American Literature: Romanticism Sample Final Exams 2013 final exam assignment Question 1

Sarah McCall DeLaRosa

“The desire and loss cycle through American Romanticism and beyond”

The cycle of desire and loss is present in, even integral to, many American Romantic texts. To desire something you do not have, to yearn for it and dream of it is a very romantic feeling. Once the desired object is obtained the situation can become static and boring—but if the object is lost after it has been had, then the feelings of loss are exquisite and can be even more powerful than the initial longing for the thing had been. This violent flux of heightened emotion that comes from the desire/loss cycle is perfectly suited to American Romantic literature, and it helps to motivate many romance narrative quests and to disillusion many Byronic hero bad-boys.

Edgar Allan Poe is wonderful at dealing in the desire/loss cycle, one of his most exemplary texts being his short story “Ligea” which we discussed in class. Since we covered “Ligea” so well, I would like to discuss Poe’s use of the desire/loss cycle in another of his texts that I studied for my first research post, “William Wilson.” I see the narrator Wilson as suffering from the desire/loss cycle throughout his story. Wilson desires to do various misdeeds to people, and his evilness increases with age, but he is continually foiled by his double, also named Wilson. Narrator Wilson goes through the cycle of desire and loss, for some reason always desiring to cheat or harm someone in some way, but the object of his schemes is always lost because Double Wilson intervenes at the last moment to prevent the commitment of the evil deed. After one of these early interruptions, in paragraph 35 Narrator Wilson recalls, “[e]xcited by such appliances to vice, my constitutional temperament broke forth with redoubled ardor, and I spurned even the common restraints of decency in the mad infatuation of my revels.” His loss seems to fuel his desire. As the story progresses, we see Narrator Wilson becoming increasingly risky and determined, and ever more desirous, to complete one of his foul plans; and his frustration and despair is exponentially increased at each instance of intervention by Double Wilson and the loss of his desired evil conclusion.

In “Winter Dreams,” F. Scott Fitzgerald employs the desire and loss cycle between the protagonist Dexter Green and the alluring Judy Jones. In paragraph 3.20 Dexter recalls “that he had wanted Judy Jones ever since he was a proud, desirous little boy.” Throughout the years over which the story takes place Dexter longs for Judy, sometimes partially attains her—but never completely, and then loses her to yet another man or life circumstances that pull them apart. The cycle repeats itself and Dexter’s emotional trajectory differs slightly from Poe’s Narrator Wilson’s in that Dexter seems to grow less emotional after each loss of Judy. After he becomes engaged to another woman, Dexter meditates on his long history with Judy: “She had beckoned him and yawned at him and beckoned him again and he had responded often with bitterness and narrowed eyes. She had brought him ecstatic happiness and intolerable agony of spirit” (paragraph 4.11). After so much repetition of the desire/loss cycle with Judy, Dexter becomes accustomed to it and even cynically participates at times in his own losing of her.  The end of the story, however, is when Dexter truly and finally experiences loss—but not of Judy in particular—of his dreams, his illusions, and his youth.

In her 2008 final exam essay on this same topic, Christine Ford also handles Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” and a short story by Poe (Ford chose “Ligea”). Her conclusion concerning these two writers and their respective texts, Fitzgerald being more a Realist with Romantic tendencies and Poe being very strongly American Romantic, is very insightful:

The strongest tie to the best part of his [Dexter] youth is gone when Judy becomes a “nice girl”, and now “the thing” that previously wouldn’t die in him, is at last gone. In some ways, this story is very similar to “Ligeia” with the loss of the idealized female leaving her male lover desolated—yet Dexter’s loss comes across as being far keener than Poe’s narrator. Poe’s narrator does experience a metaphorical loss when his lover dies, but it lacks the pathos of Dexter’s pain. Dexter goes on living an outwardly normal life with this gaping hole in his heart while the Ligeia narrator goes into a wild drug-filled crash—we don’t doubt the reality of the pain of either loss, but Dexter’s response is one most of us are more likely to experience. And therein lies the tempering influence of Realism. Romanticism, with its ideals and emotional highs and lows, is not gone but is paired with people and situations that are closer to real life, giving us a world that is neither hugely excessive nor too cold and clinical. http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/LITR/5431rom/models/2008/finals/f08ess1.htm

Poe’s narrator in “Ligea” has a similar emotional trajectory to his narrator in “William Wilson,” who increasingly loses his self control and ends up murdering someone (his conscience? his double? himself?). As Ford explains, this difference in the severity of reaction to the desire/loss cycle between Dexter and Poe’s two narrators is indicative of the traditions Fitzgerald and Poe are writing within. This same difference follows through to the next text I will deal with, also more Realistic than Romantic in the emotional outcome of the desire/loss cycle.

Henry James’s “Daisy Miller” is another text that deals with a man, the protagonist Winterbourne, cyclically desiring and losing a woman, Daisy. Upon meeting each other as fellow Americans in Europe, Winterbourne immediately begins to desire Daisy for her strangeness to him and her beauty. Attempting to analyze Daisy in paragraph 69, Winterbourne decides that he “was amused, perplexed, and decidedly charmed. He had never yet heard a young girl express herself in just this fashion, […] He was inclined to think Miss Daisy Miller was a flirt—a pretty American flirt.” Her silliness and coquettishness keep Daisy always beyond Winterbourne’s grasp, but he does come tantalizingly close to obtaining her attachment early in the story. After that initial tease Daisy continues to tempt and intrigue Winterbourne, but he can never have her because she is too close to another man, Giovanelli, and too unconventional for Winterbourne’s regular society. Winterbourne’s emotions take a different track than either Poe’s Narrator Wilson or Fitzgerald’s Dexter because Winterbourne becomes increasingly disconnected from the desire/loss cycle and numb to Daisy, and only deals very matter-of-factly with her sudden death at the end of the story.

The roller-coaster of emotion that is the American Romantic desire/loss cycle presents itself in various ways across the history of American literature. The cycle and the extremities of emotion that it induces are very productive for the artistic exploration of deep yearning and the expression of the realistic highs and lows we all experience in life. It is interesting to see how Poe, with his American Renaissance psychological gothic, and Fitzgerald and James with their increasing levels of Realism, deal in differing ways with the common concept of desire and loss.