Peter Becnel

Containing the Romantic Impulse

          It is impossible to read Realist and Modern literature without accounting for the influence of the Romantic period, as it resonates throughout both of these subsequent literary periods each of these periods is established in reaction to the Romanticism. While the Romantic remains present in Realism and Modernism, it is no longer treated as the stuff of reality—the content of the story that should be believed—and is instead relegated to the subjectivity of individual perception. Characters can perceive events and people as Romantic, but characters who mistakenly assume that these Romantic fictions are reality do so at their own peril. In this way, in both Realism and Modernism, the Romantic is contained, but it no longer controls or drives the narrative.

          Writing about Daisy Miller, Jonathon Anderson indicates that Henry James “seems to suggest Romantic points of reference throughout the story, as with the Castle of Chillon episode and the climactic evening at the Colliseum, both of which find Winterbourne thinking of Byron.” In essence, my claim is a more extreme version of his; Romanticism provides “points of reference” for both Realism and Modernism, that, in Realism, provide the reader with what should be taken as “real,” and in modernism, what should be taken as new. Looking at the Castle of Chillon scene, the reader can perceive the manner in which Realism begins to contain Romanticism through the subjectivity of experience. Anticipating the trip, Wilbourne is described as “a man of of imagination and, as our ancestors used to say, sensibility; as he looked at her dress and, on the great staircase, her little rapid, confiding step, he felt as if there were something romantic going forward. He could have believed he was going to elope with her” (emphasis added).   Here, a typical feature of the Romantic, the imagination is treated as influencing Winterbourne’s perception of the event. The event itself is decidedly realistic, but Winterbourne is capable of perceiving it as “so much of an escapade—an adventure—that, even allowing for her habitual sense of freedom, he had some expectation of seeing her regard it in the same way. It must be confessed that, in this particular moment, he was disappointed.” Though Winterbourne romanticizes the event and his perception of Daisy, Daisy declines to share in the Romantic delusion. Instead, Winterbourne projects a romanticized version of the event onto Daisy, and then is inspired through his romantic “imagination” to envision of Romanticized version of the remainder of the story. The inclusion of typical romantic symbols, like the castle, enhance Winterbourne’s subjective perception, which the reader is able to discern as a Romantic projection of the event.

          Daisy Miller does not present a story in which the narrator and the heroine run off together and the romance narrative reaches completion. Instead, at the moment when Winterbourne discovers that Daisy was “not engaged,” and a typical romance narrative appears to be nearing completion, he discovers “the poor girl died; it had been a terrible case of fever” (James). Worse, because he has romanticized Daisy Miller, Winterbourne never actually knows her. The troubling possibilities of objective reality kill the heroine before she is adequately portrayed by the narrator, and as a result, the story itself.

          Similarly, Dexter, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Winter Dreams recalls, not the loss of the woman Judy Jones, but his loss of the Romanticized image of his time with the woman Judy Jones. When Dexter discovers that Judy Jones is married, and has “faded,” “he pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes and tried to bring up a picture of the waters lapping on Sherry island and the moonlit veranda, and gingham on the golf-links and the dry sun and the gold color of her neck’s soft down. And her mouth dam to his kisses and her eyes plaintive with melancholy and her freshness like new fine linen in the morning. Why, these things were no longer in the world! They had existed and existed and they existed no longer.”

           When Modernism’s propensity for “fragmenting reality through internalized or interior perception,” is taken into account, Dexter’s “push[ing] the palms of his hands into his eyes and [trying] to bring up a picture” takes on a new significance. In Daisy Miller, a realist text, in which “the many conflicts and complications inherent in everyday reality” lead to the literal death of Daisy Miller, she is lost to Wilbourne due to the interjection of the reality of the exterior world (White). His romanticized image of Daisy is subsequently destroyed by the real. However, Judy lives at the end of Winter Dreams. Instead, Dexter is left to grapple with the destruction of his romanticized dream of Judy, which he has difficulty maintaining following the rejection of his exalted ideal. Like Daisy Miller, the end of Winter Dreams is marked by loss, but for Dexter, and indicative of Modernism, it is the loss of the conviction of sense that something ever existed at all.

          The relationship between memory and reality seems to appeal to Modernist sensibilities, as we see another treatment of similar themes in Thomas Wolfe’s The Lost Boy. The structure of the narrative itself, told from a number of perspectives, is preoccupied with rediscovering the lost boy Grover. But instead, it discovers only the loss that is associated with memory. As the narrator remembers his lost brother, after returning to his family home, “it all came back, and faded, and was lost again” (Wolfe). The narrator’s recognition that “he would never come again, and that lost magic would not come again” acknowledges the role of subjective perspective in the formation of memories. This complicates the issue of romanticizing someone through remembrance, and indicates that the Modernist narrator is self-aware enough to recognize that the “magic” cannot be recreated, because it may have never existed in the first place.

          Where Realism seems to contain Romanticism within the world of subjectivity—for example, when Winterbourne romanticizes Daisy—Modernism seems to present a world of subjectivity. In the Daisy Miller, Winterbourne’s ability to romanticize Daisy, and his relationship with her is destroyed by the limits of the objective world, but in Winter Dreams or The Lost Boy, it is not the act of romanticizing a person that is called into question, it is the act of remembering someone at all. Dexter is troubled by the news that Judy is married, that he can no longer elevate her to an exalted position in his mind, just as Wolfe’s narrator realizes that despite the layers of subjectivity he can explore through multiple perspectives, it is impossible to even reclaim the romanticized memory of Grover; that is, "the lost magic would never come again” (Wolfe).

          In Romanticism the romanticized image of a person is taken for the real. In Realism, the romanticized image of a person is exposed as constructed by comparison to the real. Modernism calls “the real” into question. The issues of Modernism seem to remain a preoccupation of contemporary writers as well. Robert Hayden’s poem Those Winter Sundays attempts to remember a father, but recognizes its inability to do so. The poem borrows from familiar gothic images, the “angers of that house,” the “cold splintering, breaking,” while “fires blaze,” it includes objective details that one would expect in Realism such as the speaker’s father’s “cracked hands,” and the speaker’s “polished good shoes,” but the theme of the poem is best identified in the final couplet’s question: “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” (Hayden). The speaker questions his perspective of his father, while recognizing that his subjective experience, while false, is all that he has on which to base his memory. What Those Winter Sundays indicates in terms of genre, is that working authors and poets continue to borrow from the Romantic and Realist periods, even if they still seem to be grappling with the issues of Modernism.