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1. Long Essay 1a. Describe and focus backgrounds, learning, challenges . . . |
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Jessica Myers
10/12/2016
American Nationalism in the American Renaissance
During the nineteenth century, literature circulated across the Atlantic between
America, England, and the European continent. As European Romantic authors began
publishing, American authors borrowed from their style and attempted to add
their own national elements to create more distinct “American” pieces. Although
these authors lacked the deep historical roots of Europe, American Romantics
still captured the melancholy tone and dark gothic elements. However, American
authors sought to further distinguish their writing from the European Romantic
pieces. American Renaissance literature sets itself apart from European Romantic
literature by creating nationalistic ties to a budding American culture through
the authors’ use of setting and character types.
Renaissance authors utilize America’s untamed wilderness to incorporate elements
of the gothic. The lack of civilization, the unsettled land, and the raw
resources yet to be discovered lend themselves as a canvas to paint their
Romantic tales. This space is secluded and cut off from the “motherland.” Small
towns such as Washington Irving’s fictional Sleepy Hollow are “sequestered” and
full of a “drowsy, dreamy influence” (3). Sleepy Hollow is isolated from an
industrial city life, and the town promotes a quiet life of farm work and
leisure. The environment itself functions as an opiate on the townspeople living
there. These sheltered towns had a lack of information or news since it must
travel from the “motherland.” Their seclusion and close proximity to forests and
woods breeds a fear of the supernatural. For example, in Sleepy Hollow, there is
“an enormous tulip-tree” whose “limbs were gnarled and fantastic” (56). The
townspeople “regarded it with a mixture of fear and superstition, partly out of
sympathy for the fate of its ill-starred namesake, and partly from the tales of
strange sights, and doleful lamentations, told concerning it” (56). The
superstitious whispers surrounding the origins of the tree generate a fear of
the supernatural which is associated with the woods. The forest’s association
with the supernatural embellishes the gothic atmosphere surrounding it because
the woods are untamed and full of unknown dangers. The overgrown wilderness, the
open frontier, and the small villages promote an opposition to the
industrialization movement in Europe where people are moving away from villages
to big cities. America’s connection to the vast wilderness that its people
inhabit builds the foundation for the nationalistic atmosphere developing in
American Renaissance literature.
However, Edgar Allan Poe complicates the use of the American wilderness
or a secluded town by continuing to use the traditional gothic settings of the
European Romance. Although American, Poe sets his pieces in places such as
abbeys, large haunting mansions, schools, and Rome’s Carnival. In “Ligeia,” the
narrator purchases an abbey in “in one of the wildest and least frequented
portions of fair England” (14). Roderick Usher lives in a mansion where “there
appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaption of parts,
and the crumbling condition of the individual stones” (6). There are multiple
settings in “William Wilson,” including the boarding school the narrator
attends. The school is described as “quaint” and “a place of enchantment,” yet
“[t]here was no end to its windings – to its incomprehensible subdivisions. It
was difficult at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two
stories one happened to be” (9). Later in the piece, the narrator ends up in
“Rome, during the Carnival of 18–,” where he attends “a masquerade in the
palazzo of the Neapolitan Duke Di Broglio” (49). Poe’s use of traditional gothic
settings challenges nationalistic tendencies. However, each of these settings
drips with every dark crevice and gothic embellishment he could include, which
gives his pieces an almost mocking undertone. These conventional settings
establish a familiar backdrop which then provide a space for Poe’s unique
pursuit of the human psyche.
Poe’s
understanding and exploration of the human brain, conscience, and psyche
establishes him as a pioneer of a budding genre. His singular ability to take
the traditional elements of the gothic and delve into a preliminary
understanding of psychology and psychosis sets him apart as an American author.
The sanity of his character’s is constantly being called into question. For
instance, as the narrator in “Ligeia” “shrieked aloud, … ‘these are the full,
and the black, and the wild eyes – of my lost love – of the lady – of the LADY
LIGEIA,’” the reader asks themselves whether Ligeia is real or a ghost (27). The
ambiguity is effective because it produces tension between a supernatural
occurrence and a hallucination. Poe also probes the deterioration of an
unhealthy mind in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” At the end, Roderick Usher
exclaims, “We have put her living in the
tomb! … I now tell you that I
heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them – many, many
days ago – yet I dared not – I dared not
speak!” (42). The question of whether or not Usher buried his sister alive
challenges his sanity as well as the narrator’s since he helped bury her.
Lastly, Poe examines the human conscience by splitting a soul into good and evil
through the use of a doppelganger figure. The narrator in “William Wilson” faces
Wilson and sees that he is “in the most absolute identity, [his] own” (55). By
killing his doppelganger, the narrator in essence splits himself and kills his
own conscience. The narrator effectually destroys the best in himself because
“he” was a nuisance and hindered him from exploiting others. Poe’s pursuit of
these topics establishes him within the American Renaissance because he is the
first to delve into these dark spaces of the human brain, conscience, and
subconscious.
In contrast to Poe, Hawthorne grounds his narratives firmly on American
soil by setting his pieces in historic towns, such as Salem, and incorporating
his characters into the Puritan belief system. Hawthorne’s choice of setting and
character type builds nationalism by forging a connection to the original
settlers of Plymouth and their reason for coming to America: religious freedom.
Hawthorne’s short story, “Young Goodman Brown,” is set in Salem. Near the end,
Goodman Brown witnesses both “grave, reputable, and pious people” consorting
with “men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame” (56). Mixed among the
group of Puritans are “Indian priests, or powwows, who had often scared their
native forest with more hideous incantations than any known to English
witchcraft” (56). Both sets of people are unique to America since Americans can
claim ties to the early Puritan settlers as well as hostility towards Native
Americans. By having this diverse group of people associating with one another,
Hawthorne transforms the Puritan’s hypocrisy into an element of the gothic.
Hawthorne furthers the tie to American nationalism by connecting the Puritan
beliefs of God and the Devil to the supernatural and gothic. Hawthorne links the
common figure of an American pastor with the horror of the gothic through the
use of a black veil in his short story, “The Minister’s Black Veil.” The Puritan
minister “became a man of awful power over souls that were in agony for sin. His
converts always regarded him with a dread peculiar to themselves, affirming,
though but figuratively, that before he brought them to celestial light, they
had been with him behind the black veil” (54). The veil gives the minister a
supernatural connection with sinners so that they repent and become true
believers. Ultimately, Hawthorne gives traditional gothic elements an American
twist by characterizing Puritans as gothic figures and adding horror to Puritan
hypocrisy.
Another American author, James Fenimore Cooper, transforms the demeaning
depiction of the “savage” Native American to either a noble savage or a Byronic
hero. For most of his tale, Cooper depicts the Native Americans as savages. For
example, one of them “dash[es]
the head of [an] infant against a rock” and then “mercifully
[drives a] tomahawk into [the mother’s] own brain” (17.9). However, for the
Mohican, Uncas, he uses the character type of the “noble savage” that has
previously been applied to Africans, such as Oroonoko. Cooper depicts
Uncas as an “unblemished specimen of the noblest proportions of man”
(6.4). Cooper combines the aspects of a Native American and a Greek god by using
descriptors such as, “dark,” “fearless,” and “terrible,” yet “haughty,”
“dignified,” and “noble” (6.4). This terminology uplifts Uncas so that he will
not be associated with other “savages” but be considered as a distinct and noble
branch of the Native American race. By bringing these characteristics to a
uniquely American subject, Cooper expands the parameters for the “noble savage.”
Cooper also incorporates the elements of a Byronic hero into his
characterization of Magua. Magua is described as being “swarthy”
and “attentive” (11.9). While resting in the woods with his captives, an
expression of joy crosses his face that “became
so fiercely malignant that it was impossible not to apprehend it proceeded from
some passion more sinister than avarice” (11.9). Magua is not categorized as a
savage, but a worthy advisory who is cunning and astute. Although Magua is the
antagonist, his reasons for hating the white settlers are justified. He shows
his “‘scars
given by
knives and bullets” which “a warrior may boast before his nation” and then the
“marks” left on his back “that he must hide like a squaw, under this painted
cloth of the whites’” (11.30). His desire for revenge is fueled by his cruel
treatment while he was a prisoner. He does not merely have a thirst for
bloodshed like his savage peers; he has a “noble” purpose for pursing justice to
right wrongs done to him in the past. Cooper “Americanizes” the Byronic hero by
bringing these traits to a character who can only exist in the American forests.
Besides the Byronic hero, American Renaissance authors expanded the caricature
of the “rugged individual” who survives on bare minimum necessities. This
character of a frontiersman is first seen in Cooper’s
The Last of the Mohicans. Hawkeye has
no family ties and survives off the land as he travels with his Delaware
comrades.
He
constantly reminds his audience that he is “no Indian [himself], but a man
without a cross” (13.8). He prides himself on his pure bloodlines, but also on
his ability to survive in the wilderness and learn the customs of the Delaware
people. Hawkeye is not trying to conquer or control the Delaware people but
learn from them. Hawkeye’s character type can be paralleled with Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s eulogy of Henry David Thoreau, “Thoreau.” Emerson praises Thoreau by
claiming that “[n]o
truer American existed” (14). He is proud of Thoreau’s “preference [for] his
country” and “genuine[ness]” as well as his contempt and “aversion [to] English
and European manners and tastes” (14). What makes Thoreau most similar to
Hawkeye is his nomadic lifestyle and voluntary simplicity. He describes Thoreau
as “rich by making his wants few, and supplying them himself” (9). Emerson
describes how “[i]t was a pleasure and privilege to walk with him” because “[h]e
knew the country like a fox or bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of
his own” (23). These character types commune with nature and emphasize the
importance of the individual through their nomadic lifestyle. Their simplicity
and self-sufficiency were made possible by the extensive unsettled lands of the
American frontier.
The
unique characters and settings of America provide a space for authors to
generate nationalistic ties which set American Renaissance pieces apart from
other Romantic literature. Part of the Romantic genre was to discover the ties
that bound a nation together as a people. Many authors found these ties through
the roots of folklore and fairy tales specific to their nation. Since Americans
were mostly immigrants from other nations, they didn’t have folktales or fairy
tales that marked them as uniquely “American.” However, American authors created
this for them, starting with Washington Irving who took Dutch fairy tales and
wove pieces of American culture into them. Other authors did the same by looking
to the foreboding woods or spacious frontier and manipulating caricatures from
other cultures to develop the genre into something uniquely “American.”
