Natasha Bondar
Dr. Craig White
Literature 5535
14 June 2002

Midterm

Enchanting, engaging, the Romantic literature is loved for its passionate nature. Not rigid, not predictable, it draws the reader to be lost in its storm of sensations.  Its vibrancy is a quality of life.  Creating characters whose innermost thoughts and sentiments are fully revealed to the reader, the Romantic writers must be introspective, careful students of the human psyche. But their characters are not such – they are innocent, not-knowing-themselves personages.  They are dreamers, idealists, searching to be filled . . . with . . . whatever may satisfy their desire.  Like children, they are driven chiefly by emotion, lacking stability but also callousness of adulthood.  Perhaps some of the appeal of the romantic hero or heroine lies in their charming, trusting naïveté. Like an unopened flower, a child is delightful to us in the contemplation of its potential. So is a romantic hero. He or she “may appear empty or innocent of all but potential or desire” (syllabus). Such are Charlotte Temple, Rip Van Winkle, and the narrator of Ligeia.

Susana Rowson’s portrayal of Charlotte Temple is quite romantic in that the heroine is malleable (almost lacking any identity) and brimming with desire. The first indication of the malleability of Charlotte’s opinion is displayed in her exchange with Mademoiselle La Rue after their tryst with Montraville.  As La Rue chides Charlotte for her displeasure with the evening’s outcome, the girl is easily swayed by her companion’s perspective.  Charlotte is touched by Mademoiselle’s appeal.  She is moved not by reason or conscience but by her love toward the person closest to her at the moment. First persuaded by Mademoiselle’s rhetoric, and later by Montraville’s incessant wooing and entreaties, she acts as a child who is tossed about by her feelings, controlling her reason.  To be sure, she is a reasonable girl, only without an internal foundation that can withstand human persuasion.  In contrast to Mademoiselle La Rue’s constant taking matters in her own hands, Charlotte is an object, upon which different sources act. For example, her final decision to elope almost seems accidental as she faints into the carriage (387). The same passive attitude is displayed when she helplessly cries on the ship to America or attempts nothing when Montraville leaves her (395). 

Thus Charlotte is empty of all but expectant desire, which is easily sparked by a “smart young officer” (377).  She is moved when she meets Montraville at the beginning of the narrative, musing about their previous meeting – “a blush of recollection suffused her cheeks” (373). And as the story progresses, though Charlotte tries to be prudent in her decision making, she cannot resist her desire for Montraville’s love. When she receives his letter, she longs to read it.  From the conversation that takes place between La Rue and Charlotte before she opens Montraville’s letter, one can imagine a passionate young woman who responds to La Rue’s coy “He is a genteel young fellow . . . but I think he is marked with small pox” with a passionate outburst of “Oh you are greatly mistaken . . . he has a remarkable clear skin and fine complexion.” This exchange is followed by another as La Rue continues her manipulation, “His eyes, if I could judge by what I saw . . . are grey and want expression.” This Charlotte is quick to refute, “By no means, . . . they are the most expressive eyes I ever saw” (377).  Finally having read the letter, Charlotte is greatly affected by it; its “contents had awakened new emotions in her youthful bosom: [Mademoiselle] encouraged her hopes, calmed her fears, and before they parted for the night, it was determined that she should meet Montraville the ensuing evening” (378).  In a true Romatic fashion, the lack of identity and the presence of desire are two of the things that initiate Charlotte’s journey.  As the story unfolds, the reader feels empathetic toward Charlotte despite her errors of judgment because this delightful and innocent heroine is a victim of ill-meaning adults, and her passionate person moves us greatly.

While Charlotte, a character belonging to a slightly earlier period of the American literature, fits the Romantic heroine profile fairy well, the narrator of Poe’s Ligeia’ is even more closely fitting the same profile, in his apparent emptiness and abundance of desire.  From the very beginning of the narrative, his childlikeness and emptiness are evident.  Like Charlotte whose foil is Mademoisell La Rue, the Ligeia hero has a foil in his wife who underscores his lack of identity – he cannot exist without Ligeia because she defines him, gives him meaning, fills him.  Ligeia with “her rare learning, her singular yet placid cast of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musical language” is the embodiment of that which satisfies desire (708). As a result she constantly both whets and fulfills his desire. He is so taken with her lavish, rare beauty that there is none of him left; he is melted into Ligeia with her “skin rivaling the purest ivory, . . . the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet ‘hyacinthine’” (709).  He is especially preoccupied with her eyes, which seem to possess some mystery.  “The expression of the eyes of Ligeia! How for long hours have I pondered upon it! How have I through the whole of a mid-summer night, struggled to fathom it. . . . I was possessed with a passion to discover.  . . . Not for a moment the unfathomable meaning of their glance, by day or by night, was absent from my soul” (710). Indeed he is the embodiment of desire.

Loved and desired both for her beauty and her mystery, most importantly, Ligeia intoxicates our Romantic hero by the knowledge she offers:

. . . [T]he acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, were astounding – yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself, with a childlike confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most busily occupied during the earlier years of our marriage. With how vast a triumph – with how vivid a delight- with how much of all that is ethereal in hope – did I feel, as she bent over me, in studies but little sought for – but less known that delicious vista by slow but very perceptible degrees expanding before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path I might at length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden. (711)

This passage seems so directly to allude to the Garden, where the woman brought the forbidden knowledge to the man.  In that, both of them are depicted as emerging human beings at the commencement of human existence.  And here once again, the hero is like a child guided by and completely dependent on, the wise like a goddess and tempting like Eve, Ligeia.

When Ligeia is lost, his childlikeness is intensified.  Then he too is lost, fumbling about in the dark without the guidance of his beloved wife and mentor. His comparison to a child is explicit in his own words: “Without Ligeia I was but a child groping benighted” (711).  The hero is powerless to recover vitality without her.  And another woman is incapable of taking her place of filling him.  Ultimately, his sorrow is unresolved even by the incarnation of Ligeia, which appears to be temporary because at the beginning of his tale, which should be in the present time of the narrative, he invokes the  “. . . the image of her who is no more” (708). The final impression with which the story leaves the reader is one of ultimate loss, the unfulfilled desire. Thus both Charlotte Temple and Ligeia’s narrator find an unhappy resolution to their desire.

Washington Irving’s Romantic Rip Van Winkle is quite unalike the first two Romantic personages in that he does not embrace romantic love, but tries to find solace in escaping from his domestic despot into the fairy world of imagination. The innocent and sensory narrative is much like its hero. Although Rip’s desire is different from that of Charlotte and Ligeia’s narrator, he is yet full of desire, expressed in dreaming. 

He simply lives in his imagination, trying by all means to evade the harassment of the “petticoat government” (439). The matters of the “real” world, in which his querulous wife abides, are of no interest to Rip. 

The great error in Rip’s composition was an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labour. It could not be for the want of assiduity or perseverance; for he would sit on a wet rock, with a rod as long and heavy as a Tartar’s lance, and fish all day without a murmur, even though he should not be encouraged by a single nibble. He would carry a fowling piece on his shoulder, for hours together, trudging through the woods and swamps, and up hill and down dale, to shoot a few squirrels or wild pigeons.  He would never even refuse to assist a neighbour in the roughest toil. (430)

He is most happy when he is away from home, literally and figuratively. A lazy dreamer, Rip is like a child. In fact he spends most of his time with children, well accepted into their company.

He assisted at their sports, made their playthings, taught them to fly kites and shoot marbles, and told them long stories of ghosts, witches, and Indians. Whenever he went dodging about the village, he was surrounded by a troop of them, hanging on his skirts, clambering oh his back, and playing a thousand tricks on him with impunity; and not a dog would bark at him throughout the neighborhood. (430)

Unlike the previous two characters’ experiences in which their childlikeness became their undoing, Rip’s childlike tendency toward dreaming becomes his salvation and restoration to his much-improved, free world.  Is it possible that only in the fairy world a person can remain a child and live a happy life? Perhaps. At least these three characters exemplify this claim. All three underwent no significant change during the course of their stories.  Charlotte’s life is destroyed by external forces before she has a chance to grow up.  The Ligeia’s narrator is similarly unable to pass into adulthood and is undone by his childlike dependence on Ligeia.  Likewise Rip is unchanged, though granted his fairy-tale happy ending. While the fact that they needed to grow up reamains, there is something that keeps us, even if briefly, from wishing they did. Perhaps it’s our trying to catch a glimpse of our own irreversibly departed childhood. The feeling is akin to surveying one’s childhood photographs – feeling nostalgic but realizing that to remains a child is to regress.

Thus the literary attraction of these heroes and heroine is precisely in the childlikeness, affording the nostalgic feeling of pleasure mixed with a tinge of pain. And of course the characters’ desire serves as a catalyst for the romantic journey. For these reasons, their faults are overlooked, and instead Charlotte, the Ligeia narrator, and Rip become a source of delight and empathy. This feature makes the Romantic hero or heroine an important focus and attraction of the Romantic narrative.

Also, on the level of literary contributions, the Romantic writers’ lifelike development of their heroes and heroines, their insights into human nature prepare the groundwork for the emerging literary craftsmen of the realist tradition, perhaps most importantly of psychological realism.