American Romanticism Sample Student Final Exam Answers 2010

Kyle Rahe

To Be Romantic in the Face of Reality: Changes in American Romanticism:

          Is American Romanticism an era of American literature or is it a concept that is shaped and evolves?  After studying the authors in the second half of our survey it is evident that romance is a complex part of the American character that never really goes away, but just takes on new forms and is even a part of realist and modernist texts.  One of the challenges of romanticism is as America grows older and becomes more jaded with cynicism, then how does the author portray that romance of America as a new golden land?  Furthermore, how does minority or disenfranchised voices have any sense of romance towards democracy or freedom when the realities of their own limitations are so present?  I would like to look at several different authors who wrote in the post-Romanticism era, but yet featured new ways to show romance and elements of the sublime in their writings. 

          Henry James is in no way a literary outsider; in fact he is as close to American literary royalty as we might have.  However, his wanderlust makes him a different type of American writer who broke from previous traditions and found his own style.  In this style though he molds old forms for his purposes and one example of this is his updating of romance in the novella Daisy Miller.  When most people speak of James they want to pigeonhole him as a realist, but he is far too complex a writer to be narrowly defined.  For James, Daisy as the American abroad, is herself a romantic notion.  Daisy is fresh, exotic, and repellant to Europe’s conventions.  Daisy’s way of comporting herself is as exotic to the people of the novel as America’s democracy is to the monarchies of Europe.  James breaks from his predecessors by telling a tale of American romanticism in a foreign land.  Yet, he makes the Coliseum of Rome seem as romantic as Cooper’s woods or Hawthorne’s forest.  Speaking of Hawthorne, James manages to tell the story of Daisy in terms like innocence, but without the Gothic heaviness of Hawthorne’s focus on original sin.  One of the ways romanticism evolves in this period is that the authors seem to give the reader a glance of a normal romantic trope only to have cruel reality set in.  A specific example of this is when Winterbourne and Daisy are dreamily contemplating the late night boat ride only to have it instantly dashed by the presence of Daisy’s family.  Romance is fine in the mind, but the reality of the situation is always foremost and real.  This twisting of normal romance is also present in our next author, F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

          Fitzgerald is an interesting author to discuss in terms of romance because seemingly he should be entirely romantic as the chronicler of the Jazz Age.  However, he also is ripening as an author during the modernist period and had seen the destruction of World War One and knew that to be quixotically romantic was foolish.  “Winter Dreams” is a story that shows this split.  Dexter Green is a quixotic dreamer, but in keeping with modernism much of Fitzgerald’s language is inverted.  For Dexter, cold winter is where his dreams are formed and most come to life.  If Fitzgerald were a traditional romantic he would stage this in spring or summer, rather than in the season of trees dying and cold sterility.  Fitzgerald’s descriptions of Judy Jones are mixed as well.  In one way she is the traditional beautiful austere princess that Dexter must win over, but at other times she is called beautifully ugly, artificial, and absurd.  This modernist technique of making even the divine seem cracked shows the way in which Fitzgerald wanted to break free from the previous type of quest story.  The ending of the story is a very clear exclamation point of Fitzgerald’s mixed use of romance.  Even though Dexter Green is not with Judy he still thinks of her as lovely and a “great beauty” and in his own mind his quest was successful and has truly brought him financial success.  But when Devlin gives him the true news of the state of Judy Jones’s life he snaps, he can’t take it.  Once again Fitzgerald is emphasizing the ways in which our romantic visions cannot escape the realities of life such as old age, sadness, poverty, and war. 

          As the nation changed the market and culture opened up to welcome in new previously unheard voices in literature.  Perhaps, none was more important than Langston Hughes.  How can one see anything romantic about America when every day is another harsh reality after another?  How can one embrace self-reliance or civil disobedience when the culture is set up to make those concepts impossible for an African-American?  The most important way our Harlem Renaissance writers use romance is as a rallying cry for romantic notions of their own freedom and voice.  They use the language of revolution and their literary forefathers and hurl it back at them.  In “I Too Sing America” Langston Hughes reminds the reader of the romantic democracy ideals of Whitman through the title, but then shows how they are not being met.  The use of a word like ashamed drives this home.  The resilience of the message itself though is romantic.  Hughes is using the romance of a quest or a journey to mirror the struggles of blacks to achieve equality.  Another romantic notion occurs in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”.  Hughes displays the ways that blacks have been present in all cultures from time immemorial thereby superseding the false romanticism of the white man’s America.  A poem like “Dream Variations” makes new use of the color code so often used in Romantic authors like Cooper and Hawthorne.  For Hughes though, blackness is a symbol of pride and not evil and mystery like the former writers. 

          A poem that represents this change in romanticism is Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die”.  The poem has always been seen as a rallying cry for all oppressed groups, but it is also very romantic in a modern way.  It uses language that harkens back to the epic romances of old like Ivanhoe and Beowulf.  McKay turns the enemies of the poem into animals and calls them monsters and a cowardly pack, thus using the same language of animals that racists of the time would hurl at blacks and hurls them back.  Another romantic notion in the poem is one of sacrifice; everyone must die, but use your death as part of something.  The poem’s main contribution is this aura of romance concerning all who have the courage to take place in any civil rights movement while using opposite language to reduce the opponents of innate freedoms. 

          All of these writers updated romanticism to use in their work in new and different ways than the generation of writers before them.  One of the main differences was the eras in which they lived.  America was changing too fast for the simply straightforward romanticism of the American Renaissance era.  For writers like James and Fitzgerald the dominant culture would adjust its ideas on what was romantic and how the American dream was changing.  Also, new voices like Hughes and McKay were fighting for their voice to be heard and their struggle to be as romantic as Thoreau at Walden Pond.  These are just a few examples of the ways in which romantic literature never goes away, but is only morphing into something more sublime and complex.