American Literature: Romanticism Sample Final Exam Essays 2015 final exam assignment #2.Post-Romantic American Literature

Jonathon Anderson

“The early impressions remain”: Romanticism as Touchstone in American Literature

          If America was born of the Enlightenment, its adolescence coincided with the Romantic Era. It was the artists who began to find a characteristically American voice in the Romantic reverence for the individual, the fundamental truth of desire and loss, and a fascination with the sublime who first produced a body of work that successfully articulated the New World experience in a form which illuminated the reality that the American had already been “transformed [into something new] … without his having realized it” (Auden xxii). Consequently, American Romanticism forms the foundation of American Literature, and any serious account of our literary art must come to terms with this era.

          That this is true is easy enough to see by general acquaintance with the work of the ensuing generations. More than this, these later aesthetic trends, while having their own unique agendas, can to some extent be understood through their relationship to Romanticism. Although this is merely one among many perspectives through which to compare literary periods, the attitude toward Romantic ideals in large part reveals attitudes toward what we might call the Platonic form of America; that is, our ideal America.

Realism

          Shifts in aesthetic agenda usually seem to be reactionary. Such is the case with Realism, which counters the Romantics’ “anything but the here and now” attitude with a resolute “here and now” (White). As such, we might expect the leading exponents of American Realism to squash the first sign of sentiment in their work and scrupulously avoid situations that lend themselves to heroic individualism or idealizations. However, this does not seem to be the case. William Dean Howells, one of the guiding forces of the American Realist aesthetic, constructed one of his best known novels, The Rise of Silas Lapham, around just such a heroic individual, giving us a story in which a war hero capitalizes on a fair bit of luck to amass a fortune by the power of his unimpeachable integrity and work ethic. Descriptions of Silas throughout the novel accentuate his “larger than life” presence.

          In “Daisy Miller” Henry James proceeds with more subtlety, but still seems to suggest Romantic points of reference throughout the story, as with the Castle of Chillon episode and the climactic evening at the Colliseum, both of which find Winterbourne thinking of Byron. Winterbourne’s own sense of chivalry toward Daisy often digresses into Romantic tropes related to “a fresh and beautiful young girl.” In the early stages of Winterbourne’s infatuation with her, just about any time spent together plays out as “an adventure” in his mind. By the end of the story, Winterbourne seems to make an effort to distance himself from his Romantic (not just his romantic) inclinations. This procedure of distancing is probably framed most clearly by a contemporary of James’s who never worked in fiction, Andrew Carnegie:

The child … absorbs poetry and romance with the air he breathes, assimilates history and tradition as he gazes around. These become to him his real world in childhood—the ideal is the ever-present real. The actual has yet to come when, later in life, he is launched into the workaday world of stern reality. Even then, and till his last day, the early impressions remain, sometimes for short seasons disappearing perchance, but only apparently driven away or suppressed. They are always rising and coming again to the front to exert their influence, to elevate his thought and color his life.

          So, for the Realists, Romantic sentiment seems to remain in the background to “elevate [one’s] thought and color [one’s] life.”

Modernism

          By the time we arrive in the era of Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, and Faulkner, this attitude toward Romantic idealism has changed, possibly shifting in response to the individual’s problematized social reality. There is a sense in Faulkner and Hemingway in particular of bitter disappointment in the world’s inability to live up to, or even approximate, Romantic ideals. Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” exhibits this disappointment both in the tone of the narration and in the figure of Emily. Often the two amplify one another, as with the commentary on her refusal to let the townspeople bury her father, in which nostalgia, disappointment, and a sad sense of compassion mingle: “We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.” The end of the story makes explicit the criticism aimed at Romantic transcendence: “For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him.” Behind this bleak statement, we might see a brutal and mocking re-inversion of Oscar Wilde’s famous line from Salome (“The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.”).

Jazz Age

          Although writing at the same time, the artists associated with the Jazz Age seem to have a sufficiently distinct aesthetic response to their world to justify a separate category. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work embodies this aesthetic, which we might think of as “Daisy Miller” realism with an apparent consumerist enthusiasm in place of James’s considered skepticism. The relationship to Romanticism seems to consist of the rhetoric without the substance. Judy Jones’s smile is “radiant, blatantly artificial – convincing”, as if the characters are going through the motions of desire and loss or the Romantic quest, but without any real interest or commitment. There is a brittle individualism that is characterized by an almost impenetrable self-centeredness that commodifies human interaction:

The helpless part of trying to do anything about it was that she did it all herself. She was not a girl who could be "won" in the kinetic sense—she was proof against cleverness, she was proof against charm; if any of these assailed her too strongly she would immediately resolve the affair to a physical basis, and under the magic of her physical splendor the strong as well as the brilliant played her game and not their own. She was entertained only by the gratification of her desires and by the direct exercise of her own charm. Perhaps from so much youthful love, so many youthful lovers, she had come, in self-defense, to nourish herself wholly from within.

          This is not to say, though, that the characters are depthless. They seem merely to exert more effort in affecting superficiality as a defense against the problematized social reality mentioned above. In both Modernist and Jazz Age work, there is a deep sense of alarm at the exponential acceleration of the social and economical worlds which undermines the relative stability that heroic individuals of the Romantic imprint rebelled against. The Modernist response seems to consist of a more truculent, cynical individualism, while the Jazz Age response is this affected superficiality. That it is only protective affectation is seen in the perceptiveness of Judy when her “serious” beau moves onto the scene. As she says, “When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I'm his ideal."

          That Romantic attitudes and ideals continue to inform American literature makes sense: just as individuals continue to contemplate, examine, recontextualize, and redefine the influences of their adolescence, so too do nations. I recently asked some of my students to explain what, besides age, makes someone an adult. Their responses overwhelmingly defined adulthood in contrast to their understanding of their current adolescent state. One conclusion to draw from the exercise, which seems apropos here, is that, without knowing who they will be in the future, all they can logically conjecture is that they will be “not this.” Culturally, we are in the same position now that earlier generations were in – not being able to predict who we will be in the future, our only logically sound interpretive framework is to identify how closely we resemble who we have been.