American Literature: Romanticism Sample Final Exam Essays 2015 final exam assignment Overall Learning Essay

Melissa Hodgkins

5 May 2015

Mid-Length Essay- “Modernism and Fairy Tales: My Kind of Romance”

          As I reflect over this semester studying American Romantic Literature, I am not surprised to find that I have walked away from this course with a deeper appreciation for American Literature, not just in the Romantic period, but American Literature in general. When I sat down to begin answering questions from the Midterm exam and as I begin work on the Final, I started to fully realize that I now possess a greater understanding of Romanticism. I see it as a movement in literature that is not bound by time and place, but rather a narrative that seeks optimism even in the face of tragedy and death. It is a literary frame of reference that in the past I tended to only relegate to the nineteenth century, but I am able to recognize facets of Romanticism in literature that I never expected to find it in: namely, in Modernist literature. I now find myself half-way through completion of my Master’s degree in literature, with a Bachelor’s degree in English already in my arsenal, and I cannot believe how limited my knowledge of American literature truly is. I suppose some of those limitations have been self-imposed as I never enjoyed American literature growing up in school, strongly preferring British and World literature. The irony now is that I recognize that the whimsical fantasies that drew me to British literature in particular (Shakespeare especially. Yes, I was “that” kid in high school) are the same elements that have drawn me into a newfound appreciation for American literature in the Romantic style.

          As I stated above, for a long time I had an aversion to American literature, perhaps created from the “boredom” I experienced reading sermons and pamphlets from the Enlightenment period that were required readings in school, or satires I never fully comprehended, and a fear of the complexity and almost foreign (to me growing up in the suburbs) return to nature and self-reliance that Transcendentalism portrayed; and I dreaded HAVING to take American literature my Junior year in high school. At that point in my life I had not yet discovered the American writers that would capture my heart: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Andersen, and Edith Wharton, to name a few. In college I discovered that I did love American literature; and not just Poe as I had once thought. I loved Modernism. I could relate to the feelings of fragmentation and isolation and the desire and inability to connect meaningfully with others. For me, these tenets of Modernist thought were not abstractions based solely on Modernists’ reactions to antiquated Victorian attitudes, rapidly changing technology, post-war elegy and the isolation of urbanization and modernity, although those are certainly important influences and themes within the movement, it was the desire for nostalgia, for something or some place that was gone and may never return. I was nostalgic for a place I have yet to find except in the pages of literature. I understood this longing and for the first time in my life I connected with American writers.

          Similarly, I have learned that Romanticism shares this sense of nostalgia that I connected with in Modernism. If anything, nostalgia runs deep within the heart of the Romantic period. Early on in the course I found myself deeply moved by Walt Whitman’s “There Was a Child Went Forth”. One of the most moving sections of the poem is as follows:

His own parents, he that had father'd him and she that had conceiv'd

him in her womb and birth'd him,                                                                                    

They gave this child more of themselves than that,

They gave him afterward every day, they became part of him (19-22).

The idealization and yearning for the simplicity and safety of childhood oozes out of this poem. There is an almost ardent desire to understand that everything a child experiences, whether through his senses, his feelings, his genetics and/or his home become a part of who he is and who he will be. There is almost nostalgia for a time yet to come. This is a notion that I can understand and relate to. The juxtaposition of a yearning for a time to come while simultaneously yearning for a childhood gone by is both Romantic and almost Modern. It is teetering on the edge of what I want to call Modernist nostalgia; I almost get the sense that the child going forth at the end of the poem will take his past with him as he becomes a man that must face the challenges of waiting modernity. As the poem closes we read: “These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day” (41). Modernist writers sought a simpler time never able to reconnect with their forever gone childhood experiences. What’s left is a yearning, a need to remember a time when modernity didn’t permeate every facet of life, a time when life was innocent and enchanted and just beginning. For me— learning that Romanticism didn’t live in a time capsule, changed my understanding, not only of Romantic literature, not only of American literature, but how styles permeate literary periods and find their way into evolving styles and periods in fiction.

          I mentioned previously that growing up I found myself inexplicably drawn to British and World literature because of the sense of magic and other-worldliness that it provided me as a young reader. What I have come to appreciate about American Romanticism is that the same whimsy, the same magic of a French or German fairy tale exists within Romanticism. I find myself returning again and again to Washington Irving’s short stories to illustrate my point. I was vaguely familiar with “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” prior to taking this course, mostly from modern film and television adaptations, but I honestly had never bothered to read the story from which it was all based until this semester. Irving created something proto-typically Romantic, he created what I will call an American “fairy tale”. The necessary elements of fairy tale are present: the beautiful princess in this case personified by “Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and only child of a substantial Dutch farmer. She was a blooming lass of fresh eighteen; plump as a partridge; ripe and melting and rosy-cheeked as one of her father's peaches, and universally famed... She was withal a little of a coquette”. You also have the prototypical “hero” in the shape of “a burly, roaring, roystering blade, of the name of Abraham, or, according to the Dutch abbreviation, Brom Van Brunt, the hero of the country round which rang with his feats of strength and hardihood” and the villain of mythic proportions, the deadly Headless Horseman himself. While the story certainly plays with familiar fairy tale characters it also comically alters the expectations of the fairy tale reader by making Ichabod Crane the unlikely (and self-imagined) knight in shining armor. Irving writes:

From the moment Ichabod laid his eyes upon these regions of delight… his only study was how to gain the affections of the peerless daughter of Van Tassel. In this enterprise, however, he had more real difficulties than generally fell to the lot of a knight-errant of yore, who seldom had anything but giants, enchanters, fiery dragons, and such like easily conquered adversaries, to contend with and had to make his way merely through gates of iron and brass, and walls of adamant to the castle keep, where the lady of his heart was confined; all which he achieved as easily as a man would carve his way to the centre of a Christmas pie; and then the lady gave him her hand as a matter of course. Ichabod, on the contrary, had to win his way to the heart of a country coquette, beset with a labyrinth of whims and caprices, which were forever presenting new difficulties and impediments; and he had to encounter a host of fearful adversaries of real flesh and blood, the numerous rustic admirers…

It is within works like Irving’s tales that we begin to see an early Romantic bent to American literature. There are vestiges of satire left within the text and a playfulness that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Unlike Whitman who is writing between the end of Romanticism and the beginning of Realism, Irving is at the forefront of the American Romance narrative. What I found in his writing is more than satire, more than a desire to create American identity, what I experience is classic folklore that is uniquely and wonderfully American.

          While there are certainly a bevy of complexities that contribute to the works of the American Romantic canon, these are a couple lessons I will carry with me everywhere I go and with every book I read. I feel that I have rediscovered American literature and that I can find Romantic concepts and approaches in almost everything. Romanticism felt to me at the beginning of the semester like an idea borrowed from the European tradition, and chronologically that may be true, but what I’ve discovered is that American writers have found their own Romantic voice and have latched on to the Romance narrative and clung to its hopefulness even in times of doubt and despair.