American Romanticism Sample Student Final Exam Answers 2010

Helena Suess

More Modern than Not: On the American Literature of Centuries Past

I came into this course familiar with a few representatives of the American Renaissance, particularly the Gothic tales of Poe, Douglass’ Narrative, and some of Whitman’s and Dickinson’s poetry, as well as a little background in Emerson, Thoreau, and Cooper. Having grown up with some (especially Poe) and studied others as an undergraduate, I had come to associate these artists with an anachronistic kind of canonicity: the great mostly-white fathers of American literature whose work while interesting in a historical context (and just as a good read) was largely outdated by the Twentieth Century, let alone the Twenty-First in which I took this course. Mainly, I felt that I was spending too much time with my favorite (post)modernists in a vacuum, lacking the immediate literary background against which the moderns were themselves writing, and I thought that my experience of those authors would be enriched by studying their antecedents. (That, and the presence of Fitzgerald and Faulkner on the syllabus.)

Definitely I was justified in these assumptions to an extent. These Romanticists are indeed the authors whose talents set the watermark, who whether by national and international acclaim or by the (re)discoveries of later readers came to be standard texts of American literature of the Nineteenth Century and beyond. And these authors do also provide excellent background for studying the moderns, according to either inheritance of technique or in rebellion against ideological assumptions. What surprised me, and pleasantly, was to find that these texts and their authors are in many ways not as dated as I once took them for. Not only are they more diverse in their authorship, consisting not only of the fathers and Dickinson but of Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, and Harriet Stowe, than I had imagined. Additionally, far from anachronistic examples of pre-modern literature, these texts, I came to find, are themselves obsessed with modernity, with making sense of a world vastly and suddenly changing as new political methodologies, spiritual practices, industrial technology, and humanistic philosophy made inroads on the solid traditions and vast wildernesses of the early European settlements.

To an extent, before taking this class I had already felt that modernity must have had some impact on Nineteenth Century American literature, having with millions of other adolescents taken in the American and Industrial Revolutions, slavery and the abolition debates, the Civil War and Reconstruction with the pizza from the high school cafeteria. But I had only ever studied these modernizations in an historical or sociological context, never in an explicitly aesthetic one. In my view, any literature before about 1910 was still “old”—outdated in its premises and methods (though to be fair, I’m increasingly feeling that way about modernist literature)—especially that literature called “Romantic,” as if it were like something by Johnson or Austen muddled up with old chansons de geste, or at best, attenuating Eighteenth Century popular Gothicism like The Castle of Otranto through Poe and Hawthorne. Come to find out, modernity is the very condition of the American Renaissance. Even Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”—which I would prefer remain in the syllabus even if the pre-Romantics are otherwise left out, as it is some excellent spiritual Gothicism—though composed decades before the American Renaissance proper, was a reaction to changing times, an attempt to recover the Puritan spiritual morality of the Seventeenth Century. And “Sinners” made its own impact on modernity, helping to touch off the evangelical Great Awakenings whose echoes yet reverberate into the present. More than half a century later, Washington Irving’s 1819 story “Rip Van Winkle” allegorized the sudden shifts in American lifestyle and politics that occurred in the closing years of the Eighteenth Century, as an idle farmer from a tiny and traditional pastoral village sleeps twenty years to wake up in an expanding village of political partisanship. Until I understood the context of their time, the magnitude of modernity the authors were dealing with, these and similar texts remained largely outside my interest as rather irrelevant to the world in which I live. Now, I see in my own time significant parallels to the conditions that produced those texts two hundred years ago: religious sentiment over fears of progress and secularism and the status of my home nation on the international stage changing substantially in a handful of decades.

On into the Nineteenth Century, as urbanization and industrialization clashed ever more stridently against the agrarian frontier, and agitation for untraditional social and political rights—especially the rights of women and slaves—intensified. From this dynamic arose the naturalistic idealism of the essays of Thoreau and Emerson, and of Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales; the Transcendentalist attempts to reconcile Enlightenment individualism with universal humanism, in no small part toward the political project of abolition; and the heteroglossic women’s novels of Warner and Cummins, which gave women an aesthetic voice where a political and social one was largely lacking. Even Poe—though definitely not an abolitionist and of a tendency to objectify women in his stories—wrote work consequential of modernity. Not only can some of his more lurid tales be read in part as satire of the Gothic genre he inherited from decades past—making the narrator-protagonist of “Ligeia” a misogynistic opium addict, for example—but his Dupin stories activate modern epistemological theories, of what is and can be known, even as they touched off the entire genre of the Euro-American detective mystery. Meanwhile the narratives of Douglass, Jacobs, and other former slaves became both a signification and an activation of increasing popular sentiment (at least in the North) against slavery and racial prejudice. If such narratives did not resolve the problems they challenged (how could they? art is always a reflection and a motivation of its times, but is never sufficient to change things on its own) they became canonical of fiction invested in the increasing diversity of American society, an investment immensely relevant not only to modernist and post-colonial literature but to the Twenty-First Century global stage.

All this is of course not to label the literature of the American Renaissance as in any way “modernist.” Modernist literature specifically and with not a little self-contradiction attempts to represent an anxiety about whether the world can in fact be sufficiently understood by human beings to be represented in fiction. Romanticist literature of Nineteenth Century America is not concerned with whether the world can be represented but how to represent it, assuming (and along with realism this is the major epistemological divergence of Romanticism from modernism) that the world—whether physical, spiritual, social, or political—is intrinsically understandable to human perceptive and intellectual capacities. However, the fact that modernity, and a modernity not vastly different in concerns or effects from the present, underlay nearly all literary production of the American Renaissance is, I have come to believe at the semester’s end, indisputable. All of the essays I have written for this course have in some way found themselves necessarily concerned with modernity, and through those exercises as well as the class lectures and discussions I have learned to perceive the “old white fathers” of American literature as not so male, not so white, and not so old as I once assumed.

On to business. As far as the course syllabus went, I felt that it was representative of the major texts of American Romanticism, which is to say I recognized most of the names and titles. However, it is difficult for me to know how much of the period is in fact telescoped into those texts. By this I mean that the course seemed to spend a little too much time on pre- and post-Romanticism. Definitely some pre-Romantic context should be given, and I’m loathe to see either Edwards’s “Sinners” or Rowlandson’s captivity narrative go, but it would have been nice were more time free for the American Renaissance itself, especially for more artists I’ve not heard of if any are relevant (and I assume that there are plenty; I’m not as ecumenical in my reading as I’d like). By the same token, and as a fan of modernists this is almost hard for me to write, four classes on post-Romanticism—almost a third of the semester—felt like too much.

Granted, there was a lot of good stuff; I make no secret of my infatuation with Faulkner, Henry James and Zora Hurston and Langston Hughes are always great, and I may never have read Katherine Porter’s “The Grave,” one of my favorite stories of the semester, were it not included in the syllabus. But the really important bits might be able to be compressed into just one or two classes, maybe one day of Daisy Miller for realism, and another day with one modernist story and a handful Jazz Age poetry to bring us to the Twentieth Century. Meanwhile the rest of the semester could be fleshed out with (as we talked about in class) more poetry—my own preference would be more Dickinson, Whitman, and Poe, but I’d have loved to have encountered Romanticist poets I’ve not heard of—and, because it seemed that Native Americans were somewhat underrepresented on the whole, perhaps some selections from Black Elk Speaks, which I remember from last semester’s class on minority literature as highly Romanticist. Melville would have been nice to see too, though I have no idea how Moby-Dick would fit in without taking over the entire course.

A last wish, and this is really stuffing Helena’s imaginary syllabus with ten pounds of texts in a five-pound text-bag, would have been some contextualization with European Romanticism, some Keats or Goethe contrasted with Whitman et al., in the early days of the semester. Otherwise, the texts were engaging, the assignments challenging, and my classmates invigorating, while the course overall gave me opportunity to reconsider my position on pre-Twentieth Century American literature. Historical contextualization does wonders, and I came out of the semester less ready to dismiss those authors and works I’ve been trained to think of, by my education as well as my personal interests, as outdated and irrelevant to my post-post-modern/colonial/national world.