Tanya Stanley

Broadening the Romanticism Horizon: Looking Beyond Transcendence, Sublimity, and Defiance

            Throughout the last six months, I have journeyed from the ideal to the real. Maturing into a suffering graduate student after being a successful undergraduate student, I realized the individual stresses of wanting to succeed at a much higher level. My writing has suffered and my self-confidence has almost vanished because I have begun to doubt everything I write. I spoke with a tutor at the University of Houston-Clear Lake Writing Center, and we discussed the possibility of having a difficult time transitioning from an undergraduate student to a graduate student and the self-doubt that can occur when a successful undergraduate wants to be an even more successful graduate. We discussed my concerns with not wanting to submit a cookie-cutter essay, but my focus on originality forced me to forget about transitions, clarity, unity, and other concepts I revised for in the past. My self-doubt has made me feel vulnerable to my audience and to myself. Since recognizing my self-doubt, I want to explore what I have learned from the coursework and analyze my changes in perspective and previous understanding of Romanticism. Previously, I believed Romanticism focused on the individual in nature, the individual’s expression of feelings, and the individual’s defiance of society; however, the American Romanticism course expanded my view to the individual in nature experiencing transcendence beyond the natural world to the spiritual world, the individual’s inability of expression during moments of the sublime, and the unveiling of universal truths to mere social conventions which changed my perspective of thought and analysis of literature.

            I began the American Romanticism seminar with visuals of William Wordsworth surrounded by nature and isolated from society, which I remembered from a sophomore British literature course; however, my analysis of what can happen to the individual who becomes isolated from society remained absent.  Prior to reading and discussing the texts, I had not fully comprehended the concept of transcendence during the character’s Romantic journey. Denise Levertov’s poem “The Jacob’s Ladder” describes the ladder that reaches heaven:

                        A stairway of sharp

                        angles, solidly built.

                        One sees that the angels must spring

                        down from one step to the next, giving a little

                        lift of the wings:

                        (11-15)

The stairway becomes independent of the material world as it leads to and from heaven. Levertov paints an intense image of the stairs suggesting the difficulty the angels face on their journey to Earth by saying the angels must bounce while lifting their wings as they descend. For Levertov’s angels, the Romantic journey from heaven to Earth is physically straining, as they desire anything besides the here and now and cross physical borders in order to attain their own transcendent goal. I believe Levertov’s omission of why the angels journey to Earth encourages the reader to interpret their journey according to her own perspective. By suggesting the angels’ wish to transcend from heaven, I believe the concept of transcendence is not limited to the material world. Giving angels desire to journey to anywhere but their here and now suggests transcendence moves beyond the spiritual to the inconceivable.

            As the angels transcend, the reader transcends from the physical world to a spiritual world by imagining herself as the man who is climbing the stairs as the angels descend past him (16, 19). The man in the poem also struggles during his journey upon the staircase.  The man “must scrape his knees, and bring / the grip of his hands into play. The cut stone / consoles his groping feet” (17-19). The journey to heaven is physically painful for the man in the poem as he journeys to spirituality. The man scrapes his knees and must use the implied handrail to keep on ascending to reach his own transcendence. The protagonist’s groping feet suggest he is trying to find his way as he moves upward through his uncertain journey for anything but the here and now—his journey from the material world to the spiritual world.

            As the man yearns for a connection with the spiritual world, “…Wings brush past him” comparing the man’s journey to the angels’ journey (19). Like the protagonist and the angels’ journey of transcendence, I feel like I have also transcended in my search for answers to why I feel unsuccessful as a graduate student. By understanding my limitations and learning how to change, I am beginning to feel internal happiness beyond the warm and fuzzy feelings a Hallmark card can bring. I may not have been isolated in nature, but I did detach myself from the here and now to overcome my internal struggles and deficiencies resulting in a move from the natural world to the spiritual world. I understand the importance of one transcending from the here and now to a place beyond limitations.

            After the course, I revisited my midterm and realized how my perception changed by extending my previous analysis of the sublime and by finding inadequacies within the essay. In the introduction, I suggest a forthcoming explanation of nostalgia, the gothic, and the sublime as important aspects of Romanticism; however, the essay takes a sharp abrupt turn from an analysis including nostalgia and the gothic to an essay exclusively on the sublime. As a reader, I was looking for elements of nostalgia and the gothic within the discussion of the sublime, but neither aspect resurfaced until my conclusion. As a reader, the lack of elaboration regarding nostalgia and the gothic seem unexpected, and I think the inclusion of these aspects of American Romanticism within the introductory paragraph misleads the reader. Even though I describe the sublime, the definition seems limiting. My thesis seems mangled because of the inclusion of all the authors and their works, and I fail to state why the sublime is an important aspect within American Romanticism.

            Within my midterm, I analyze three protagonists’ desires to escape from the here and now into their own individual moments of transcendence, but I limited my analysis of the individuals’ separation from the masses as only examples of the sublime without offering any extension into transcendence. Washington Irving’s protagonist Rip Van Winkle desires to escape the reality of his wife’s constant harassment (458). Rip Van Winkle decides to journey to the Catskill mountains in order to escape the here and now, and when he decides to rest, he finds himself juxtaposed between two magnificent scenes in nature. Rip Van Winkle sees “…all the lower country for many a mile of rich woodland…the lordly Hudson...moving on its silent but majestic course…On the other side he looked down into a deep mountain glen, wild lonely, and shagged, the bottom filled with fragments from the impending cliffs…” (459).

            The spectacle of the woods and the lordly Hudson gives Rip Van Winkle a pleasurable feeling while simultaneously the terrifying view of the cliff and long narrow valley invoke an uneasy sensation—a sublime panorama that Rip Van Winkle meditates on as he transcends from the here and now to the spiritual.  Rip Van Winkle experiences a moment beyond reality, a moment of extraordinary proportion, which he pauses reality to transcend. Sometimes we need to pause reality and escape from the here and now in order to rediscover ourselves. Wrapped up in my cocoon of undergraduate analysis and expected successes, I failed to see the panoramic view in front of me—my own internal transformation. My journey may not have been to the Catskill Mountains, but I understand how Rip Van Winkle feels as he escapes the reality of everyday life and witnesses an image almost inconceivable.

            My perception of Romanticism also extended from the individual’s ability to express himself to the individual’s inability to express himself during moments of the sublime. Prior to this semester, I connected William Blake to Romanticism through Blake’s correlating poems, “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience.” I remember reading Blake’s individuals expressing their feelings instead of restraining them. Romanticism gives individuals an ability to express themselves; however, prior to the seminar, I was unfamiliar with the concept of the sublime and the individual’s inability to describe an awe-inspiring moment. Rip Van Winkle experiences the sublime during his journey up a narrow passage between the mountains (460).  The narrator describes Rip Van Winkle’s expedition with exaggerated language. Rip Van Winkle and the stranger travel through areas “surrounded by perpendicular precipices, over the brinks of which impeding trees shot their branches, so that you only caught glimpses of the azure sky and the bright evening cloud” (460). Even though the narrator uses exaggerated language to describe the journey, Rip Van Winkle and the stranger travel in silence admiring “something strange and incomprehensible about the unknown, that inspired awe, and checked familiarity” (460). At one point, the narrator cannot describe the landscape of Rip Van Winkle’s journey, which signifies Irving’s use of the sublime within all three of the affected characters. 

            The narrator’s next description, “inspired awe,” denotes amazement and powerlessness—a mixture of pleasure and pain—another characteristic of the sublime.  A further example of the sublime is a checked familiarity, which Rip Van Winkle experiences transcendence as his conception of reality changes.  After Rip Van Winkle encounters the sublime, he notices the sublime nature of the men who are bowling: “What seemed particularly odd to Rip, was, that though these folks were evidently amusing themselves, yet they maintained the gravest faces, the most mysterious silence, and were, withal, the most melancholy party of pleasure he had ever witnessed” (460).  The melancholy pleasure suggests the mixture of pleasure and pain as the sublime, but Rip Van Winkle’s transcendence allows him to witness the phenomenon of the sublime as an onlooker linking the sublime and transcendence to the spiritual world. My perspective changes from an ability to express one’s feelings to an inability to express oneself during moments of the sublime.  My analysis of literature has changed because I can attach the sublime and transcendence to the analysis of characters including the narrator of future texts. In the future, I will not assume characters looking at the horizon to only represent romantic aspects within the texts but also Romantic aspects.

            I also analyzed James Wright’s poem “The Blessing” in my midterm as a representation of the sublime through the poem’s speaker. At the conclusion of the poem, the speaker transcends into a state outside reality in which he realizes if he steps out of his body, he “would break / Into blossom” (22-24). The speaker becomes enthralled with the pony that touches his hand. He feels elated to the point of achieving ultimate satisfaction if only he could break through his body. By suggesting the speaker break through his body, Wright uses the sublime to describe a painful experience juxtaposed with an overly satisfying experience of blossoming into spiritual transcendence through the essence of a flower. The speaker experiences a “uniquely all-consuming, yet satisfying, human experience…one that cannot be replicated or sought within the normalcy of everyday life” (Sharon Lockett, Midterm 2006). Like Lockett, I believe those consumed by a sublime experience represent an unsurpassed human experience, which they achieve by moving from the material world.

            Although the speaker is able to describe his moment of the sublime, unlike Rip Van Winkle, the stranger, and the narrator in Irving’s work, he is unable to describe his overly satisfying experience as a human. The speaker must blossom into a flower in order to express the unexplainable pleasure of the sublime. The course has taught me to look beyond the explainable to the unexplainable. Now I understand the concept of analyzing what is missing in the text—the silences—an analysis I could not fully comprehend in the past.  American Romanticism extended my view of the individual expressing herself to the individual’s inability to express herself creating a new perspective of thought and analysis of literature by looking beyond what the narrators and characters reveal.

            Through transcendence and the sublime, my previous understanding of Romanticism extends beyond the individual in nature and the individual’s ability to express feelings; in addition, my understanding of the individual’s defiance of society extends to the unveiling of universal truths to mere social conventions, which changed my point of view of several binary oppositions I had yet to question. Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles represents a young woman who defies the community’s denial of burying her infant whom she gives birth to out of wedlock. Tess buries her son in the churchyard without question, which represents the Romantic characteristic of denying social conventions; however, since the American Romanticism course, my knowledge extends from denying social conventions to unveiling what I assumed to be universal truths and not just Western thought.

            Continuing with Wright’s poem, the speaker describes the two ponies whose eyes “Darken with Kindness” (4). Western thought introduces several binary oppositions including dark and light, in which darkness suggests evil and light suggests good. Examples of darkness as evil and the light as good appear in multiple venues of Western life. In “The Blessing,” the ponies’ eyes become dark with compassion instead of becoming dark with coldness. Instead of Wright complying with social conventions by using the Western acceptance of the binary opposition of light and dark, Wright creates a sublime feeling for many of his Western readers because he extends their presumed knowledge of light as a representation of good and darkness as a representation of evil. During a classroom discussion, Dr. White asked us to imagine the way an African American feels when he hears darkness is equivalent to evil while light is equivalent to good. To a slave in America, light—especially white—becomes pure evil, but darkness becomes safety, love, and goodness.

            In chapter one of the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself,” Douglass says he never saw his mother “more than four or five times…and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night. …She made her journeys to see me in the night…I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me at night” (931-932). Douglass’ perception of the dark describes loving memories of brief moments with his mother with an emphasis of the darkness as the producer of his mother next to his side—darkness—his community—as the producer of love. Unlike Western thought, darkness becomes Douglass’ happiness. To Douglass and to his mother, the light forbids them of each other’s companionship, but darkness invites the mother to her son.

            I had never considered reversing light and dark or white and black from what I once considered a universal truth instead of a mere social convention; however, from the dark-skinned person’s perspective, the assumption that dark equal evilness is against the individual’s perception of herself and her community. Until the American Romanticism course, I had not thought of the inversion of light and dark with light representing evil and dark representing goodness. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to adhere to the universality of the Western thought and use of binary oppositions. For the dominant culture, the binary opposition of light and dark as good and evil suggests superiority and righteousness, but what about the minorities?

            After the course, I wrote a list of several binary oppositions and I attempted to invert those oppositions. I realized how often I use binary oppositions in my analysis of literature and in my general thought process. To me the binary oppositions such as light and dark have always seemed universal, but the universality weakens into a mere social convention of the West. I researched a theorist of binary oppositions, Jacques Derrida, and Pam Hardman, English professor at Western Washington University, claims Derrida thinks binaries exist throughout all cultures. Hardman states “binaries are socially agreed upon ways of organizing what people know. Societies are constructed on binaries, some of which include how to characterize people. However, it is dangerous to think only in terms of the two categories of a binary. Binaries follow the line of thinking that nothing exists in-between” (Hagan Webpost). Since the midterm and the American Romanticism course, my previous knowledge of Romanticism extends from an individual defying the society she lives in to the awareness of universal truths as only a community’s tradition. My perspective of thought changes from a limited Western view to a more critical view of what I used to believe as universal. My analysis of literature extends to questioning the binary oppositions throughout literature and theoretical essays I will read in the future.

            Prior to the American Romanticism seminar, my knowledge of Romanticism remained limited, but after the course, my comprehension extended to a more in-depth look at the concept of transcendence, the sublime, and the unraveling of Western thought and binary oppositions. Instead of just accepting the individual in nature as an aspect of Romanticism, I understand the individual’s desire to leave the here and now on a journey from the physical to the spiritual. Although the individual’s ability to express her feelings remains important, I recognize the unspoken words of characters and narrators as an important facet to the text. Questioning the universality of social conventions has become a substantial learning outcome from the course. Instead of accepting the Western thought of binary oppositions, I have become more inquisitive and suspicious of the theories I have learned in the past. I think the course has extended my knowledge beyond the concepts of Romanticism, and I anticipate a successful semester in Literary Theory and future literature courses. Many people speak about college as being a place for people to find themselves and to change who they were before, but until now, I had not seen any significant change within myself as I do now. Literature changed my life during my sophomore year when I changed my major from business administration to English, and now during my first full-time semester as a graduate student, literature changes how I think and dissect literary works. Even though I continue to experience self-doubt in my writing, I have broadened my horizon by looking beyond the limitations of vulnerability and self-doubt to see the rise of the successful graduate student.