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American
Literature: Romanticism Student Midterm Samples 2015 3. Web Highlights |
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Marichia Wyatt
Light, Dark,
and the Other:
Reviewing a
Few of My Favorite Things
I was first drawn to Kyle Rahe’s essay
“Chiaroscuro: Reconciling Light and Dark in Teaching Romanticism” by the title
as I too had just written over the contents of color codes in this class.
However, from the first sentence I realized I was getting more than an
essay on simply light and dark, Rahe is also discussing teaching techniques for
romanticism. I particularly agreed
with his beginning where he states that his “class has done well [in showing]
the ways in which American Romanticism can overlap with realism or German
writers or can evolve into new forms.”
While I do think that he should use a comma or two in that sentence, I
wholeheartedly believe this statement also pertains to our class as well;
despite having no German authors assigned in our syllabus, we have spent several
hours on romantic aspects present in all genres, types, and forms.
There is also a parallel with the way Kyle and I viewed American
Romanticism as congruent, yet separate from the American Renaissance:
“romanticism is actually richer… [and] it is much easier to show how romance has
evolved throughout modern literature, whereas the American Renaissance is more
of a specific time period.” However, where we agree the most is on the
“difficulty” of “the opposing forces of light and dark” that “adds to [the]
complexity” of romanticism.
While I found myself looking for more in
Kyle’s analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” Walt Whitman’s
poetry, and Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” to illustrate the title of his
essay of “reconciling light and dark,” I thoroughly enjoyed how he illustrated
the “challenge of teaching American romanticism...from the mix of so many
different elements.”
Along the same lines that I chose Kyle’s
essay, the title of “The Gothic Other” lead me to Ron Burton’s 2008 essay.
Right away in his entry paragraph I found myself nodding my head with him
that “it is by personifying elements onto the other that we create real fear.”
Burton’s essay seamlessly delivers this theory through close analysis and
insightful comparisons of the gothic other in Mary Rowlandson’s “A Narrative of
the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
“Young Goodman Brown,” and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.”
Burton’s best written lines come from his
ability to connect the three texts together and separately to his thesis, while
also showing how each author plays with the traditional roles of the gothic
other through projection. A
stunning example of his ability to read between the lines of typical troupes
comes from his astute assertion that Mary Rowlandson “portrays the Indians as
being the scourge of death and misery to the settlers, but never considers that
she is a colonizer who will in effect destroy the lives of those she paints
gothic.” Burton is able to connect
the Indians in Rowlandson’s story to the Indians in Hawthorne’s when he says
“here again, Indians are aligned with European Christian ideals, stressing the
binary of who is evil and who is not.”
However, this point is driven even further home by connecting Faulkner to
these ideals as he “turns the tables on the plight of the other as being the
gothic element to being the somewhat normal character for which that element is
contradicted.” Burton’s essay is
clear, concise, and full of interconnectivity proving that in these stories “it
is clear that the other is either catalyst or facilitator of gothic traits onto
their counterparts” and that “humanity’s dark side is more prevalent in the
heart than in the skin.”
Continuing with the ever present theme of
light and dark in romanticism, the last submission I reviewed was Marcia
Toalson’s 2005 research proposal, entitled “When and Where has the Black/White
Issue Become a Shadowy Gray?”. Like
Rahe and Burton’s essay, Toalson’s proposal caught my attention through her
title. While this essay does not
focus on the novels in particular, Toalson explains that throughout romanticism
“questions of racial ambiguity have been raised.”
As someone who is thinking of writing my own proposal based on Cora’s
mixed racial ethnicity, I thought it would be a good idea to see how she was to
going to “explore when the black/white conflict turned from black and white to
shades of gray.” While Marcia’s
proposal was not what I was originally looking for, I found her use of gothic
language to describe her intent and reasoning to be quite enjoyable,
particularly when she states that “with quiet intensity the cauldron of racial
tension bubbled with attitudes and actions of our found fathers and early
statesmen.” Her wish to
“investigate the origins of racial tensions and appropriateness of relationships
in early Romantic literature and those years surrounding,” seems extremely
difficult. I am sure that if she
followed the guidelines she set for herself in her proposal, and narrowed down
her topic a bit more, her essay is probably a very interesting read (if only it
were on our model assignment).
By reviewing three very different writers,
and three very different takes on the mid-term assignment, it is easy to see
that the traditional troupes of the color code, black as bad and white as good,
need not apply to every text.
Through this selection we can see that color coding and the device of the other
have limitless avenues for research.
