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American
Literature: Romanticism Student Midterm Samples 2013 3. Web Highlights |
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Carrie Hatfield
Three Ways Light & Dark
I don’t think that I am alone in saying that I have always
been fascinated by the interplay between light and dark. I think that some of
the most “honest” reactions we can have are laced with both positive and
negative connotations, that the lines are drawn very finely between genius and
insanity, beauty and the grotesque, and that as no person can be wholly good or
wholly evil, our perceptions are often tied up in many shades of grey. This is
why I am fascinated by the gothic and the sublime. Gothic language allows us to
revel in a little wickedness, and gives us permission to find beauty in the
lurid, corrupt, or macabre. The sublime on the other hand, can be neutral. It
can merely indicate a grandiosity of scope, or it can be both positive and
negative at the same time (which is what I truly love,) evoking an extremity
that is transcendent in its contradiction.
In “Chiaroscuro: Reconciling Light and Dark
in Teaching Romanticism,” Kyle Rahe describes the universal nature of light/dark
comparisons, and their usefulness in teaching romantic literature. I was
previously unfamiliar with the term, “Chiaroscuro,” and immediately felt the
need to look it up as it was not defined (except possibly by inference) anywhere
in the text. I was delighted to find that has several meanings related to
various arts media:
pictorial representation in terms of light and shade without regard to color,
the arrangement or treatment of light and dark parts in a pictorial work of art,
the interplay or contrast of dissimilar qualities (as of mood or character,) a
16th century woodcut technique involving the use of several blocks to print
different tones of the same color; also : a print made by this
technique, the interplay of light and shadow on or as if on a surface, or the
quality of being veiled or partly in shadow (Webster).
As a teacher and in my graduate career I have been careful and determined to
observe and teach these interplays of light and dark as they were woefully
missing from my high school and undergraduate educations.
In “Human
Nature in Characters and Motivation in Authors: A Look at Hawthorne and Poe,”
Sarah Coronado looks at the darker tendencies in Hawthorne’s and Poe’s works and
what they say about people’s natural tendencies. I really enjoyed Sarah’s class
presentation as well and thought that questioning and exploring the very human
tendency toward the “dark side” was interesting, if not always entirely fruitful
(why do we like “darkness” in our art and literature?
Because we do.) Though not
stated in the essay, I also think that the gothic can, at times, emphasize light
and or hope. For example, in “The Minister’s Black Veil,” the veil itself,
though a sinister symbol, makes Minister Hooper “more approachable” thus
furthering his potential outreach as an agent of good/God. Sarah seems to be on
the brink of mentioning this but seems to shy away when she says,
Ironically, however, the very nature of the black veil is
precisely what makes Minister Hooper “a man of awful power over souls that were
in agony for sin…its gloom, indeed, enabled him to sympathize with all dark
affections” (629). Sinners on their deathbed, though they “shuddered at the
veiled face so near their own” felt they could, as sinners, relate to the
despair and darkness associated with the veil (629).
I think that gothic language often highlights the
juxtaposition of light and dark, often “revealing the light” by being dark.
I was greatly impressed with Kimberley Yancey’s
essay, “Slaves and
Ghosts: Desire, Loss, and Gothic Styling in Toni Morrison’s
Beloved.” I first encountered
Beloved academically in Dr.
McNamara’s Modernism class. Obviously, gothic styling was not covered at that
time. However, I did have a conversation with my mother about the book. I told
her that regardless of the actual “legitimate genre” of the book, this was a
horror novel. I told her that stylistically (brace yourself, some people are
going to call this blasphemy,) Morrison’s prose in some places resembles that of
Stephen King (the modern “king” of the gothic.) I had a basic sense of what
gothic is, but in this class those ideas have solidified and achieved a new
level of recognition. Though I agree with everything Yancey has to say, I would
say “yes, and then some.” The two
passages that, to me, make the novel horror, it’s most graphic, dark, and
soul-rending passages are Sethe’s account of the night she ran away, and Paul
D.’s story of what happened to everyone else that night. I think that Yancey’s
assessment of Denver’s gothic tendencies is very accurate as well.
Denver’s devotion to Beloved is sublime in nature. She is
intrigued by Beloved, she loves her and fears her all at once. The act of
feeding Beloved through storytelling provides escape for both of the girls;
Beloved is able to escape into a world that she never knew and longs for , and
Denver is able to escape into an image of her mother birthing her in the
wilderness that grants a moment of epic-like significance to her own existence.
I am fascinated by the interaction of dark and light, as well as the
“neutrality” formed by juxtapositions or contradictions. The gothic provides so
many ways to accomplish this interplay: loss and longing, obsession, corruption
and decay, lurid coloring. Likewise, the sublime is more obvious in its
exposition of interaction. It is easier to see that interplay when something is
“terrible in the French Sense.”
