Beginnings of Romanticism in American literature

TRANSCENDENTALISM

TRANSCENDENTALISM (1835 – 1860)

- A New England movement rooted in Romanticism and post-Kantian idealism.

Basically religious, emphasized role and importance of individual conscience and value of
intuition in matters of moral guidance and inspiration. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne,
Fuller. Critical of formalized religion. All constructive practical activity, great literature
viewed as an expression of the divine spirit. An ambition to achieve vivid perception of
the divine as it operates in common life which would lead to personal cultivation.
Insistence on authority of individual conscience.

- A trust in the individual, democracy, possibility of continued change for the better.

- A need to see beyond what is before our eyes, to see a deeper significance, a
transcendent reality.

- Intellectual eclecticism; a vague conception of the God-like nature of human spirit.

- Nature conceived of not as a machine but as an organism, symbol and analogue of

the mind.

- Spontaneous activity of the creative artist seen as the highest achievement.

- Transcendentalism offers what many consider to be the positive or optimistic view

of humanity.

- Individualism through the use of the natural environment, focusing on a change or

separation from society.

AUTHORS:

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)

A US writer of essays and poems. He greatly influenced religion and philosophy, especially
with his idea of Transcendentalism, which said that God’s nature was in every person and
thing. After being a Unitarian minister (= church leader) in New England, he settled in 1834
in Concord, Massachusetts, where he worked closely with Henry David Thoreau and others.
Emerson’s essay Nature (1836) explained Transcendentalism as the unity of nature.

Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862)

A US writer and poet who believed strongly in the rights of individual people. As an
experiment he lived a simple life for two years (1845–7) in a small wooden house near
Concord, Massachusetts, and then wrote about this in Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854).
He also wrote the essay Civil Disobedience (1849), a work that influenced such leaders as
Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King to protest in a peaceful way.

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Their goals were less about the blind obedience of the Puritan age and more about social
commentary and striving for a better life.

They used these feelings to help analyze life and find the “transcended truth” beyond reason
or experience. Their over all philosophy centered on trust. If you trust in yourself, not others,
success is almost definite.

Broad Romanticism in American literature

GOTHIC LITERATURE + SELF - REFLECTIVE LITERATURE

GOTHIC ROMANCE

- More interest in action than in the development of character

- Action often fantastic, allegorical, interest in the supernatural, terror, madness
- Characters have mysterious origins; tend to be ideal, exaggerated, more types
- Suspense and mystery involving fantastic and supernatural, interest in light and shade
- Interest in evil, its origins
- Descriptions of various mental states often verging on the abnormal

Know as “the dark side of romanticism,” Gothicism offered a more bizarre, pessimistic view
of life at the time.

Authors stressed what was wrong with humanity, the negative components of human life, not
the positives.

Their stories usually revolved around dark, dreary, often twisted and creepy, to reflect the
somber tones of their stories. These usually consisted of strange situations and violent events,
where mistake were costly and the endings were rarely happy. Unlike romanticism, these
stories showed the reader how not to act, as personal weaknesses in the characters often led to
tragedy.

The writings still focused on analyzing human life while stressing individualism, but by
showing the aspect of life not shoed in transcendentalism.

Typical Elements of American GOTHIC FICTION

1. Settings most often include large, drafty old houses that have "been in the family for
years." Since castles in the American landscape were practically unheard of, early Gothic
fiction writers began substituting the family estate for the traditional castle.

2. An atmosphere of mystery and suspense that is enhanced by a plot which seeks to discover
the secrets lying within the supernaturally charged environment.

3. A ghostly legend, an unexplainable occurrence, or a story about a horrible death or murder

that took place at the family estate in question.

4. Omens, foreshadowing, and dreams usually play a large role in the mysterious air that is
created within the story.

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5. Tales include highly charged emotional states like: terror, a feeling that one is on the brink
of insanity, anger, agitation, an exaggerated feeling of some impending doom, and obsessive
love.

6. Supernatural events: ghosts, doors that open themselves, unexplained sounds, etc.

7. Damsels in distress are frequent. Women who are frightened and confused, wandering
around lost, or dying due to a slow and unexplainable ailment.

8. Words designed to evoke images of gloom and doom: dark, foreboding, forbidding,
ghostly, etc.

9. Romantic themes often involve the death of a man or woman in the throes of some great
passion, the obsessive nature of a man or woman in love, or excessive grief one feels upon the
loss of a loved one.

- Edgar Allan Poe They found transcendental beliefs too optimistic and egoistic and
- Herman Melville modified them in their prose or poetry, which are now labeled as
- Emily Dickinson American Gothic or Dark Romanticism works.

Transcendentalism expresses optimism while Gothicism shows pessimism

= BASIC DIFFRENCE between them.
SELF - REFLECTIVE LITERATURE

James Fenimore Cooper (1789- 1851)

- His literary career-an answer to the challenge of his wife. In his fiction he dealt with the
themes of wilderness versus civilization, freedom versus law, order versus change, aristocrat
versus democrat, and natural rights versus legal rights.

- The Leatherstocking Tales are five novels set in the early frontier period of American
history about the American wilderness: The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans
(1826), The Prairie (1827) The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841).

- They illustrate the importance of the frontier and the wilderness for the first time in the
history of American literature. he central figure Natty Bumppo is a symbol of the American
desire for unity with nature. He seems to related to the deepest meaning of the American
national experience of adventure into the wilderness of the American West.

Washington Irving (1783- 1859)

- "the father of American literature," as the first internationally recognized American writer
and he made great contribution to the form of short story in American literature. He was
extremely popular in Europe.

- He is indifferent to the immediate reality and wrote for pleasure and to produce pleasure as
he regards literature as a self-contained amusement. He gave an impetus both to the
American humor and to the urbane wit.

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- In his Sketch Book appeared the first modern American short stories and the first great
American juvenile literature.

- His style reflected the shift in American literature from the rationalism of the 18th century
to the sentimentalism 19th century. His essays are models of effect English.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, a fifth generation American of English descent, was born in Salem,
Massachusetts, a wealthy seaport north of Boston that specialized in East India trade. One of his
ancestors had been a judge in an earlier century, during trials in Salem of women accused of being
witches.
Hawthorne used the idea of curs on the family of an evil judge in his novel The House of the
Seven Gables.
Many of Hawthorne’s stories are set in Puritan New England, and his greatest novel, The
Scarlet Letter (1850), has become the classic portrayal of Puritan America. It tells of the passionate,
forbidden love affair linking a sensitive, religious young man, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and
the sensuous, beautiful townsperson, Hester Prynne. Set in Boston around 1650 during early Puritan
colonization, the novel highlights the Calvinistic obsession with morality, sexual repression, guilt and
confession, and spiritual salvation. For its time, The Scarlet Letter was a daring and even subversive
book. Hawthorne’s gentle style, remote historical setting, and ambiguity softened his grim themes and
contented the general public, but sophisticated writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman
Melville recognized the book’s “hellish” power. It treated issues that were usually suppressed in
19thcentury America, such as the impact of the new, liberating democratic experience on individual
behavior, especially on sexual and religious freedom. The book is superbly organized and beautifully
written. Appropriately, it uses allegory, a technique the early Puritan colonists themselves practiced.
Hawthorne’s reputation rests on his other novels and tales as well. In The House of the Seven
Gables (1851), he again returns to New England’s history. The crumbling of the “house” refers to a
family in Salem as well as to the actual structure. The theme concerns an inherited curse and its
resolution through love. As one critic has noted, the idealistic protagonist Holgrave voices
Hawthorne’s own democratic distrust of old aristocratic families: “The truth is, that once in every half-
century, at least, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget about
its ancestors.”
Hawthorne’s last two novels were less successful. Both use modern settings, which hamper
the magic of romance. The Blithedale Romance (1852) is interesting for its portrait of the socialist,
utopian Brook Farm community. In the book, Hawthorne criticizes egotistical, power-hungry social
reformers whose deepest instincts are not genuinely democratic. The Marble Faun (1860), though set
in Rome, dwells on the Puritan themes of sin, isolation, expiation, and salvation. These themes, and
his characteristic settings in Puritan colonial New England, are trademarks of many of Hawthorne’s
best-known shorter stories: “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “Young Goodman Brown,” and “My
Kinsman, Major Molineux.” In the last of these, a young man from the country comes to the city —
a common route in urbanizing 19th-century America — to seek help from his powerful relative, whom
he has never met. Robin has great difficulty finding the major, and finally joins in a strange night riot
in which a man who seems to be a disgraced criminal is comically and cruelly driven out of town.
Robin laughs loudest of all until he realizes that this “criminal” is none other than the man he sought
— a representative of the British who has just been overthrown by a revolutionary American mob. The
story confirms the bond of sin and suffering shared by all humanity. It also stresses the theme of the
self-made man: Robin must learn, like every democratic American, to prosper from his own hard
work, not from special favors from wealthy relatives. “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” casts light on
one of the most striking elements in Hawthorne’s fiction: the lack of functioning families in his works.
Although Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales manage to introduce families into the least likely
wilderness places, Hawthorne’s stories and novels repeatedly show broken, cursed, or artificial
families and the sufferings of the isolated individual. The ideology of revolution, too, may have played

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a part in glorifying a sense of proud yet alienated freedom. The American Revolution, from a psycho-
historical viewpoint, parallels an adolescent rebellion away from the parent-figure of England and the
larger family of the British Empire. Americans won their independence and were then faced with the
bewildering dilemma of discovering their identity apart from old authorities. This scenario was played
out countless times on the frontier, to the extent that, in fiction, isolation often seems the basic
American condition of life. Puritanism and its Protestant off shoots may have further weakened the
family by preaching that the individual’s first responsibility was to save his or her own soul.