American Romanticism Sample Student Final Exam Answers 2010

Helena Suess

Modern Consequences: Desire and Loss in American Romanticism

Desire and loss always imply one another. A thing cannot be desired if it is sensed as found and possessed, for in that instance desire gives way to the pride or indifference of possessorship. Nor can a thing be sensed as lost without the desire that the thing be regained. Desire, quite simply, is motivation, whether of action or perspective; desire’s reverse, loss, is arrest, but with the potential for its obverse to again move the desiring subject. The complex relationship of the psychic states, their ability to drive each other—a thing desired is sensed as absent, i.e. “lost,” and so desired all the more; while the loss of a thing triggers the desire for its return—and their fundamentality to the human condition altogether suit them to aesthetic deployment in any number of configurations.

In some sense, the configurations are too malleable. The interplay of desire and loss is tautologically the requirement of most if not all narrative progression, regardless of genre: something not had is wished for and sought, as in Viola’s frustrated desire for Orsino (and Orsino’s for Olivia, and Olivia’s for Viola) in Twelfth Night, or the awkward paternalism Leopold Bloom, whose own son is dead, feels for the miserable youth Stephen in Ulysses. But in the genre of romance, desire and loss tend to be foregrounded or thematized, and do not serve as mere conditions or requirements for narrative progression, though they inevitably perform this function as well. The protagonist of a romance tends to be in the first place motivated by something external to his or her self, even if that motivation is necessarily experienced as interiority: a need to escape, to face and defeat some threat, to recover some artifact or secret truth—in a word, desire. Or, conversely, the protagonist may be forcibly motivated, by authority or circumstance, to separate from something familiar and to which he or she wishes to return—in a word, loss. In the period of American Romanticism, an era of literary output informed by the Enlightenment principles of heroic individualism and (conditional) human equality, by the conflict of Calvinist traditionalism with secular progressivism, and by the clash of industrial innovation and sprawl with the spartan agrarianism of the vast frontier, desire and loss became encoded with concerns for the ideal in the human and the ideal way of life. Not infrequently, their interplay in Romanticist literature activates the conditions of achieving the sublime.

          In his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741), John Edwards hoped to return the attention of his modernizing, increasingly urban, increasingly secularist congregants to the roots of their country and religion, to the Puritan deference to God’s absolute sovereignty and commitment to moral piety. A kind of Gothic nostalgia motivates Edwards’s narrative, a call to revitalize the old ways before incurring God’s wrath with impious “youthful vanities.” Edwards’s mode is indeed Gothic, full of demons and darkness and the pain of sublimity, while his theme is tragic, a commentary on the loss of grace. From a passage in Deuteronomy describing “the vengeance of God on the wicked unbelieving Israelites, who were God’s visible people,” Edwards extrapolates the perpetual and universal threat of losing God’s favor. Edwards’s genius here, the genius of eschatologists in general, is to render this loss of grace in a positive sense, the negatives made concrete by virtue of action and place, the “anger and wrath of God, that is expressed in the torments of hell.” God’s action is a loss: he “will not hold them up,” and the place they shall fall into is the physicalization of absence: the void, “the infinite gloom” of “the pit of hell” (emphasis added). It is “God’s mere will,” “nothing but the mere pleasure of God,” that holds back “[t]he sword of divine justice;” should the “hand of arbitrary mercy” depart, should grace be lost, doom will fall. The immediacy of the threat of such loss, its lurid depiction and uncertain forbearance and tremendous stakes, the damnation of the soul, transport Edwards’s sermon into the realm of the sublime, wherein the crimes against God reach infinite proportions and his mercy seems at its breaking point: “You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment.”

           But it is from this same sublimity that Edwards is able to reverse the wrath and gloom of his Gothic hell toward “awakening unconverted persons” to “a great change of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls.” Through the sublime experience of communion with God, achieved through strict moral piety and absolute fealty to God’s authority, Edwards in other words explains, hell can be avoided: “Christ has thrown the door of mercy wide open.” The negative desire implicit in Edwards’s threats of loss—the desire to escape the horrors of loss—becomes a positive and explicit desire in which the sermon’s main point of damnation is implicit—the desire to attain, to possess God’s favor and join him in heaven. The essential reciprocity of grace and damnation structures an emotional tension itself sublime, as fear and hope, joy and pain, are suspended in their dependence on one another. But strict emotional appeal is not the only reason Edwards’s sermon was so convincing upon its debut as to become a touchstone text of the Great Awakening. Though its audience is general, the sermon’s assumptions and implications are individualist. In the theology of “Sinners” the almighty ruler of the universe takes a personal interest in the lives and actions of every single person. Regardless of whether the source is merciful or vengeful, such an interest fulfills the desire, late of the Enlightenment and Reformation, for personal meaning: that God himself (and no intermediary priest or saint) finds not only the human race but each individual human being important enough to police, damn, and save. The threat of loss that Edwards tries to communicate in “Sinners” is that God in his wrath might stop paying attention and let the “wicked men” fall.

The individualism implicit in Edwards’s theology became explicit over the Eighteenth Century and into the Nineteenth as the United States became sovereign and democratic. Cities pushed back the wilderness, and life for many became either more impersonal, as more people moved to the safety of urban areas, or more isolated, as settlers braved danger to grab up the tremendous amounts of land unrolling before the frontier. In either case, the desire for meaningful and powerful personal experience in a changing and uncertain world fueled literary output, and by the early Nineteenth Century this experience needed no longer be contingent on God. Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) is thoroughly nostalgic, describing one man’s strange and profound experience of losing his idyllic, romantic old world, and his anachronistic desire to remain ever as he is in changed times. Located by his narrator in an alternating world—“Every change of season, every change of weather … every hour of the day produces some change in … these mountains,” the story begins—Van Winkle exists at first in a state of happy, individualistic arrest. He has a romantic pedigree, “the Van Winkles who figured so gallantly in the chivalrous days of Peter Stuyvesant,” that grants his perpetual repose an aristocratic, Old World authority. His one flaw, “an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor,” is offset by his whimsical altruism, “ready to attend to anybody’s business but his own.” If his carelessness regarding his own family and affairs exasperates his “termagant wife” and impoverishes his children, he is nevertheless of “universal popularity” in his village, itself a site of Old World idyllism with its “portrait of His Majesty George the Third” and venerable “patriarch of the village.” But ultimately, Van Winkle lacks that which he most desires: a pastoral romanticist’s ideal peace to do ever as he pleases, which his more realistically grounded wife perpetually denies him.

This drive leads him to ever seek “escape from the labor of the farm and the clamor of his wife.” One day, in search of just such peace, Van Winkle goes out hunting with his dog and loses everything. In a sublime moment of disturbing strangeness and awe, Van Winkle notices a “strange figure” dressed in “the antique Dutch fashion,” descending into a “deep ravine” from which issue “long rolling peals, like distant thunder.” Following, Van Winkle finds himself transported into a fairy-tale world out of “an old Flemish painting,” where “odd-looking personages” in old Dutch dress and beards are “playing at nine-pins” in a “melancholy party of pleasure.” Sharing in the whiskey of these prodigies, Van Winkle falls asleep and, coming awake, returns to his village to find it wholly “altered … larger and more populous,” full of “a number of people, but none of whom he knew,” in dress “of a different fashion from that to which he was accustomed.” His own “house has gone to decay,” his wife is dead and his children grown, his fellows have nearly all died or moved away, and General Washington has replaced King George in the portrait. Moreover the social placidity of the village, centered on its patriarch and prominent men, has given way to passionately partisan patriotism: Van Winkle nearly finds himself mobbed when he admits to being “‘a loyal subject of the king’.” The strain of the bewilderment, the effect of desire for the familiar in the midst of its absence, is incredible, and Van Winkle laments the loss of his familiar world in a quasi-sublime moment of psychological vertigo: “‘I’m not myself—I’m somebody else […] everything’s changed, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!’” Sorting things out with the help of “the most ancient inhabitant of the village,” the villagers learn that the idle farmer has slept for twenty years, through the revolution against Britain and the rise of democratic government. Van Winkle adjusts to the new world the only way he knows how: by willful ignorance of that which distresses. “[T]he changes of states and empires made but little impression on him,” and in his great age Van Winkle achieves at last his desire for complete peace, returning to contentment as “one of the patriarchs of the village,” “idle with impunity.” But his fulfilled desire is wholly anachronistic, its deliberately slow pace completely out of place in modern times, and as such coincides with the loss of Van Winkle’s world itself. Respected as “a chronicle of the old times ‘before the war,’” Van Winkle has no place in the new world except as a pleasant anachronism, a reminder of times gone by and the idyllic arrest of tradition before progress swept it away. In the fulfillment of desire he becomes an archetype of nostalgia, of the ideal past lost and never to return. Over and over again, even after all “knew it by heart,” he “tell[s] his story to every stranger.”

 Allegorically, Van Winkle’s long sleep represents the accelerated pace of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century modernity as it seemed to sweep whole new worlds into being in a matter of years (though the “ruby face” shared between the portraits of the king and the president may suggest that the past and present are not so different as they seem). Van Winkle himself evinces the psychological tension between desire for an idealized past and the present reality in which the ideal is forever lost (and may not have even existed) in that past. But the effect of progress during the American Renaissance was not only to activate longing for lost tradition, but also hope for the future and the opportunities it seemed to promise. In the North of the United States at least, national sympathy was slowly and sporadically but with increasing force turning toward abolition. In Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of his life as a slave (1845), desire for the kinds of individualist humanisms attenuated out of the Enlightenment into the Romanticists and Transcendentalists—liberation from bondage, dignity and self-agency, in particular—is without a doubt the motivating principle.[1] Douglass, sensate that freedom’s loss predates his own birth, exposed constantly to slavery’s atrocity, perpetually frustrated in his efforts to escape it, finally achieving freedom in secrecy, crafts a narrative not specifically Romantic, but substantially Romanticist in its sublime tension of desire and loss, especially loss in the form of preexisting absence: lack.

Douglass’ Narrative is, to be accurate, realist to a large extent, a chronicling of events, people, places and dates. It opens its author’s life with specific geographical orientation, the detail that Douglass “was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county.” Where it enters Romanticist territory, Douglass’s narrative is usually Gothic in order to emphasize the brutality of slavery. He writes of “the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery;” slaves being tortured and submitted to an “infernal purpose;” the “fiendish barbarity” of the overseer Mr. Severe; white and black colorations as racial coding. Meanwhile the narrative’s psychological content is saturated with lack. In his first paragraph, Douglass informs his reader that his “want of information concerning my own [birthday],” a consequence of the ignorance into which he was born, “was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood.” Reflecting later on songs he himself used to sing, Douglass determines that “[e]very tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for the deliverance from chains.” In their expression of coterminous desire and loss, their yearning for freedom and lament of its absence, Douglass reports, the songs inspired his “first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery.” For slavery is the very condition of human lack, as its “dark night” effaces humanity and intelligence. Douglass himself as a boy physicalizes this lack of humanity, the animal degradation of slavery, having “no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing on but a coarse tow linen shirt,” and eating with other children from “a large wooden tray or trough […] like so many pigs.” So abject is Douglass as a slave that “[t]he thought of owning a pair of trousers was great indeed!” But this humble acquirement inspires in Douglass an individualist work ethic, the free-market trade-off of “working … with the hope of reward,” that will in time become representative of the struggle of his desire for freedom against bondage’s lack.

While still a boy at the Baltimore home of Mr. and Mrs. Auld, Douglass is made inadvertently aware of his master’s fear of educated slaves, who so Mr. Auld claims are “discontented and unhappy.” And this is true, as Douglass himself later comments on the reciprocal nature of the desire/loss dynamic: “whenever my condition was improved,” whenever the desire to escape the dehumanization of slavery was in some way realized, “instead of increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free” (emphasis added). Mr. Auld’s accidental “special revelation” gives Douglass hope toward the fulfillment of his deepest desire even as it begins to fill in the void of ignorance imposed upon him by slavery: “[f]rom that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was just what I wanted.” With the encouragement of this deceptively minor achievement and his goal for the first time in sight, Douglass’s desire for freedom becomes more concrete and complex. He determines “to run away” if he should “one day find a good chance;” in the meantime he applies himself to the long-term and sets about teaching himself letters, so that “after a long, tedious effort for years, I finally succeeded in learning how to write.”

Under the lash of Mr. Covey the slave-breaker, however, Douglass faces the fullest test of his determination against the dehumanizing power of slavery. By Mr. Covey’s long brutality, Douglass laments, “[m]y natural elasticity was crushed; my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed … behold a man transformed into a brute!” The inhumanity of bondage bearing down on him with all its strength, Douglass loses his motivation, becoming docile to slavery in a “beast-like stupor.” Yet he remains aware in rare instances of “a faint beam of hope” for escape. In his anguished arrest, a state of loss in which desire fails to move, Douglass’s hopes struggle the most valiantly, and the tension between apparently triumphant loss and beaten but uncapitulant desire effects perhaps the most overt manifestation of a Romanticist natural sublime in the Narrative. Looking out on the ships of the “noble bay” of the Chesapeake “moving off to the mighty ocean,” the sight of which “always affected me powerfully,” Douglass “would pour out my soul’s complaint.” In this moment of beauty and sorrow Douglass reawakens for a moment from the darkness of slavery. When loss returns, when “[t]he glad ship is gone” and Douglass is “left in the hottest hell of unending slavery,” he yet realizes that he is not so far from desire’s victory as his condition would make it seem; rather, freedom is only “one hundred miles straight north,” and he “had as well be killed running as die standing.” With no real relief forthcoming, however, the optimism soon fades; defeat and loss fully return, and Douglass “reconcil[es] myself to my wretched lot.”

Desperation and the aid of a friend finally help Douglass regain his lost humanity. Escaping Mr. Covey, Douglass takes up with an acquaintance, the slave Sandy Jenkins, who directs Douglass to carry a mystical root to protect him from harm. Whether the root “really” works or no, Douglass has again the confidence to assert his individual will, as he trounces Covey in a fight so thoroughly that the slave-breaker never again “laid the weight of his finger upon me in anger.” This victory, Douglass reports, has the sublime virtue of “inspir[ing] me again with a determination to be free” in a transcendent “glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom.” His confidence restored, Douglass may once again pit his determination against the thievery both physical and psychic of the slave system.

 The dynamic takes on a specifically economic cast as Douglass enters more into the life of a skilled professional in paradoxical combination with his persisting status as a slave. Returning to Baltimore after a failed attempt at escape that had left him “covered in gloom,” Douglass learns to caulk sufficiently that he is “able to command the highest wages.” Having “sought my own employment, made my own contracts” so as to activate within him “old notions of freedom,” Douglass yet finds himself paradoxically in bondage, forced to hand money “rightfully my own” over to his master. However much good pay for good work stimulates his desire for a sense of freedom, while he remains a slave that desire’s achievement remains a simulation; Douglass achieves only to lose, with coin itself now as the symbol of the loss within his ostensible gain. In this economic exchange Douglass articulates not only the power of slavery to rob the slave, but a failure of the “American Dream” narrative in its naïve claim to universal applicability, a qualitatively Romanticist ideal of equal opportunity born of the individualistic desire to better oneself socially and economically. In doing so, Douglass perhaps condemns, or at least qualifies this narrative as a source of loss in its inapplicability to the millions of slaves, as much as it is a reflection of Euro-American desire.

Douglass eventually achieves his desire for freedom, but narratively his escape from slavery is structured as an informational absence resulting from the persistence of slavery; to explicate his flight to the North would “run the hazard of closing the slightest avenue by which a brother slave might clear himself ... of slavery.” And Douglass himself for a time experiences freedom itself as loss, “a feeling of great insecurity and loneliness” at his lack of friends and at the threat of being “taken back, and subjected to all the tortures of slavery.” Thus for Douglass desire at its moment of realization, at the moment of transcendence over slavery into freedom, again lapses into loss. In so foregrounding and thematizing the perpetual reciprocity between loss and desire, then, the Narrative follows to an extent the Romanticist pattern established in this essay for Van Winkle, for whom desire was realized only in the loss of its reality, and Edwards, for whom desire was ever qualified by the possibility of loss. Moreover in all these texts the sublime is located at the site where the tension between desire and loss reaches its critical point—at the edge of hell, in a world vastly changed, at Chesapeake Bay. And finally, all three texts are entirely driven by the Romanticist pursuit of, i.e., desire for, the ideal—whether purity on earth and salvation in heaven; pastoral ease and permanent tradition; or the claiming of humanity out of brutality—a metaphysical quality that could not be ideal as such unless absent in the physical state of things, the “real.” The dynamic of desire and loss explicated in these texts can be seen repeating throughout literature of the American Renaissance, from the idealistic naturalism of Cooper’s Champlain, where Hawkeye and Heyward continually lose and regain Alice and Cora; to the psychological Gothicism of Poe’s possessed, lost, recovered, and lost again Ligeia. Desire and loss therefore function as the implicit or explicit theme of American Romanticist literature in general, in which the romantic quest no longer leads to the Grail, to the preservation of what is and was as such (as in classical or chivalric romance), but instead aims at the realization of the possibilities, and at the overcoming of the frustrations, of the modern world.