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American
Literature: Romanticism Student Midterm Samples 2015 1. Long Essay |
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Jonathon Anderson
3/21/2015
Between Gloom and Splendor: Assessments of
Identity in American Romantic Literature
Many considerations of the American Renaissance or American Romantic period seem
to proceed either by comparison with the work of Romantics in the European
tradition or through a detailed look at the genealogy of our received cultural
heritage. Both of these strategies can highlight the unique qualities of the
“first flowering” of our culture in a global context. Part of the attractiveness
of this way of looking at the literature of this period resides in the eminent
readability, and relatability, of the best of it. Who is not charmed by the keen
eye and whimsy of Washington Irving’s tales? What teenager doesn’t exult in
Hawthorne’s fascination with the hypocrisy of authority figures? Poe’s tales
still retain their ability to creep out the interested reader, while Cooper’s
wilderness remains mysterious and brutal in a way that is both beautiful and
sublime.
The continuing appreciation for this body of
work, along with its self-evident Americanness, can make it seem as if it sprang
fully formed from the shadowy realm of a deeply mythologized past of
Thanksgivings, cherry trees, keys on kites, and midnight rides. For many readers
of the American Romantics, the era of the Founders has little more reality than
the Greek Pantheon and about as much immediate relevance to their enjoyment.
From this perspective, the shift toward fiction from theoretical and political
documents around the beginning of the nineteenth century appears fundamentally
discontinuous, a welcome upheaval of literary sensibilities in favor of spinning
a good yarn. I would like to argue, however, that this shift in literary
sensibility is more continuous, and more logical, than may commonly be assumed.
A cursory glance at texts from the Founders’
Era available on Dr. White’s webpage for
Early American Lit. shows
a focus on contextualizing the American experiment in relation to European
heritage. When we read in Article III of
The Articles of Confederation
that the States have entered into
a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common
defense, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare,
binding themselves to assist each other, against all force offered to, or
attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty,
trade, or any other pretense whatever[,]
we understand the document to be
primarily concerned with a sense of solidarity against European military
aggression. Similarly, Alexander Hamilton’s advocacy for the new U. S.
Constitution seeks to allay historically-informed concerns over the stability of
“republican government” in
Federalist
#9 with the
assurances that
[t]he science of politics has received great improvement. The
efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not
known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients. The regular distribution of
power into distinct departments; the introduction of legislative balances and
checks; the institution of courts composed of judges holding their offices
during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by
deputies of their own election: these are wholly new discoveries, or have made
their principal progress towards perfection in modern times. They are means, and
powerful means, by which the excellences of republican government may be
retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided.
Both of these texts emphasize that one of the main concerns during the period
between 1776 and 1787 seems to be replacing or improving inherited (mostly
English) institutions in order to distinguish the identity of an American nation
from that of European precedent.
At the same time, this large scale
reevaluation of eighteenth century political and social identity invites a
reconsideration of that other increasingly contentious, fractured institution,
the Church. Throughout the literature of the Founder’s Era, the notion of
private individualism steadily gains traction in opposition to public
professions of faith. Franklin, in his
Autobiography,
writes that, though he “seldom attended any public worship, [he] had still an
opinion of its propriety, and of its utility when rightly conducted,” and Thomas
Paine’s
The Age of Reason
proclaims, “I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious
duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our
fellow-creatures happy. […] I do not believe in the creed professed by the
Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church,
by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my
own church.”
To an extent there is also a sense
that there is a brief window of opportunity for political, social, and ethical
change from conventional modes as the nation endeavors to define itself in texts
like Jefferson’s
Notes on the State
of Virginia when he says, in support of
religious tolerance, “Let us too give this experiment [the religious tolerance
of Pennsylvania and New York] fair play, and get rid, while we may, of those
tyrannical laws. It is true, we are as yet secured against them by the spirit of
the times. . . . But is the spirit of the people an infallible, a
permanent reliance? Is it government?” The consistent concern running through
the literature of the Founders’ Era, then, from the discretion and wit of
Franklin to the radicalism of Paine, is essentially of a piece with Hector St.
Jean de Crevecoeur’s statements in
Letters from an
American Farmer when he conceives of the
“American” as “a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore
entertain new ideas, and form new opinions.”
Already in the bold statements of Paine there is a new awareness of self as
manifestly distinct from large groups of people, and Crevecoeur perceives the
phenomenon of “a new mode of life” resulting in “leaving behind … ancient
prejudices and manners.” These are logical consequences of the sustained effort
of the Founders to articulate how an American nation is different from nations
of the European heritage. In other words, if the Founders’ Era was in part a
period of world-building during which the fledgling nation was defined
negatively (ie We are not like them), the following period turns
its gaze from Europe onto itself in order to begin to define itself positively (ie
Then who are we?). This, in fact, seems to be just what Charles Brockden
Brown proposes in the preface to his 1799 novel
Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker:
America has opened new views to the naturalist and
politician, but has seldom furnished themes to the moral painter. That new
springs of action and new motives to curiosity should operate,—that the field of
investigation, opened to us by our own country, should differ essentially from
those which exist in Europe,—may be readily conceived. The sources of amusement
to the fancy and instruction to the heart, that are peculiar to ourselves, are
equally numerous and inexhaustible.
Brown goes on to point out that his means of “calling forth
the passions and engaging the sympathy of the reader” do not, like European
Gothic authors, employ “[p]uerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic
castles and chimeras” but “incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the
Western wilderness”. In large part, the representative works we’ve read stick
fairly close to Brown’s statement of intention: the “Western wilderness”
features prominently as setting, we see not only “incidents of Indian hostility”
but other consequences of racial and cultural heterogeneity.
Irving’s “Rip
van Winkle”
invites the reader to consider ideas of identity throughout the story, which is
immediately attributed to the “original” Dutch settlers of New York. The
authorship of the tale is further problematized by the interposition of “the
late Diedrich Knickerbocker, an old gentleman of New York” whose “historical
researches … did not lie so much among books as among men.” Rip’s enchanted
sleep takes place after meeting a strangely attired group of gentlemen in the
wilderness, “on a green knoll, covered with mountain herbage, that crowned the
brow of a precipice.” Irving/Knickerbocker clarifies Rip’s distance from the
relative safety of his town, telling us that, “[f]rom an opening between the
trees he could overlook all the lower country for many a mile of rich woodland.”
Rip’s eventual return to town occasions his own bewildered uncertainties of
identity when he sees his son, now grown into “a precise counterpart of
himself.” The narrator underscores the importance of the incident: “He doubted
his own identity, and whether he was himself or another man.” Rip’s confusion is
more or less cleared up, as a neighbor recognizes him (his own family, however,
doesn’t). For all its easy charm and wit, this story subtly destabilizes firm,
traditional conceptions of identity by using the characteristically American
cultural materials available to the author. Identity, Irving seems to suggest,
is more contingent upon one’s personal character and relationship to one’s
community than upon fidelity to a European cultural tradition.
Problematic identity exists in James Fenimore Cooper's
The Last of the Mohicans
both in the ethnic or cultural interactions of the characters and on the level
of language (which is a by-product of the first). Cooper's Introduction glosses
the linguistic complications for the reader, saying
The whites have assisted greatly in rendering the traditions of the Aborigines
more obscure by their own manner of corrupting names. […] When it is remembered
that the Dutch (who first settled New York), the English, and the French, all
gave appellations to the tribes that dwelt within the country which is the scene
of the story, and that the Indians not only gave different names to their
enemies, but frequently to themselves, the cause of the confusion will be
understood.
Identity cannot help but exist in something like a state of flickering
mutability when the words (or verbal symbols) are in a constant state of
fluctuation. Interestingly, Cooper locates this problem in both the proprietary
attitude of the Europeans ("their own manner of corrupting names") and the
Native Americans' creative profusion of nomenclature. Cooper also briefly
establishes the cultural context for the relationships between characters: "The
Mohicans … were … the first dispossessed; and the seemingly inevitable fate of
all these people, who disappear before the advances, or it might be termed the
inroads, of civilization … is represented as having already befallen them." We
are also to understand by this that all other tribes in the path of
"civilization" suffer the same fate, so we can see Magua's point when he begins
his invective against Colonel Munro as a convenient proxy for the negative
effects of colonization.
Cooper seems to set out to represent the problematic multiculturalism of
mid-18th Century America in his inclusion of not only conflicting ethnic groups,
but of variability within groups. Magua is set against Uncas, Hawkeye is set
against David Gamut, and Cooper invites comparisons between Chingachgook and
Hawkeye, Major Heyward and David Gamut, and Alice and Cora, just to name central
characters. It is in the consideration of Cora, though, that Cooper explores the
issue of identity most explicitly:
There it was my [Colonel Munro's] lot to form a connection with one who in time
became my wife, and the mother of Cora. She was the daughter of a gentleman of
those isles, by a lady whose misfortune it was, if you will,” said the old man,
proudly, "to be descended, remotely, from that unfortunate class who are so
basely enslaved to administer to the wants of a luxurious people. [Cora is part
African] Ay, sir, that is a curse, entailed on Scotland by her unnatural union
with a foreign and trading people. But could I find a man among them who would
dare to reflect on my child, he should feel the weight of a father's anger!
A few lines later, after Heyward admits uncomfortably that in the south, where
he was born, "these unfortunate beings are considered of a race inferior to your
own," Munro continues, "fiercely," "And you cast it on my child as a reproach!
You scorn to mingle the blood of the Heywards with one so degraded - lovely and
virtuous though she be?" Munro, like Cora herself, is acutely aware of the
dissonance between the social consequences of racial stigma in the European
cultural tradition and the "American" concept of one's personal character being
proof of quality in itself. Meanwhile, Cooper's descriptive abilities seem to be
at his best when carrying the reader along with his haunted characters into his
richly detailed wilderness of majesty and danger.
In "Young
Goodman Brown,"
Hawthorne evokes a "Western wilderness" that, devoid of any but the darkest
majesty, looks all the way back to that of
William Bradford
and the Pilgrims, "where there are only savage and brutish men which range up
and down, little otherwise than the wild beasts of the same." The forest
surrounding Salem village is hostile and threatening, "darkened by all the
gloomiest trees […], which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep
through". Hawthorne sets village and forest in opposition as light and dark or
good and evil in order to establish the simplistic duality of Brown's sense of
identity as he thinks of "cling[ing] to [Faith's] skirts and follow[ing] her to
heaven" at the story's beginning. Brown's mounting horror towards the climax of
the story is indicated by his experience through correspondence of the
"benighted wilderness pealing in awful harmony together." Brown cries out in
alarm, and Hawthorne nudges the young man's identity a step closer to supreme
complication as "his cry [is] lost to his own ear by its unison with the cry of
the desert."
For Hawthorne, in this particular story, Puritanical questions of identity seem
to give way to a radical Gothic sensibility. Like Charles Brockden Brown, Irving
and Cooper before him, there is a close, correspondent relationship between the
"Western wilderness" and his character's sense of psychological identity. Unique
to Hawthorne, though, is the degree to which his literary skill enables him to
create a seamless continuity between those incidents of the "perils of the
Western wilderness" and the assessment of an identity that "differ[s]
essentially from those that exist in Europe" that Charles Brockden Brown had
already proposed for the "instruction of the heart."
Brown may actually be an important transitional figure between Enlightenment and
Romantic sensibilities, at once interested in "new springs of action and new
motives to curiosity" and "sources of amusement to the fancy and instruction to
the heart" while "calling forth the passions and engaging the sympathy of the
reader." In an article titled "The Difference Between History and Romance,"
Brown considers the meeting point between empirical observation and spinning a
good yarn:
The observer or experimentalist, therefore, who carefully watches, and
faithfully enumerates the appearances which occur, may claim the appellation of
historian. He who adorns the appearances with cause and effect, and traces
resemblances between past, distant, and future, with the present, performs a
different part. He is a dealer, not in certainties, but probabilities, and is
therefore a romancer.
