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American
Literature: Romanticism Student Midterm Submissions 2016 (midterm assignment) 3. Web Highlights |
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Stephen Defferari
Gregory Buchanan’s essay, “The Complex Duality of Romantic Selfhood,” highlights
an important aspect of Romanticism as a whole: the relationship of desire and
loss to self-formation. In relation to the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was
deeply concerned with the efficacy of identity and self-fragmentation, desire
and loss are problematic within the context of puritanism. Mortality was a
consequence of Edenic transgression, and so mortal flesh becomes a sinful medium
in a transitory world that should by all rights eschew its more base impulses,
such as desire. Yet for parson Hooper in “The Minister’s Black Veil,” the loss
of flesh and the abnegation of its attendant desires are traded for spiritual
gain, even if this transaction is rendered untenable by the theological concept
of original sin.
Elena
Luquette’s essay, “A Gothic Transcendence into the Sublime,” addresses the
untenable doctrine of original sin in puritan theology. In relation to the
narrator of “The Minister’s Black Veil,” it is difficult though to determine its
intention – whether it is to simply convey a story which demonstrates a series
of uncanny aspects, or if it is calling into question the tenable or untenable
nature of puritanism.
Marissa Holland’s essay, “The Trifecta of the Sublime,” interested me for the
reason that I began to think about the potential compatibility between the
sublime in nature and perhaps also in relation to human nature. Is it possible
to experience a moment of the sublime when confronted with some significant
aspect of human nature. Naturally those things which are deemed sublime in
quality are found in nature, but could some aspect of human nature produce the
same effect?
All
of these essays raise important issues related to my interest in American
Romanticism, and Romanticism as a broad thematic category with a complex series
of interrelated topics – Gothicism, sublimity, mankind’s relationship with
nature, individuality, and alienation. Alienation is perhaps a topic I have
dealt with less in my exposure and critical work with Romanticism, and this
seems to me to be related to identity in some way.
Romantic identity is usually thought of in terms of intrinsic qualities or
alienation; or perhaps there is a degree of mutuality subsists between the two,
insofar as intrinsic qualities or abilities produce a natural separation from
mankind at large. So it seems these criteria are problematic for puritanism,
since the latter denies almost univocally spiritual individuality, and
disregards the importance of material efforts in this world.
