American Romanticism Sample Student Final Exam Answers 2010

Helena Suess

The Ideal v. the Real: Post-Romantic American Literature

          Industrialization, capitalism, urbanization—in a word, the modernity of the West, has its origins well before the Civil War in the mid-millennial rise of mercantilism, in humanistic philosophy and scientific advance. This “Enlightenment,” however, also for centuries perpetuated a kind of Platonism, a narrative both cosmological and moralistic aiming at an ideal world existing “above” or “beyond” the “real” world and which was qualitatively better than the real in all respects. This ideal was highly adaptable to individual experience, coloring perception and physical sensation, religious sentiment, moral concerns, and aesthetic experimentation. In the Romanticist literature of the American Renaissance, the ideal of humanity (for example) can be found in “that Unity, that Over-Soul” of Emerson, who asserts that though “we live … in particles […] every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One” (Emerson 1844). “[I]n beauty of face” the ideal exists in Poe’s Ligeia (Poe 1838) and Cooper’s Alice of “dazzling complexion,” while Hawkeye gives the ideal morality, religion, and setting in one breath: the submission of oneself to the natural order of God “which is so clear in the wilderness” (Cooper 1826). But by the late Nineteenth Century, as the United States painfully reformed itself from its citizens’ war over a question of basic humanity, disillusioned of dreams of glory and honor; as technological and infrastructural advances pushed the idealized wilderness of the Romanticists further than ever from the common lifestyle; and as that lifestyle  became at once more common (urbanized, industrialized, capitalist), more diverse (racially, economically) and altogether more complex, Romanticism and its ideals lost their ability to represent and order American life.

          Many of the tropes and stylizations of Romanticism survived into post-Romantic literature, but they were deployed in new ways to achieve different effects. Realism, in America the major successor genre to Romanticism, had in many ways always existed side-by-side and within Romanticist literature, having attenuated with Romanticism out of the same Enlightenment concepts of individualism and universal order. The description of Lake Champlain in the opening paragraphs of The Last of the Mohicans is full of geographical and historical detail contextualizing for the reader the setting and events that shape the world of Cooper’s novel. But where Cooper goes on to encode Champlain and its environs with symbols of the divine and the quest of the hero, realism emphasizes detail for the sake of bringing narrative to a ground level of reality, to locate its characters in an ordinary world of ordinary (if frequently strange and amazing) society, humanity, ability, and possibility.

          Henry James’s Daisy Miller (1938) contains almost nothing in the way of outright Romanticism. When Romanticist qualities arise, they do so in a way that divides from them if not their horizontality, their potential to inspire awe in any given reader, then their verticality, their connection to things “higher” than the material. Calvinism, for example, is a religious and moral code not only significantly American through the New England and Mid-Atlantic settlers, but whose emphases on moral purity and material simplicity can be seen in late form in the spartan naturalism of Thoreau, Warner’s Aunt Fortune, and Cooper’s Hawkeye (though this last would surely deny it). But in Daisy Miller, Calvinism loses all its symbolic meaning. It becomes simply a characteristic of Geneva “the little metropolis of Calvinism,” a quaintly anachronistic facilitator of Winterbourne’s social life, his “great many youthful friendships.” Granted, virtue is held in high regard in Winterbourne’s Geneva, as Mrs. Costello “with dignity” warns Winterbourne to beware of “‘tremendous flirts’.” But this is a social morality, more a manner than anything, through which the friends and outsiders of Winterbourne’s social set are identified and accordingly dealt with. Winterbourne’s interest in and Mrs. Costello’s shared concern about the story’s eponymous young woman is not that Daisy is evil but that she is “uncultivated,” that she is of a class whose manners are not as refined as theirs, and her freer manner marks her as both mysterious and of suspect virtue. For Daisy characteristically cannot be possessed, as Ligeia and Alice are possessed in the affections of their men; rather she exists outside of any dynamic in which she can become an ideal, not only because she is too low-born but because she shows absolutely no conviction toward marriage. Daisy, however intriguing and affecting, is therefore no Romanticist’s ideal of virtuous womanhood and sublime beauty: Winterbourne sizes her up and declares her “in want of finish … bright, sweet, superficial.”

Daisy’s progress through her story is likewise nothing romantic, in which a separation or conflict is faced and overcome to the protagonists’ physical and moral betterment. Daisy’s punishment for offending Mrs. Walker is neither death nor damnation, as might be the case for violating some Romanticist morality, but social ostracism. Though the humiliation certainly affects Daisy (“she turned very pale […] ‘I shouldn’t think you would let people be so unkind!’”) she remains the same person, going out alone with Giovanni as before whether in defiance of or indifference to the snub. Gone too in James’s story are the rhetorical rhapsodies of Poe’s narrators and Cooper’s Hawkeye, replaced by heteroglossia, of different ways of speaking interacting in dialogue with social significance. Mrs. Walker affects an Old World authoritarianism (“‘Do get in and drive with me!’ […] ‘You should walk with your mother, dear!’”) in instructing Daisy that young ladies should not walk alone with a man, while Daisy retorts without compunction, “‘I never heard of anything so stiff!’” And finally, romantic setting and the natural sublime become realistically qualified by urban conditions and environmental effect. The Castle of Chillon, the site of Winterbourne’s first private outing with Daisy, on which he has the feeling that “there was something romantic going forward,” ends up making “but a slight impression on [Daisy],” while she meanwhile uses “the rugged embrasures of Chillon” as  pretext “for asking Winterbourne sudden questions about himself.” The journey loses its romance, its mystery and potential, as it becomes an interrogative conversation about personal details. Meanwhile the beauty of “‘the Colosseum by moonlight,’” Daisy’s last expression of her freedom to do as she pleases, a Romanticist symbol of the very freedom that characterizes her, leaves her susceptible to the “Roman fever” that kills her. The tragedy that Daisy Miller in the end becomes is one in which the social and material worlds, and nothing transcendental or idealistic, conspire together to restrict the free “innocence” of its heroine.

For the most part, Romanticisms simply remain absent from Daisy Miller, whose aim is not to portray a heroic quest for some ideal but the effect on real(istic) human beings by the conditions of living in the real world. When Romanticisms do arise in James’s novella, they typically find themselves subsumed into the background as mere detail, or ironized as imagination and desire quickly contrasted with quotidian reality. This last technique—Romanticism as irony—is deployed persistently and self-consciously in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” (1928). Fitzgerald’s story seeks less to avoid or subvert outright the styles and tropes of Romanticism, than it does to reconfigure them into a more accurate representation of Twentieth Century modernization than they had hitherto been capable. Such self-conscious reprisal of the old style into a new form marks Fitzgerald as a modernist, not a realist, though his story does contain realistic elements. The motivation of “Winter Dreams,” though, is, again, not to outright avoid Romanticism, but to activate through its elements the transition from fantasy to reality, the necessary process of maturation into the new way of life demanded by modernity, and by life in general.

Fitzgerald’s prose style, first, is sensuously descriptive, tending toward the Romantically poetic in its naturalistic metaphors and personifications, but ironically remains quite focused on civilized and quotidian objects and persons. The opening paragraphs of “Winter Dreams” describe a golf course “haunted by ragged sparrows” in winter; the golfers themselves are cast as heroes who “brave the season,” which itself departs “without an interval of moist glory.” The seasons themselves are noticeably altered in emotivity from the traditional. For the story’s protagonist Dexter the season of spring, which Northrop Frye describes as the “archetype of romance,” “of the defeat of the powers of darkness, winter and death” (Frye 1452), is “dismal.” On the other hand autumn, for Frye the “archetype of tragedy” (Frye 1453), is for Dexter “gorgeous” and indeed sublime, making Dexter “clinch his hands and tremble,” the “hope” of October in “November raised to a sort of ecstatic triumph.” On into winter—thematically fundamental to the ironic project of “Winter Dreams” as the “archetype of satire”—which though its “wind blew cold as misery” nevertheless transports Dexter into a reverie of imagined desires fulfilled, of rising from humble caddie origins to “bec[o]me a golf champion” whose skill and fame inspires “open-mouthed wonder.” (Summer, Frye’s “archetype of comedy” (Frye 1453), will in Part II of the story become linked with Romanticism as a season of nostalgia, a piano tune “gay and new five years before […] precipitat[ing] in Dexter a sort of ecstasy” in the throes of which he submits to the young woman Judy’s “casual whim.”) And it is during one winter that Dexter, “not more than fourteen,” meets the “radiant, blatantly artificial” Miss Judy Jones, an aristocratic girl then eleven years of age, whose condescension to the older caddie Dexter, followed by her brutalizing of her own nurse, inspires Dexter to quit his servant’s position to seek his own fortune. In the “dissolution phase” of winter, and not the “birth phase” of romantic spring (Frye 1452-3), Dexter’s quest for manhood begins.

In a further structural irony, Fitzgerald telescopes that quest itself into a few short paragraphs at the beginning of several parts of the story, leaping through time in order to bring the reader to the root of Dexter’s conflict of maturation. And this root, the reader learns, is the (now grown) beautiful woman Judy Jones, whom Dexter quickly realizes he has “wanted ever since he was a proud, desirous little boy.” Judy is on her surface an overt casting of a Romanticist ideal of female beauty: a woman of surpassing loveliness and mystery, both desired by and apparently desirous of all men but possessed by none. Her teasing, coy flirtation, her precious insubstantiality as “a slender enamelled doll,” seems to cast her as a femme fatale in Dexter’s bildungsroman, her “unforgivable, yet forgiven turbulence” luring him away from the “solidity” of his respectable fiancée Irene Scheerer. A Byronic kind of romance plays out for Dexter between the “sturdily popular” Irene and the ephemerally flirtatious Judy, in which the obviously virtuous choice is left as “no more than a curtain spreading behind” Dexter as he pursues the “fire and loveliness” of his passion. In an irony not incompatible with the Byronic mode, Dexter’s passion brings him in contact with the sublime, so frequently in Romanticism a condition of encountering the ideal, as a source of mystification and unethical, unwise behavior: “a perfect wave of emotion washed over [Dexter], carrying off with it a sediment of wisdom, of convention, of doubt, of honor” as he goes alone with Judy into her house.

Fitzgerald’s real stroke of irony in the Byronism, however, is to humanize Judy. She is, first, aware of her romanticized status, and moreover resentful of it, running away from a man “‘because he says I’m his ideal.’” She seems caught in that interpellation, knowing that because she is very beautiful and rich she is to be an object to be admired, but also that as a woman she must be virtuous, and so compromising by flirting with all while preferring none. So caught is Judy that when Dexter, a young man who once pursued her, seems in his pending nuptials to have “definitely given her up,” she must reappear to reinsinuate herself in his life. But lest the reader take her for a mercenary temptress, moments before inviting Dexter into her house Judy’s dollface cracks into tears. She demands an answer from Dexter than touches at the heart of who she is not only to him but to the social reality in which they both exist: “‘I’m more beautiful than anybody else,’ she said brokenly, ‘why can’t I be happy?’” Fitzgerald twists the reunion of Judy and Dexter into a moment of psychological realism, in which Judy’s complicated ideological position loses the ease of essentiality it evinces the ideal woman of the Romanticists—who through whatever trial remains ever exalted as an ideal—and bears down on her with all its pressure.

The one-month engagement which follows this moment, inaugurated in the storm of Dexter’s “anger, pride, passion, hatred, tenderness,” engages the reader with another irony. Dexter, unlike a Romantic hero who typically learns from experience and adapts to new understanding, repeats a mistake he has been making for pages: “[n]o disillusion … could cure his illusion as to her desirability.”  Judy continuously inflicts on Dexter’s state of mind a sensation superficially like Romanticist sublimity, “ecstatic happiness and intolerable agony,” an effect that “cause[s] him untold inconvenience and not a little trouble,” yet he continuously returns to her regardless of the “utter indifference she manifested and sincerely felt toward him.” Dexter’s bildungsroman remains in perpetual arrest as he fails and fails again to shake himself of his passion, however much he admits to himself that “he did not possess in himself the power to move fundamentally or to hold Judy Jones.” Even after selling his business and spending his passion in war “with a certain amount of relief,” Dexter yet holds on to his illusion of Judy. It takes seven years and the casual, brutal, undeniable humanization of Judy by a second party to finally destroy that illusion. Mr. Devlin, a business associate of Dexter’s, reports flippantly on Judy’s marriage, children, and person, his descriptions of her as “a little old” and having “fade[d] just like that” robbing Dexter of the idealized beauty of his youth. Here, in a highly ironized fashion, Dexter encounters a kind of reversed sublimity, at first “possessed with a wild notion” by Devlin’s remarks, only to sink by the end of the report into a teary “sort of dulness” in which “[h]e wanted to care, but could not care.” The ideal of Judy, implanted in Dexter’s mind as an adolescent, is erased finally, and he now perceives “no beauty but the gray beauty of steel.” “The dream was gone” for Dexter, and “Winter Dreams” takes on allegorical properties: as with Dexter’s dream the imagination and desires and ideals of youthful romance are gone in Fitzgerald’s 1920s, for the Twentieth Century has brought a modern world “of steel that withstands of all time,” and Romanticist dreams, which are dreams only, must be laid to rest.

This particular allegorism in “Winter Dreams” may be consequential not only of Fitzgerald’s time but of his setting, the American Northeast, in which industrialization and urbanization had been of increasingly significant influence since the late Eighteenth Century. But in America’s South, slave-supported agriculture had made cotton king, and even the Civil War could not shake the romantic agrarian narrative of race- and region-based aristocracy and chivalry that W. J. Cash recorded as still strongly extant in the Twentieth Century (The Mind of the South, 1941). The modern South was (and still is) a place where industry and agriculture, the present and the past, and the black and white races existed uneasily and sometimes brutally alongside one another. The artistic movement of Southern Agrarians (against whom Cash to no small extent wrote his book) were moreover working in the 1920s and ‘30s to revitalize the Southern narrative of holy Cavaliers and Puritans, of God’s chosen lords and ladies, of (white) chivalric virtue and honor that had existed once, and had been dealt a heavy blow by war and modernity, but would surely exist once again. Adopting on this persisting anachronism a position of irony similar to Fitzgerald’s, but differing significantly in methodology, William Faulkner in “A Rose for Emily” (1930) charts in a complex and Gothicized vignette the interaction of tradition and modernity in the Twentieth Century American South.

Faulkner’s story is framed nostalgically by the funeral of an old woman from a bygone time, a woman ironically idealized in death as “a fallen monument” to the old ways. Miss Emily Grierson’s house, though surrounded by “garages and cotton gins,” retains “the heavily lightsome style of the [eighteen-]seventies.” Miss Emily’s is in fact the last of this kind of house in town, but the nostalgia itself is ironized as the narrator, an everyman more or less representing the town’s perspective, disclaims the Grierson house as “an eyesore among eyesore.” The inside of the house emanates a Gothic aura of age and haunted decay, its “dim hall” smelling claustrophobically of “dust and disuse—a close, dank smell,” all presided over by the “crayon portrait of Miss Emily’s father” peering out of “a tarnished gilt easel.” Miss Emily herself goes well with the house, a tiny, grotesque woman with “skeleton small and spare” incongruously supporting a frame “bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water.” Corpse-like not only in features but in implacability, Miss Emily resists “the next generation, with its more modern ideas” who have come to collect taxes remitted since 1894. “See Colonel Sartoris,” now long dead; “I have no taxes in Jefferson,” she insists before having Tobe, her “old Negro” servant, see the younger men out. And though Tobe is as Gothicized as Miss Emily in many ways, a mysterious, silent racial ‘other’ who vanishes at the story’s end, through him Faulkner further ironizes the attenuated romance of the South, as Miss Emily, carryover of the past, exerts her traditional command over Tobe as a Southern white lady: the black servant carries out an act of authority over modern white men on behalf of a white woman apparently preserved out of history.

As for the town itself, it does not seem to have ever made up its mind exactly how to deal with the problem of Miss Emily, who has always held herself above “the gross, teeming world” however much she is reduced to it by circumstance. In Miss Emily’s pretence Faulkner may be commenting on the general pretence to aristocracy among Southern planters, an ideological consciousness that Cash explicates (Cash, 1941). Regardless, in the town’s reaction to that pretence past and present, Faulkner reveals the real complications that underlie the simplicity of Romanticist nostalgia and idealism. Turning back the clock, the narrator reflects on the town’s idealized vision, not without spite, of Miss Emily as a haughty “idol” or figure in a “tableau.” Ironically, the narrator reveals that Miss Emily’s idealistic qualities stem not from inherent beauty like that of Fitzgerald’s Judy, but from a vicarious virtue resulting from her father’s rejection of all her suitors. Furthermore Miss Emily’s strange and grotesque habits with their disgusting effects, particularly her habit of keeping around the corpses of the men in her life, bring her out of that idealism into the material sphere, a descent that leaves the town feeling “not pleased exactly, but vindicated.”

When the skeletal thirty-year-old Miss Emily, with her grotesquely “cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eyesockets,” purchases arsenic from a confused and anxious druggist, the town decides she means to kill herself, which it feels “would be the best thing.” For Miss Emily, it seems, has once again lost her man—first her suitors, then her father, and now her Yankee beau Homer Barron has made it clear “that he was not a marrying man.” The romance of Miss Emily’s “woman’s life” never forms, done in first by the romanticisms of her father that simply made her too much an ideal, and at the last by the strange effects of modernity manifest in the coming of a ‘other’ doubly despised in Southern romantic tradition: Homer Barron, Northern in origin and, for all his machismo, no admirer of women. When Miss Emily’s door finally shuts on her last china-painting pupil, “closed for good” to visitors, as her life whiles away in anachronicity, refusing even the free postal service, the town can relax. Its mystifying and audacious past remains, but somehow separate from and harmless to the changing times, passing “like a carven torso […] from generation to generation—dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.”

The final irony in “A Rose,” of course, is how the present pretends to have settled with its past but yet desires to know it, to mine it for the answers to its mysteries. The last paragraphs of Faulkner’s story return to the framing funeral, “sibilant and macabre” in its respect for the dead past represented in the dead woman, which ends with the shocking “violence of breaking down the door” to the secret top-floor room of the Grierson house. In this room, the men of the town find Homer’s dusty rotted corpse on a bed “in the attitude of embrace,” and on a pillow adjacent to the body, “a long strand of iron-gray hair.” Miss Emily had got her man at last, though she had to kill him to do it. This final scene’s grotesque juxtaposition of love and death commingled in a state of decay suggest a Gothicized sublimity, but if so it is at its core a sublime revelation of profound ignorance on the part of the townsfolk. They had thought once that Miss Emily was to marry; then they thought her beau had run away; then they decided she was of no offense as long as she stayed indoors, and that she existed alone save for Tobe. All of these things prove false in the end, as Miss Emily turns out a murderer, albeit of a twistedly Byronic character, and the town (and the reader) finds it barely knew who she was.

In “A Rose,” modernity proves itself incapable of comprehending the past even in preserving it, just as the romanticisms of the past no longer account for the world that is. This is a theme that will resound in Faulkner’s greater works, most notably in the solipsistic historiographies of Absalom, Absalom! But Faulkner, like Fitzgerald, was limited in his perspective by his ideological position on modernity. For Langston Hughes and other artists of the Harlem Renaissance, the styles, techniques, and themes of American Romanticism were open for redeployment in such a way as to make aesthetic sense of African-American life and experience in the Twentieth Century. The mass migration of African-Americans to major cities in search of work and community in the early 1900s brought together otherwise isolated artists, all working in their communal or divergent ways to represent the social identity of a people only recently free from bondage. Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” makes use of Whitmanesque anaphora and racially qualified Emersonian transcendentalism to locate himself and his ancestors, by extension all African-American persons, in the history of the world.

The anaphora of Hughes’ poem, its repetition of “I” and a verb to start a line, and of the word “rivers” within lines, in the first place suggests heroic individualism not inconsistent with romantic naturalists like Thoreau or Hawkeye: “I’ve known,” “I bathed,” “I built,” “I looked,” “I heard.” But in fact the geo-historical context in great rivers—“the Euphrates,” “the Congo,” “the Nile,” “the Mississippi”—bespeaks a universality of “I”—“I” as all those who lived with these rivers “ancient as the world” from the time “when dawns were young”—more in common with Emerson’s “Over-Soul,” except that this particular “Unity” is troubled by the fissure between human beings carved out by the politics of race. There is “human blood in human rivers,” suggesting strife and death in great quantities. Indeed, “the singing of the Mississippi” suggests not only the joy of a race in bondage liberated at Lincoln’s coming, but that race’s bondage itself, the “wild songs” of the slaves of which Fredrick Douglass wrote. The act of having “raised the pyramids above the Nile” evokes not only the Africans who ruled ancient Egypt and commanded the vast triangular tombs, but the slaves who did the actual labor under the whip (the term “pharaoh,” for example, has its use as a synonym for “slave-master”). The sublime in “Rivers,” too, is qualified by its connection to American racial history, the “muddy bosom” of the Mississippi turning gloriously “golden in the sunset” as “Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans,” while the narrator’s “soul has grown deep like the rivers […] ancient dusky rivers” whose color-coding at the poem’s end recapitulates its title.

The emphasis on world history, the presence of Abe Lincoln, the “human rivers,” the relationship to American literary tradition above described—these factors altogether prevent Hughes’ poem from assuming a stance so racialized as to separate black from white. Rather, through such unifying elements, Hughes’ poem locates a uniquely African-American history and perspective within a universal history of humanity hitherto implicitly Euro-American, thus activating a modern identity both racialized and humanistic. Like all the works treated in this essay, the use (or abuse) of traditional Romanticism is for Hughes not an end but a means, a way of reusing the narratives of the past, no longer feasible in and of themselves, to represent aesthetically, in a necessarily qualified and frequently ironic manner, a world that has moved on.

External Work Cited