Sample Student Research Project 2018: Essay
LITR
4328 American Renaissance / Model Assignments
Sample Student Research Project 2018:
Essay
Curtis Crunk
26 November 2018
The
Sublime and Time
Industrialization changed
the landscapes of the American wilderness faster than time ever could in its
infiniteness; proud, magnificent forests that had stood for millennia fell to
axes of men after a few moments of swinging and plains blossoming with wildlife
and flora of wild grandeur became littered with railroads and ash as trains
darted around the countryside faster than any wagon could. As the natural world
fled from civilization, individuals who yearned for the pastoral, picturesque
days of old began to write and depict on canvas the world they had destroyed in
the pursuit of modernity. In their pursuit of depicting the sublime power of
nature, writers and painters of the Romantic period focused on the magnificence
and inspiring horror of nature without paying much attention to how time impacts
not only the sublime but the Gothic as well. In order to expand on the thesis of
this paper, the following will be examined and dissected in order to show the
importance of time in the nature of the sublime and the Gothic: Washington
Irving’s stories Rip Van Winkle and
Sleepy Hollow and how time impacts
the picturesque, the use of the decaying of the body and buildings in Edgar
Allan Poe’s work, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing in the religious sublime and
the use of time in the text. By examining time as a major, rarely discussed
element of the sublime, the beauty and horror of time in Romantic literature can
be expanded upon more so than it has been in previous lectures.
Irving’s tales implement the
sublime more often than most of the writers in the course thus far. The opening
of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow states
that the titular location is “like those little nooks of still water, which
border a rapid stream, where we may see the straw and bubble riding quietly at
anchor…, yet I question whether I should not still find the same trees and the
same families vegetating in its sheltered bosom” (6). This line from Irving
creates a picturesque image of the countryside of Sleepy Hollow, which in turn
adds to the notion that Sleepy Hollow resides in a state of timelessness; the
narrator can plainly see the same trees and families that reside in the town in
contrasts to the industrialized world of America. This picturesque imagery is
further used as the narrator states “a great elm tree spread its broad branches
over it, at the foot of which bubbled up a spring of the softest and sweetest
water, in a little well-formed of a barrel; and then stole sparkling away
through the grass, to a neighboring brook, that babbled along among alders and
dwarf willows” (21). These images are subject to the sublime due to the
picturesque imagery acting as a snapshot of a moment in time; time itself is
made material in the form of the aesthetic. Time, however, does not care for the
picturesque as the town of Sleepy Hollow cannot stop the flow of time as seen by
“the schoolhouse being deserted soon fell to decay” (69). Decay, as later to be
examined with Poe, is how time festers in the picturesque and taints the sublime
imagery of the pristine landscapes of Sleepy Hollow because nothing can escape
the touch of time.
The use of decay as a force
of time is also found in Rip Van Winkle
through the physical degradation of the world around the titular character.
Prior to finding his home in ruins, Rip had fallen “into a deep sleep” (21) only
to awaken and find his rifle “incrusted with rust, the lock falling off, and the
stock worm-eaten” (23). As Rip explores his old town, the narrator states that
“their dress, too, was of a different fashion from that to which he was
accustomed” (26) and of his home that “he found the house gone to decay” (28),
showing that time as a force of the sublime is able to use its horrible but awe
inspiring power to change the world around the characters. Rip’s own dog, Wolf,
even forgets his master as Rip laments “’My very dog…has forgotten me” (28),
which in turn shows how time can not only decay the world around its characters
but also their body and mind as well. In essence, the world Rip knows is in
ruins and a new one has taken its place as time as gone on without Rip. Carolyn
Korsmey writes in “The Triumph of Time: Romanticism Redux” that “ruins bear the
marks of the passage of time that is in the process of gradually destroying
them” (430) and “a ruin represents a fragment of what once was whole, and it is
the image or the idea of that former whole that fills the mind with wonder and
admiration, constituting the significant object of aesthetic experience” (431).
Ruins, therefore, are indicative of time past, present, and future, and that
time is above all the most sublime of all of nature because of its ability to
alter the aesthetic experience and the world and its values as seen in
Sleepy Hollow and
Rip Van Winkle. In
Sleepy Hollow, time leaves the
schoolhouse in ruin in steep contrast to the town itself (which is still stuck
in that picturesque setting), whereas in
Rip Van Winkle the world Rip knows and its values are in ruin and have been
built upon with new faces and ideas. As seen in
Rip Van Winkle, Korsmey argues that
“no matter how fervent and sincere our attempts to rebuild and repopulate
ancient places with our imaginations, the gap between
then and
now is unbridgeable” (433); time is
constant and trying to return to a previous state from the present in
impossible, especially in the case of Rip Van Winkle and his shocking
transference from a pastoral era to modernity. For Irving, the grandeur of
nature is present, but his subtle use of time as a force of sublimity is a
hallmark of his writing that needs to be investigated further in order to truly
understand how time impacts the sublime.
Moving from Irving to Poe,
the Gothic tradition of writing has ample examples and arguably the best use of
the sublime and time as a whole. David B. Morris writes in “Gothic Sublimity”
that “the eighteenth-century sublime always implied (but managed to restrain)
the threat of lost control. Gothic sublimity-by releasing into fiction images
and desires long suppressed, deeply hidden, forced into silence-greatly
intensifies the dangers of an uncontrollable release from restraint” (306). In
essence, the major sublime element of Gothic fiction is that of a loss of
control. Death, however, is the ultimate loss of control as seen in
The Cask of Amontillado when the
narrator buries his victim behind a wall that for “half of a century no mortal
has disturbed them” (235). The narrator uses his cunning and the passage of time
to hasten the process of death for his antagonist, which in turn creates the
sublime feeling of horror for both the cruelty of his actions and the effect
time will certainly have on the antagonist’s sanity and body. The decaying
process, halted by the air-sealed room, becomes the most sublime element found
in The Cask of Amontillado. Death,
the biggest existential threats mankind deals with, is tackled by the Gothic by
glorifying or focusing on the last moments of death; death is the ultimate loss
of control in regards to the sublime and the human experience. As mentioned
previously, decay is the result of time at work on someone or something and
nowhere else is this greatly exemplified than in Gothic fiction. In Edgar Allan
Poe’s Ligeia, the narrator mentions
that he met Ligeia “in some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine” (1). The
city is only ever described as just that, old and decaying, and paints the image
that time has not been kind of the unnamed city near the Rhine and has hastened
its decay. As the story progresses, the narrator is plagued with visions of his
dead lover Rowena transforming into Ligeia until her corpse takes her form. For
Morris, “death is now so thoroughly interlocked with sexuality that it becomes
difficult to know them apart” (309) and here the narrator is unable to tell what
is alive and truly dead because of his dead lover plaguing his sanity. Time
clearly has not done the man any favors in forgetting his lover Ligeia, and
because his sanity is put to the test when he claims to hear moans from the
corpse until it resembles his former lover, the Gothic sublime could arguably be
shown here as an example of rotting of the man’s sanity (rotting being
indicative of the passage of time).
Much like the decrepit city
in Ligeia, the central location in
The Fall of the House of Usher is
described as an “excessive antiquity” and that the “discolorations of age had
been great” (6). While the house itself might appear to be in “extraordinary
dilapidation,” the narrators mentions that “there appeared to be a wild
inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling
condition of the individual stones…which has rotted for long years in some
neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air” (6),
which implies that the house is slowly decaying with the passing of time and its
end is imminent. Michael J. Hoffman argues in “The House of Usher and Negative
Romanticism” that “the House of Usher is a metaphor for the faltering
Enlightenment” (163) and that the house itself is representative of the fall of
the Enlightenment era into the age of Romanticism. If this is the case, than the
symbolism implies that the passage of time, a sublime force found in
Romanticism, is the reason behind the change in the thinking process of the
minds of the time. Keeping in mind the notion of time, Hoffman mentions that “in
the days that follow, the narrator witnesses the growing dissolution of his
host's mind” (166) and, after his host dies, “runs out into the night, and in
the light of the "blood-red moon" watches the final disintegration of the House
of Usher as the zigzag fissure begins to split apart” (167), which shows that
time has finally taken the members of the House of Usher with its awe-inspiring
sublime power. If we follow the metaphor outlined by Hoffman, the House of Usher
is the end of an era and the inhabitants, who were sick in mind and body, were
the last of a dying breed that had to crumble with their foundation in order for
a new era (Romanticism) to emerge. Regardless of how you look at the story, time
plays a central role in both premises because the sublimity of time ultimately
leads to the ruin, both literally and metaphorically, of the house and its
inhabitants and whatever customs and ideas that they might have had at one point
in time. Hoffman ends his argument by stating:
The nameless narrator
(nameless for good reason, because he can find no means of self-identification)
perceives the disparity between the old ways of structuring the world (Usher's
ways) and his own perceptions of the way things are; but he sees no way out of
his dilemma, and he is left a lone individual without any sense of self and
without any engagement in the world around him—the new post-Enlightenment man,
the “Negative Romantic”. (168)
In this sense, the duality
of the characters in The Fall of the
House of Usher can be seen to represent both the literal loss of sanity and
life from time and the emergence of a new era with the passing of time.
Therefore, time as seen in Poe is indicative of a force of decay as seen in the
Gothic tradition and helps to illustrate the grandeur of the sublime in its
relation to time and the Gothic.
While Irving and Poe both dabble with
the Gothic, Hawthorne takes a more religious approach to the sublime and how he
portrays the world. Leo B. Levy states in “Hawthorne and the Sublime”
that “the Gothic becomes another version of the religious sublime, focusing
upon the misery and despair of lost soul” and that “in some of its appearances
the moral or religious sublime is secondary to the aesthetic appeal of vast
landscapes or seascapes. These manifestations are typically marginal, but the
fascination is there” (399). Most of the content covered in the course would
agree with this statement; Hawthorne’s writing is centered on the moral
convictions of a central protagonist that is tested by some unseen force or by
the social norms of the time. Perhaps this was from Hawthorne’s troubled
ancestry and he wished to right the wrongs of his fire and brimstone ancestors,
or perhaps because of his New England upbringing Hawthorne saw grandeur in the
world around him through a spiritual lens rather than a naturalistic eye. That
said, Hawthorne does dabble in the Gothic and time as the sublime as seen in
Young Goodman Brown when he writes at
the end “and when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse,
followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly
procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his
tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom” (72). The imagery of the corpse, hoary
and desecrated by age, paints the picture of something awesome if not grotesque.
Faith’s faithfulness towards Young Goodman Brown is also sublime in nature due
to the magnitude of time spent with him. What is also important to note is that
Young Goodman Brown died at an old age, which implies that the sublime was at
work in his passing due to the grotesque nature of his appearance at death due
to his age. Hawthorne’s naturalism does shine briefly as well as he writes “he
had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest,
which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed
immediately behind” (8). While Gothic in its approach, the sublime does exist
here and the gloomy trees of the forest hint at a sadness that lingers in the
environment that Goodman Brown inhabits. Interesting enough is the subtle
presence of time and the sublime, which can be seen when Brown recounts “the
moment his fingers touched them they became strangely withered and dried up as
with a week's sunshine” (38). The corpselike imagery here, along with the
decaying elements of the sun, hint at the use of time in the sublime to show the
horror of the imagery that Brown encounters with the old man. Time, as used
here, truly does impact the sublime because of the immediate nature of the
sublime as well as the effects of decay described by the sunlight on the fingers
of the old man appear to have on Goodman Brown. In short, Hawthorne’s writing,
while religious in nature, does contain elements of time and the sublime as seen
in Young Goodman Brown.
Time and its relationship to sublimity
is clearly important in the bodies of work used from the course. While not
discussed as widely due to the more prevalent forces of Gothic tradition at
work, the nature of time does contribute heavily to the sublime, be it the
passing of time and the changes that come with it in Irving’s writing or the way
time impacts the body and mind as seen in Gothic literature and in Hawthorne’s
work. The sublime and the Gothic require not only each other, but also must take
advantage of the forces of time in order to truly create their impacts in the
picturesque and the grotesque respectively. Time is fleeting and its
awe-inspiring nature must be both seen as beautiful and horrifying in order to
truly understand the impact it has in the subtle and overt narrative traditions
found in the texts of this course.
Works Cited
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Young
Goodman Brown.” LITR 4328 American Renaissance, 1835,
coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/AmClassics/RomFiction/Hawthorne/YngGmnBrown.htm.
Hoffman,
Michael J. “The House of Usher and Negative Romanticism.” Studies in
Romanticism, vol. 4, no. 3, 1965, pp. 158–168. JSTOR, JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/25599641.
Irving, Washington. “Rip Van
Winkle.” LITR 4328 American Renaissance, 1819,
coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/AmClassics/RomFiction/Irving/RipVanWinkle.htm.
Irving, Washington. “The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” LITR 4328 American Renaissance, 1819,
coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/AmClassics/RomFiction/Irving/sleepyhollow.htm.
Korsmeyer,
Carolyn. “The Triumph of Time: Romanticism Redux.” The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism, vol. 72, no. 4, 2014, pp. 429–435. JSTOR, JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/43282365.
Levy, Leo B.
“Hawthorne and the Sublime.” American Literature, vol. 37, no. 4, 1966,
pp. 391–402. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2923134.
Morris, David
B. “Gothic Sublimity.” New Literary History, vol. 16, no. 2, 1985, pp.
299–319. JSTOR, JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/468749.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “Ligeia.”
LITR 4328 American Renaissance, 1838,
coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/AmClassics/RomFiction/Poe/PoeLigeia.htm.
Poe, Edgar Allan “The Cask
of Amontillado.” The Complete Tales &
Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Castle Books, 2002, pp. 231–235.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall
of the House of Usher.” LITR 4328 American Renaissance, 1839,
coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/AmClassics/RomFiction/Poe/PoeUsher.htm.
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