Umaymah Shahid

07 December 2016

The Immortality of Romanticism

I had entered the class having, as my midterm states, “already presupposed that [it] was going to be about daffodils, waterfalls, and a Tarzan type character” at one with nature. As the weeks passed on and my repertoire of Romantic literature increased, I learned that Romanticism was a lot more than nature and love; it was a broad movement that encompassed the domestic and gothic, the sane and insane, the free and enslaved, the Native American and the bourgeois. The seemingly polar opposites functioned within the same literary movement, just like the sublime—simultaneously awe-inspiring and terrifying. Learning about Romanticism through a literary-historical survey class proved quite effective because it allowed me to isolate the movement and read the various genres and styles of writing within that one period. Stereotypical stories such as The Wide, Wide World by Susan B. Warner, selections from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson; gothic stories such as The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe; and the African American slave narratives such as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs allowed me to better understand the variety of texts that fell under the broad Romantic literary movement and their use of Romantic conventions.

          The Wide, Wide World and selections from Nature stand out as texts that embody those stereotypical Romantic conventions I had mistakenly isolated Romanticism to: nature, emotions, and individualism. Although the selections we read of The Wide, Wide World only touched upon the outdoors, the first few chapters dealt specifically with the domestic sphere, and what one would expect to be found in nature was found in the living room: warmth, tranquility, and separation from the outside world. Although sadness hangs over the home, the reader observes the sacred bond between the mother and Ellen, and Ellen’s growth in understanding God and herself becomes the same journey Emerson claims one would experience within nature. “The moral law,” according to Emerson, “lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference” (17). God’s law does not need to be witnessed at Church, rather it within nature that man will find the presence of God. Adding to the natural elements, both texts involve raw emotion. Ellen’s genuine love for her mother and her sorrow over the separation from her depict childhood innocence and the human capacity to feel. Emerson points out that “[i]n the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows” and so it is within nature that man can be himself, emotions correspond with nature and one is free to express himself as he desires. Domesticity, emotions, and finally individualism wrap up the two texts as typical Romanticism. Ellen’s home becomes a man-made isolation from the public life, while Emerson starts of Nature emphasizing the importance of man going into solitude from his chamber and from society.

Nature and the domestic in the previous stories are challenged by the gothic horror of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and the African American slave narrative of Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Darkness, insanity, cruelty, and friendship paint these stories and the stories resist being read through the lens of a layman’s stereotypical understanding of Romanticism. Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher forces the reader to appreciate Romanticism in a different context. The light and dark, supernatural, lack of reality, overwhelming emotions, and correspondence help one to read the gothic genre as a style within the Romantic literary movement. Green trees, lush gardens, and bright morning skies are unlikely to be seen in The Fall of the House of Usher, but what makes it Romantic are not those elements the narrative lacks, but the different way the same conventions are implemented within the narrative. For example, in her aunt’s small country home, Ellen, from The Wide, Wide World, finds herself at one with the “bracing atmosphere” which had “restored strength and spirits; and the bright morning light made it impossible to be dull or downhearted” (10.4). In contrast, the decaying House of Usher corresponds with the decaying inhabitants that live within it. Having both styles of writing allows the reader to see how the same convention could be used in various ways, and this was not apparent to me until I had seen these varying texts within the same literary movement.

I must digress to note that I remember Romanticism being taught as a genre instead of a literary movement, in which various genres and styles develop and evolve. By reading Romanticism as a genre, I was limiting my perception of it and what it encompassed. By studying it as a literary movement, I can see the various genres that fall into the movement and how they evolve until we are left with touches of Romanticism in the realm of Realism.

Going back to the stories that challenged my view of Romanticism, I would never categorize slave narratives as Romantic, but the conventions of Romanticism are absolutely present in the narratives. In Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the brutality, injustice, and oppression of the black slaves still finds Romanticism filtering through the dark windows with conventions of the innocent child, domesticity, female bonding, and hints of the stars glistening in the dark sky, attempting to bring some form of repose in such harsh times. It is within the moments of excruciatingly realistic realizations that the reader glimpses the nostalgia of a time before she knew she was a slave and her innocence throughout the beginning of the text. When discovering her beloved mistress decrees in her will that Harriet be sold, she reminds herself that “as a child, [she] loved [her] mistress...she taught [her] to read and spell; and for this privilege, which so rarely falls to the lot of slaves, [she] bless[ed] her memory” (1.13). Here Jacob takes the cruelty of the world and romanticizes it in order to genuinely forgive a wrong committed towards her. Facing a real threat to being unable to marry the man she loves, Harriet calls up the Romantic code of honor next to her most dishonorable master, saying it was “right and honorable for” her and the free colored man “to love each other” (7.16). This “love-dream” between the two supported her through her many trials, and it is these glimpses of honor, love, and loyalty that shine amongst the dark reality of the slaves.

Studying Romanticism in a literary-historical survey style exposes readers to various styles of writing within the movement and the evolution of one movement to another, such as Romanticism into Realism. “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner is one of the texts categorized under Modernist Romanticism that particularly appealed to me because the evolution between the two literary periods can be seen within the text. This short story is dark and deeply disturbing, yet, still mesmerizes the reader with its simultaneous Realistic details and Romantic ideals. The last passage in the story serves as a perfect example of the two writing styles coming together. The mysterious locked up room is described as “decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and man’s toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured”; descriptions conveying beauty and decay (5.4; emphasis added). With descriptive detail the narrator paints the “profound and fleshless grin,” his body “rotted beneath what was left of a nightshirt” (5.6). Yet in the horror of it all comes the desire and the deep-seated emotions that drove Emily to sleep with her poisoned lover for approximately forty years. The realistic details and aspects of the story combined with the sense of deep, yet twisted, love brings about the evolution of Romanticism. There is an overwhelming amount of realistic descriptions in the text and other Modernist Romanticism texts, however, the reader can see Romantic conventions still touching up parts of the story.

I always considered Romanticism as a broad genre encompassing various sub-genres; however, through the course of this semester I have learned that Romanticism is a literary movement that encompasses various styles and genres of writing. Reading various texts from early American, Gothic, Transcendental, local color and Modernist Romanticism, even poems that were not written within the time period, have shown me that Romanticism is not a literary movement encapsulated within a certain time and place but ever present in texts today.