Sample Student Research Project 2010
Essay
LITR
4232 American Renaissance
Sample Student Research Project 2010
Essay
Dan Matthew Chavez
November 28, 2010
Minority Accessibility to American Romanticism
The American
Renaissance Period in literary and historical studies offers a rare insight
concerning the developmental course of what has become one of the most pervasive
movements of English literature, Romanticism. Emerging from an Augustan age of
logic and reason headed by the likes of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, the
literary world witnessed the rise of Romanticism in Western European culture,
primarily in Great Britain with writers such as William Blake, S.T. Coleridge,
Lord Byron, and John Keats.
Regardless of what ‘broad’ approach—natural, gothic, personality—was taken, the
English Romanticists laid the crafted the movement with certain guiding
elements. And in time, English
Romanticism came to the United States and became the base for American
Renaissance literature, with those guiding elements intact and no less
influential. However, the base of
writers between these two great nations, the U.S. and the U.K., differed
tremendously. While English
Romantics consist primarily of the well-off, white, European male, American
Renaissance writers covered a grand scope of disparate characters, from whites
to blacks, genders of either color, religious to politic, the well-versed to the
illiterate, and socio-economic standings across the spectrum.
This diversity of perspective illuminates an issue with Romanticism that
never begged address, the issue of whom Romanticism is accessible to.
Shown particularly in the works of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs,
many key elements of Romanticism are inverted to fit the needs of minority
groups, claiming and rearranging Romanticism itself so that it may operate as a
vehicle for their own artistic expression.
What the works of these authors makes clear is that the oppressed group
in a given society, the oppressed people of the American Renaissance Period,
cannot access Romanticism in its traditional form, due in particular to their
standing in the society.
In understanding
where minority groups diverged from other writers of the American Renaissance, a
firm comprehension of what elements drove traditional Romanticism is needed.
Romanticism as a whole is a rebellion
against the previous Augustan age which held science and reason above all else,
stanchly opposing a view in which capacity for emotion is less-esteemed than
one’s faculty of reason. Romanticism is
truly an escape from a reality formed by facts and stratums, for some to a past
which no longer exists and for others to a world which doesn’t yet or never
will. Some of the key elements of
Romanticism, elements which indeed carried over to writers such as Walt Whitman
and Ralph Waldo Emerson, are a certain reverence for the natural and the
sublime, a beauty of the natural or pastoral world which corresponds to a
person’s inner self, and a reverence for the isolated individual, the single
‘self’ who exalts his or her own being in self-interest and solitude.
Both of these elements of Romanticism are seen clearly in Whitman’s poem
“When I heard the learn’d astronomer,” in which the narrator, presumably Whitman
himself, rejects empirical studies of the heavens and embraces the stars through
self-immersion of natural sublimity in solitude.
Whitman “wander’d off by [him]self, / In the mystical moist night-air,
and from time to time, / Look’d up in the perfect silence of the stars,” not
only displaying an exaltation of self by his voluntary self-removal from
society, but an acknowledgment of the sublime through the mysticism and
religious view he has for nature.
The preference any reality other than the urban, industrial society shows itself
not only in the escape to rural or hermetic life, but in an escape to the
supernatural and transcendental as well.
The gothic works of Poe and Hawthorne, the utopian dreams of which
accompanied many of the movement writer’s works (women’s rights, abolitionists,
religious re-awakenings, etc)—these texts all exhibit the reaction against a
scientifically or logically ordered world.
Additionally, in rebelling against reason and logic, the embrace of
emotions spurned the rise of sentimentality or sensibility, and a nostalgic
longing for times before the harsh and objective reality which the period was
faced with. All of these elements,
carried over in the language of the average man, create Romanticism for the
English and the American Renaissance in the U.S.
With the elements
laid out, it is easy to see which parts of Romanticism minority groups could
embrace, and which needed be rejected or inverted.
For the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, the
predominant Romantic trait is sentimentality.
Sentimentality is more firmly implemented in Jacobs’
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
(henceforth Incidents), in which she
uses the agonies wrought by slavery on the family, particularly from a mother’s
perspective. For the slave mother,
the reality of how swiftly a family might be torn asunder is poignantly
addressed and done so in a way that provokes the heart of the reader into action
against a system which would compel such sorrows.
Jacobs shows the mother “watching the children who may all be torn from
her the next morning; … [who] wish[es] that she and they might die before the
day dawns,” illustrating the extreme to which the slave’s motherly instincts
have driven her, and simultaneously drawing in any reader with similar
instincts, instincts which disregard racial divisions, to identify with her
plight. Douglass evokes
sentimentality with a different emotional pull just as effectively though.
The incidents Douglass pulls from in
Narrative of the life of Frederick
Douglass (henceforth Narrative)
are not those of familial sundering, but of flesh being flayed from the person.
Douglass’ depiction of whippings, of what could aptly be described as
outright torture, and his own reaction to his first view of a whipping as a
child evoke an outrage that not only could such things happen to fellow human
beings, but that it might scar a child psychologically.
Mirroring Douglass the child in the first chapter who, “terrified and
horror-stricken at the sight,” the reader is forced to feel the same instinctual
rejection of such an act. More
incidents which stroke sentimental chords exist throughout Douglass’ narrative,
not only with regard to the dehumanized state of the enslaved, but the
dehumanization of the slaveholders as well.
A beautiful
example of traditional Romantic reverence for nature exists in
Narratives, displaying another moment
when the minority group may firmly embrace Romanticism.
“One cannot but admire… the language of the apostrophe to the ships on
the Chesapeak Bay beginning” (McDonald) for its Romantic overtone.
During this passage of chapter ten of his book, Douglass shows himself as
a younger man in awe of the scene of Chesapeake Bay, laid beautifully across the
land, full of ships symbolic of freedom, the white men who are “loosed from
[their] moorings, and are free,” while Douglass, and all the slaves, is “fast in
[his] chains.” The scene is very
obviously in reverence to the sublime, and a rare moment in Douglass’
Narrative during which nature holds a
place over the city.
Another undeniably
Romantic element of both Incidents
and Narrative is that they are both
escapist narratives, inherent in the fact that reality for either text is
slavery, a subhuman mode of existence.
For Romantic texts, whether they seek a nostalgic memory which no longer
exists or a utopian world which may never exist but on paper, escaping reality
is simply part of the movement, and the same holds true for the works of
Douglass and Jacobs, though their reality is without a doubt, much harsher than
the standard Romantic’s. This is
where the bulk of similarities between traditional Romanticism and the
minorities’ Romanticism end though.
The first major
diversion from traditional Romanticism, which presents itself in both
Incidents and
Narrative, is in the escapism which
either exhibit. While escapism is a
traditional trait of Romanticism, typically it is an escape from reason, logic,
and urban society. As seen in
Whitman’s poem “When I heard the learn’d astronomer,” the escape is to a world
with fewer formulas, fewer signs of society, and fewer people.
In Whitman’s poem, it even goes as far to be an escape from educated
society. For Douglass and Jacobs,
literacy, industry, and community are all desired.
The educated, scientific world which seems to suffocate the typical
Romantic is exalted by the minority Romantic, and there is great stress place on
the importance of being able to read and write in both
Incidents and
Narrative.
For Douglass, though in the beginning, chapter seven, he questioned
whether “learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing,” reading was
strongly pursued, through “tedious effort for years,” because of just how vital
literacy is to escaping a slave reality.
Jacobs presents a similar appreciation of learning, citing one of her
mistresses in the first chapter of
Incidents with her advancement in literacy, since “while I [Jacobs] was with
her [the mistress], she taught me to read and spell; and for this privilege,
which so rarely falls to the lot of a slave, I bless her memory.”
It is because Douglass and Jacobs had the privilege of masters who
spurned or started the practice of literacy that either emerged so swiftly
(comparatively) from the bonds of slavery and were able to produce the
literature which further ennobled the abolitionist cause.
While it is true that other black supporters of the abolitionist
movement, such as Sojourner Truth, succeeded in spreading their message without
the means of pen to paper, the ability to do so is an invaluable asset to the
escape from slavery not only for Douglass and Jacobs, but for the slave
community as a whole. So, not only
is education, in time perhaps to extend beyond literacy to arithmetic and the
sciences, of greater value to the minority group than the simple exaltation of
nature, but it is this very notion of society, which the traditional Romantic
seeks to escape, that the minority Romantic seeks refuge in.
The inverted
escapism of minority Romantics ties in to another important inversion for this
group, the inversion of nostalgia.
While it is undoubtedly there, the literature of Douglass or Jacobs does not
reflect a desire for the past, or a longing to return to Africa.
There is instead always a hopefulness which looks towards the future and
salvation which lies in what’s ahead, rather than what is long past.
In the stories of Washington Irving, such as
Rip Van Winkle, there exists a
definite longing for permanency in an ever-changing world.
This is also present in another story of his,
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, in which
new elements are rejected (Ichabod Crane) in an attempt to maintain days which
will inevitably be looked on with the sense of nostalgia.
Douglass displays a healthy hopefulness, as opposed to nostalgia, best in
Narrative in chapter five as he looks
back at “Colonel Lloyd’s plantation [for] what I [Douglass] hoped would be the
last time. I then placed myself in
the bows of the sloop… interesting myself in what was in the distance rather
than in things near or behind.”
Jacobs reports a similar experience near the end of chapter seven of
Incidents, writing of how they “often
planned how [they] could get to the north,” a hopefulness most slaves probably
shared, a shared dream Jacobs acknowledges further on in the same passage, that
“many a slave sister has formed the same plans.”
These plans all
point in one direction for the minority Romantics, which is towards the urban,
industrial lifestyle. Perhaps the
most important point made by traditional Romantics is the value of the rural,
natural world over that of the city.
Whenever Romanticism is called up in parody or mockery, the focus is the
highfalutin, over-the-top nature revelry which makes up some of the most popular
Romantic poetry. In American
Renaissance writing, the imagery is not so nauseating, but still contains the
natural mysticism which Whitman makes mention of in his poem “When I heard the
learn’d astronomer.” In both
Jacobs’ and Douglass’ writing though, this reverence of nature is not only
primarily absent, but nature is also at times shown as isolating and undesired.
The preference for the city over the country is perhaps due to the simple
necessity of survival; the odds are greater in the city than on the frontier,
especially for a slave or former slave.
But regardless what due should be paid to Darwinian theory, the fact
remains that it is the city which Douglass and Jacobs aspire to, the city and a
home to call their own, respectively.
In Incidents, at the end of
the text, Jacobs acknowledges the city preference in acknowledging that her
dream “is not yet realized. I
[Jacobs] do not sit with my children in a home of my own.
I still long for a hearthstone.”
The preference shows much better in
Incidents because Jacobs still
strives for it. For Douglass, the
preference of the city is achieved, as evidenced in chapter eleven of
Narrative, as Douglass “left [his]
chains, and succeeded in reaching New York,” clearly placing the city as the
home of salvation. What truly shows
a preference of the city over nature though, comes in chapter eight of
Narrative, in which the slave
property is being re-evaluated and redistributed, and Douglass’ grandmother,
having outlived her usefulness, is taken by the owners out “to the woods, [who
then] built her a little hut… and then made her welcome to the privilege of
supporting herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtually turning her out
to die.” This scene shows just how
undesirable nature is to the minority Romantic, and also leads to another
important inversion of traditional Romanticism.
This final
inversion is of the individual identity so highly valued by traditional
Romantics. For the minority
Romantic, individual identity is not so important as community identity.
This is dominant in Incidents
with Jacobs’ value of the familial bond, but also in her gratitude in chapter
six at living “in a town where all the inhabitants knew each other!
If I [Jacobs] had been on a remote
plantation, or lost among the multitude of a crowded city, I should not be a
living woman.” Clearly, community
is important, and not simply for protection against aggressors.
It is made clear in both of the texts that “a deeply personal quest for
freedom is also understood as representing the desires of the entire slave
community” (Carson). Douglass
values community just as much in acknowledging that his “fellow-slaves were dear
to [him]” in the tenth chapter. He
“was anxious to have them participate with [him],” a sign of group identity and
cohesiveness, rather than the traditional Romantic preference for the individual
experience. Further on, after the
group has made plans to escape, and these plans have been discovered and the
group dispersed, “it is this separation from his fellow slaves that Douglass
experiences as the more painful punishment as he is cut off from his community”
(Stocks), rather than any fear of
physical abuse. In chapter eleven,
the same fear of isolation which his grandmother experiences when being put out
in the woods, Douglass fears upon being separated from the community he knows,
even in the city, “in the midst of thousands, and yet a perfect stranger;
without home and without friends.”
All of these
inversions which define the minority Romantic experience point to something
other than traditional Romanticism, indicating that it is inaccessible to
minority groups. So, while American
Renaissance literature is essentially Romantic, it requires a basic human
freedom to be expressed. Otherwise,
aspirations for a connection with nature, for an individual experience, for a
time long past, are lost in the face of oppression and abuse of the soul.
Before finding a connection to the natural world, a connection to society
and community needs to be found; before exploring the self, a sense of human
identity must be known; and a decent existence, one which has time to become
sour and then regretted, must be experienced before the oppressed can wish for
its return.
Works Cited
Carson, Sharon.
“Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.”
Masterplots II: African American
Literature, Revised Edition.
Salem Press, 2009.
Literary Reference Center.
Web. 25 Nov 2010.
McDonald, Shiela.
“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave.”
Masterplots II: African American
Literature, Revised Edition.
Salem Press, 2009.
Literary Reference Center.
Web. 25 Nov 2010.
Stocks, Claire.
“Literary Contexts in Novels: Frederick Douglass.”
Literary Contexts in
Plays, Essays, and Memoirs.
Great Neck Publishing, 2006.
Literary Reference Center.
Web. 25 Nov 2010.
White, Craig.
American Renaissance Literature.
Humanities Department.
University of
Houston Clear
Lake, n.d. Web.
25 Nov 2010.
