Natasha Bondar
Dr. Craig White
Literature 5535
3 July 2002 

Final Exam

Essay #3

            Having gained a following in writers of different races and ethnic backgrounds, Romanticism re-emerged a tradition of different races. The writers whose works I will examine, Hughes, Toomer, and Faulkner, all have a Southern element or reference in their work; yet they differ ethnically – two Black-American writers and an Anglo-American. The traditional form of Romanticism takes on a new image/face in “Song for a Dark Girl,” “Fern,” and “A Rose for Emily,” while the writers either adapted Romantic formulas and or complicated them.

            Hughes’ adapts the lyric poem genre as he chooses a form for his expression of Black indignation at the injustice and horror of lynching. The poem sings, “Way down South in Dixie, / (Break the heart of me) / They hung my black young lover / To a cross roads tree.”  One’s heart contracts in a pang as Hughes makes the girl sing of and out of her grief.  In its form, the poem greatly resembles the European Romantic style (almost a ballad, perhaps having a Tennyson touch).  Rhymed and metered in trochaic tetrameter, it has a very familiar sound, yet the poet turns the lyric genre, adapting it to a Black man’s Romanticism in subject matter (and its form is already akin to the culture of the Black Americans who have a long tradition of music and song), and complicating it by the choice of his subject: “They hung my black young lover / To a cross roads tree.” 

            Another text by an African-American author, having been set in the South, reveals similar adoption of traditional Romantic elements while complicating them.  In Toomer’s story, romance, with its desire and loss, seems quite traditional  – a beautiful black woman is the object of desire much like beautiful white Ligeia is in Poe’s story. Yet the beauty Toomer creates is not fair but creamy brown:

Face flowed into her eyes. Flowed in soft cream foam and plaintive ripples, in such a way that wherever, your glance may momentarily have rested, it immediately thereafter wavered in the direction of her eyes.  The soft suggestion of down slightly darkened, like the shadow of a bird’s wing might, the creamy brown color of the upper lip.

The author puts a twist on the traditional European association of beauty with fair skin, thus expanding the realm of beauty (en element from Dr. White’s lecture).

            Also, Fern’s accessibility echoes, somehow, the forced accessibility of the slave women. “Men saw her eyes and fooled themselves. Fern’s eyes said she was easy.” Men felt “that they would not be denied.” Fern is strangely available and unavailable at once.  And she is free, but something in her is not free, or not whole. Fern’s “were strange eyes. In this, that they sought nothing – that is, nothing that was obvious and tangible” (she is depicted here as a Romantic heroine in that she is not living in “here and now,” even though her body in the beginning of the story is quite involved in the present – again like a slave woman, Fern gives, as if by hereditary habit, what she is asked of by men, but her soul longs for another, transcendent lover.  She yearns, though somewhat unconsciously – for something intangible and inexpressible – she desires “nothing that [is] obvious and tangible” as she stands, leaning against the post.  Importantly, the attention is continually drawn to Fern’s eyes; it is the direction of her eyes that we follow. It is her illusive longing for something naturally Romantic, something otherworldly is emphasized: “Here eyes, if it were sunset, rested idly where the sun, molten and glorious, was pouring down between the fringe of pines.  Or maybe they gazed at the gray cabin on the knoll from which an evening folk-song was coming.” But her yearning is undermined by passivity – her eyes “[rest] idly.”  She is not a femme fatale, although she is beautiful and quite desirable to qualify for the position.  Fern’s passivity seems to betray something of an enslaved person.  Perhaps she could be perceived as a symbol of the Black people, having emerged free and beautiful – but not free completely, still waking out of a narcotic slumber. There is an ambivalence or maybe ambiguity in her.

Fern’s Romantic portrayal, set in the natural surrounding of a Georgia town, is revised as she herself is presented as natural, even primal.

She sprang up.  Rushed some distance from me.  Fell to her knees, and began swaying, swaying. Her was tortured with something it could not let out. Like boiling sap it flooded arms and fingers till she shook them as if they burned her.  It found her throat, and spattered inarticulately in plaintive, convulsive sounds, mingled with calls to Jesus Christ.

She is mysterious, primal.  African perhaps? Describing the men’s attitude toward Fern, the narrator says that they were “bringing their bodies” or offering a “bestowal of their bodies” to her as if making an offering to a goddess.  If there is an African overtone/allusion here, it is augmented by Fern’s half-prayer to Christ. Such augmentation is understandable since the combination of African and Christian traditions is a feature of the Black culture.

            As do Hughes and Toomer, Faulkner also adopts/echoes Romantic elements in “A Rose for Emily.”  The story’s narrator, the town or the town person, romanticizes Emily (whose position is already removed from the common folk), creating a place of veneration for her. The narrator announces that on the day of her funeral, people come to her house out of  “respectful affection for a fallen monument.” By idolizing her, they remove her into the Romantic realm.  The Southern twist of this romance, a woman on a pedestal, finds its roots in the Southern chivalry.

            The story is also full of Southern Gothic elements.  Like in a European Gothic novel, in “A Rose for Emily,” the house is the place of gloom, dreariness, and mystery.  A part of her house, Miss Emily’s herself is uncanny in the night. “As they recrossed the lawn, a window, that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat init, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street.” The Gothic element of the house and its owner is what perhaps stirs the people’s curiosity. They come to Miss Emily’s funeral as if for some ghastly entertainment: “The two female cousins came at once.  They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre.”  Perhaps this may be considered an instance of correspondence as the people attending the funeral acquire a quality of the surroundings – like the eerie house, the ladies are “sibilant and macabre.”

            By adopting and complicating the traditional Romantic feature in their work, these American Romantics of two different ethnic backgrounds add a charm and a new face to Romanticism. There is something delightful in the retelling of an old story and something freshly convincing.

Essay #2

            A tenacious flower, Romanticism, having come from Europe, found new home in America.  But the curious thing is that the passing on of the Romantic tradition did not stop after it has bloomed in America in the first half of the nineteenth century; it was handed down to the following generation of writers, having re-emerged in the twentieth century Modernist works.  Hurston, Fitzgerald, Cullen, and Plath have recaptured the Romantic spirit in their works. An offspring of Romanticism, Modernism bears resemblance to it while being its own entity.

            In Hurston’s “The Gilded Six-Bits,” The idyll of Joe and Missie May’s life is jolted out of place when she commits adultery. Yet after the disruption, comes the healing, the restoration of their peaceful bond.  Between the disruption and restoration lies this young couple’s journey to wisdom and forgiveness.  In the beginning, both the husband and the wife are childlike, oblivious to the fact that their perfect married life is a tender creature in need of protection.  When the story commences, both bear characteristics of a Romantic hero and heroine in their simplicity. They are playful like children.

Missie May grinned with delight. She had not seen the big tall man come stealing in the gate and creep up the walk grinning happily at the joyful mischief he was about to commit.  But she knew that it was her husband throwing silver dollars in the door for her to pick up and pile beside her plate at dinner. It was this way every Saturday afternoon.  The nine dollars hurled into the door, he scurried

Yet they do not remain simple, which is a step away from the Romantic notion of a hero. As a result of Missie May’s unfaithfulness both are disillusioned, and shocked.  But their recovery at the end almost has a Romantic ring to it.  This story is not so Modernist as to allow the characters’ lives to become fragmented without remedy.

            Another twist of a Romantic feature is that desire in this story is not for sublime, otherworldly things but for money – a Romantic element is barely recognizable here. Perhaps it could hardly be called Romantic because it has been revised to such a degree. Yet money is the central desire of the story.  The beginning and the end are framed with the playful scene of the silver dollars tossed at Missie May.  In the middle of the story, the gilded coin plays a significant role, at first as an object of desire and later as a reminder, a sting of Missie May’s wrongdoing. I think the contrast between the role of the silver and gold money is significant to the story.  Both the silver coins and the gold coin represent the couple’s love for one another.  The silver dollars are a medium used for their love’s expression.  The gold coin, although connected to Missie May’s unfaithfulness, still represents Missie May’s desire to please her husband – although foolishly, it was out of love for him that she gave in to Slemmons’s entreaties. But she did desire the money. This situation reveals a strangely human interplay of selflessness and selfishness.

            Like in Hurston’s story, in Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams,” the object of desire is material as well. Dexter displays a desire for valuable material possessions: “He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people – he wanted glittering things themselves.”

The lovely Judy Jones is valued in material terms too.  “He waited for Judy Jones in her house, and he saw these other young men around him. It excited him that many men had loved her. It increased her value in his eyes.” His likening of her to dollars is even more explicit in the next selection. When Judy reappears in Dexter’s life, he is cautious with her, aware of heady presence. To himself, he says, “This was nothing, he must remember. She had done it before and he had put her behind him, as he would have slashed a bad account from his books.” It is a terrible disillusionment for Dexter to learn that Judy is no longer beautiful.  The object of his desire lost its value irreversibly – it is no wonder that he is crushed but finding this out. In contrast to Joe and Missie May’s largely unselfish, somewhat childish attraction toward money, Dexter’s desire is purely for himself.  He is so intoxicated with Judy that he misses her as a human being.

            While Hurston and Fitzgerald deal with the Romantic notion of desire in material terms, Cullen embarks on a psychological journey in his poem “Heritage.” This journeying hero is different form the traditional Romantic one in that he doesn’t simply pursue what he desires, he questions, agonizes about reconciling his roots with his present state. In addition to this questioning of the existing order, another Modernist element of Cullen’s poem is in comparing the primitive Africa with the civilized way of life he knows. He wrestles with his inheritance.  A similar theme is found in another one of his poems, “Yet Do I Marvel.” There is a struggle to reconcile opposing elements – his African and Christian heritage.

            He begins his poem “Heritage” by asking, “What is Africa to me . . . ?” and continues on to resolve at the end “I belong to Jesus Christ, / Preacher of humility; / Heathen gods are naught to me.” But in the final section of the poem, he again brings up the question of his Blackness and his realization of a spiritually dark side of him (in this he seems to use the color black in its traditional sense) when he says, “Lord, I fashion dark gods, too, / Daring even to give You / Dark despairing features.”  As a result of his searching he finds anger and pride that dangerously swell inside him.  The speaker resolves: “One thing only must I do: / Quench my pride and cool my blood / Lest I perish in the flood / . . . Not yet has my heart or head / In the least way realized / They and I are civilized.” But the poet ends on an unresolved note – the primal and the civilized still war in him. Thus this speaker is not a traditionally Romantic hero. In contrast to a character like Jeff from Out of the Past, the speaker of the poem is not confident or sure of himself, but uncertain, searching.

            In Plath’s “Blackberrying,” the theme of desire is muted.  It is a nebulous desire for soul fulfillment, a little bit like Fern’s indescribable desire.  The poem is brimming with feeling, yet the feeling’s direction is even less obvious than Fern’s – the former speaker’s desire is unuttered. Yet it seeps through such lines as “Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries, / Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly, / A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea / Somewhere at the end of it, heaving.”

            Nature, vibrant though susceptible to death, is in every line until the very last one where only metal remains. Yet the nature of  “Blackberrying” is not the traditional Romantic nature, refreshing and inspiring.  It is simply present with its juiciness, primitive in its figurative muteness, and unable to satisfy the soul.

            The Romantic themes of desire and journey, the treatment of the Romantic hero/heroine and of nature acquire a new meaning as they are worked by these post-Romantic authors – the mark of Modernity is undeniably present. 

10:03 p.m. – 11:00 =1h

12:00 – 12:50 =50 min

1:20 – 3:00 = 1h 40min

3:15 – 3:40  = 25 min

3:50 – 4:15 = 25 min