American Romanticism Sample Student Final Exam Answers 2010

Kyle Rahe

Nothing Romantic about Race: A Struggle for Representation:

          One of the challenges of including minority voices in a course like ours is the extent to which the class gets complicated with questions.  Do not get me wrong, the class is much richer with our minority voices, but romanticism becomes much more complex when we move past the “dead old white guy” part of the canon.  How can America have ever been romantic when people were in shackles?  What is romantic about Thoreau’s civil disobedience when women were denied the right to vote?  These type of questions show how much must be taken into account when look at new voices.  Also, we must look backward to our course’s beginning authors and see how they dealt with race in their own writings. 

          Hawthorne is an interesting writer because even though he doesn’t deal directly with black or Indian characters there is racial coding all over his writing.  For instance, in his short stories the Native Americans are always referred to as heathens or are associated with the evils of the forest or the untamed land.  To be fair, in The Scarlet Letter he does have Indians present at the governor’s election, but he gives them no speaking parts, no substance.  They merely exist so that his prose has their native dress to describe.  They are merely props for the scene.  The group of sailors gets more detail and even a speaking part.  What would Sherman Alexie say about this type of marginalization?  At least a writer like Cooper took the time to make some of his Indian characters heroes and to fully develop them.  For Hawthorne, Indians exist to support his ideas of the Puritan settlements as civilization, while the forest and its native people are brutish, evil, and wild. 

          I found not one black character in all the Hawthorne I read, but there is still plenty a careful reader can do with his language.  The racial coding of Hawthorne’s language having to do with good and evil could clearly be seen as offensive to a minority reader.  In The Scarlet Letter the devil is referred to by name as The Black Man.  Now, Hawthorne may have just been trying to associate the devil with death or blackness, but the fact that these same colors are always used just shows the ways readers are trained to recognize white as good and black as evil.  Hester Prynne is forced to wear a scarlet letter.  Could red be associated with the red skin of wild Indians?  Has her crime made her the same type of outsider that Native Americans are in Hawthorne’s fiction? 

          Fitzgerald is an interesting study in race from the dominant culture because he just chooses to ignore it completely.  Such conflict doesn’t seem to fit in with his fragile world of cotillions and mint juleps.  This is astounding because he is writing at basically the same time as the Harlem Renaissance poets.  Fitzgerald was perhaps the pre-eminent young writer of his generation, but he chose to ignore the question.  There are not even any minor black characters in “Winter Dreams” or The Great Gatsby.  No room for even a waiter or a jazz musician or something?  As prevalent as blacks were becoming during the national conversation during this period it seems obvious that Fitzgerald made a conscious choice to exclude them so as to not complicate his vision.  Although, it is possible that those two worlds were still so segregated that the idea of the inclusion of blacks didn’t even register.  One familiar racial aspect that Fitzgerald does employ is the use of white to represent beauty, innocence, and purity.  We cannot know though whether Fitzgerald consciously did this to mock the quest narratives he was trying to update in a modernist way or if he actually in his own mind associated whiteness with all goodness. 

          A writer who does choose to deal directly with race is Countee Cullen.  For the black writer, there is no chance of exclusion of racial matters because he is writing for his very existence, to have his voice heard.  In a poem like “From the Dark Tower” Cullen uses the romantic image of a prisoner locked away in a tower to mock the romantic fairy tales of past writers.  As with many black writers, he wants to end the familiar stigma of black being associated pejoratively.  He writes, “White stars is no less lovely being dark”.   This quote is another example of the black writers’ contention that these pre-learned racial signifiers can be unlearned and that there is richness to black culture that white writers will never know of.  A poem that shows how unromantic it can be to grow up black is “Incident”.  The young speaker spends six months in Baltimore, but the only memory he has is of a white youth calling him a nigger.  Cullen is clearly making a statement on the impact racism and unfairness make on everyone no matter the age or how much time has passed. 

          Racism is an ugly concept that jars with the concept of romanticism.  Writers from the dominant culture may mold the terms to inhabit their own ideas of light and dark or the Gothic.  Other writers may just choose to ignore it for fear of political retribution or detriment to the fictional world they are attempting to create.  Writers from the minority culture struggle to make their struggle heard and to undo the harm that has been done with the associations of black with wildness or even evil.  One thing is certain though, until America fulfills its true promise race in literature is something we will be discussing forever.