American Literature: Romanticism Student Midterm Submissions 2016 (midterm assignment) 1. Long Essay 1a. Describe and focus backgrounds, learning, challenges . . .

Caryn Livingston

          In an early class meeting we discussed the idea that some of the Romantic texts we were reading functioned as American fairy tales or fables, and that though they were set in New York and New England, we feel a universal ownership of these tales that establish a mythological history of the country. As someone whose literary preferences gravitate toward the biting humor and insights of the Enlightenment and Realism movements, gaining an awareness of how the ideas and fears of the Romantics are embedded in the American national consciousness has helped me appreciate the strengths and understand the weaknesses of Romanticism. As stated in our course objectives, the concurrence of the American Revolution and Romanticism in Europe resulted in the United States and Romanticism forming “ideas of individualism, sentimental nature, rebellion, and equality in parallel.” The heroic individual vaunted by American Romanticism is parodied in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, as the ridiculous figure Ichabod Crane imagines himself selling the Van Tassel homestead in New York and setting off for the Western frontier, but only two decades later Emerson’s Self-Reliance took the earnest view that “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose.” This attitude extends to modern day America, when we still idolize our bold, typically masculine heroic national figures from Ronald Reagan to Steve Jobs—men who society perceived to stand apart from a society that was corrupt or petty and by doing so, accomplished great things—while overlooking how marginalized groups are excluded from this worldview. Understanding the mythic nature of Romantic ideals gives insight into the American desire to mythologize our national heroes, but of course Romanticism also has a darker side that is previewed in the racial and gender issues raised in our texts so far.

          Predating the actual Romantic era of American literature, American writing began to create a national literary and philosophical identity founded in major ideas of Romanticism as soon as it began. Early European settlers in America frequently embodied the role of the individual in nature, either as heroic men meeting the wilderness and besting it through perseverance and Christianity—exemplified by the letters of Christopher Columbus written from 1493-1504 and John Smith’s 1624 writing A General History of Virginia—or by captivity narratives of women as depicted in Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative of the Captivity & Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, written in 1682. The accounts of early America by Columbus and Smith anticipate Romanticism’s preoccupation with heroic individualism as a larger-than-life figure confronts the hostility of nature. In Smith’s writing a dramatic, unrealistic battle scene is depicted wherein Smith accomplishes virtually superhuman feats as he singlehandedly takes on 200 Indians: “two of them he slew, still defending himself with the aid of a savage his guide, whom he bound to his arm with his garters, and used him as a buckler, yet he was shot in his thigh a little, and had many arrows that stuck in his clothes.” Smith emerges from this conflict with no real damage, however, and is only taken prisoner before being adopted into the tribe.

          The captivity narrative depicted by Mary Rowlandson adopts another viewpoint due to the perspective shift from a heroic, masculine figure taking on the American frontier to a feminine figure attempting to bring ideas of European civilization and religion to the new world. Gothic tropes common in Romantic writing appear in this narrative ahead of the Romantic era in America, as the American Indians who capture Rowlandson are described in demonic terms that utilize the gothic color code by contrasting the white European settlers and Christianity with Indians who are “black creatures in the night, which made the place a lively resemblance of hell.” The same imagery and contrast between light-skinned, Christian women and dark-skinned, non-Christian American Indians appears during the Romantic era in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, but its presence earlier in the American consciousness is evidence of the extent to which Romantic ideas were part of the earlier American experience.

          Cooper’s text, as a fictional version of the earlier writings that were at least based in truth, exaggerates both the Romantic concepts of the heroic individual and the gothic as they relate to captivity narratives and the individual in nature. From the heroism of Smith, brave and skilled enough to face battle against 200 Indians, we move to Hawkeye—a woodsman who, like Smith, is “adopted” by Indians through his very close friendship with Chingachgook and Uncas. Mary Rowlandson’s demonic Indians also reappear in Mohicans in the form of the villainous Magua and his Iroquois allies, whose yells when they besiege the heroes sound “as if the demons of hell had possessed themselves of the air about them, and were venting their savage humors in barbarous sounds.” This depiction of the Indians is in contrast to the light aspect in the interplay between light and dark necessary to the gothic, which Cooper depicts through the fair lady of Alice Munro, with her “dazzling complexion, fair golden hair, and bright blue eyes,” and to a lesser extent through her mixed-race sister Cora Munro whose darker complexion, Cooper emphasizes, “was exquisitely regular, and dignified and surpassingly beautiful.” Most importantly, both of the Munro sisters are devoted Christians whose faith is used to draw the sharpest distinction between even mixed-race Cora and her captor Magua, as she faces danger in the novel as an American Christian martyr, saying “that the worst to us can be but death; a tribute that all must pay at the good time of God’s appointment.”

          The idea that Cora’s Christian faith elevates her to a level of holy womanhood approaching that of her sister Alice is appealing in that it seems to offer the promise of racial equality through shared faith, but the final outcome of the novel reveals that both the inspiring and infuriating aspects of American culture are on display in American Romanticism. As the dark lady to Alice’s fair lady, Cora’s racial identity leaves her as an imperfect match either for Duncan, who is drawn to the fair Alice, or for Uncas, who like Hawkeye is “a man without a cross” in his blood. With the threat of a mixed-race relationship hanging over the novel it becomes more expedient to kill those characters whose identities threaten the purity of the respective bloodlines in the novel. The Last of the Mohicans therefore ends with a joint funeral for Cora and Uncas, who as the titular last Mohican was in a similar position to Cora in his inability to marry within his race. The restoration of Mary Rowlandson is impossible for a character like Cora in American Romanticism because anxiety over racial difference in sexual relationships is too powerful. This problem of racial anxiety has—as demonstrated in earlier American literature, through the Romantic era, and into modernity—refused to fade out of America’s identity. Its imperfect resolution in Cooper’s novel is as unsatisfying as so many resolutions in America’s racial history have been.

           The duality of American Romanticism seen in Cooper’s novel, including both beautiful depictions of religious devotion and ugly racial discomfort leading to the deaths of two characters, is also exemplified in the philosophy of Transcendentalism within American Romanticism. In his essay Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson contemplates how one can approach an understanding of nature, which he emphasizes is not through empirical science or a societal view of one’s surroundings. “There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title,” Emerson writes. His description of what is to be gained through a transcendent communion with the natural world is beautiful, poetic in its language, and clearly an attempt at becoming a better person, as he says, “Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes.” However, just as Cooper’s depiction of Indians exemplified past and current racism in America, Emerson’s understanding of Transcendentalism excludes women in its direct address only to a presumably male reader and to its rhetorical consideration, “What is woman?” in his reflection on the ability to see the miraculous in common things.

          Margaret Fuller’s essay The Great Lawsuit attempts to expand a Transcendentalist worldview to include women. Women are as human as men, and Fuller argues that as the opportunity to grow as people and expand the understanding of the universe is a necessity for human survival, Transcendentalism mandates that women be allowed the same opportunity for expansion that men enjoy. When women are denied those opportunities, they resort to less noble pursuits to approximate the same participation in and enjoyment of the world—“For human beings are not so constituted, that they can live without expansion; and if they do not get it one way, must another, or perish.” Fuller’s argument for Transcendentalism that includes women is promising in that it addresses a lack of gender equality that also persists in America and was seen in the helplessness of the women in The Last of the Mohicans. I am hopeful that as we continue the semester and consider African-American contributions to American literature, we will see protests to earlier racist depictions of People of Color just as Fuller’s essay functioned as a protest to the exclusion of women from literary consideration. As we see currently with activist movements like Black Lives Matter, this sort of pushback against exclusion and mistreatment is just as persistent in American life as in American literature, and is perhaps the truest embodiment of the American ideal of resistance that Romantic thinkers like Thoreau advocated.