Caryn Livingston

December 5, 2016

Marginalized America: The New Romantics

My primary takeaway from the study of American Romanticism as a literary period is how thoroughly America’s understanding of itself is bound up in the values of Romanticism. There are positive and negative implications of this through the country’s history, as the tendency to value heroic individualism over collectivism and inner truth over scientific inquiry has different consequences for a newly formed and expanding nation than for a global superpower. However, the way Romantic ideals are adopted and adapted by marginalized groups as their own literary traditions emerge has given me an appreciation of the American values of Romanticism that the benefit of hindsight prevented me from forming during my brief undergraduate exposure to Romanticism and during our early course readings.

The capacity for adapting Romanticism from the traditional masculine individual discussed in Emerson’s Self-Reliance emerged early in the course in Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative of the Captivity & Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, as I discussed in my midterm long essay. Rowlandson’s position as part of the colonizing nation in a particularly heightened colonial encounter, though, meant that the Romantic appeal still existed primarily in the white, European woman confronting gothic, wild America. During the latter half of the course, we were introduced to different visions of the woman Romantic in both black and white writers whose ideas of heroic individualism and views of themselves as societal outsiders are distinct from those same views held by earlier Romantic writers. Margaret Fuller’s The Great Lawsuit, wherein Fuller presents a case that as men gain increased liberty it is natural and inevitable that women will desire to do the same, is a precursor to later women Romantics who take up Fuller’s cause for their own individuality.

The writer I found most memorable during our course was Harriet Jacobs for her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Though not a traditionally Romantic text, in my opinion the slave narratives embody the spirit of American Romanticism in ways that early Romantic writers could only imagine. Jacobs’s narrative of struggling against a society that promoted real evil embodied the idea of heroic individualism through her willingness to go to extreme lengths to escape her life as a slave in a society where being Black and being a woman presented unique and significant obstacles that Jacobs managed to overcome. Additionally, the slave-owning south provided a gothic setting that required no supernatural assistance to become a place of horror. Simply by telling the story of her life, Jacobs created a real American Romantic story that is effective because it exposed American audiences to the shared humanity of slaves who were truly heroic in seizing their freedom, and to the gothic horror of American society itself.

As the course moved beyond the era of the Civil War and into first realism and then modernism, I was struck by how the values of Romanticism often remained in the literature even as traits of other literary periods began to emerge. With Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Town Poor,” even as more realistic elements of day-to-day town life and small domestic details entered the story, Mrs. Trimble and Miss Wright were confronted by the incompetence and lack of feeling of the “selec’men” and resolved to reject the easy acceptance of social ills condoned by their town in favor of the inner truth that moves them to acknowledge that the town’s indifference to the Bray sisters is wrong. Just as in earlier Romantic works where the common individual rises morally above a corrupt or indifferent society, the women in Jewett’s story are struck by the failures of their own society and its incompetent male leaders and resolve to take action themselves.

The same situation occurs later in literature of the Harlem Renaissance, in the poetry of Langston Hughes. Hughes, though not a woman, was an outsider in a society controlled by white people, and could therefore see clearly how racism in American society corrupts it. His poem “Dream Variations” imagines a society in which he can transition between the white day and the black night, and in which both are valued. However, as that is not easily achieved, his later poem “Harlem” considers what may happen when the heroic individual with a dream is continually denied by society. Its gothic elements, with the foreboding questions of whether a dream deferred may “fester like a sore— / And then run,” or whether it may even explode, again functions in the way the depiction of the south during slavery did for Jacobs by revealing the potential for gothic horror in everyday American society. As much as American history has always been a struggle between different groups and of marginalized people demanding their rights, Romantic ideals first adopted in the country by white men have been continuously put to new use by American writers of other identities as a testament that they are equally American.