Chris Wissel

October 4, 2006

Reason is Not Enough: Romanticism’s Emergence
in Colonial America

     The benefits of the Age of Reason were obvious in colonial America. With the increasing political power of the middle class and the beginnings of industrialization, the first glimmers of widespread literacy began to take shape. Yet, despite this prosperity, there was still something missing in colonial life, unfulfilled by Reason alone. For the pioneers that attempted to make a living in the harshness of the landscape, a new perspective of heroism was needed. The colonial needed to sense that the individual passions that drove them to labor were relevant to the human experience. This yearning to read about such recognizable truths became the roots of a new movement in literature called Romanticism.

     Some of the most popular writings leading up to the Romantic period displayed many predictive elements, such as desire and loss, rebellion, and morality through heroic action. The characters and situations presented in popular writing began to shift toward the rugged passions of the American Romantic spirit. As far back as John Smith’s General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles to Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, we can see the stirrings of this Romantic spirit and how it both defied and recreated the ideas of the Age of Reason. Finally, by the time of James Fennimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, these mere stirrings finally transcended Reason altogether, and catapulted the readers of that time into a full-blown Romantic vision of the American landscape that catered to the core passions of the idealized self.

     In Smith’s writing, we begin to see reasonable behavior replaced by something more exciting. The narrative paints a landscape of pre-colonial life, with few supplies on hand, and no reward save hours of backbreaking labor. Smith states that “Our extreme toil in bearing and planting palisades so strained and bruised us . . . as were cause sufficient to have made us as miserable in our native country or any other place in the world.” (Smith 45) Given that reality, it would seem quite rational to make the decision to give up and go home. Invariably, the colonials choose to live in a worse situation in the hope that their survival will lead to future prosperity. Yet Smith’s text is no mere history of the colony’s choices. Instead, much of the action is predicated through the perspectives and stubborn heroism of its author.

     The tone of the writing reflects this idea, which is not based on reasonable assessments, or on a pluralistic vision of how policy should be executed in the colony. Instead, it is portrayed as being held together by the bravery of a single, audacious individual. While the text goes into detail regarding the negotiation of native threats and the exploration of the landscape, the most interesting aspect of the narrative in the context of Reason and Romanticism turns out to be John Smith’s relationship with his own colony. These are not disagreements based on debate and compromise. Instead, it is violent and one-sided. On three different occasions in the text, Smith returns to the colony just in time to thwart another escape attempt. “With a store of saker and musket shot he forced them to stay or sink in the river.” (Smith 47)

     Determined that his people will survive in the colony and overcome their fears, John Smith proves quite willing to attack and kill the colony’s own leaders, and sink their own trading ship. While the reasons for this are rational, in a sense, the tactics and methods are quite Romantic, characterizing both rebellion against a common sentiment within the colony, and the heroic use of force which trumps dialogue and rational debate. The characterizations of these interactions were described as “disgustful . . . yet all men of good judgment will conclude it were better their baseness should be manifest to the world.” (Smith 47)

     Interestingly, what might be considered rational based on the untenable dangers of living in the colony, are now characterized by Smith as villainous. His actions crystallize a wider stake for the colony, and the battle against an entire continent being corrupted by a few baseless men of poor character. By taking the physical actions and expanding them into a wide-sweeping set of moral ramifications, the appeals to Reason are gone, replaced by the Romantic conflict of “sink or stay.”

     For Smith, the well-being of the colony and the lives of the individuals who lived there suddenly become secondary to the preservation of commerce. Voices of dissent are quelled in the face of a single heroic dissident and his vision of what should be. In this way, John Smith is both an outsider to the wishes of the colony, and the sole insider who knows what is best for them. This simple rebellion is heroic, and serves as the beginnings of a larger romantic vision of America.
     In Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, the denial of the Age of Reason takes a different course from Smith’s colonial narrative. Instead of an individual’s heroic vision supplanting the ordered Reason of his people, we have a singular innocence based on reason, which is corrupted from without by the Romantic concepts of the wider world. In the promise of adventure and youthful romance in America, Charlotte proves herself willing to negate her former life, and press onward into danger and ultimately, disgrace and death.

     Rowson portrays Charlotte as a poor soul overcome by her emotional and romantic needs. Throughout, the narrator takes great pains to point out the nature of her improprieties as “the mind of youth eagerly catches at promised pleasure . . . it thinks not of the dangers lurking beneath those pleasures, till too late to avoid them.” (Rowson 3) This treatise of proper behavior is not just a dogma to be blindly followed, but serves as the only reasonable path for that time and place. According to the narrator, Romantic impulses are to be suppressed, should it cause peril to Reason.

     Charlotte, with the new world looming on the horizon, can no longer suppress her desires. Reason, and the life of chastity and simple humility it creates, is no longer enough to sustain her. By giving into the advances of the handsome Montraville, she is not only fulfilling her adventurous needs, but also opening herself up to a life of hardship and suffering. “’Indeed I do repent,’ replied Charlotte, ‘from my soul: but while discretion points out the impropriety of my conduct, inclination urges me on to ruin.’” (Rowson 10) Rowson paints Charlotte as innocent and naïve, but from this passage, we see that the character is not completely without foresight. Charlotte understands the dangers. However, these considerations of ruin simply aren’t a compelling enough reason to turn away. In the face of such Romantic possibility, how can she confine herself to such codified regulations, set down and promoted by those who cannot feel with the same intensity of passion as herself? Charlotte may have been seduced by such “inclinations,” but in the end, she made a choice, and Romance supplanted Reason as her new driving paradigm.

     Surely the audience who read Rowson’s book secretly hungered for their own Romantic fantasies, even as they read about its terrible conclusion with fascination. The penchant for the Romantic, desired by readers and only partially developed by Rowson and previous authors, finally takes center stage in James Fennimore Cooper’s novel, The Last of the Mohicans. Here, the Romantic vision is not just a tool to fill the gaps of human desire left behind by Reason; it is a method of its own, fully justified as its own philosophy of morality and action. Unlike previous works, the reader does not just get a taste of Romanticism, but rather an entire world where it is the enduring reality.

     In his book, Cooper describes a wilderness so vast and untamed that Reason, steeped in education and common sense, seems no longer useful at all. While John Smith and Charlotte Temple seek out their individual passions amidst a landscape of Reason, Cooper paints an aesthetic of Romanticism that stands as its own truth, breathtaking and melodramatic. Reason has no place in this constructed world, and only reveals itself in the narrative to serve the greater Romantic impulse.

     The character of Hawkeye provides a window into the nature of this Romance over Reason. As Matt Mayo states in his 2005 Midterm:

 It would be erroneous to claim that this man of common stock; this sharp-shooting gunslinger; this chivalrous rescuer; this stern arbiter of honor and justice called Hawkeye, was not . . . engaging in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. (2005 Mayo)

     Making the comparison between Hawkeye’s actions and Jefferson’s description of humankind’s inalienable rights is revealing. Here, as with the experiences of John Smith and Charlotte Temple, the key word is “pursuit.” While it is reasonable to desire the achievement of these inalienable rights, it does not mean man can necessarily obtain them. Cooper portrays Hawkeye as saturated with passion and life, always seeking a future goal among the subtle trails of the forest. He does not seem to need sleep or food, and his abilities to track and fire his rifle are almost preternatural in their perfection. Here, Reason is supplanted by the wild and unfettered Romantic reality. Inside this realm, Hawkeye is an unrealistic character with “Acute and long practiced senses, whose powers so often exceed the limits of all ordinary credulity” (Cooper 197) make perfect sense in Cooper’s world.

     Hawkeye’s journeys are also populated by native Indians. Cooper makes it very clear that the whites in his narrative, lost in the wilds of the American landscape, are in an environment much different than their own. Their traditional education and upbringing serve them poorly in this hostile world and they must rely, time and again, on the sagacity of Indian intelligence. Hawkeye explains how vast Chingachgook’s knowledge is compared to western education, as he examines the scalp of a fallen foe:

The Sagamore declares it came from the poll of a Mingo; nay, he even names the tribe of the poor devil, with as much ease as if the scalp was the leaf of a book, and each hair a letter. What right have christian whites to boast of their learning, when a savage can read a language, that would prove too much for the wisest of them all! (Cooper 196)

     Reason is useless when faced with such inscrutable capabilities. For white characters used to a world based on formal education, the unknowable reality of the native intelligence is all the more perplexing.

     Despite Cooper’s world of larger-than-life characters, insurmountable physical threats, and unknowable truths, in is interesting to find places where Reason is still used. However, since the world is essentially a Romantic construction, the rational is only meant to serve the greater half-truths of the reality. For example, when the females are once again captured by Magua after the massacre, the trackers are quick to pick up their trail. However, instead of pressing forward, they balk, much to Heyward’s chagrin. Hawkeye justifies this with a seemingly reasonable explanation:

Young blood and hot blood, they say, are much the same thing. We are not about to start on a squirrel hunt, or to drive a deer into the Horicon, but to outlie for days and nights, and to stretch across a wilderness where the feet of men seldom go, and where no bookish knowledge will carry you through, harmless. (Cooper 189)

     Here we see Reason seemingly overcoming passion, but only in the context of the Romantic. The true goal of Hawkeye and his companions are not to take stock and resupply. It is to center themselves for the joys of a future hunt, and to smoke a pipe together in quiet reflection as their quarry moves further away. Here, calming Reason is relegated to a mere device to fuel the core Romantic impulses of the characters. When Reason goes from the defining force of a narrative, to a justification within the context of a greater Romantic theme, the transfer to the Age of Romanticism is complete.

     In the end, the landscape of the wilderness during the emergence of American Romanticism did not just promise a reasonable world of security and prosperity. It was also the promise of a real and present danger threatening personal change, political upheaval, and an absence of the familiar. In the stories about this period, we see that civilization and safely are often the omnipresent final goal of any character, as Reason might demand. Yet, the readers of these stories seek characters incapable of atually obtaining these elusive goals. They would rather have a Romantic pursuit that can end in failure more often than it succeeds. For American colonials, this may be a reflection of a life they already understand. But for the rest of us, perhaps it is only a reflection of a life we can only imagine.