 |
American
Literature: Romanticism
Student Final Exam Samples
2013 |
 |
Kristine Vermillion
Romance Is "Desire and Loss"
"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
or what's a heaven for?" Robert Browning
The elements "desire and loss" appear
and re-appear so frequently in American Romantic texts because they are the
stuff that Romanticism is made of.
The page introducing Romanticism on the course
website identifies the general characteristic of the writings in this period:
"Romanticism almost always is something beyond or something lost, another
reality to challenge or transform the everyday."
The quote from Barbara Lazear Ashcher on the
"Desire & Loss" page defines romance as "structured yearning.
In the romantic moment, we gather and focus that
yearning in order to connect with something outside ourselves, believing against
all odds that such connection is possible, knowing paradoxically that romance is
born in the space between our reach and our grasp."
This being said, not all of the texts
deal with this romantic desire and loss in the same way.
The conventional way that it is dealt with is the
nostalgia of the past and the promise of a glorious future.
Of course, the past has been lost, and the desire
is some sort of return to a better place.
One of the most fundamental storylines behind this
idea is the Christian pilgrimage between the two poles which are best described
in Milton's titles,
Paradise Lost and
Paradise Regained.
The
journey in-between is Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress.
The underlying influence of this story, what I call
a Meta-narrative in my Research paper, is very important in understanding the
consistent, though varying use of wilderness imagery throughout the period.
It is also helpful in understanding the elements
"desire & loss."
While the wilderness is the place of where all this
happens, whether it be the actual American wilderness or the psychological
wilderness, desire and loss are keys to the perennial questions concerning the
motivation of characters.
Examples of the conventional use of
desire and loss are found primarily at the front end of the syllabus.
The first place I see it, besides the initial
references to Genesis, is in the writings of Columbus.
It is found first in the description of the land in
[1.3] and the vision as to future of the land in [2.9].
It is here that Columbus writes that "Jerusalem and
Mount Sion are to be rebuilt by the hand of a Christian."
The desire for the land is fueled by the idea that
it is a land of paradise where God's people are going to build and bring in the
coming Kingdom.
This is not an idea that was embraced by all the
future people who arrived on the continent.
David R. Williams in his book
Wilderness Lost
describes the first generation Puritans' view of the wilderness
as "a place of refuge and trial, of suffering and
hope, the scene of both their damnation and their ultimate resurrection" (46).
Mrs.
Mary Rowlandson's narrative is a prime example of this interpretive model.
Hers
is a view that contains both elements. In her narrative she loses her actual
home and family, and there's also the underlying loss of glory as evidenced by
sin.
The element of desire is also in the literal desire for
the reestablishment of her home and family in this life, but there is also the
desire for the ultimate reestablishment of her family in heaven.
Williams also describes what he calls second
generation Puritans' view of the land.
For this group it had ceased to be wilderness and
"they began to think of their condition as the Kingdom come" (Williams 80).
Their position became stale in that their desire,
the desire for that which was beyond their grasp, was gone.
If they had supposedly arrived at their ultimate
destination, what was their purpose and how could they possibly explain the
surrounding, less than ideal conditions?
This stagnancy helped ferment the first Great
Awakening, which helped to reaffirm their original identity--in a position of
loss and a desire for God.
The most obvious place to go next with
discussion is to Jonathan Edwards' writings, a major influence in the
"awakening." While his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" might be one of
the most powerful expositions of the utter depravity and "loss" of mankind's
glory, his
Personal Narrative might just be the most
powerful testimony to a personal desire for the return of God's glory.
He writes, "I had vehement longings of soul after
God and Christ, and after more holiness, wherewith my heart seemed to be full,
and ready to break; which often brought to mind the words of the psalmist, Psa.
119:28, 'My soul breaketh for the longing it hath'" [8].
The same desire and sentiment is seen in Warner's
The Wide,
Wide World. Ellen
suffers greatly in her soul due to the loss of her mother and her original home,
but she is converted and learns to desire heaven and God and a future reunion
with all of those who had gone before her.
This is also the same storyline of Uncle Tom in
Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin as evidenced in the closing
lines of the book concerning Tom's last words.
When Sambo and Quimbo ask Tom who this Jesus he
loves is, he answers them: "The word roused the failing spirit.
He poured forth a few energetic sentences of that
wondrous One,--his life, his death, his everlasting presence, and power to save"
(Stowe 40.62). His hope and desire carried him through to his end.
The Christian story is alive and well in the
present, and the same characteristics of romance, including desire and loss, are
still deep in worship liturgy and language.
It resounds through hymnody and in the contemporary
praise and worship movement as well.
Heaven is still in their sights, yet beyond their
grasp.
The elements also appear
non-contemporary and non-traditional ways as well.
Poe's writings are hinged on these elements, but
the main difference is that the idea of heaven and ultimate attainment are
subverted.
In the traditional heaven is a guaranteed promise.
In the more artistically creative off-shoots and in
the later modern style, the idea of heaven or an actual attainment or
realization of the desire is subverted in a myriad of ways.
In
Ligeia, for example, the
loss of Ligeia is the impulse of the story.
Her death is a supreme loss, and as a result the
narrator occupies a psychological wilderness of desire.
In the fantastic end, with the rising of the corpse
of Lady Rowena in the form of Ligeia makes the ending so uncertain.
Does he get what he wants or not?
He attains that which he supposedly desires, but
what has he really gained, and what in the world is he going to do with her now?
Skipping along the syllabus the next
place I want to stop is with Henry James'
Daisy Miller,
for it is here that the greatest subversion of the more conventional romantic
elements get turned on their heads.
Winterbourne is obviously fascinated by Daisy, and
he desires her, but how does he desire her?
Does he want her or not?
Or is his desire just that of curiosity; a desire
to understand what makes this American girl tick?
Throughout the story there's a continual deflation
of the romantic tendency.
In the end, Daisy loses her life, and it affects
Winterbourne.
He loses something, but we are never quite sure
what it is.
The elements of desire and loss are never clarified, and
by the end the boundaries of these elements and the romantic in general are so
blurred and ambiguous and the characters are so ambivalent that we have no true
sense of what just happened.
This is Modernism.
Then there's Thomas Wolfe's
The Lost Boy.
I find the style and progression of this story to
be fascinating.
In this case, we get the nostalgic memories from
different members of a family about a boy, a special boy who is no more.
The whole family: the dad, the mom, the sister and
the brother, all have suffered a great loss and are indelibly affected by it.
The desire of the brother at the end is the main
focus.
What did he really desire?
He
wanted to see the place where Grover died in hopes of what?
What did he desire to gain by the visit?
Did he hope that it would provide some sort of
closure and help him find himself?
Whatever
his desire was, I don't think he attained it.
"It
all came back, and faded, and was lost again" [4.114].
By the end of the story the idea of the story
resonates in a simple word--lost.
The desire, the hope, the everything is lost
somehow.
The Romantic is flipped on its head.
There
is no dream that can be gained.
It is entirely outside of his grasp.
The hope is gone.
The idea of heaven or something that
compels man to keep going is absent in James' and Wolfe's stories, and the same
is true in Fitzgerald's
Winter Dreams.
The class discussion on the name of the story alone
brought to light all the modern variations of desire and loss.
Like James' work, there's a desire for a girl that
one can't quite figure out.
What is the content of Dexter's desire?
By the end of the story, when he learns that Judy
Jones has settled down and married, you realize that he didn't really want to
marry her and have a life and build a family with her.
His desire was for the sensual and unknown in the
tantalizing Judy Jones.
He was impelled by the exotic in her.
If she would have married him, if he would have
attained that which he desired, he probably would have been more unhappy than he
was with the loss of his dream of her in the end.
She had to remain out of his grasp.
She had to remain mysterious.
Perhaps it is a "Winter Dream" because there's no
spring or life that can come out of it.
It was a cold and lifeless dream because it was a
dream that could never be realized.
My analysis of the last three works
above are more surface generalizations.
Perhaps they should be more in depth, but the area
is relatively new to me, so I hope that the generalized conversations about the
subversion of the conventional uses of desire and loss are discussion enough
about the fluidity of the elements between the periods.
The conversation and exploration as such has been
very beneficial for me.
