooper represent whites as evil when poisoned with the influence of slavery.
In a 2003 midterm, JD states that “for our culture to progress, we must recognize voices that have in the past been shut out.” Good literature emphasizes important moments in history, and the gothic element is a powerful and effective language device which attracts a multitude of readers which then creates a powerful influence of equality among all and a better future. [SM]