11. American Romanticism: writers, themes, style, characters.

 

Romanticism: Romantic Period in America 1828-1865.

 

Principles:

1. Belief in natural goodness of man, that man in a state of nature would behave well but is hindered by civilization. The figure of the "Noble Savage" is an outgrowth of this idea.

2. Sincerity, spontaneity, and faith in emotion as markers of truth. (Doctrine of sensibility)

3. Belief that what is special in a man is to be valued over what is representative; delight in self-analysis.

4. Nature as a source of instruction, delight, and nourishment for the soul;  return to nature as a source of inspiration and wisdom; celebration of man’s connection with nature; life in nature often contrasted with the unnatural constraints of society.

5. Affirmation of the values of democracy and the freedom of the individual. (Jacksonian Democracy)

6. High value placed on finding connection with fresh, spontaneous in nature and self.

7. Aspiration after the sublime and the wonderful, that which transcends mundane limits.

8. In art, the sublime, the grotesque, the picturesque, and the beautiful with a touch of strangeness all were valued above the Neoclassical principles of order, proportion, and decorum.  (Hudson River School of painters)

9. Interest in the “antique”: medieval tales and forms, ballads, Norse and Celtic mythology; the Gothic.

10. Belief in perfectibility of man; spiritual force immanent not only in nature but in mind of man.

11. Belief in organicism rather than Neoclassical rules; development of a unique form in each work.

 

Elements of Romanticism

1. Frontier: vast expanse, freedom, no geographic limitations.

2. Optimism: greater than in Europe because of the presence of frontier.

3. Experimentation: in science, in institutions.

4. Mingling of races: immigrants in large numbers arrive to the US.

5. Growth of industrialization: polarization of north and south; north becomes industrialized, south remains agricultural.

 

Romantic Subject Matter

1. The quest for beauty: non-didactic, "pure beauty."

2. The use of the far-away and non-normal - antique and fanciful:

a. In historical perspective: antiquarianism; antiquing or artificially aging; interest in the past.

b. Characterization and mood: grotesque, gothicism, sense of terror, fear; use of the odd and queer.

3. Escapism - from American problems.

4. Interest in external nature - for itself, for beauty:

a. Nature as source for the knowledge of the primitive.

b. Nature as refuge.

c. Nature as revelation of God to the individual.

 

Romantic Attitudes

1. Appeals to imagination; use of the "willing suspension of disbelief."

2. Stress on emotion rather than reason; optimism, geniality.

3. Subjectivity: in form and meaning.

 

Romantic Techniques

1. Remoteness of settings in time and space.

2. Improbable plots.

3. Inadequate or unlikely characterization.

4. Authorial subjectivity.

5. Socially "harmful morality;" a world of "lies."

6. Organic principle in writing: form rises out of content, non-formal.

7. Experimentation in new forms: picking up and using obsolete patterns.

8. Cultivation of the individualized, subjective form of writing.

 

Literary Themes:
1. Highly imaginative and subjective
2. Emotional intensity
3. Escapism
4. Common man as hero
5. Nature as refuge, source of knowledge and/or spirituality

 

The American Romantic Hero:

1. Youthful, innocent, and pure of heart

2. Has a sense of honor based not on society’s rules, but on a higher principle

3. Knowledge of life/people through intuition = street smarts

4. Loves nature; avoids city-life

5. Quests for a “higher truth” in the natural world

 

Romantic Period in American Literature, 1830-1865.

The period between the "second revolution" of the Jacksonian Era and the close of the Civil War in America saw the testings of a nation and its development by ordeal. It was an age of great westward expansion, of the increasing gravity of the slavery question, of an intensification of the spirit of embattled sectionalism in the South, and of a powerful impulse to reform in the North. Its culminating act was the trial by arms of the opposing views in a civil war, whose conclusion certified the fact of a united nation dedicated to the concepts of industry and capitalism and philosophically committed to egalitarianism. In a sense it may be said that the three decades following the inauguration of President Andrew Jackson in 1829 put to the test his views of democracy and saw emerge from the test a secure union committed to essentially Jacksonian principles.

In literature it was America's first great creative period, a full flowering of the romantic impulse on American soil. Surviving form the Federalist Age were its three major literary figures: Bryant, Irving, and Cooper. Emerging as new writers of strength and creative power were the novelists Hawthorne, Simms, Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe; the poets Poe, Whittier, Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, Dickinson, and Whitman; the essayists Thoreau, Emerson, and Holmes; the critics Poe, Lowell, and Simms....

The poetry was predominantly romantic in spirit and form. Moral qualities were significantly present in the verse of Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and Thoreau. The sectional issues were debated in poetry by Whittier and Lowell speaking for abolition, and Timrod, Hayne, and Simms speaking for the South. Poe formulated his theories of poetry and in some fifty lyrics practiced a symbolist verse that was to be, despite the change of triviality by such contemporaries as Emerson, the strongest single poetic influence emerging from pre-Civil War America, particularly in its impact on European poetry....Whitman, beginning with the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, was the ultimate expression of a poetry organic in form and romantic in spirit, united to a concept of democracy that was pervasively egalitarian.

In essays and in lectures the New England transcendentalists-- Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Alcott--carried the expression of philosophic and religious ideas to a high level....In the 1850s emerged the powerful symbolic novels of Hawthorne and Melville and the effective propaganda novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Poe, Hawthorne, and Simms practiced the writing of short stories through the period, taking up where Irving had left off in the development of the form…

At the end of the Civil War a new nation had been born, and it was to demand and receive a new literature less idealistic and more practical, less exalted and more earthy, less consciously artistic and more honest than that produced in the age when the American dream had glowed with greatest intensity and American writers had made a great literary period by capturing on their pages the enthusiasm and the optimism of that dream.

 

12) E. A. Poe as Romantic writer.
Edgar Allan Poe can be regarded as a father of the American literature. He is clearly a product of his time, which in terms of literature, is called the Romantic era. The Romantic Movement was one which began in Germany, moved through all of Europe and Russia, and, almost simultaneously, changed the entire course of American literature. Poe's brand of Romanticism was akin to his contemporaries but most of his works often bordered on what was later called the gothic genre. Perhaps the most dominant characteristic of the Romantic Movement was the rejection of the rational and the intellectual in favor of the intuitive and the emotional. Poe emphasized that didactic and intellectual elements had no place in art. The subject matter of art should deal with the emotions, and the greatest art was that which had a direct effect on the emotions. After all, Poe reasoned, man felt and sensed things before he thought about them. Throughout Poe's works, his characters are usually dominated by their emotions. This concept explains much of the seemingly erratic behavior of the characters in all of the stories. Roderick Usher's emotions are overwrought; Ligeia and the narrator of that story both exist in the world of emotions; the behaviors of the narrators of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat" are not rational; in "The Cask of Amontillado," the hatred of Montresor exceeds all rational explanations.
About setting and time. Poe created new worlds so that his readers would concentrate wholly on the themes or atmospheres with which he infused his stories. Poe believed that the highest art existed in a realm that was different from this world, and in order to create this realm, vagueness and indefiniteness were necessary to alienate the reader from the everyday world and to thrust him toward the ideal and the beautiful. Thus, Poe's stories are set in some unknown place, such as in "The Fall of the House of Usher," or else they are set in some romantic castle on the Rhine, or in an abbey in some remote part of England, as in "Ligeia," or else they are set during the period of the Spanish Inquisition (the fourteenth century), as in "The Pit and the Pendulum." In other words, Poe's reader will not find a story which is set in some recognizable place in the present time.
Subject matter. The Romantic felt that the common or the ordinary had no place in the realm of art. Poe eschewed or despised literature that dealt with mundane subjects. The purpose of art, for Poe, was to choose subjects which could affect the reader in a manner which he would not encounter in everyday life. Thus, the subject matter of many of his tales dealt with living corpses, with frightening experiences, with horrors which startled the reader, and with situations which even we have never imagined before. In conclusion, what might sometimes seem puzzling in a story by Poe, such as an unexpected ending or an unexpected event, is not puzzling if we remember that what he created was a result of his writing during the Romantic tradition.
 

 

13. The Fall of the House of Usher as a parable about the artist.

As vague as Edgar Allan Poe could be at times with the theme of one of his stories, The Fall of the House of Usher contains a theme which is decipherable with little energy expended. The story can be interpreted as an artist who becomes detached from the external world and therefore loses his ability to create art. This also results in his ultimate demise.
We first see evidence of this very early in the story. The narrator receives a letter from Mr. Roderick Usher, in which he describes “an acute bodily illness—of a mental disorder which oppressed him...” We learn later that Usher has remained with his sister in the manor that they have occupied for years. The narrator describes the house (and the family therein) as having “no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn...” This can be taken as a separation from the Ushers and the external world. They are made completely out of the house and its surrounding property with no influence from the outside.
The narrator is affected by the gloomy atmosphere of the Usher mansion. He is "sucked in" to Usher's "dream world," the world he created after living alone in his dismal house for years. Usher's house itself is a symbol for Usher. It is isolated like Usher. There are many "intricate passages," like the many facets of his mind. He lives in his own world he created. Reality enters his brain only in "feeble gleams of light." The books Usher read, his art, and music all reveal his personality. He played "long improvised dirges" on the guitar. The narrator describes his painting as "phantasmagoric." The books he reads are about death, magic, mysticism, the occult, and torture. His favorite is a book of vigils for the dead. All these things show that Usher is unstable and obsessed with death.

We also learn that one of Usher's paintings impresses the narrator immensely with its originality and its bizarre depiction: It is a picture of a luminous tunnel or vault with no visible outlet. This visual image is symbolic of what will happen later; it suggests both the vault that Usher will put his sister into and also the maelstrom that will finally destroy the House of Usher.

Likewise, the poem "The Haunted Palace," which Poe places almost exactly in the center of the story, is similar to the House of Usher in that some "evil things" are there influencing its occupants in the same way that Roderick Usher, the author of the poem seems to be haunted by some unnamed "evil things." After he has finished reading the poem, Usher offers another of his bizarre views; this time, he muses on the possibility that vegetables and fungi are sentient beings—that is, that they are conscious and capable of having feelings of their own. He feels that the growth around the House of Usher has this peculiar ability to feel and sense matters within the house itself. This otherworldly atmosphere enhances Poe's already grimly threatening atmosphere.

Roderick Usher, an artist, has been affected by the distance that is between him and the external in another way. Because of hereditary affliction caused by intermarriage in his family, he has developed an illness that prevents him from listening to art in the form of music, created by anything but stringed instruments. Any music created in any other form results in a painful irritation. This limitation can be seen as a minute example of the main theme that still conveys the same message.
The ultimate demise of the House of Usher and its connected members is the second part of the theme. A separation from the external world will result in death. The fragments in the house that were so miniscule in the beginning of the story can be likened to the fragmented connection between Usher and the external world. As the story progresses the cracks grow and result in the collapse of the house and of the death of Roderick Usher.
Maybe conveying this message was not a completely selfless act of Poe’s. The story may have only expressed a realization of his own and was made to further his acceptance of such an idea. Edgar Allan Poe was certainly not the most social man and was quite the introvert. Maybe he saw his own demise and developed a character, an artist, modeled after himself. In any case, Poe did express that if one disconnected himself from the “outside world,” his collapse would be inevitable.