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LITR 5431 Seminar in American Literature:
Romanticism lecture notes |
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Romanticism as anything but here and now
Realism as here and now
Modernism: reality destabilizes and fragments as knowledge expands; interiority and perspective as only unity
(postmodernity: all of above but end of history as limits of human multiplication, expansion, and knowledge are reached)
1. How has Romanticism been absorbed or transformed as Modernism? How does Romanticism recognizably survive by adaptation to Modernist needs? What does Modernism add to or subtract from Romanticism? What styles in these stories are identifiable as Modernism? (Consider stream-of-consciousness narration, symbolism, primitivism, sexuality.)
2. These stories retain Realistic elements or forms. Where do the styles of Modernism, Romanticism, and Realism (incl. Local Color) meet or separate? (These major styles also meet in Modernist fiction by Fitzgerald and Hemingway.)
3. Both "A Rose for Emily" and "The Grave" refer directly to African American characters. Are these references patronizing sentimental stereotypes, or meaningfully realistic and symbolic?
Grave 4 "maybe one of the niggers'll see us and tell somebody." [Af Am cf. children as marginalized]
Rose 1.1 old man-servant [Af Am]
1.3 that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor—he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron—remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity [patriarchy]
1.5 admitted by the old Negro [Af Am]
[1.14] "See Colonel Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) . . . Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out." [primitive identification? Af Am name almost individualizes, de-mythicizes]
2.6 "It's probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about it."
3.2 The construction company came with niggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee
3.2 The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the niggers, and the niggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. [Af Am: lack of individuation but something admirable, if only for difference]
3.13 The Negro delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didn't come back.
[4.5] And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. The Negro man went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed.
[4.9] Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out with the market basket. [metonym]
[4.10] And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any information from the Negro. He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse. [Af Am]
[5.1] The negro met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again. [Af Am; cf. butler in mysteries]
4. In what ways does Faulkner's writing here and elsewhere qualify as "Southern Gothic?" What other authors might be included in this category?
Poe, Anne Rice, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Harry Crews, Walker Percy, Tennessee Williams
5. Overall, how has Romanticism changed across a century or more? Is Romanticism still recognizable in the heroic sprawl of Modernism? What parallels between Romanticism and Modernism? Is Modernism an evolution or a radical break from Romanticism and Realism? How may Romanticism appear in current literature, either as postmodern "literary" literature or as popular or genre literature?
Michael's email
I'm sorry, but it appears I will not be able to attend class tonight. I'm
very disappointed that I can't make it, especially since we didn't have class
last week. I was really looking forward to the discussion tonight, I hate to
miss it.
I'm from the Deep South, so I thought I would be eager
to discuss the Faulkner story, but then I read Thomas Wolfe (with whom I have
almost no previous exposure). That final section of
The Lost Boy
is amazing! You need a few years on you, I think, to completely connect with
the story, but it has such a powerful resonance...with me at least. With many,
I would think. There's something universal about that desperate quest to
recapture some small and dimly remembered part of our younger lives...a part of
ourselves we think we've lost...and maybe we have, but I'm not sure that's
always a bad thing. I've been on that quest, and like Eugene, I left
disappointed. I think everyone is disappointed on that quest. The
disappointment is necessary, though; we all have to learn that we can't go back,
and that our memories, no matter how good, very rarely accurately reflect
reality. It's sad, but poignant in its sadness. Sorry...I'm rambling.
Katherine Anne Porter
Old Mortality 1937
Noon Wine 1937
Pale Horse, Pale Rider 1939
The Grave
1 twice disturbed in his long repose by the constancy and possessiveness of his widow. She removed his bones [gothic, grotesque]
necessary to take up the bodies and bury them again
2 The graves were lying open and empty
3 the entire commonplaceness of the actual spectacle. [realism]
a pleasantly sweet, corrupt smell, being mixed with cedar needles and small leaves, and as the crumbs fell apart, she saw a silver dove no larger than a hazel nut, with spread wings and a neat fan-shaped tail. The breast had a deep round hollow in it.
[symbol: dove as innocence, wounded or opened]
His head appeared smiling over the rim of another grave. [macabre but innocent]
a screw head for a coffin!
4 "maybe one of the niggers'll see us and tell somebody." [Af Am cf. children as marginalized]
5
What I like about shooting," said Miranda, with exasperating inconsequence,
"is pulling the trigger and hearing the noise."
A Rose for Emily
1.1 an old man-servant—a combined gardener and cook [Af Am]
1.2 garages and cotton gins [industrialization, cf. Realism]
1.3 that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor—he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron—remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity [patriarchy]
1.4 next generation, more modern ideas
1.5 admitted by the old Negro [Af Am]
dust and disuse—a close, dank smell. [gothic--cf. Poe but less Romantic, more Realistic]
1.6 She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough* . [*gothic to grotesque?]
also fragmented imagery--inconsistency cf. Porter and Fitzgerald
[1.14] "See Colonel Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) . . . Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out." [primitive identification? Af Am name almost individualizes, de-mythicizes]
2.1 So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.
2.1 the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man—a young man then—going in and out with a market basket.
2.6 "It's probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about it."
2.7 the Board of Aldermen met—three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation. [intensification of change, destabilization]
[2.9] "Dammit, sir," Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?"
2.10 They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. [cf. primitive as Modernist]
2.11 People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last
We had long thought of them as a tableau*;
2.12 Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized.
2.13 She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.
2.14 We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will. [suggestion of incest? gothic threat?]
3.2 The construction company came with niggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee
change of local color [Chesnutt, Goophered Grapevine, narrator a northerner bringing modern techniques]
folkways > rationalization
3.2 The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the niggers, and the niggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. [Af Am: lack of individuation but something admirable, if only for difference]
[3.4] And as soon as the old people said, "Poor Emily," the whispering began.
3.5 touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness. Like when she bought the rat poison, the arsenic.
3.13 The Negro delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didn't come back.
4.1 Homer himself had remarked—he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club—that he was not a marrying man. [alt gender?]
4.2 the ladies forced the Baptist minister—Miss Emily's people were Episcopal*—
the minister's wife wrote to Miss
Emily's relations in
4.3 Miss Emily had been to the jeweler's and ordered a man's toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece. Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit of men's clothing, including a nightshirt, [Realism]
[4.5] And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. The Negro man went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed.
as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman's life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.
4.6 that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man.
4.7 lessons in china-painting
4.8 When the town got free postal delivery Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. [anti-rationalization]
[4.9] Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out with the market basket. [metonym]
4.9 like the carven torso of an idol in a niche [Mod / primitivism]
4.9 Thus she passed from generation to generation—dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse. [Faulknerian catalog]
[4.10] And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any information from the Negro. He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse. [Af Am]
4.11 a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.
[5.1] The negro met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again. [Af Am; cf. butler in mysteries]
5.2 the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men—some in their brushed Confederate uniforms
5.2 confusing time with its mathematical progression [Modernism as non-linear time]
[5.3] Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced. [gothic]
5.4 pervading dust.
A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb
tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured.
5.6 the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him.
Thomas Wolfe, The Lost Boy
1.1 Impressionist light
realistic details
union of Forever and Now [non-linear time]
1.2 everything was just the same as it had always been
1.3 the month of April, 1904. Here is the courthouse bell and three o'clock. Here is Grover on the Square that never changes. Here is Grover, caught upon this point of time." [Realism]
1.4 n his soul's picture, the earth's pivot, the granite core of changelessness, the eternal place where all things came and passed, and yet abode forever and would never change. [childhood illusion > adult instability, fragmentation]
1.5 the busy hum of housework and of women sewing, the intricacy of stitch and weave, the mystery of style and pattern, the memory of women bending over flashing needles, the pedaled tread, the busy whir. It was women's work: it filled him with unknown associations of dullness and of vague depression. And always, also, with a moment's twinge of horror, [primitive, interiority]
1.6 He loved windows full of hammers, saws, and planing boards.
1.14 He was a cripple. And like his wife, he was a wrenny, wizened little creature, with bony hands, thin lips, a pinched and meager face. One leg was inches shorter than the other, and on this leg there was an enormous thick-soled boot, with a kind of wooden, rocker-like arrangement, six inches high at least, to make up for the deficiency. [grotesque]
1.21 again he felt the old embarrassment that was almost like strong pain
[1.51] But something had gone out of day. He felt the overwhelming, soul-sickening guilt that all the children, all the good men of the earth, have felt since Time began. [desire / loss]
1.52 the Square reeled drunkenly around him, light went in blind gray motes before his eyes,
[1.57] He found and felt the steps—the width and thickness of old lumber twenty feet in length. He saw it all—the iron columns on his father's porch, painted with the dull anomalous black-green that all such columns in this land and weather come to; two angels, flyspecked, and the waiting stones. Beyond and all around, in the stonecutter's shop, cold shapes of white and marble, rounded stone, the languid angel with strong marble hands of love.
1.59 the name and date: "John Creasman, November 7, 1903." [Realism]
1.74 an old gray horse, with a peaceful look about his torn lips, swucked up the cool mountain water from the trough as Grover and his father went across the Square, but they did not notice it.
[1.82] Gant cleared his throat: "You never were a father," he said. "You never knew the feelings of a father, or understood the feelings of a child; and that is why you acted as you did. But a judgment is upon you. God has cursed you. He has afflicted you. He has made you lame and childless as you are—and lame and childless, miserable as you are, you will go to your grave and be forgotten!" [grotesque]
[1.83] And Crocker's wife kept kneading her bony little hands and said imploringly, "Oh, no—oh don't say that, please don't say that."
[1.92] And light came and went and came again—but now not quite the same as it had done before. The boy saw the pattern of familiar shapes and knew that they were just the same as they had always been. But something had gone out of day, and something had come in again. Out of the vision of those quiet eyes some brightness had, gone, and into their vision had come some deeper color. He could not say, he did not know through what transforming shadows life had passed within that quarter hour. He only knew that something had been lost—something forever gained. [desire - loss]
1.93 plot device > World's Fair
2 The Mother [fragmentation of perspectives, voices]
[2.1] As we went down through Indiana—you were too young, child, to remember it—but I always think of all of you the way you looked that morning, when we went down through Indiana, going to the Fair. All of the apple trees were coming out, and it was April; it was the beginning of spring in southern Indiana and everything was getting green.
[2.6] Except for Grover! He—no, not him. Now, boy, I want to tell you—I've raised the lot of you—and if I do say so, there wasn't a numbskull in the lot. But Grover! Well, you've all grown up now, all of you have gone away, and none of you are childern any more. . . .
[2.8] Why, I didn't even have to tell him. You could send that child to market and tell him what you wanted, and he'd come home with twice as much as you could get yourself for the same money! [cf. Evangeline, gifted doomed child; Helen Burns in Jane Eyre]
[2.13] His eyes would get as black as coals—oh! the way that child would look at you, the intelligence and sense in his expression.
[2.23] And Grover sat there, so still and earnest-like, looking out the window, and he didn't move. He sat there like a man. He was just eleven and a half years old, but he had more sense, more judgment, and more understanding than any child I ever saw.
[2.27] It was so long ago, but when I think of it, it all comes back [interiority as unity]
3 The Sister
3.1 the birthmark, the black eyes, the olive skin
3.2 and then how everyone either dies or grows up and goes away—and then—look at us now! Do you ever get to feeling funny? You know what I mean—do you ever get to feeling queer—when you try to figure these things out? You've been to college and you ought to know the answer—and I wish you'd tell me if you know.
3.4 and there were all of us together
[3.7] And there was Steve and Ben and Grover, Daisy, Luke, and me lined up there before the house with one foot on our bicycles. And I got to thinking back about it all. It all came back.
3.10 I tell you, boy, you were Somebody back in those days.
3.11 The Snake-Eater and the Living Skeleton, the Fat Woman and the Chute-the-chute, the Scenic Railway and the Ferris Wheel? [realistic to grotesque]
3.14 I hear that it's all built up around there now. [small world > Wide, Wide World; development, rationalization]
3.16 I guess the poor kid was already sick when we came in there and didn't know it. But I turned and looked at him, and he was white as death
3.19 she was so white you could have made a black mark on her face with chalk
3.21 But she looked as if she was dying right before my eyes. And I knew that if anything happened to him, she'd never get over it if she lived to be a hundred.
[3.23] It all came back to me the other day when I was looking at that picture, and I thought, my God, we were two kids together, and I was only two years older than Grover was, and now I'm forty-six. . . . Can you believe it? Can you figure it out—the way we grow up and change and go away?
3.24 All my hopes and dreams and big ambitions have come to nothing, and it's all so long ago, as if it happened in another world. Then it comes back, as if it happened yesterday . . . . Sometimes I lie awake at night and think of all the people who have come and gone, and how everything is different from the way we thought that it would be. Then I go out on the street next day and see the faces of the people that I pass . . . . Don't they look strange to you?
3.26 It all gets lost until it seems that it has never happened—that it is something we dreamed somewhere
[3.28] It all comes back as if it happened yesterday. And then it goes away again, and seems farther off and stranger than if it happened in a dream.
The Brother
[4.1] "This is King's Highway," the man said.
4.2 some big new buildings, a large hotel, some restaurants and "bar-grill" places of the modern kind, the livid monotone of neon lights, the ceaseless traffic of motor cars—all this was new, but it was just a street. And he knew that it had always been just a street, and nothing more—but somehow—well, he stood there looking at it, wondering what else he had expected to find.
4.11 feel a kind of absence in the afternoon after the car had gone
[4.12] He did not say that King's Highway had not been a street in those days but a kind of road that wound from magic out of some dim and haunted land, and that along the way it had got mixed in with Tom the Piper's son, with hot cross buns, with all the light that came and went, and with coming down through Indiana in the morning, and the smell of engine smoke, the Union Station, and most of all with voices lost and far and long ago that said "King's Highway." [interior non-rational consciousness]
4.15 as if the street were Time.
[4.16] For a moment he stood there, waiting—for a word, and for a door to open, for the child to come. He waited, but no words were spoken; no one came.
[4.19] It was all so strong, so solid, and so ugly—and all so enduring and so good, the way he had remembered it, except he did not smell the tar, the hot and caulky dryness of the old cracked ties, the boards of backyard fences and the coarse and sultry grass, and absence in the afternoon when the street car had gone, and the twins
[4.20] Except for this, it all was just the same; except for this and for King's Highway, which was now a street; except for this, and for the child that did not come.
4.21 "It cannot last. It's bound to go away," as we always say it in America. [hypermodern]
[4.22] And he feels nothing but absence, absence, and the desolation of America, the loneliness and sadness of the high, hot skies, and evening coming on across the Middle West, across the sweltering and heat-sunken land, across all the lonely little towns, the farms, the fields, the oven swelter of Ohio, Kansas. Iowa, and Indiana at the close of day, and voices, casual in the heat, voices at the little stations, quiet, casual, somehow faded into that enormous vacancy and weariness of heat, of space, and of the immense, the sorrowful, the most high and awful skies. [catalog]
4.24 St. Louis—the enchanted name—a big, hot, common town upon the river, sweltering in wet, dreary heat, and not quite South, and nothing else enough to make it better.
4.26 and all these things themselves would have a kind of life: would seem to wait attentively, to be most living and most still.
4.27 [conflation of present and past perspectives]
[4.54] She nodded, smiling. "Yes, it's just the same—we still have the sliding doors and the stained glass window on the stairs. There's no bead curtain any more," she said, "but I remember when people had them. I know what you mean."
[4.62] Inside it was just the same—the stairs, the hallway, the sliding doors, the window of stained glass upon the stairs. And all of it was just the same, except for absence, the stained light of absence in the afternoon, and the child who once had sat there, waiting on the stairs.
4.63 by all things that came and went and came again, like the cloud shadows passing in a wood, that never could be captured. [elegaic]
4.64 the brief sum of himself, the universe of his four years, with all the light of Time upon it—that universe which was so short to measure, and yet so far, so endless, to remember.
[4.65] But as he thought it, he knew that even if he could sit here alone and get it back again, it would be gone as soon as seized, just as it had been then—first coming like the vast and drowsy rumors of the distant and enchanted Fair, then fading like cloud shadows on a hill, going like faces in a dream—coming, going, coming, possessed and held but never captured, like lost voices in the mountains long ago—and like the dark eyes and quiet face of the dark, lost boy, his brother, who, in the mysterious rhythms of his life and work, used to come into this house, then go, and then return again.
[4.76] She said that she was glad and that it was no trouble. "And when you see your family, you can tell them that you saw the house," she said. "My name is Mrs. Bell. You can tell your mother that a Mrs. Bell has the house now. And when you see your brother, you can tell him that you saw the room he slept in, and that you found it just the same."
[4.77] He told her then that his brother was dead.
[4.78] The woman was silent for a moment. Then she looked at him and said: "He died here, didn't he? In this room?"
[4.102] The years dropped off like fallen leaves: the face came back again—the soft dark oval, the dark eyes, the soft brown berry on the neck, the raven hair, all bending down, approaching—the whole appearing to him ghost-wise, intent and instant. [gothic? cf. Ligeia?]
4.115 You'll find everything changed now, I guess. It's all built up around here now—and way out beyond here, out beyond where the Fair Grounds used to be. I guess you'll find it changed."
[4.119] And he knew that he would never come again, and that lost magic would not come again. Lost now was all of it—the street, the heat, King's Highway, and Tom the Piper's son, all mixed in with the vast and drowsy murmur of the Fair, and with the sense of absence in the afternoon, and the house that waited, and the child that dreamed. And out of the enchanted wood, that thicket of man's memory, Eugene knew that the dark eye and the quiet face of his friend and brother—poor child, life's stranger, and life's exile, lost like all of us, a cipher in blind mazes, long ago—the lost boy was gone forever, and would not return.
