American Literature: Romanticism Sample Final Exam Essays 2015 final exam assignment #3 Multicultural Romanticism & #6 Romance Narrative

Heather Schutmaat

The Romance Narrative in the Works of Douglass, Jacobs, and Stowe

          An essential component of American Romanticism is the romance narrative. Thus, it is important to begin a course in American Romanticism with a clear understanding of the romance narrative in the literary sense by divorcing it from the popular understanding of “romance” as love or a love story. As Dr. White made clear at the beginning of the semester, “in popular use, ‘romance’ means love or a love story, but in literary studies romance means a broader, more inclusive type of story or narrative that usually features a hero's journey or quest through tests and trials (often involving a villain) in order to reach a transcendent goal, whether love, salvation, justice (usu. revenge), or rescue or salvation.”

Because romance is the essential narrative of popular literature and because the popular understanding of romance is a love story, a consequential learning challenge in American Romanticism is overcoming or resolving "cognitive dissonance" between "romance as women's love story" and "romance as narrative of quest, trial, and transcendence." As Dr. White notes on his website, “many students comprehend these distinctions as instructor explains or reinforces them, but few exams or research essays refer to the romance narrative (or they continue to refer to romance exclusively as a love story), indicating that for most students the cognitive dissonance overpowers or nullifies the new information, which is not reinforced except in advanced literary studies.”

For me, the most helpful aspect of the course in overcoming the cognitive dissonance between romance as a love story and romance as a narrative of quest, trial, and transcendence, and to never forget the actual meaning of a romance narrative in the literary sense, was to study the romance narrative in unexpected contexts, such as in the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, and in the anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. After having taken a course in American Minority Literature and reading the heartrending slave narratives of Douglass and Jacobs, and revisiting them for a course in American Immigrant Literature, I was taken aback to see that these narratives were included in the syllabus for American Romanticism. However, my surprise was owing to never having studied Romanticism, and after developing a clear understanding of what the romance narrative involves in literary studies, I understand that Douglass’s and Jacobs’ narratives and Stowe’s novel powerfully represent and exemplify the romance narrative as a hero’s journey through tests and trials to meet a transcendent goal.

      For example, one the most significant traits of American Romanticism is a speaker’s unremitting desire to escape reality, or “the here and now.” As we’ve seen throughout the semester, this desire can appear in many different forms, but in the narratives of Douglass and Jacobs, and in the story of Eliza in Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Stowe modeled after slave narratives, the desire to escape reality is perhaps the most powerful example I encountered throughout the semester. Douglass and Jacobs, living within the oppressive and ghastly institution of slavery, and Eliza, in a situation in which her own son is to be sold to a slave trader, all have an absolute desire to escape the here and now, and to move forward on a journey and reach their transcendental goal of freedom.

Fitting the criteria for a romance narrative, Douglass, Jacobs, and Eliza all go through tests and trials—such as Douglass’s failed attempts to escape, Jacobs’ confinement to her grandmother’s attic, and Eliza’s crossing of the icy river, all of which also involve villains (slave masters), and display heroic individualism. Lastly, Douglass, Jacobs, and Eliza all end their journeys by reaching a transcendental goal and obtaining freedom. Therefore, because slaves narratives and Eliza’s story in Uncle Tom’s Cabin certainly aren’t romance stories in the popular sense of the word, or even typical romance narratives in a literary sense, and were unexpected contexts to discover the romance narrative, they helped me to disconnect the word “romantic” from the popular notion of romance.

It’s also important to note that another learning challenge of the romance narrative is to understand that although a romance narrative isn’t just a love story, it certainly can be. In other words, while the romance narrative isn’t a love story in a popular sense of the word, a romance narrative that involves a hero’s quest or journey may be motivated by love, or the transcendental goal the hero is pursuing could be a goal of love. For instance, in the narrative of Jacobs and in the story of Eliza, their journeys through tests and trials to obtain their transcendental goal of freedom were motivated by their love for their children. However, although the romance narrative can certainly involve love, I still believe it’s important to first help students dissolve the notion of romance in the popular sense, and separate it from the romance narrative before bringing love back into the conversation, in order for them to develop an understanding of the romance narrative in the literary sense.

In short, while overcoming the cognitive dissonance between romance as a love story and romance as a narrative of quest, trial, and transcendence is certainly a challenge, I believe an effective route to overcoming the challenge is to identify the romance narrative in unexpected contexts, such as in slave narratives like those of Douglass and Jacobs. Furthermore, because these texts proved so effective in my experience in understanding the romance narrative, they are texts that I would also incorporate in an American Romanticism course in order to help my students arrive at a clear understanding of the romance narrative in the literary sense, and also to demonstrate the variations of a hero’s quest, and to emphasize Romanticism as an umbrella term.