Amy Sidle

October 11, 2008

The Romantic Narrative: Seeking a New Reality with the Romantic Journey

            With great influence from the successful European Romantics, Americans emerged with a fresh landscape on which to build their own Romantic realities. American Romanticism is about creation – constructing worlds, alternative realities, in which to live out ambitious and, at times, obscure, capriciousness. The American Narrative is idealistic – the hero saves the heroine from impending doom or the ever-present good vs. evil. There are facets within these all consuming tales that make the reader feel drawn and familiar, nearly a part of their pages. Romantic characters are overwhelmed with worry, pain, and loneliness; they constantly search for an alternative from the “here and now” – often going to great extremes to obtain it, despite its brevity. Within these pieces, characters must “[cross] physical borders or [transgress] social or psychological boundaries in order to attain or regain some transcendent goal or dream” (Objective 1a).

            The most effective of American Romanticism authors take the reader on whirlwind adventures in search for the unknown, at times merely hoping to ditch the reality of their feeble existence in order to create an alternative universe in which the character might find peace, love, spiritual awakening or, oddly enough, just a place to nap. It is upon this base knowledge that the following stories are examined.

            In “A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner effectively employs the Romantic journey by making a new reality non-negotiable for his love deprived outcast. Emily lives a drab life of nothingness in her “eyesore among eyesores” of a home that “smell[s] of dust and disuse” (2218). For decades no one visits Miss Emily save some ill advised city officials and her Negro manservant Tobe. After her dear father’s death, Emily, internally distraught yet not externally, eerily keeps his corpse for three days, denying his passing to the townspeople. However, they do not call her crazy; despite her father “driv[ing] away” multiple suitors, the townspeople “knew [that] with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will” (2220). Emily’s reality is far from ideal; thus, her journey begins; “left alone, and a pauper, she... [finally] become[s] humanized,” the lowly spinster must now search for a companion to alleviate her mourning (2220).

            After a public courting, Homer Barron self-exclaims he is “not the marrying kind” and the entire town has begun to repeat that “Poor Emily” will not be able to convince him to settle down (2222).  Struck yet again by her harsh reality, Emily will not allow this slight glimmer of hope to get away; she will create a satisfying life by any means necessary. She lives her married life with Homer, despite his being dead and her, the one that poisoned him; she grows content with her new reality – allowing children to come for china-painting lessons and even getting plump in her aging years. She is described as “dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse” (2223). For forty years, she keeps their bridal room picturesque:

“upon the dressing table… [lay] the man’s toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them a collar and tie, as if they had just been removed… [and] upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks” (2224).

Homer’s body “had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace”, and upon the second pillow beside him “was the indentation of a head” with a “long strand of iron-gray hair” (2224). Thus, Emily’s desire to transcend social and psychological boundaries in order to live happily is blatantly apparent. Though not romantic, Emily successfully exploits the Romantic facet of shedding her pitiful and lonely life for a self-made, gratifying veracity.

            Similar to Faulkner, “Washington Irving effectively exemplifies the Romantic idea of creating a new reality because of dissatisfaction with the present in the story ‘Rip Van Winkle’” (Robert Hoffman 2005). Rip is a “simple good natured man; he [is] moreover a kind neighbour, and an obedient, henpecked husband”; however, he is also an “indolent man who has no aspiration to work and support his family” (456; Robert Hoffman 2005). “Under the discipline of [a] shrew at home”, Rip “is married to a woman who enjoys caviling and carping about every issue and event” (456; Robert Hoffman 2005). Attributing his utter dissatisfaction to his home life, Rip “escapes to the beauty of nature in the Catskill Mountains to find peace, happiness, and a new world” (Robert Hoffman 2005). Serenity and silence characterize his new, natural world – one that is far from his irksome home life. He relaxes “on a green knoll, covered with mountain herbage” while absorbing “the reflected rays of the setting sun” (459). While on his personal journey for a new life, Rip encounters a stranger and an amphitheater of odd persons; yet after a night of heaving drinking Rip awakens in his initial life twenty years later. “The new life that Rip experienced is a reaction of his unending dissatisfaction of his current one, and his longing to remove himself from his displeasure” (Robert Hoffman 2005). Much like Poor Miss Emily, Rip Van Winkle too is handed a warped new reality resembling much of his first. Though his wife had died and his children grown, Rip, “having nothing to do at home and being arrived at that happy age when a man can do nothing with impunity,…took his place once more on the bench” ready to resume his gossip and neighborly assistance (465).

            Finally, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s unsettling “The Minister’s Black Veil”, Mr. Hooper is faced with a challenging internal journey to secure a pristine after life, though it is soon fraught with an extensive external sacrifice as well.

Plagued by his worldly sins, Mr. Hooper dons a black veil; nevertheless, his actions soon ignite the parishioners’ acknowledgement of their own sinful activities making contact with others, even his precious Elizabeth, painfully difficult:

“in an instant…her eyes were fixed insensibly on the black veil, when, like a sudden twilight in the air, its terrors fell around her. She… stood trembling before him” (628).

The reality in which he is forced to live is dismal, lonely, and deprived; he is obligated to sacrifice his love for a woman and the cherished interaction with his parishioners; and at times, so utterly self-loathing, he avoids all reflective surfaces to evade even the mostt minute glimpse of himself bearing those “two folds of crape” (623).

His personal redemption, or spiritual journey, is not intentionally supposed to effect others, and despite his self-inflicted new reality’s horror (i.e. children run screaming, out-of-towners coming to gawk), Mr. Hooper remains steadfast to his spiritual quest hoping that the pain he endures on earth will lead to a peaceful after life. Even upon his deathbed he remains loyal to his quest – refusing to remove the veil a moment too soon; upon his last breath he feels the necessity to share the insight of a redeemed, yet bitter old man:

“Why do you tremble at me alone? …Tremble also at each other! …What, but the mystery which it obscurely typifies, has made this piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows his inmost hear to his friend; the lover to this best-beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring which I have live, and die! I look around me, and lo! on every visage a black veil!” (631).

By sharing his grief with the world, maybe Mr. Hooper finally achieves a spiritual awakening in all those that share his dissatisfaction with their sinful lives.

            With new realities conjured, no matter how brief or the manner in which they are achieved, the American Narrative is evident in each of the finely crafted pieces by some of America’s most beloved authors. It is with their expert skill that makes these pieces classic representations of American Romanticism.