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1. Long Essay 1a. Describe and focus backgrounds, learning, challenges . . . |
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Brittney Wilson
Romance with a capital ‘R’
Growing up, everyone always hears about romance and instantly thinks Romeo and
Juliet, roses, kissing, and “Until death do us part”. Then college comes and you
start hearing people say “Romance with a capital ‘R’” as though they assume that
means something to everyone by that point. Unfortunately, it truly didn’t mean
anything to me for a while because I spent most of my time in college focusing
on nursing and psychology before deciding to move on to literature. So, when I
heard several students in my Jane Austen course refer to “Romance with a capital
‘R’” I just sat back and shook my head in agreement like that episode of Friends
when Joey buys the ‘V’ encyclopedia in attempt to contribute to conversation but
when they don’t want to talk about volcanoes or the Vietnam War, then he is left
just as comically lost as before. Luckily, I didn’t have to buy the ‘R’
encyclopedia to get caught up on Romance. I just had to turn to some friendly
students who didn’t look at me like I’d asked who the Beatles are.
So,
these friends gave me a basic idea that Romanticism was a movement in music,
art, literature, and intellect in Europe during the end of the 18th
century and continued through the middle of the 19th century. They
further explained that it was a push away from the classical and towards the
more emotional side of things as well as individualism, nature, and the past—the
focus was more medieval which contrasted with the more Classical ideals. Closing
on this more technical snack of information, I was given a vague idea of what
books would constitute as Romantic and then given a few examples of books I was
personally familiar with like Jane Austen’s
Northanger Abbey and Bronte’s
Jane Eyre. These two examples were
given to me with the basic idea that they both had elements of the gothic with
their settings in shadowy castles with secret doors and creepy woods surrounding
the homes. Thus far, I have the basic understanding that there are elements of
an individual in nature or some gothic setting on some sort of emotional quest.
This is all I had coming into Dr. White’s course this semester.
Knowing that there was a difference between romance and Romance gave me enough
information to know that I would most likely enjoy Dr. White’s course because it
contained authors I had always enjoyed reading but never knew were contained in
this period of time or this artistic movement or genre. We would be reading
Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, and Emily Dickinson as well as several
authors that I had previously seen in other literature courses like Jonathan
Edwards, Nathanial Hawthorne, and James Fenimore Cooper. These, I knew I could
enjoy much more than anything romantic in the more contemporary use of the term.
There was enough lower-case ‘romance’ in Jane Austen’s works for me as well, and
I would not have cared to partake in reading more about lusty hearts and pining
over a love unrequited.
Onward into the darkness! Dr. White opened up a much more in-depth dialogue
about the specific elements of Romanticism and how it came to be. For instance,
with the Enlightenment came the rise of social status, stability, wealth, and
increased lifespans which further enabled individuals to more deeply imagine and
idealize ideas and values like individualism, love, nature, the past, childhood,
and family. And though the Romantic period has long passed, the style and genre
is still thriving with certain elements of writing. Using the gothic as a sort
of nightmare alternative world with deep psychological undertones is just one
value still devoted to the practice of writing in the style of the Romantic
Period. Others include but are not limited to: Feelings and emotions taking
precedence over logic and reason; the belief of a child’s innocence and the
gaining of experience through age which can darken the spirit (as in William
Blake’s Songs of Innocence &
Songs of Experience); heroic
individualism; idealized people and settings; and nature as representative of
what is true and beautiful.
Last
of the Mohicans
by
James Fenimore Cooper exhibited several if not all of these qualities. It showed
aspects of the American gothic set in nature instead of a shadowy castle in
Europe which also played into it as a wilderness narrative and a captivity
narrative once you get to Cora and Alice being taken prisoner by the Hurons
which furthermore made it reflective of another captivity narrative of Mary
Rowlandson’s. Then there was definitely a heroic individual in the form of
Hawkeye who ultimately is thrown into a quest for revenge and love to find the
prisoners, one of whom is a woman he loves. So, even just with this one reading
we were able to better visualize many of these qualities of Romanticism that Dr.
White had spread out on the table for us as being models of Romance.
But
wait—there are more! Another piece we went over which portrayed many of these
qualities—with the gothic being the overarching one of them—was Edgar Allan
Poe’s Ligeia. And unlike many of my
peers, I did not have much background reading Poe other than
Annabel Lee, The System of Doctor
Tarr & Professor Fether, and the obligatory high school reading of
The Raven. So Ligeia was new to me
and I didn’t have a large grasp on Poe’s style of writing or any knowledge of it
being categorized as Romantic until this course. But it ended up being one of
the eeriest pieces I had ever read considering that it was abounding with the
gothic and the sublime. He framed Ligeia as a character that transcended this
world in her beauty and intelligence and at the same time had an air of danger
and terror—alive as well as posthumously. Though the gothic in this case was of
the castle variety, it also contained psychological as well as supernatural
affections. There was actual romance going on in this piece as well though—that
of the narrator towards Ligeia because she was this ideal person in his eyes
even after death when he was hopeful of her spirit coming back in his fiancé’s
corpse.
Though readings like this and the Sleepy Hollow piece are what initially drew me
into taking this course, other readings with different styles drew me in further
yet. The slave narratives we read, like that of Harriet Jacobs’ were so
intriguing not just because they contained essence of the gothic, the sublime,
and the heroic individual but because of the realism involved therein. Unlike
Ligeia, with Harriet Jacobs’ piece,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, was surreal and gothic in a real
way—Harriet gives a sad account of an actual life as a slave in the 19th
century. We cannot truly relate to the story Poe gives us or even that of Cooper
because they are complete fiction whereas Jacobs’ piece is like so many other
stories of African Americans during the time. Having said that, Jacobs is a
legitimate hero in her individualism because she overcame factual odds and that
can further make this woman more heroic because her struggle was something
tangible in history. Then this can bring back around to Mary Rowlandson’s
captivity by virtue that her story was one that actually happened as well.
Finding a bond like this one between texts is another bonus of learning more
about Romanticism.
Respectively, finding this intertextuality further lead to finding more texts
like them and to me thinking back on anything I have read in the past and trying
to put it through the Romanticism checklist and discovering that the majority of
what I’ve ever read or enjoyed has fallen into this genre or style. I am in love
with the Master of Horror, Stephen King, but I would have never thought about
him falling into this category but then when I thought about it more in depth I
deduced that most of his novels indeed fall into this genre. Right now I am
concluding King’s The Dark Tower Series
but always assumed they only fell within the genre of horror and western but
thanks to this course, I realize that the series fits well within the genre of
‘Romance with a capital R’. They have the obvious gothic and horror themes but
when you look further, the main character is on a quest to save all of the
universes as well as attain revenge all the while in nature with the constant
element of the sublime.
Now
that I constantly analyze whether what I am reading fits into the genre of
Romanticism, I realize how much this course is capable of. Going from close to
zero knowledge on the subject, it was easy to find examples of the topic in our
readings while gaining further insight, and now I am perfectly capable of
applying this insight to the real world and books I actually read. Even this
simple task can help further by shedding light on the author intent, how the
work is supposed to be interpreted, and to simply appreciate the overall
atmosphere of the work.
