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

James Simpson

On Desire and Loss

The reality that desire and loss are inseparable from the nature and condition of being alive makes for good literature, if not for happy lives. Good writing, like good music and good painting, explores the deepest places of our souls where loss and joy intermingle; we love, knowing that the objects of our affections are impermanent—and this knowledge makes our loving the more powerful, and the burdens of our eventual loss more intolerable. It is indeed arguable that Romantic literature could not—and cannot—exist were Man born without original sin, were he in fact born happy. Even whimsical romantic literature—stories of quests and heroic deeds—are a quest to regain Paradise, to find, beyond hope, a “far green country”[1] where good deeds are rewarded and evil is punished. These tales are heroic because we know that humanity fights “the long defeat”[2] against the fates and our own inherent natures—in fantasy tales, Good sometimes wins—unlike this life, at least, where evil usually prospers and the good suffer more readily than the unjust. As such, to call a work Romantic is to say that it explores this ever-present foreboding in the human heart that what we value most will soon be taken from us. Fantasy tales—say, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King—typically approach loss and desire with a manly[3] valor and optimism,[4] with a confidence that battles, at least, in the long war of defeat of can be won—that hope is at least as strong as despair. Suffice it to say that the three works I have surveyed are not fantasy tales, and they are decidedly not hopeful; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Winter Dreams, Thomas Wolfe’s The Lost Boy, and Katherine Anne Porter’s The Grave are in fact examples of the profound nihilism that is the indulgence of postmodern man. Let us, therefore, see what these works have to say about the human condition—let us see, and despair.

The theme of these stories is the same; they can all be considered as taking the same philosophical approach to loss and desire: essentially, that our desire for our lost beloved are an insupportable grief that is beyond the powers of time to reconcile or heal; they are permanent wounds that know no balm. This is the kernel and soul of nihilism: our souls, our hearts, are permanently and irrevocably lost. Let us examine in brief how each of these works expresses this fear, and how each of their authors are philosophers of despair; let us look at the great existential emptiness that awaits us when we, too, lose that which we love most—whether our beloved, or, perhaps, our own innocence which is apparently irrecoverable. We will start with The Grave and that first and universal experience of loss that is known (if not always felt)[5] by all: the loss of innocence.

Porter here gives us a glimpse of the moment when a girl loses her innocence, when she becomes fully aware of the difference between our expectation of goodness from the universe, and the reality of suffering experienced by helpless creatures; here Miranda first experiences that instinctive impulse to recoil from the truth about our inherent natures; here she first experiences the guilt and revulsion that all good people at times feel about their true selves:

She looked and looked [at the rabbit fetuses]… --filled with pity and astonishment and a kind of shocked delight in the wonderful little creatures for their own sakes, they were so pretty. She touched one of them ever so carefully. ‘Ah, there’s blood running over them,’ she said, and began to tremble without knowing why. Yet she wanted most deeply to see and to know. Having seen, she felt at once as if she had known all along. The very memory of her former ignorance faded, she had always known this. [15]

Her brother Paul, too, experiences this will to hide his deed,[6] although one suspects that his spiritual and intellectual awakening to the unlovely things of nature and existence came somewhat before this experience with the rabbits. He does, however, betray that shame and that even the remotely sensitive instinctively feel when confronted with something that ought not to be—such as seeing helpless young torn—albeit “innocently” (because he didn’t know that the rabbit was pregnant when he shot it) —from their mother’s womb; his first impulse, like that of all but the rare saints among us, is to hide his guilt—to hide, at least existentially, his shame of being human:

Paul buried the young rabbits again in their mother’s body, wrapped the skin around her, and carried her to a clump of sage bushes and hid her away. He came out again at once and said to Miranda, with an eager friendliness, a confidential tone quite unusual in him, as if he were taking her into an important secret on equal terms: ‘Listen now. Now you listen to me, and don’t ever forget. Don’t you ever tell a living soul that you saw this. Don’t tell a soul.’ [16]

There is something terribly poignant—and proper—about those creatures being returned to their mother’s womb in death; that Paul sensed this is proof of his own better nature, and proof that The Grave is not entirely a work of existential nihilism. That title might be applied with justice to Fitzgerald’s Winter Dreams.

            I’d argue that Winter Dreams is implicitly also about the loss of innocence, rather than about the madness of unreachable desire that is it’s more obvious subject. The philosophical conclusion that Fitzgerald reaches is different than Porter’s because Winter Dreams fundamentally lacks the flicker of hope for the human condition that Paul’s gesture in The Grave implies. In Winter Dreams, the presence of unreachable desire itself ruins innocence; therefore, the man who desires has become aware of the terrible truths of human existence—he has in fact become guilty, because he has awoken to unbearable knowledge. Man can never be clean because the awakening of fundamental knowledge—just as in the Garden in Genesis—forever stains Man’s soul. I suspect that volumes of dissertations have been written about what Judy metaphorically represents. My own short thesis is a rather obvious observation (although most truths are plain): she is the serpent in the Garden of his soul. And, just as in Genesis, the seduction and Fall of Man begins with a taste of the forbidden fruit:

Then she smiled and the corners of her mouth drooped and an almost imperceptible sway brought her closer to him, looking up into his eyes. A lump rose in Dexter’s throat, and he waited breathless for the experiment, facing the unpredictable compound that would form mysteriously from the elements of their lips. Then he saw—she communicated her excitement to him, lavishly, deeply, with kisses that were not a promise but a fulfillment. They aroused in him not hunger demanding renewal but surfeit that would demand more surfeit … kisses that were like charity, creating want by holding back nothing at all. It did not take him many hours to decide that he had wanted Judy Jones ever since he was a proud, desirous little boy. [3.19-3.20]

These kisses are, metaphorically, as the forbidden fruit in the garden; they lead to desires that not only cannot be satiated, but also cannot be gratified without madness—indeed, even the fleeting gratification of the desire, the kiss (which was itself merely a temptation to further desire, rather than a consummation of affection)—leads one to a madness from which there is no recovery. Thus, when Dexter learns that Judy’s loveliness is gone, he experiences not relief that the temptation has been removed, but instead further madness because the desire must hereafter exist without hope of gratification. Whereas there was once hope beyond hope that Judy might kiss him again—and so return him to that Summer night when desire was first whetted, now there is just final knowledge that the unbearable and unwholesome loveliness of Judy will remain a memory to torment him:

The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him. In a sort of panic he pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes and tried to bring up a picture of… her mouth damp to his kisses and her eyes plaintive with melancholy and her freshness like new fine linen in the morning. Why, these things were no longer in the world! They had existed and they existed no longer…. For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face… He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished. ‘Lone ago,’ he said, ‘long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.’ [6.34-6.36]

Again, we have final and irredeemable loss of innocence and hope. In this story desire necessarily leads to loss and madness, which begets more desire. Winter Dreams is a romantic story, not merely because Fitzgerald beautifully employs the language of longing that is the hallmark of Romanticism, but because the story yearns for that far-off and better place where desire and longing are satisfied—but ends with the nihilistic conclusion that all is lost, that the natural condition of the mature human soul is one of abandoned and empty loneliness.

            Thomas Wolfe’s The Lost Boy extends this theme of nihilistic loss even further, going so far as to cast its protagonist, Grover, as an incarnate Christ-like figure that experiences no triumphant resurrection; when Grover dies, there is only an emptiness that refuses to fill—a place of hurt and longing that cannot be healed, because Grover, whom was good, is lost, and his death was a nihilistic and meaningless chance event that proves that existential fairness is not only dead, but in fact never existed—reality as such is not immoral, but amoral—there is no good standard by which to judge Grover’s illness as bad. Grover was god—and god is dead.

            From the beginning of the story, Grover is foreshadowed as a prophetic or holy figure; an incarnate soul, quiet and sensitive, who suffers, like Christ, unjust rebukes—the wicked Crockers, like all sinners, instinctively hate the just. As in the Gospels, Grover experiences his temptation, his “why hast thou forsaken me” moment, although he experiences this crisis not in relation to a heavenly father, but in terms of his existential existence. There was Before, the time before his shame, and Now, after his shame, and a gulf lies between the former and the latter selves. Perhaps the god Grover has lost his own innocence and has become aware that the universe is capricious and unjust. Note the disillusion:

He felt the overwhelming soul-sickening guilt that all the children, all the good men of the earth, have felt since Time began. And even anger had died down, had been drowned out, in this swelling tide of guilt, and ‘This is—the Square’—thought Grover as before—“This is Now. There is my father’s shop. And all of it is as it has always been, save I.’ [1.51]

Indeed, suggestions throughout the story that Grover is a suffering Christ figure are many. That his father is an engraver of tombstones is foreshadowing of death. In retrospect his sister understood that Grover was a kind of prophet: “My Lord! Poor little Grover. He wasn’t quite twelve years old at the time, but he seemed so grown up to us. I was two years older, but I thought he knew it all. It was always that way with him. Looking back now, it sometimes seems that it was Grover who brought us up.’” [3.12] He even had a stigmata (granted, not a Biblical reference, but one that is associated with Catholicism), the birthmark on his neck. [3.27] Finally, there is the train ride to St. Louis that can be understood as his journey to Jerusalem, and the Fair represents both the temporal Temple, holiest of places in that holy city—and Paradise itself. Grover, like, Christ, was going down to Jerusalem to die.

The metaphors here end, as Grover does not rise from the dead, there is no victory over death; Grover went to St. Louis—went to Jerusalem—to die, and all that is left for his mother, and brother and sister is regret and emptiness. Note, in particular, the unsupportable sadness of this: His mother, a lonely woman, speaks aloud to herself, addressing, in this terrible vacancy, children that are not there:

It was so long ago, but when I think of it, it all comes back, as if it happened yesterday. Now all of you have either died or grown up and gone away, and nothing is the same as it was then. But all of you were there with me that morning and I guess I should remember how the others looked, but somehow I don’t. Yet I can still see Grover just the way he looked that morning when we went down through Indiana, by the river, to the Fair. [2.27]

The journey of Grover’s brother Eugene back to the family’s home in St. Louis after many years can be understood as his own search for redemption, his search to find liberation, even salvation; I think that the brother assumed that the years passed since Grover’s death would impart wisdom within him—that he would find meaning in the loss; that he would understand the greater good that came from Grover’s death. Alas, no such good was found—only a worse and final shock to his soul as he realized that there was neither purpose nor redemption in Grover’s death; there was, in fact, no resurrection:

Eugene… went on till he found the place. And so at last he turned into the street, finding the place where the two corners met, the huddled block, the turret, and the steps, and paused a moment, looking back, as if the street were Time. For a moment he stood there, waiting—for a word, and for a door to open, for the child to come. He waited, but no words were spoken; no one came [4.15-4.15]…. ‘Here is the House and here House listening; here is Absence, Absence in the afternoon; and here in this House, this Absence, is my core, my kernel—here am I!’ [4.64]

Absence and loss; this is the kernel of the Romance narrative, if Fitzgerald, Porter, and Wolfe can be taken as representative authors within the genre. Is there any reason why this theme of loss and desire should be inherent to Romanticism? The answer is simply this: Romanticism explores the deep impulses and fears of the human heart. Because the human condition is fraught with longing for that far green country of our souls, the Romantic narrative is defined by the answers that we can find to explain the existential problems of existence. Among these three authors, Porter offers us a glimpse of that better place, while Fitzgerald and Wolfe find no balm for our souls; there is only an eternal Now of emptiness.