Tuesday, 16 November: Hawthorne, from Abraham Lincoln 2378-79. Abraham Lincoln, 2007-2011.

Reader: Bryan Lestarjette

Objective 2: To study the movement of "Romanticism," the narrative genre of "romance," and the related styles of the "gothic" and the "sublime."

Abraham Lincoln is sometimes considered the greatest American president, and it is perhaps easy to forget that he was human just like anybody else. In his description of Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne reminds us fondly of his humanity, including his physical imperfections. He is "about the homeliest man I ever saw, yet by no means repulsive or disagreeable." His physical appearance is more like Ichabod Crane or David Gamut than someone we would associate with the presidency.

Throughout the short piece (which was originally edited out of a longer work so as not to offend), Lincoln is portrayed as an American Everyman, and his remarkable rise is seen in somewhat romantic terms: "Unquestionably, Western man though he be, and Kentuckian by birth, President Lincoln is the essential representative of all Yankees, and the veritable specimen, physically, of what the world seems determined to regard as our characteristic qualities. It is the strangest and yet the fittest thing in the jumble of human vicissitudes, that he, out of so many millions, unlooked for, unselected by any intelligible process that could be based upon his genuine qualities, unknown to those who chose him, and unsuspected of what endowments may adapt him for this tremendous responsibility, should have found the way open for him to fling his lank personality into the chair of state,–where, I presume, it was his first impulse to throw his legs on the council-table , and tell the Cabinet Ministers a story. There is no describing his lengthy awkwardness, nor the uncouthness of his movement; and yet it seemed as if I had been in the habit of seeing him daily, and had shaken hands with him a thousand times in some village street; so true was he to the aspect of the pattern American…" [pp. 2378-9]

In what ways could this be considered romantic (or could it)?

Does the description of Lincoln in this piece include elements of the gothic or sublime?

What is romantic about the two speeches we read?