Laurence Finn

Crossroads: American Romanticism’s Mixture of the Spiritual and Material

Shortly after the birth of America, came the conception of a new way of literary thinking. The American Romantic movement fostered the idea that there is more to the tangible world – the idea that physical borders can be crossed, in pursuit of a transcendent goal or dream. The literature of this period spawns an intriguing debate – whether America is, as Dr. Craig White states, “a culture of sensory and material gratification, or of moral, spiritual, idealistic mission.” Romantic prose and poetry by Jonathan Edwards, Edgar Allen Poe, and Susanna Rowson provide an answer to this question – their versions of America mix both the material and the spiritual. The two are inseparable.

            Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth takes an emotion – Love – and transmutes it into a physical and psychological threat. Her novel is not merely the effusion of Fancy, but...a reality.” Love is not merely “fancy” – it is a corrupting force which can inflict physical harm, in that it destroys families and even brings about physical illness. It is the notion of love that creates the theme of desire and loss which prevails throughout the piece. Rowson states:

“When I think on the miseries that must rend the heart of a doting parent, when he sees the darling of his age at first seduced from his protection, and afterwards abandoned...when he sees her poor and wretched, her bosom torn between remorse for her crime and love for her vile betrayer...my bosom glows with honest indignation, and I wish for power to extirpate those monsters of seduction from the earth.”

These “monsters of seduction” are love personified. The villain of this story is not necessarily Montraville – it is love, which guides Charlotte away from her family and into an impoverished life. The lure that love employs is the idea of pleasure. It is an idea which Rowson personifies: “Pleasure is a vain illusion; she draws you on to a thousand follies, errors, and I may say vices, and then leaves you to deplore your thoughtless credulity.” These emotions become antagonists of their own, working against Charlotte Temple, her children, and her parents. The pursuit of love, a goal of both Montraville and Charlotte, is both material and spiritual.

Charlotte’s literal demise stems from a figurative broken heart. She wanders the streets, and settles into a house, away from her family and lover. Her specific illness is never mentioned, though Charlotte states that she is “quite sensible of [her] weakness” and ascribes her illness to her transgressions of leaving her family. Montraville himself becomes ill upon seeing Charlotte’s funeral and sparring with Belcour: “A dangerous illness and obstinate delirium ensued...to the end of his life was subject to severe fits of melancholy.” Rowson, as narrator and author, wishes her audience to believe that love is a dangerous force, capable of not only emotional damage, but physical harm and fatality.

Love is also a transcendent force (one of many) within Edgar Allen Poe’s work. In “Ligeia,” Poe links Ligeia’s physical beauty with her capacity for love: “That Ligeia loved me, I should not have doubted; and I might have been easily aware that, in a bosom such as hers, love would have reigned no ordinary passion.” The woman’s mere appearance bestows a sort of grace upon her soul. The narrator does not use details concerning their emotional relationship to acknowledge Ligeia’s love for him – instead, he idealizes her physical form, claiming that because of her beauty, there is simply no possibility that she does not love him.

Poe uses physical attributes to explain other emotional aspects of Ligeia’s personality. For example, by looking into the woman’s eyes, the narrator sees

“the full knowledge of the secret of their expression – felt it approaching – and so at length utterly depart...when Ligeia’s beauty passed into my spirit, there dwelling as in a shrine, I derived from many existences in the material world, a sentiment, such as I felt always aroused within me by her large and luminous orbs.”

Ligeia’s beauty is a transcendent ideal for the narrator – it provides him with somewhat of a sublime, divine experience, which affects the core of his very being. Poe’s use of the dramatic within this piece shows a willingness and a need to reconcile the existence of the material with the intervention of the spiritual.

            Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” also demonstrates a mixture of the spiritual and material. In this case, Poe sets up the tangible environment as a reflection of emotional issues. Marion Carpenter, in his midterm essay, states that Poe is “externalizing the internal,” and that “the very imagery of the home’s exterior is an expression of the people within. Isolated from society, the Ushers have withered and decayed in solitude.” Poe uses layers of sublime imagery to depict the gothic scenery of the house, which is literally dying from the inside out.

            In fact, Roderick Usher describes the house as sentient – life, a spiritual element, impossibly possesses the material house. Nature turns into artifice. Roderick’s belief, as Poe writes, is that the vegetation and arrangement of the stones that make up the foundation of the house provide evidence of the building’s sentience. While the idea is insane (according to the narrator) and the “evidence” is suspect, it is true that nature – human nature – makes the impossible possible in this story.

The sicknesses that Roderick and his sister experience are purely neurological and fit with the theme of the material reflecting the spiritual. Roderick’s anxiety and hypersensitivity are brought on by fear – even in death, he was “a victim to the terrors he had dreaded,” dying of fright.

In Charlotte Temple, the transcendent sickness is love; in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” it is fear; and with Jonathan Edwards’s work, it is sin. Within his “Personal Narrative,” Edwards becomes afflicted by a pleurisy while he “was in the midst of many uneasy thoughts about the state of [his] soul.” Edwards asserts the potential for faith (a spiritual concept) to affect physical well-being.

However, despite this capacity for physical harm due to spiritual unease, Edwards sums up his beliefs by using a specific term – “delight.” To Edwards, delight is a transcendent emotion which links faithfulness to God with physical pleasure. According to the Norton Anthology biography of Edwards, “the word links him to the transatlantic community of those who recognized sentiment as the basic emotion that connects individuals to each other in manifold ways.” Religion has a definite physical effect on the world – it brings people together, and strengthens their resolve through conviction in the Lord.

            Belief in God, to Edwards, is a tangible commodity, and advances this idea through romantic nature imagery. Holiness, as he describes, makes “the soul like a field or garden of God.” Furthermore, “the soul of a true Christian…appeared like such a little white flower…diffusing around a sweet fragrancy.” Usage of the word “sweet” abounds throughout the “Personal Narrative,” and is a term often acquainted with holiness in antiquity – upon their death, saints retain a sweet fragrance of roses. With the usage of natural imagery, Edwards shows a constant fascination with the physical manifestation of the Holy Spirit. 

            Rowson, Poe, and Edwards, through their varying works, are not content with a simply material world, separated from the emotional and spiritual. Both the tangible and intangible are inevitably entangled. These authors, among other Romantic authors, provided glimpses of a transcendent dream. They inspired a sense of wonder – of the miraculous – in everyday life.