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American
Literature: Romanticism Student Midterm Samples 2015 1. Long Essay 1b. Describe, analyze, and illustrate a term, objective, or combinations |
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Marichia Wyatt
Black and
White, With Shades of Gray,
What’s an
Other Anyway?
As students of literature, we are
taught to pay special attention to color codes within a text; the old westerns
being a prime teaching example where the good guy is always clad in white, and
the bad guy wears a black hat. For
me, the best part of the texts we have read in this class is that these ideals
do not always hold true; the world is not simply black and white, but rather
filled with shades of gray. Perfect
examples of romantic texts not adhering to the standard color code come from “A
Blessing,” The Last of the Mohicans,
and “Young Goodman Brown,” as each text plays with color codes and the device of
the traditional other.
James Wright’s poem “A Blessing” is an
excellent way to introduce the concept of the mixture of traditional color
codes, and the other personified as good.
The title alone suggests a sublime experience, and a transcendent moment,
yet the speaker himself infringes upon the ponies’ home making him just as much
the other of the text as the animals.
While the poem occurs at “twilight,” it is not a threatening encroaching
darkness (2). Twilight instead
becomes an inviting, serene scene so beautiful the two friends stop their cars
and get out to explore. Wright
upsets the normal standard of darkness equating with bad characterization
through the descriptions of the animals as a mixture of light and dark.
When the men approach the ponies, “the eyes of the two Indian ponies/
Darken with kindness,” and they have even “come gladly” out of the dark shade of
“the willows/ To welcome” them (3-6).
The color of the female pony is especially important as “She is black and
white,” a mixture of each color so that she can neither be all good or all bad
even if her “mane falls wildly” (18-9).
By filling this poem with several contradictory statements of light and
dark mixtures, Wright boldly paints his ponies and their new acquaintances with
several shades of gray. The last
line of the poem when the speaker comes to the realization “That if I stepped
out of my body I would break/ Into blossom,” shows that when you transcend the
limits of tradition, you grow (22-4).
For a short poem, “A Blessing” is full of potential exploration of the
color codes and common interpretations of the other.
James Fenimore Cooper’s
The Last of the Mohicans is perhaps
the best example of color codes and the other represented as not what they seem,
as the main characters themselves are contrasted by their bloodlines and dark
features as the others of the group.
From the stories titled character being the last of a noble bloodline, to
the main female heroine’s mixed race constantly alluded to, Cooper shows his
reader that the world cannot be divided by black as bad and white as good; Cora
and Uncas’s ethnicities embody gray areas as the noble protagonists of the tale.
The very first time the reader is given
Cora’s description is in direct contrast to her “fair” sister Alice: “the
other… [whose] tresses were shining and black, like
the plumage of the raven. Her complexion was not brown, but it rather appeared
charged with the color of the rich blood, that seemed ready to burst its bounds”
(1.20.21). Through this narration
Cora is associated as the dark lady, and automatically juxtaposed with her
younger, lighter sister. By
depicting Cora’s skin tone as “charged… with blood,” Hawthorne affiliates Cora’s
appearance with the Indians reddish hue (1.21).
The characterization of Cora is the personification of everything the
other should be; Cora is dark, she has a mixed identity, and she does not truly
fit anywhere. Where her younger sister
startles easy, Cora is calm and mature; reinforcing the fair Alice’s pure
innocence, and darker Cora’s more knowledgeable maturity.
The scene in which
Cora’s relationship as the other may be most apparent is in the difference of
how the sisters feel about their Indian guide.
Alice is at once put off and distrustful of someone different from her,
to which her sister “coldly” replies: “should
we distrust the man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin
is dark?” (2.12). Cora uses her own
ethnic mixture as a way to help her sister understand that because someone is
different, or dark in appearance, does not mean they are bad; you have to look
at the person beneath the skin. By
instilling the main female heroine with a combination of white and black ethnic
roots, and identifying her complexion with that of the Indians (good or bad),
Cooper shows his reader that the color code has no place in the real world;
reality is not simply black or white.
Cooper instills this point over and over in his work through his
characters, especially between the good and bad Indians with the same skin
color, yet different blood lines.
As the very last of their kind, Uncas
and his father are automatically set up as outsiders in the world; there is no
one else who is or can ever be like them.
Uncas is described as “graceful
and unrestrained in the attitudes and movements of nature” with “dark,
glancing, fearless eyes, alike terrible and calm; the bold outline of his high,
haughty features, pure in their native
red” (6.4). Uncas is not black,
white, or brown; he is dark, and he is red.
While red is typically a personification of blood or passion, which suits
his character well, he is also dark and deadly.
Although those colors tend to be portrayed in a negative fashion, Uncas
is also beautiful (like Cora), which surpasses these negative qualities with
good ones. Even the fair Alice has
no qualms about the noble savage after seeing “his
whole person thrown
powerfully into view”
and looked at him “as she would
have looked upon some
precious relic of the Grecian chisel to
which life had been imparted by the intervention of a miracle” (6.4-5).
Uncas’s beauty even outweighs his noble bloodline and his chivalrous
nature to the girls. This is apparent when Cora states that “who that looks at
this creature of nature, remembers the shade of his skin?” (6.7). Cora again has
to point out to her sister that skin color does not define a person.
By taking a character who would normally be associated with the other
based on his darkness and being the last of his kind, and making him the tragic
hero of the story who sacrifices himself so that another outsider may live
(Cora), Cooper illustrates for his reader that the other can also be the hero,
and that darkness on the outside does not mean there is darkness on the inside.
Another prime example of the
interchangeability of the color codes and the other represented as good is
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.”
As a member of the small village of Salem, married to a young woman
“aptly named” Faith, and a descendant from “honest men and good Christians,”
Goodman Brown does not fit the standard definition of the other in the way that
Cora and Uncas do (1,17). However,
as the protagonist of his story, that is what he becomes.
Through a series of fantastical events, whether it was only a dream or it
actually happened, Brown becomes an outsider to everyone in his community for
the rest of his life.
Though the devil makes several
attempts to tempt Brown down the dark path, he is not persuaded.
Even with the devil’s insistence that his grandfather and father had been
his “good friends, both,” and the sight of the old woman who taught him his
“Catechism” embracing the devil as her “old friend,” or when he hears his
minister and deacon continuing on the path, Brown is not compelled to join the
dark congregation (18,31, 37 ). It
is only after a scream and sight of “a pink ribbon,” a color usually associated
with female innocence that has no place in the dark wilderness, that Brown
declares his “Faith is gone!...There is no good on earth…Come, devil; for thee
is this world given” (50). His faith in
humanity and his faith in his wife are both shattered by this sign of female
innocence contributing to the devil’s folly.
Brown’s entire community, every person he “deemed… holier than
[himself], and shrank from [his] own sin, contrasting it with their lives of
righteousness and prayerful aspirations heavenward…[are] all in [the devil’s]
worshipping assembly” (63). There
can be no color code in a story where everything that is usually associated with
evil, dark, dangerous, and sin is the pinnacle of a village, and the one person
who denounces evil is an outsider.
The reality of this world is a gray area where “the good [shrink] not from the
wicked, nor [are] the sinners abashed by the saints” (56).
Through Goodman Brown the reader can see that nothing is what it seems.
Even if it was only a dream, it does not matter because the next day, the world
had changed for Goodman Brown forever.
Where he had once been an active member in a Christian society he deemed
pious and good, he is now the other who did not join the devil in “the communion
of [his] race” (61).
“A
Blessing,” The Last of the Mohicans,
and “Young Goodman Brown” all have examples of the main protagonist being an
outsider in their current situations.
Each text also throws the traditional color coding system of black as bad
and white as good into complete disarray by creating a mixture of gray for their
reader. Wright, Cooper, and
Hawthorne ingeniously turn these devices upside down to make the powerful
statement that looks are not always what they seem.
