Caryn Livingston

Adapting the Romantic: Individualism in a Modernist World

The transition into Realism from Romanticism during the course produced a distinct impression of difference, as the sentimental pre-Civil War Uncle Tom’s Cabin with its generalized settings and clear heroes and villains gave way to Henry James’s Daisy Miller and its more complex subjects and detailed social interactions. Moving further into the course, Modernism introduced more fragmented narratives than were found in the romance narratives earlier in the course, as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” featured a protagonist who longed for a woman that served more as an allegory for what he desired for his American Dream than an actual character, especially compared with Romantic era heroines like Cora in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. However, even as new elements are introduced in American writers’ exploration of a national identity, elements of Romanticism remain and are frequently expressed in both a continued belief in American heroic individualism and in the ways gothic elements are adapted into Realism and Modernism to continue expressing American fears.

As an offshoot of Realism, the local color movement is much more detailed in its setting and descriptions, and depicts detailed examples of local dialects that set the narrative within a very specific place and time. An example of this in our course was Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron,” in the speech of the character Mrs. Tilley, who when telling the young ornithologist about her granddaughter Sylvia says “There ain't a foot o' ground she don't know her way over, and the wild creatur's counts her one o' themselves.” In this very realistic depiction of more rural humanity, however, local color retains many of the values of Romanticism. The humanity of the rural characters is idealized in the way Sylvia keeps the heron’s secret from the city man who would kill it in his attempt to understand it—an echo of the heroic individualism prevalent in Romanticism.

The gothic element also remains in local color, but has altered from the gothic fear of the woods depicted by Hawthorne and Cooper during the Romantic era. In Jewett’s story, the gothic emerges as Sylvia is walking through the woods and remembers “the great red-faced boy who used to chase and frighten her” when she lived in the city. This hurries her along her path, but she is at her most fearful not merely when walking through the woods, but when she then hears the ornithologist’s whistle in the woods and it brings to mind the fears she felt in the city and thought she had escaped with her move to rural life.

Thomas Wolfe’s “The Lost Boy” was part of the class transition into Modernism, as the narrative becomes more fragmented in its narration and is removed from time with the different parts of the story about Grover depicting his life as a remembrance by his family. The story is heavily influenced by Modernist concepts and the focus on how what was lost by the family in the death of Grover cannot be regained even by attempting to revisit the past. The Romantic elements adapted by the story serve primarily to illustrate the changes in the world, as Grover, described by his mother as “the best one of the lot” of her children, and the one who is depicted as having the best understanding and best moral sense, dies early and tragically. The heroic individual, or the one who is the best among the other characters, is too pure for the world of Modernism, which is a more primitive and less idealized place than the world of Romanticism.

This alteration of Romanticism continues in the way “The Lost Boy” adapts the gothic elements into a Modernist depiction, as the overwhelming loss of Grover haunts the rest of the members of the family throughout their lives. In the sister’s portion of the story, the speaker says, “Sometimes I lie awake at night and think of all the people who have come and gone, and how everything is different from the way we thought that it would be. Then I go out on the street next day and see the faces of the people that I pass. . . . Don't they look strange to you? Don't you see something funny in people's eyes, as if all of them were puzzled about something?” The day-to-day world becomes gothic through internal reflection on life and death and the losses of the past, and the gothic becomes directly psychological as opposed to Romanticism’s representation of psychological fear through the supernatural or more concrete manifestations of gothic fears.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams,” another Modernist short story, features its protagonist Dexter. Dexter in many ways embodies the American dream of the heroic individual, even as he ultimately loses the idea that symbolized the American dream for him. As an upwardly mobile young man with a middle-class background, Dexter is recognized as the sort of “common man” typical in American Romanticism who is a superior person morally and often intellectually and physically because he is a product of his less elite background. As Fitzgerald writes of Dexter’s understanding of his place within the upper class society he is beginning to orbit, “He had seen that, in one sense, he was better than these men. He was newer and stronger.” However, the awareness of class differences common to Modernism also emerges in the story: “Yet in acknowledging to himself that he wished his children to be like them he was admitting that he was but the rough, strong stuff from which they eternally sprang.” In this way, the heroic individual of Romanticism is altered by Modernism to indicate that the inevitable outcome to those superior individuals pursuing their destinies is the continued renewal of the existing upper class with the next generation.

Modernism does not always adapt the heroic individual of Romanticism into a negative figure, however. In writing from the Harlem Renaissance, Black writers redefine American Romanticism and depict the struggle of the African-American in a way that recalls the struggle of the heroic individual in society. This theme is both prevalent and explicit in Langston Hughes’s poetry, including in his poem “I Too Sing America.” In the poem, the speaker calls himself “the darker brother” of America, adapting the gothic color code as he acknowledges that the darker brother’s kinship to white America is unacknowledged. Rather than accept the gothic implications of this, though, Hughes redefines the role of the dark twin by throwing off bitterness over his treatment: “But I laugh, / And eat well, / And grow strong.” The speaker states his confidence that in the future, he will be acknowledged as part of America through his intrinsic worth, and even if his confidence within the poem seems tongue-in-cheek, his estimation of his value is honest. The deliberate echoes of Walt Whitman in the poem similarly hearken back to Romanticism, as Whitman wrote “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” and Hughes reasserts himself as a successive American literary hero.