American Romanticism Sample Student Final Exam Answers 2010

Julie Garza

Studying Multicultural Authors in a Mainstream or Classics Course

     Both Douglass’s Narrative and Jacobs’s Life of a Slave Girl are presented in Minority, Immigrant, and American Romanticism Literature. Studying these texts under different classifications allows us the opportunity to consider diverse aspects of the narratives, including representation of style, literary reign, and historical significance. While each course provides certain unique benefits as prisms through which to look at these works, Romantic Literature poses more downsides than advantages. Although I do agree that both texts can be mainstream as well as multicultural, the slave narratives fit best within the Minority and Immigrant courses.

     The literature of these courses was grouped by regions and style, rather than history. Historically, Romanticism arose in Europe and is mostly associated with European literary traditions and cultural values. American Romantic writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, and James Fenimore Cooper, were all of European decent. Although the history of the region was taught in conjunction with the particular region and style in American Romanticism, it was more beneficial to group the slave narratives with other texts in their particular genre. Thus, in Minority Literature, Douglass’s and Jacobs’s narratives are organized with other works by African American authors; instead of simply being presented in chronological order. This proved to be an effective learning strategy, because it allowed us to interpret these texts as part of the larger tradition of African American literature.

     In America, Romanticism adapted itself to a multiracial and multicultural nation, which included both a dominant culture and distinct minority cultures. Currently in Multicultural Literature seminars as ours, all students write in English, a European language. In addition to understanding assorted versions of this language, writers from non-European races must acknowledge the dominant culture’s themes, and its different genres, as options for their literary compositions. In Romantic Literature, race can complicate the principles of Romanticism. About midway through my research of the romantic styling in distinct minority cultures, I discovered that my views on race and Romanticism had changed. Before, my understanding of the Romantic styling was based on universal truths; however, through further investigation, my ideas of Romanticism have transformed. At the beginning of my research I thought that the Romantic style might also be based on a set of historical and cultural conventions, but I found that the Romantic styling is a shifting set of features that reflect the desire and perspective of the observer. The usefulness of the term “Romanticism” is most significant when I compare both Douglass’s and Jacob’s slave narratives to the works of the prominent European American writer, Edgar Allan Poe.

     Poe is a Romantic writer of sorts, but primarily a Dark Romance writer. His dark romantic styling usually embodies the Gothic and the Sublime. Similar to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poe uses interanimation and interillumination, in which his characters converse for the sole purpose of bringing each other to life. Poe incorporates poetry-heightened language, which is described through an interweaving of the beautiful and the painful, i.e. the Sublime. Another aspect of Poe’s dark Romanticism his use of opposing twins who share few similarities, such as Roderick and Madeline in The Fall of the House of Usher. Poe’s use of “twinning” occurs in the biological makeup of the house too, in which the name of the house is also the last name of the family. In addition, Poe incorporates the color code, in which light and dark are described in the friend’s painting of bright hallways. The vibrant painting is distinct from the dark surroundings of the house. In general, Edgar Allan Poe’s portrayal of the gothic, the sublime, “twinning,” and the color code demonstrate the psychological dimensions of Dark Romantic Literature.

     Attempting to consider the narratives of Douglass and Jacobs as examples of American Romanticism poses some problems. It is true that both texts embody characteristics of Romantic Literature. For example, “dehumanization,” a typical theme of Romantic literature, is a common thread in both. In these works, dehumanization is portrayed as one of the harsh realities of slavery. For example, Douglass’s initial relationship with Mrs. Auld provides him with one of his first encounters with humanity. When Mrs. Auld teaches Douglass the alphabet, she promotes not only literacy, but also kindness and tranquility, which are aspects of Romanticism. Also, when Douglass stands at the bank of Chesapeake Bay and dreams of freedom and taking “flight” from the dehumanized world of slavery, there is an instance of sublimity and pathos. In this scene, the Romantic styling of the sublime is a combination of pleasure and pain. Such escapist scenes are often found in Romantic narratives. Dehumanization in Jacobs’s slave narrative fixates on the misery of bondage for a woman. Jacobs describes aspects of Dark Romanticism through the Gothic in her Preface by explaining to the reader the “deep, and dark” realities of slavery that one can only know through experience. Some incidents in her story appear as Romantic fiction, which is why her slave narrative possesses some qualities of the Romantic narrative.

     However, although Douglass’s and Jacob’s narratives, like the works of Poe, embody elements of Dark Romanticism, they fit best within minority literature. They have much more in common with other works of this genre than with Romanticism.  For instance, Douglass's narrative presents the irony of the minority using aspects of the dominant culture against it. When Douglass’s mistress teaches him the alphabet, he is then closely watched to ensure that he will not become literate. Nevertheless, Douglass eventually becomes literate, because his mistress gave him an “inch, and no precaution could prevent me [him] from taking the ell.” In Jacobs’s narrative, she too is taught how to read and write by her first mistress, but then suffers from the cruelties of slavery as a teenager. To escape slavery, she defies her master, has children with a white man, and then hides for years to protect her family and herself. Also, Jacobs promotes the double-minority concept, in which slavery is worse for females than for males: “Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.” It is fairly obvious how both slave narratives fit within the Minority Literature course, since both Douglass and Jacobs belonged to minority groups. More advantages than downsides are apparent in studying these narratives under American Minority Literature. One downside to studying the slave narratives under Minority Literature is that elements of Romanticism are not considered, but this is a minor disadvantage, which can be easily dismissed.

     Grouping Douglass’s narrative as Immigrant Literature also provides the reader with some important advantages. As a whole, the class focused our discussion on how Douglass’s narrative serves as a minority narrative more than an immigrant narrative. However, we also learned that the characteristics of minority and immigrant stories overlap at times. When the dominant culture urges minorities to “forget the past,” it asks minorities to proceed as immigrants. Since African Americans were forced to come to America, they did not experience opportunity. Immigrants tend to leave their native culture behind voluntarily, in order to assimilate to the dominant culture, but minorities are stuck in an American Nightmare they did not choose to join. When Douglass becomes a free man and marries, he sets out for his “American Dream.” To this extent, his story resembles the immigrant narrative, but he is also confronted with the unique “setbacks” of the minority experience. Douglass’s Narrative therefore illuminates the experiences of minorities and immigrants, as well as the different forms of literature which have arisen from these diverse experiences. The distinct histories of immigrants and minorities promote different “social contracts.” The concept of opposing social contracts, such as opportunity and bondage, sheds light on the way that Douglass’s Narrative differs from other immigrant narratives. Therefore, it was an advantage to study Douglass’s Narrative as immigrant literature.

     Although the two narratives could be both mainstream and multicultural at once, the slave narratives fit best within the multicultural courses, because they connect better with the other narratives in the course. This is not to imply that these texts should not be taught in American Romanticism, because both possess some Romantic qualities. Yet when one compares the slave narratives to other stories in American Romanticism, one sees that they do not fit within the mold of European American writers associated with this literary movement, such as Poe, Emerson, Fitzgerald, and Cooper. Douglass’s and Jacobs’s slave narratives merely provide readers with an awareness of the Romantic elements found in the experience of slavery.