Kellye Nye
American Romanticism
Dr. Craig White
Summer 2002
Final Exam 

Question 2:  6:35-8:45 (2-10 minute breaks)

            American Romantics searched for a higher truth.  This quest led them to write of their experience and contemplation of nature and their psychological and physical desire for the past. Certain characteristics of imagery and a heightened awareness of the ordinary define this literary period, but they also transcend this period to affect the literary movements that followed. Residual elements from American Romanticism, such as boundary transcendence and nature’s sublimity, are evident in the post-Romantic writings of Zitkala Sa, Sarah Orne Jewett, Elizabeth Bishop, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

The American Romantics concept of nature is an inherent part of Zitkala Sa’s autobiographical narrative because she is a Native American whose childhood was immersed in traditions.  American Romantics placed importance on nature as did the Native Americans.  Nature is respected and revered as something mystical and otherworldly.  Sa’s story about the dead man’s plum bush interweaves nature with spirituality.  When her mother tells her to never pick a plum because the roots of this particular tree “are wrapped around an Indian’s skeleton,” Sa experiences for the first time a connection between life and death through nature. This connection is the type of experience of which the transcendentalists wrote.  Sa writes that this story was “the lasting impression of that day.”

The marbles Sa received from the missionaries also exhibit her link with nature.  She immediately makes a connection between the industrialized marbles with the colors she sees in the river ice.  Although when she tries to touch the colors in the river, the intense cold “burns” her hand.  She writes, “…for many a moon, I believed that glass marbles had river ice inside them.”  Her own connection with nature provides for her the foundation of her knowledge, the idea that nature is found inside the cultured orb.

This experience with the river ice and marbles foreshadows another emotion the missionaries will initiate.  When they tempt her with a faraway school, she convinces her mother to let her go.  This movement from a natural setting to an industrial setting, although not the Romantic ideal, will forever alter her life as she crosses a boundary to the unknown.  She feels regret for the first time on the train, and she describes herself “as [a] frightened and bewildered …captured young of a wild creature.”  Although she describes a negative experience, her oneness with nature as shown in this description of her feelings is an important characteristic of American Romanticism because she thinks in terms of nature rather than industrialization.

            In Jewett’s short story “A White Heron,” nature is a character much as it was a very real entity for Sa.  The protagonist, Sylvia, “[had never] been alive at all before she came to live on the farm.”  Like Sa’s foreshadowing regret, the city, in Jewett’s story, immediately becomes a negative force because Sylvia was “dead” while she lived in town.  On the farm her companion is a cow. The sounds from the woods allow her heart to “beat fast with pleasure.” It is only when a city sound, the boy’s whistle, disrupts nature’s music that Sylvia feels fear. 

            Sylvia’s connection with nature reaches its sublime expression when she climbs to the top of the only remaining pine tree.  She becomes like the heron for which she searches as she grasps the tree’s limbs and her hands “[hold] like bird claws.”  As she comes to the tree’s pinnacle, she reaches that transcendence that connects her with nature and causes her to feel “as if she too could go flying among the clouds.” And, in the end Sylvia does not tell the city boy about the heron even though she feels loss when he leaves. 

            In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “The Fish,” nature is also a central character.  Unlike Sa’s natural communion with nature and Jewett’s character’s search for nature, Bishop’s speaker must determine what to do now that nature (the fish) has been found.  The speaker’s description of the fish is a combination of romantic imagery by comparing the fish’s skin to “wallpaper” with “full blown roses” and realistic imagery by identifying the “white sea lice” and the “rags of green weed.”  But, the speaker notices something more, something that transcends the ordinary boundaries of this real experience.

            While she is “[admiring] his sullen face,” she sees the “five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth” and compares them to “medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering.”  It is at this point that the connection between the speaker and nature reaches its sublime expression because she experiences the “victory” that the fish exhibits.  Once this connection is made, the speaker allows the “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow” of emotion to make her decision.  Like Sylvia who saves the heron by not telling the boy where to find it, the speaker in Bishop’s poem “[lets] the fish go.”

            Nature is not a central figure in Fitzgerald’s story “Winter Dreams,” but the shift from rural to urban is an important feature.  While Bishop’s and Jewett’s characters found transcendence through nature, Fitzgerald’s main character crosses boundaries in a similar way to Sa, but with much different reasons.  Dexter Green wants to be any place else, anyone else than the place and person he is.  Although he is a favorite caddy in a small Minnesota town, this position is not enough for him because he wants “not association with glittering things and glittering people—he [wants] the glittering things themselves.”  Although this seems to contradict the Romantic ideal, Dexter’s quest for his dream makes his actions extremely romantic.

            After Dexter leaves the rural environment for the big city, he becomes a material success.  Still, one dream remains.  One of the glittering things he desires is Judy Jones, a femme fatale type character who is described as “arrestingly beautiful.”   He becomes committed to following this feminine “grail.”  But, this dream is not to be.  Dexter experiences several instances where he desires, seems to win, but loses this girl.  With the final realization that “the dream was gone,” he tries to romantically recover it in his mind by “[pushing] the palms of his hands into his eyes…to bring up a picture of the waters lapping…and the moonlit verandah.”  In this instance, he wishes for the romantic nature of his dream, but the realism of the modern world intervenes.  While Dexter is successful in transcending class and distance, his romantic dream is unfulfilled because he loses the ideal of Judy Jones.  Still, the idea of transcendence and the quest for a dream in this story show the characteristics of American Romanticism.

            In each of these literary works, American Romantic characteristics are evident.  While reality may play an equal role, dreams and nature lead these characters to a new place both physically and psychologically, one step closer to finding their own higher truths.        

Question 1: 9:20-10:50

            The romantic ideal was to transcend boundaries to find a psychological or spiritual truth.  Inherent in this quest is the concept of desire.  A goal or an idea cannot be achieved without first desiring it.  One is unable to change, to experience new things, to transcend the ordinary if desire is not present.  Loss is the other side of this coin.  If one’s desires are all achieved what, then, does the future matter.  Stagnation, emotional impotency, and complacency can be the result of complete fulfillment.  Once something that was desired is lost, a new desire to regain it is born.  Thus, loss is just as important to transcendence as desire is.  Loss allows for emotional nostalgia to bring a new desire for what is past to the present.  This cycle of desire and loss, desire and loss, brings about continual change and allows for the romantic individual to search again and again for his truth, a truth that lies in the deepest part of his emotions.    Thomas Wolfe, Zora Neale Hurston, and F. Scott Fitzgerald each use the element of desire and loss to explore through their characters this depth of human emotion.

            In his story “The Lost Boy,” Thomas Wolfe weaves a narrative of physical desire and loss as well as psychological desire and loss.  The very title gives the impression that what has been lost must be regained.  Each of the narrators focuses his/her desire on regaining a time when their brother Robert was alive.  Robert has become bigger than life because he died at a young age, and nostalgia has placed him on a pedestal.

 The sister focuses on the loss of youth.  She remembers when she and Robert went to the St. Louis Fair.  The memory is nostalgic as she says, “It all came back to me the other day when I was looking at that picture…” Nostalgia is desire for what we once had.  She not only desires her brother to be alive, but she desires to regain her youth.  She is searching for the truth of her emotions.  Looking at the picture she says, “it all comes back…and nothing has turned out the way we thought it would.”  She desires the answers she seemed to know when she was young, answers to the questions “what has changed since then?” and “if it happens to us all.”  She wants to know “how it all gets lost.”

On the other hand, the main narrator seems to be searching for lost time.  He goes back to the last place he shared with his brother.  In his mind he sees that nothing has changed.  If he goes back, will Time have stood still? Will he find his brother just the same?  The American Romantic ideal is evident in his desire to recapture the past.  He does find an answer although it causes him loss rather than fulfillment of his desire.  He finally realizes that his image of his brother is a type of shadow in his mind.  He says his brother is “the dark lost boy” who “would come, would go, and would return again.”  He has discovered that his brother isn’t there where everything seems to be the same, “in finding all…all had been lost.” 

Wolfe sums up in his final paragraph the emotional impact that is so characteristic of the romantic concept of desire and loss.

            But I knew that it could not come back—the cry of absence             in the afternoon…the child that dreamed; and through the thicket of man’s memory…poor child, life’s stranger and life’s exile, lost, like all of us…

Like Wolfe, Zora Neale Hurston explores the realms of desire and loss.  However, she looks to the dream of what could be rather than what was past.  In an excerpt from Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston’s protagonist, Janie, experiences the sublimity of nature by watching a blossoming pear tree.  She sees the beauty of true communion when she sees “a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom…” She feels she has “been summoned to behold a revelation.”  Janie desires this purity of emotion, this real connection to another, so she kisses the first boy that she sees.  She yearns for the completeness she saw with the pear tree.  But, it’s not to be. 

Janie is maneuvered into marrying a man she doesn’t love because her grandmother wants her to have his protection.  The grandmother sees the reality of the situation, but never allows for Janie’s desire for something more, something bigger.  Janie desires to experience the “depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.”  But in the face of reality, her dream is lost, for she cannot feel love for her husband, and she knows that “marriage did not make love.”  Still, even with the loss of her first dream, she desires something more.  “The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off.”

While both Wolfe and Hurston move from desire to loss and back to desire, Fitzgerald takes this concept a step further.  Wolfe examined desire and loss by looking to the past. Hurston examined desire and loss by experiencing the present but looking toward the future.  However, Fitzgerald’s protagonist in “Winter Dreams” lives his life by chasing the material things of the present.  He seems to accumulate everything he desires except Judy Jones.  It is the character, Judy Jones, who teaches Dexter Green about desire and loss.  It seems he will fulfill his desire of having her, just as she breaks it off.  This loss of her heightens Dexter’s desire for her.  “Succeeding [his] first exhilaration came restlessness and dissatisfaction.  The helpless ecstasy of losing himself in her charm was a powerful opiate rather than a tonic.”                                                                     Fitzgerald presents desire and loss as the impetus behind Dexter’s every action.  His emotional involvement takes over every dream of his life.  When this dream fails, when Dexter can no longer desire even Judy, nothing is left to him.  In this sense, desire and loss become unromantic as Fitzgerald ends the story where Romantics would begin:  “Long ago there was something in me, but now that thing is gone.”

The concept of desire and loss is integral to the Romantic ideal because it reflects the desire of the Romantics to reinvent themselves.  This reinvention brings about inevitable change, which then births a desire for the things that are past.  Wolfe’s narrators have reached the plateau of looking back. Hurston’s Janie is looking forward to a reinvention.  Fitzgerald’s protagonist has most obviously reinvented himself to achieve his desires. When the reality of complete loss seemed to have stopped the cycle from returning to desire, one must consider that Dexter desires to regain the illusions of youth.

Desire and loss are integral characteristics of change.  Transformation and transcendence are products of change.  Only in change can the romantic ideal of truth ever be actualized.