Sample answers to question 2 on post-Romanticism

[complete email essay]

Post-Romantic literature, following on the heels of Romanticism, often appears to be an extension of the American Romantic literary movement.  In this essay I will explore ways that post-Romanticism is reminiscent of its predecessor and discuss the post-Romantic movements’ disenchantment with Romantic optimism.

            Many post-Romantic works bear a striking resemblance to Romantic works because they share the same kinds of thematic elements.  F. Scott Fitzgerald in his short story “Winter Dreams,” describes Dexter’s sublime-like experience while listening to prom music near the water:

The sound of the tun and the splash of the fish jumping precipitated in him a sort of ecstasy and it was with that ecstasy he viewed what happened to him now.  The ecstasy was a gorgeous appreciation.  It was his sense tat, for once, he was magnificently attuned to life and that everything about him was radiating a brightness and a glamour he might never know again.  (Fitzgerald 2132)

In this Romantic moment, Dexter’s reminiscing brings with it an element of pain and a memory of a transcendent experience when raw beauty was enjoyed and somehow “obtained” in a single moment while communing with nature.  Dexter’s spiritual elevation seems reminiscent of early Romantic moments from Jonathan Edwards or Walt Whitman. 

            Another way that Fitzgerald implement Romantic themes is through the use of a revised brand of gothic imagery.  When Dexter visits Judy Jones’ home, he describes “a feeling of mystery” and “bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and strange than other bedrooms” (2133).  This kind of lighter gothic imagery has lost the dark colors and the foreboding quality of earlier writers and has been replaced with softer versions of nostalgia and quiet, spiritual mystery.  Judy herself often seems to be surrounded by pseudo-gothic imagery that hints at the Romantic but often turns toward the realistic.  On page 2138 when Judy enters the room, Fitzgerald says “the fragile glow of her face seemed to blossom as she smiled at him.  A breeze of warmth and light blew into the room.”   Romantic gothic versions of the haunted wood have been replaced by more realistic descriptions.

            Another author who echoes the previous era in literary style is Zitkala Sa in her narrative, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood.”  Much Whitman’s writings or the writings of Jacobs or Rowlandson, Sa’s childhood paints a portrait of the innocent child secluded from the world.  At one point, missionaries give young Sa a little bag of marbles (Sa 1803). 

The ice on the river was floating in huge pieces.  As I stood beside one large block, I noticed for the first time the colors of the rainbow in the crystal ice.  Immediately I thought of my glass marbles at home. [...] From that day on, for many a moon, I believed that glass marbles had river ice inside of them.  (1803)  

Sa has no concept of industrialized processes and attributes the creation of the glass marble to that of a natural process (lecture).  Sa is shielded from the “corruptive” outside world of industry, alone and peaceful in her Romantic innocence. 

            Sa also ties her narrative of childhood in with Romantic themes of domestic bliss.  Before missionaries enter the camp, Sa’s mother tells her daughter, “’Hush; my little daughter must never talk about my tears;’ and smiling through them, she patted my head and said, ‘Now let me see how fast you can run today” (1794).  Sa’s mother teaches her how to do needlework and how to behave in the company of guests.  Many of Sa’s phrases such as “I went to sleep over my legends,” and “the lasting impression of that day is what my mother told me [...]” give the impression of familial nostalgia and a kind of Eden-like existence.  All of these qualities are very much Romantic in nature. 

            Though Realistic literature often mirrors its Romantic predecessor, perhaps Realism is better known for its disenchantment with elements of the Romantic way of thinking, namely, with Romantic optimism.  In Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams,” Romantic elements cannot obliterate the fact that the tale is primarily about hardened characters who often deny human emotion and express a kind of depression or internal anger at the machinery of life.  These types of elements are also found in Jane Toomer’s “Fern” and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath.  

            In Jane Toomer’s short story “Fern,” the raw, primary character becomes disenchanted with the drudgery of a “real” societal existence.  Fern’s character attracts men who use her body, but whom also feel indebted to her afterwards.  “Something inside of her got tired of them, I guess, for I am certain that for the life of her she could not tell why or how she began to turn them off” (Toomer 2122).  Interestingly enough, the narrator tells us that “Fern did not deny them, yet the fact was that they were denied” (2122).  Fern’s world is one of gritty, stark reality—she allows herself to be a part of it, yet removes some inner part of her from its reach. 

            In Elizabeth Bishop’s The Fish, the narrator catches a tremendously battered fish who is “speckled with barnacles,/fine rosettes of lime,/ and infested with tiny white sea-lice,/and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down” (Bishop 18-21).  The picture of the fish is one of realist pain by a society that has been industrialized: “the little rented boat,/from the pool of bilge/where oil had spread a rainbow/around the crusted engine” (67-70).  If oil in the boat symbolizes industry’s spread across the country, perhaps Bishops fish represents a bruised and bloodied humanity that senses what is has lost, yet cannot fight back.  “He didn’t fight/He hadn’t fought at all” (4-5).  This poem has Romantic elements, but primarily seems concerned with expressing sentiments that conflict with traditional ideas of Romantic optimism.  Instead of a character that looks to improve with society, The Fish conveys a certain hopelessness that the Romantics would not understand. 

            Another poetic example might be Sylvia Plath’s “Blackberrying.”  Plath seems to set up a natural frame: “A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea/Somewhere at the end of it, heaving” (Plath 3-4).  Plath’s lovely scene, a scene that would please most Romantics of the earlier era, is soon disrupted by industrial imagery like “bits of burned paper” and “white and pewter lights.”  A Romantic poet might have optimistically ended the poem with nature carrying the person to transcendence or the sublime, yet Plath’s Blackberrying takes a decidedly fatalistic turn:

            I follow the sheep path between them.  A last hook brings me

To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock

That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space

Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths

Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

The ending seems to convey loss on a massive scale—the intrusiveness of industry and modern civilization takes over and spoils natural beauty.  In this manner, Plath’s poem is firmly rooted in Realism.

            Realism is but a short leap from the Romantics of the previous era; Romanticism left its mark, yet obviously Realist writers were continuing to revise Romantic thought.  This continuance of tradition and yet, revision of tradition, has firmly impacted American literature, leaving students and scholars alike to puzzle out the implications of these moves. [Emily Masterson]

[email excerpt]

            The American Renaissance was a literary movement, circa 1820 and continued until about 1860, that rejected the neo-classic tradition of writing that adhered to strictures of order, reason, and balance.  Instead, Romanticism embraced emotion over reason, imagination over order, and innovation over balance.  Although historians announce that the end of Romanticism was about 1860, Romanticism can never truly be extinguished (says the ever Romantic spirit).  It continues and thrives through its precepts, somewhat changed, but nevertheless persisting through threads that refuse to expire.  Indeed, Romantic notions appear in Post-Romantic texts through settings that create a bittersweet ambivalence, through nature that has co-emerged with industry, and human experience (local color) based on realism.

            Nostalgia is a concept used in Post-Romantic writings.  It mimics the Romantic idea of sentimentalism, an emotional feeling or attitude.  It is a Romantic notion, but Realism adds a twist.  Nostalgia produces bittersweet sentiments of a day gone by, something that is out of reach. Through profuse details of a region, a realist author creates an ambivalence towards the past.  Dialoging is a convention used to order details and create meaning to an otherwise meaningless list of words.

            In Romantic literature, sentimentalism is associated with being in nature that produces an exaggerated emotional response.  The writings of Jonathon Edwards and Anne Bradstreet come to mind.  Both expound on the excessive beauties of God’s nature that He has provided for mankind with an overabundance of emotion.  Conversely, realism connotes a tamer almost polar emotion.  For instance, in Thomas Wolfe’s “The Lost Boy,” the narrator’s longing for childhood, for his deceased brother, for lost dreams effectuate a solemn, soulful emotion which evinces through cataloging, “And there you are, two funny, frightened, skinny little kids with noses pressed against a dirty window thirty years ago…The way it felt, the way it smelled, even the funny smell in that old pantry of our house.  And the steps….” (1704).  The list of details that are memories excites the nostalgia for times past, a longing and desire for something intangible. . . . [Theresa Matthews]