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LITR 5431 American
Romanticism 2010 Student Midterm Samples #1 long essay |
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Kyle Rahe, “Chiaroscuro: Reconciling Light and Dark in
Teaching Romanticism
The prompt for this essay got me thinking about the
best way to try and teach romanticism and difficulties that arise when trying to
teach any literary movement. One
thing I feel our class has done well is show the ways in which American
Romanticism can overlap with realism or German writers or can evolve into new
forms. This technique is useful in
teaching something like literature because there are no clear cut boundaries
between literary movements no matter what era you are studying.
Many times writers get grouped together for convenience sake but most
writers are just as different as they are similar.
When I signed up for this course my idea of
American Romanticism was really no different than the canon and authors of
American Renaissance. Now that I’ve
been in the class I see that romanticism is actually richer because I feel it is
much easier to show how romance has evolved throughout modern literature,
whereas the American Renaissance is more of a specific time period.
I feel what also makes teaching American romance difficult is that in
high school and junior colleges we either focus exclusively on British
Romanticism or teach romance as a concept of a type of story.
One way I feel to bridge the gap in those courses would be to teach the
Preface to Lyrical Ballads alongside the Preface to Leaves of Grass and then
have students comment on the differences between Wordsworth’s and Whitman’s
respective visions for their poetry and countries.
The main difficulty I think that exists in teaching
romanticism, but one that adds to its complexity is the opposing forces of light
and dark in the work. The course
features so many authors that seem like opposing forces, but in reality they
complement each other. The stories
and novels have so much going on under one umbrella: Gothic, the Sublime,
satire, optimism, pessimism.
A story that I love is Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman
Brown”. The story is so dark yet so
mysterious. The fear that Brown
feels walking makes reference to original sin while at the same time building
upon the tradition of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards.
Even though the story has many Gothic elements the fact that something so
unbelievable could happen in the New England countryside reminds us that America
is a magical charmed place. Our
stories have most set us apart by featuring ghosts, dark savages, and eerie
attacks on untraveled roads. Adding
to the complexity of the story is the idea that the whole episode may have taken
place in Brown’s mind and been a projection of his subconscious upon the
community he lives among.
Contrast the original sin obsessed Hawthorne with someone as optimistic
and romantic as Whitman and you see how it can be difficult to teach
romanticism. Whitman oozes romance.
For him America is just beginning its great journey and has yet to
achieve its promise. In a poem like
“I Sing the Body Electric” or “O Pioneers” Whitman somehow achieves the
contradictory task of keeping the individual paramount at the same time as
including him in a revolutionary democracy.
Whitman delights in listing all that America has to offer all the way
from the smallest hamlet to the streets of New York City, from the most common
man to President Lincoln.
In “Rip Van Winkle” Washington Irving combines
elements of the fantastic with real history to create a uniquely American tale.
In Kristin Hamon’s essay she points out that Rip is no brooding Jonathan
Edwards but an Everyman who goes into nature merely for peace, but thanks to a
little romance is thrust into our America’s revolutionary future.
What I like about the story is that after the adjustment to his psyche
Rip adjusts to his new time period and becomes the same type of guy he was in
his own time. He is the kind of
free-spirited slacker that Walt Whitman would write about years later.
The story uses elements of dark magic like “Young Goodman Brown” but to a
much lighter effect.
The challenge of teaching American romanticism to
less initiated or younger students comes from the mix of so many different
elements; particularly the Gothic of Poe and Hawthorne contrasted with the dewy
optimism of Whitman and Emerson.
However, the movement is so strong and interconnected that you can teach it in
so many ways and simultaneously show similarities and differences between the
texts. I feel this class has helped
in this regard and I look forward to seeing how romanticism stays intact against
the cynicism of modern life as we move forward in the course.
