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American
Literature: Romanticism Student Midterm Samples 2013 2. Short Essay 2b. Choose a previously-read literary text, American or otherwise, Romantic or otherwise; apply course terms & themes / objectives; comparisons-contrasts, connects-disconnects, learning outcomes. |
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Carrie Hatfield
Faulkner’s “The Bear”—A Modernist Text Seen Through a Romantic Lens
Often described as a modernist work,
Go Down Moses, specifically “The
Bear,” exhibits modernist sensibilities that correspond to romantic terms. One
definition describes modernism as and “outright rejection of realism.”
The emphasis on something being “more real than real” or “larger than
life can be expressed using the gothic, and the sublime.
Gothic language and descriptions are used
frequently in “The Bear.” Faulkner
uses wilderness gothic in conveying the remoteness of the hunting camp, and in
describing the bear itself.
It loomed and towered in his dreams before he even saw the
unaxed woods where it left its crooked print, shaggy, tremendous, red-eyed, not
malevolent, but just big, too big for the dogs which tried to bay it, for the
horses which tried to ride it down, for the men and the bullets they fired into
it; too big for the country that was its constricting scope (183).
Descriptions of the woods, especially in the earlier hunting
episodes, tend toward the wilderness gothic. Faulkner describes the hunting camp
as being beyond the reaches of civilization,
the skeleton stalks of cotton and corn in the last of open
country, the last trace of man’s puny gnawing at the immemorial flank, until
dwarfed by that perspective into an almost ridiculous diminishment(184-185).
The old McCaslin plantation house can be
viewed as a gothic manse or ruins. The old plantation house is described as:
the tremendously conceived, almost barn-like edifice which he
[Lucius McCaslin or possibly Carothers McCaslin] had not even completed,
and later as
the tremendous abortive edifice, scarcely yet out of embryo,
as if even old Carothers McCaslin had paused aghast at the concrete indication
of his own vanity’s boundless conceiving(248.)
These descriptions seem to me, to vaguely echo Poe’s
descriptions of gothic manses, houses in ruin. The McCaslin plantation house
seems even more ominous to me as a ruin, because it was abandoned before it was
ever finished.
The language of the sublime is also apparent
throughout the story. Sometimes, the sublime reaches a point that resonates with
my everyday life. My husband, I (on my better days,) and several of our friends,
speak French rather well. When something occurs to us as awful, or fantastic, or
fantastically awful, we sometimes use the term “terrible in the French sense” to
describe the mingling of positive and negative, pleasurable and painful, the
juxtaposition of reaction and emotions elicited by the sublime. Faulkner
describes one cold, starlit night in the hunting camp, the images conveyed are
both beautiful, and ominous.
He crossed the gap between house and kitchen, the gap of
iron earth beneath the brilliant and
rigid night where dawn would not begin for three hours yet, tasting tongue
palate and to the very bottom of his lungs the
searing dark, and entered the
kitchen . . . (215).
The “brilliant and rigid night” and the “searing dark” both
convey images beyond mere cold, starlight, and dark.
In “The Bear,” gothic and sublime language
appears with a surprising frequency. Faulkner makes use of wilderness gothic in
the hunting episodes, sets up the old McCaslin plantation house as a gothic
manse or ruins, and offers startling, beautiful and disturbing descriptions
through use of the sublime. “The Bear” is full of romantic ideas and
sensibilities.
