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American
Literature: Romanticism Student Midterm Samples 2013 3. Web Highlights |
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Meryl Bazaman
The Sublime, the Other-Worldly, and Gothic Colors
Kyle Rahe’s “Walt Whitman’s Children” Web Review
Rahe does an admirable job relating the common man
romanticism of Walt Whitman to the poetic works of beatnik poets Jack Kerouac
and Allen Ginsberg. By demonstrating Whitman’s influence on Keroac’s
“appreciation of the common and working people of America” and in Ginsberg’s
“focus on dialect and the language of the common man,” Rahe successfully conveys
examples of how each poet’s themes and employment of poetic language are derived
from Whitman’s initial romanticist influence. While portraying Whitman as “a
spiritual godfather” that unifies each beatnik poet, Rahe manages to demonstrate
how romanticism is an “ever evolving part of the American canon.” Unfortunately,
Rahe’s parallels between the Beats and Whitman are a bit too limited in that
they primarily focus on the more transcendental aspects of romanticism by
focusing on how the Beats integrated theories, language, and people. Rahe does
not address how the Beats also incorporated elements that could be construed as
the sublime aspects of romanticism.
This
is best represented in Rahe’s description of Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.” While Rahe
focuses exclusively on how the poem represents the common man by incorporating
“the ‘other America’ with its portrayal of gays, drug-users, and hipsters,” Rahe
fails to take advantage of the sublime experience the poem offers in its
references to soaring over and through the city or the terrible awesomeness of
its representation of Moloch. By focusing exclusively on the more transcendental
aspects of Ginsberg and Keroac’s work, Rahe, then, only offers a partial
application of romanticism. Furthermore, Rahe’s descriptions of Kerouac’s poems
barely address even the possibility of there being more sublime moments
accessible in how Kerouac encounters “the struggle of modern life.” Therefore,
while I believe Rahe’s use of Whitman, as a unifying force of romanticism, in
the works of Ginsberg and Keroac, is applicable to a transcendental romanticism
theme; it manages to ignore the possibility of fully investigating sublime
romanticism themes.
Cristen Lauck’s “What’s Real, Anyway?” Web Review
I was drawn to Lauck’s essay because it tackles the question
of how to unify romantic texts. Lauck poses this question accordingly: “What is
the underlying theme at the root of Romanticism?” Her resolution to this issue
is that all works share an “unreal” quality, pitting them against realism. In
order to investigate this hypothesis, Lauck applies the construct of the unreal
to works that are considered transcendental and gothic forms of romanticism.
This is best exemplified in how she demonstrates reality being overlooked in the
case of transcendental poet James Wright’s poem “A Blessing,” and in her
analysis of how the non-worldly is given preference in Irving’s tale “Sleepy
Hollow.”
In order to evaluate the non-worldly in “Sleepy Hollow,”
Lauck considers how Crane perceives the woods and trees. She weighs how much
preference is placed on the “eerie surroundings and headless horseman tales”
versus “rationalizing that the tree and woods are harmless and the horseman is
not real.” By inquiring if logical rationalization plays a role and recording
its infrequency, Lauck demonstrates that there is indeed an overabundance of
fantastic in gothic versions of romance. She concludes that romanticism does the
following: “It doesn’t rationalize what’s going on but instead asks for other,
non-worldly explanations…” I find this application of the logic variable to be a
very telling gauge of romanticism in that it does draw attention to what is
given preference – the fantastic. However, how does the tale define the
fantastic? If all of Ichabod’s education (even his knowledge on witches) is
considered enlightened and grounded in rationality, could it not be considered,
by the terms Irving sets forth, that Ichabod is logical – fantastic elements are
a real possibility based on what he knows?
Also, Lauck claims how one goes about knowing can be flawed
in transcendental works when its emphasis is escaping reality. This is an
interesting assessment as it raises the possibility that some forms of
perception and account are more valid than others, an argument not raised in
class. When reviewing Wright’s poem, “A Blessing,” Lauck claims:
In the end, the narrator describes his feeling of being
transformed into flowers because he is overcome with joy. This level of
happiness is unrealistic because people see difficulties in the world. No one
can say they have not seen harshness in life and therefore they know this kind
of happiness cannot exist.
Here Lauck critiques Wright’s experience of transcendentalism
as one unreal and escapistic in that it denies confounding factors of
“difficulties in the world.” Ergo, Lauck is asserting that a form, which
conflates an aspect of human emotion, such as joy, is impossible because it does
not take into the influence of other, harsher emotions associated more with
realist texts. According to Lauck then, transcendentalist romanticism becomes
unreal because it is something inaccessible and impossible for real individuals
to obtain. That is if the spectrum of emotion is not addressed more concretely;
it enters the realm of romanticism – a form and way of exaggerated intensity and
the unreal.
Danielle Maldonado’s “Gothic Elements in ‘The Yellow
Wallpaper’ Web Review
Upon first glance, I was immediately drawn to Maldonado’s
choice of the words “Gothic Elements” in her title. Did her choice of the word
“elements” mean that she would reveal simplified, crucial features that would
allow me to easily identify the gothic? Would she be able to demonstrate how
these gothic elements could improve my understanding of “The Yellow Wallpaper?”
After a thorough reading, I believe Maldonado was able to accomplish a portion
of these goals in her analysis by offering clear, simplified definitions of the
features of the gothic. Yet, while she was able to demonstrate gothic elements
simplistically based on her definitions of the gothic as “haunting imagery”
gothic as “repressed desire” and gothic as a “fractured, dissociative self,” she
immediately found that the text did not “necessarily fit the conventional
definition of the gothic” when applied to gothic as “light and dark” color.
Instead of focusing on the contrast between “light and dark”
colors, Maldonando claims the gothic can also be represented by how the color
exudes a “menacing” quality or the “suppressed activity” of the character. That
is in order for a color to be gothic; it does not have to be perceived in
relation to another color (fair lady versus dark lady) or represented as a
binary (colors representing good Wilson versus bad Wilson). According to
Maldonando, a color can be gothic based on the singular response of how the
individual is viewing it. Gothic colors then are more than bold contrasts
between light and dark representing good and evil; a single color such as
yellow, without a contrasting backdrop, can be gothic color, when it embodies
the individual’s singular distorted perception of a particular color, in a way
that represents a wide variety of problematic psychology and destructive
behaviors in an individual. Gothic color then does not have to function in
relationship to something to demonstrate the haunted or menacing. Rather, gothic
color is color that itself becomes the impure, grotesque, and repulsive.
Therefore, despite providing “elemental” terminology for the gothic,
Maldonando’s explanation of color represents how application can be rather
complicating by modifying what is initially defined.
