Umaymah Shahid

07 December 2016

The Romance Narrative and its Shift Through Time

A Romance narrative is typically thought to be a story about two lovers who have a happily-ever-after ending. Although such a plot line might be encompassed within the romance narrative, it is much more complex than that. One of the most important features of a romance narrative is its feature of “a hero’s or heroine’s journey or quest through tests and trials (often involving a villain or antagonist) in order to reach a transcendental goal, whether love, salvation (or rescue), or justice (usually revenge)” (White). Every text, however, deals with the romance narrative in a different way, due to a number of factors such as the subject matter, the author’s race or background, and, most importantly, the genre within the Romantic movement the text was composed. As the movement gives way to realism, the romance narrative becomes more and more abstract where it becomes difficult to distinguish the same attributes that were obvious in the earlier Romantic texts. Romance narratives reward the audience with familiar, even if not exactly the same, attributes, yet the narratives complicate the features by making them almost allusive. Thus a student can quite easily identify features of romance narratives in one text but find it challenging to spot them in another text, due to the many ways they can be manipulated and morphed to fulfill the author’s style. James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron” and William Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” are categorized under different genres and writing styles within the Romantic literary movement, yet each play with the same three prominent features of the romance narrative: separation and quest in their plot and story-line, transcendence in their conclusions, and good guy-bad guy characterization.

  Cora and Alice, Ruth, Sylvia, and Dexter face separation within their stories, but these texts begin with a concrete separation and move towards more abstract forms; Cora and Alice are physically taken from their father; Ruth is rejected from her literal and symbolic home; Sylvia is separated from nature by losing site of the heron; Dexter grapples with the loss of someone who symbolizes wealth, status, and prestige. On the course website, The Last of the Mohicans is categorized as an early Romantic fiction, and the features of the romance narrative are more concrete. By kidnapping Colonel Munro’s daughters, Cora and Alice, Magua hopes, at first, to get revenge for being publicly whipped on the order of the Colonel. By keeping hostage “the spirit of the gray-head in his hands” (11.38), Magua knows he has forced a separation between the family. This separation of daughters from their father is a tangible depiction of the separation attribute and can be easily identified. Although Ruth in Uncle Tom’s Cabin also face a physical separation, she is not forced through kidnapping, but through social circumstances. Eliza’s escape is outlined in much detail and the reader senses her conflict between the separation from her son or the physical separation of “the only home she had ever known, and cutting loose from the protection of a friend whom she loved and revered” (7.2). As she runs away from the home she separates herself from “every familiar object, —the place where she had grown up, the trees under which she had played, the groves where she had walked many an evening in happier days,” (7.2) but a more powerful force, her maternal love, overcomes the fear of separation from her home. What distinguishes Eliza’s separation from Cora and Alice’s is the emphasis in the text on the meaning everything she was leaving behind carried. In The Last of the Mohicans it is implied that Cora and Alice being separated from their father is tragic because they do not have their father figure as safety against a violent world; Eliza’s separation from the only place she knows as home and all of the meaning attached to the place and the people is specifically described and pointed out by the author. Thus Cora and Alice have simply been separated from their father, while Eliza is separated from the only place she knows and every memory that she holds there. What is similar about the separation both texts deal with is the separation of the female character(s) from their zone of comfort into the unknown, left to the mercy of strangers.

Sylvia and Dexter face a complex form of separation within their respective texts; they separate from a physical object but the object is also symbolic of some internal desire, which means that both characters are separated from a part of themselves. Sylvia is at one with nature, always “straying about out-of-doors,” never feeling “alive at all before she came to live at the farm” (2). She walks the cow, watches the birds, and seldom speaks. When faced with disclosing the heron’s location to the young ornithologist for some money, Sylvia faces the threat of separation with nature as “no amount of thought…could decide how many wished-for treasures the ten dollars” the young man promises “would buy” (25). Although the desire for money is tempting, Sylvia separates herself from wealth instead of her oneness with nature. Unlike Cora, Alice, and Ruth, Sylvia is not physically being separated from any person or home, but is being separated from a more abstract concept. Similarly, Dexter strives for wealth and prestige and finds himself repeatedly separating and meeting Judy Jones who becomes an object to possess in order to regard himself as the wealthy man he sees himself to be. He wears suits made by “the best tailors in America” (3.2) and tells Judy, quite frankly, that he was “probably making more money than any man [his] age in the Northwest” (3.18). Judy becomes a fantasy he chases to confirm his outer image and being separated from her means the loss of something more than a lover but an abstract idea. “The White Heron “ and “Winter Dreams” reaffirm that as writing moves towards Realism or Modern Romanticism, the concept of separation becomes more abstract and, so, harder to identify.

The second important attribute all four texts share is the characters’ quest and their conclusion as transcendence. In The Last of the Mohicans, Cora and Alice’s quest is straightforward: return to their father. The central quest of the story, aside from the smaller, individual quests, is to bring the girls back to their father. The story concludes as transcendence through the death of Uncas and Cora who are reunited with their families, but are also reunited with each other in death. Additionally, not only are Cora and Uncas reunited in death, but the gulf created as a result of the spiritual separation of Uncas from the world simultaneously creates a closer bond between Chingachgook and Hawkeye. As the warriors stand at Uncas’ grave and grasp each other’s hands and “in an attitude of friendship these two sturdy and intrepid woodsmen” bow “their heads together, while scalding tears [fall] to their feet, watering the grave of Uncas like drops of falling rain” (33.46). In this beautiful scene human sorrow and separation transcend color and ethnic boundaries creating a united force. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ruth’s overall quest is straightforward as well: cross the river, with her son, to the free land. Facing obstacles on her way, Ruth jumps into the river, “stumbling—leaping—slipping—springing upwards again…blood mark[ing] every step” and out of nowhere on the Ohio side, “a man help[s] her up the bank” (7.109). One aspect of the quest and conclusion in romance narratives is the transcendent goal being salvation or rescue. Ruth’s quest ends with two rescues: the man on the Ohio side rescuing her from the slave trader, and finding relief in old John Van Trompe’s shelter for herself and her child from slave-catchers. She overcomes the quest for safety with the help of men and women who value human life even when it opposes social and political norms.

As with separation, Sylvia and Dexter express a more abstract, almost Romantic, sense of quest and transcendence. Sylvia’s quest is to find the heron’s nest, although she is unsure whether to tell the young man where it is. Her quest leads her to the top of an old pine tree, “the last of its generation” (28) where she could see a “vast and awesome world” with an ocean, sailboats, church steeples, clouds, and birds (34). Nature and Sylvia become one as she becomes a tiny creature in a world that extends past where her eyes can see. Jewett beautiful illustrates the heron coming close to Sylvia where she could see it go “by the landmark pine with steady sweep of wing and outstretched slender neck and crested head” while it “cries back to his mate on the nest, and plumes his feathers for the new day” (35). The entire scene of climbing the pine tree and finding the heron is part of Sylvia’s quest but her transcendent conclusion does not come when she sees the heron; instead it is when she decides, after all the money offered to her, that she must keep silent and not “tell the heron’s secret and give its life away” because “[t]he murmur of the pine’s green branches is in her ears, she remembers how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and morning together” (40). The salvation of the heron’s life and the personal responsibility she feels towards the bird and nature at large allow her to transcend money and personal gain for the sanctity of life in nature.  Dexter’s quest throughout the text is quite complex but to put it in a few words, he desires all that makes him wealthy, successful, and well-liked. Judy Jones becomes a part of Dexter’s dreams and quest, and when she is forever gone, separated from him by marriage, Dexter’s conclusion results in a transcendence from his inability to see how pathetic his existence was, to seeing his existence as it stood: pathetic. The loss of that which he most desired and sought after led to his transcending the outer image to a self-realization. When he discovers he can no longer have Judy Jones, in whatever capacity it might be, tears stream down his face, “[b]ut they were for himself now” because the illusion he lived in was gone till he could no longer properly grieve, care, or return. The “something” that existed in him long ago, perhaps a genuine part of himself, was gone and would “come back no more” (6.35-.36). Fitzgerald leaves the reader grappling to make sense of this ending, not able to fully comprehend the chasm within Dexter and how he himself comes to terms with it. In his final exam (2015), Gregory Buchanan points out “the length of [Dexter’s] desire for a relationship with Judy reflects on his own character, particularly his unfulfilling view of life” (paragraph 5). Thus, Dexter’s transcendence is much more complicated than Cora’s or Ruth’s, as it does not necessitate a conclusion but leaves the reader with the question of what Dexter does moving forward.

The final attribute all three texts embody is the good guy-bad guy characterization, which begins as a definite difference between the good and bad, but the closer to Realism Romanticism gets the less definite the terms good and bad becomes. In The Last of the Mohicans there is a clear distinction between the good guys and the bad guys; good guys are on Colonel Munro’s side—Uncas, Hawkeye, Alice, Cora, Chingachgook, Duncan, etc. The bad guys are on Magua’s side—the Iroquois-Huron-Mingo Indians.  In Uncle Tom’s Cabin there is some complexity to this attribute. Not all white men and women are bad and not all slaves are good. The good and bad in this story are not individualistic but the force of social customs sometimes decides upon what makes someone good or bad. Aside from Haley the slave-trader, the white slave holders treat their slaves with generosity and compassion. When Mr. and Mrs. Shelby agree to sell Ruth’s child and Uncle Tom, it is not due to some inherent evil, but the social bind they are in forces them to make such a decision, and as Mr. Shelby tells Tom, “[I]f I was able to help it, all the world shouldn’t buy you” and he repeatedly reminds the trader to sell Tom to a good person (7.63). This shift in good guy-bad guy characterization also demonstrates the attitude of the author towards those being written about. Cooper, a European-American, stereotypically portrays the Indians—not all of them—as savages, whereas Stowe tries to encourage sympathy towards white slave holders instead of painting them with the same brush stroke: evil, cruel, and condescending.

In both “A White Heron” and “Winter Dreams,” good and bad become less clearly identifiable and more mixed within each individual. The texts represent more realistic depictions of the good guy-bad guy convention by portraying an individual as neither all good nor all bad but a mixture of the two. Sylvia is neither good nor bad and neither is the young man. Dexter and Judy are neither good nor bad as a whole but represent parts of both. As the literary movement moves towards Modernist Romanticism, such an attribute becomes highly complex and the characters resist being labeled either good or bad but embody some of both for more depth and complexity.

Of the various attributes that make up the romance narrative, the three most visible in the texts read throughout the semester were separation, quest and transcendence in conclusions, and good guy-bad guy characterization. Viewing these three attributes in light of novels from different periods in the Romantic literary timeline allows the reader to see how various authors manipulated the attributes to fit their writing style or the predominant style of the time. One conclusion that can be drawn from these texts is that the romance narrative attributes became more and more abstract the closer the movement heads towards Realism. Romance narrative attributes were easily distinguished in earlier texts where as they became harder to identify as texts came closer to the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. This evolution is a reflection of man’s existence—good and bad people, separation, quests, and conclusions are not as easily distinguished in real life.