American Literature: Romanticism Student Midterm Submissions 2016 (midterm assignment) 3. Web Highlights

Caryn Livingston

Feminine Desire and Loss in Romantic Poetry

          In preparation for my planned examination of desire and loss in the poetry of Emily Dickinson I decided to review Roslynn Kelley’s final exam essay “Desiring Desire and Preventing Loss: An Examination of Different Approaches in the Romantic Tradition of Desire and Loss,” Marichia Wyatt’s final exam essay “Short, Sweet, and Subjective,” and Sheila Morris’ research post “What is Feminine Gothic and Why Should I Care?” I found the separate assignments to be thoughtful considerations of their respective subjects. In combination, they shed light on the unique accomplishment of Dickinson’s poetic achievement as a woman Romantic writer because even though they did not all approach the subject of Romanticism with the feminine perspective in mind, the analyses establish Romantic ideals that are frequently exclusive of women’s perspectives.

          Kelley’s essay compares approaches to the cycle of desire and loss in Romantic literature and establishes how frequently the cycle drives narratives in the literature. In a romance narrative, she writes, “the heroic individual upholds the value of the quest towards a desire for transcendence and self-transformation.” The heroic individuals in romance narratives are sometimes unsuccessful in achieving the object of their desire, but Kelley views this as unnecessary to achieving the cycle, as “it gives the romance a different direction by which the author can dictate alternative means of transcendence or reunification with the desired.” Kelley’s analysis of the desire and loss cycle is interesting in how it establishes the desirous person as a heroic individual in the Romantic sense—a profound declaration in the context of Dickinson’s poetry due to her feminine poetic voice and the rarity of depictions of heroic female individuals in Romantic literature.

          Kelley provides an example of the feminine voice from a Romantic perspective in her discussion of Sarah Orne Jewett’s, “A White Heron,” in which she says the heroine Sylvia desires to protect the sacred natural setting of the story from the threat of industrialization, represented by Jewett as a young man with a gun. “The individual in nature, separate from the masses has an obligation to unite with their environment and in [Jewett’s story] Sylvia understands this obligation to uphold the innocence of this romanticized world,” Kelley writes. With the fulfillment of Sylvia’s desire to protect the romanticized natural setting of the story, Jewett depicts a feminine perspective of the desire/loss cycle in which Sylvia “comprehends the destruction of loss through desire.” The contrast between Jewett’s story and Poe’s Ligeia, the other story Kelley references, is particularly striking in terms of the feminine relationship to the cycle of desire and loss, as Poe’s story depicts the lady Ligeia as the narrator’s ultimate desire and positions that desire over any the lady herself might feel in terms of importance within the story.

          In her essay on Romantic poetry, Wyatt considers how poetry from different time periods and written in different styles can synthesize themes and elements to depict ideas common to the Romantic period. Poetry is unique as a genre in that it “can relate several elements in a short amount of time; poetry delivers the essentials to studying the beginning of romanticism in a few pages or less.” She also establishes that Romantic poetry transcends the Romantic era in American literature, with some Romantic poetry written outside the defined period but still sharing the common themes of nostalgia and the desire/loss cycle. This is relevant to my own research interests due to Emily Dickinson’s own poetry bridging gaps between Romanticism and the Realism; poems may be linked in genre “even though they were written in different centuries,” according to Wyatt.

          As a deeper exploration of feminine concerns in Romantic literature, Morris’s post considers the differences in masculine and feminine Gothic narratives. Anxieties explored in Romantic literature are different depending on whether the perspective is masculine or feminine because masculine concerns are more focused on the transgression of social taboos, while feminine perspectives considered dissatisfactions of living as a woman in a patriarchal society. Morris interprets the differences between the perspectives “to mean that women’s fears were often more psychological than physical even if the Gothic narrative often portrays the heroine as victim.” She cites Elaine Showalter to explain that within Romanticism, women used gothic novels as a way to push back against “patriarchal tyranny,” frequently exploring love and loss as well as powerful supernatural forces that stood in for the overwhelming nature of societal forces women faced in their lives.

          While Dickinson’s poetry is more aligned with the transcendental than the gothic, Morris’s insight into how women’s writing utilized Romantic conventions to express different anxieties than their male contemporaries should be brought to bear on analysis of those themes in Dickinson’s writing. The cycle of desire and loss is found in gothic and transcendental writings in Romantic literature, as evidenced by its existence in Poe’s gothic short story Ligeia and discussed in Kelley’s essay and in Dickinson’s poems, and the fear and necessity of loss as part of the cycle is almost certain to be influenced by gender concerns within the respective writings.