Romantic Period

1. 1. Characteristics of American Romanticism

Romanticism is a movement in art and literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in revolt against the Neoclassicism of the previous centuries. The German poet Friedrich Schlegel, who is given credit for first using the term romantic to describe literature, defined it as "literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form." This is as accurate a general definition as can be accomplished, although Victor Hugo's phrase "liberalism in literature" is also apt. Imagination, emotion, and freedom are certainly the focal points of romanticism. Any list of particular characteristics of the literature of romanticism includes subjectivity and an emphasis on individualism; spontaneity; freedom from rules; solitary life rather than life in society; the beliefs that imagination is superior to reason and devotion to beauty; love of and worship of nature; and fascination with the past, especially the myths and mysticism of the middle ages (Romantic period). Other characteristics are as follows:

• Social background: two important revolutions: the French Revolution of 1789-1794 and the English Industrial Revolution.
•  Many writers in the Romantic period emphasized feeling and imagination and looked toward nature for insight into the divine. The individual and his or her subjective experiences and expressions of those experiences were highly valued. Many scholars see the artistic and aesthetic freedoms in romanticism in contrast to the ideals of neoclassicism. In addition to a wealth of poetry, the Romantic period featured significant innovations in the novel form, including the Gothic novel.
• Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general and a focus on his or her passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures; an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic (Mambrol “Romanticicsm”). 

      Romanticism in America flowered somewhat later than in Europe, embroiled as the new nation was in the struggle for self-definition in political, economic, and religious terms. It was American independence from British rule, achieved in 1776, that opened the path to examining national identity, the development of a distinctly American literary tradition in the light of Romantically reconceived visions of the self and nature. The major American Romantics included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville. While some of these writers were influenced by European Romantics and philosophers, nearly all of them were inspired by a nationalistic concern to develop an indigenous cultural tradition and a distinctly American literature. Indeed, they helped to define – at a far deeper and more intelligent level than the crude definitions offered by politicians since then until the present day – the very concept of American national identity. Like the European Romantics, these American writers reacted against what they perceived to be the mechanistic and utilitarian tenor of Enlightenment thinking and the industrial, urbanized world governed by the ethics and ideals of bourgeois commercialism. They sought to redeem the ideas of spirit, nature, and the richness of the human self within a specifically American context. (Mambrol “Romanticicsm”)
     The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to England, France, and beyond, reached America around the year 1820, some 20 years after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had revolutionized English poetry by publishing Lyrical Ballads. In America as in Europe, fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles. Romanticism in America coincided with the period of national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive American voice. (American History).       
      Romantic ideas centered around art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, rather than science, Romantics argued, could best express universal truth.
    The development of the self became a major theme; self-awareness, a primary method. If, according to Romantic theory, self and nature were one, self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. The idea of “self” which suggested selfishness to earlier generations was redefined. New compound words with positive meanings emerged: “self-realization,” “self-expression,” “self-reliance.” (American History)

2. 2-Major Writers and Works

The Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values.
      The period of romanticism represented a revolt against classicism and its values such as reason and form. The American variant of romanticism was different from the European one to a certain degree. There was a great interest in Indians and their culture. The writings were less political and religious, the topics were mostly American, and the writers stressed imagination, nature and individualism.
      In America, there was no extreme reformist tendency to introduce the kind of conspiratorial socialism that emerged in Europe. Instead, Romanticism in America took its own particular style from the strong legacy of 17th century rebellious Puritanism, a severe Calvinist form of Protestantism. American Romantics developed a philosophy of individualism with the unique American frontier. American colonists felt a sense of sacredness in the new land. James Fenimore Cooper idealized the self-reliance of frontier culture in historical romances like The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Moby Dick by Herman Melville reflected a moral ambiguity in the American soul- a conflict between pioneering free will and the “mystical blackness” of Puritan doctrine. (Boreham & Heath).
     American Romanticism was more about individualism and social relevance in that everyone should have a chance to maximize one’s own worth. With Emerson looking inward to find divine essence, which he claims we all share in common, and Emily Dickinson not going “public” by publishing her verse, American Romanticism is distinctly different from European in each artist. American Romanticism evolved from a frontier that promised opportunity for expansion, growth, freedom, Europe lacked this element. The spirit of optimism invoked by the promise of an uncharted frontier was portrayed in many paintings of American Romanticism. Immigration to America brought new cultures and perspectives to the American Romanticism. Growth of industry in the north that further polarized the north and the agrarian South and search for new spiritual roots influenced the American Romanticism and made it distinctly different from European Romanticism. (American)
     Although America did not have the ruins of a classical civilization or an intellectual heritage comparable to Europe’s, it did have a wilderness more primeval than anywhere in Europe, or at least it did for a while. In painting, Romantic art returned to the idealized landscape, but not the landscape of classical civilizations. Instead, painters like Bierstadt, Church, and Moran used their keen observations of the West to transform it into the promised land of America.
 Its contract with the European counterpart
“Although foreign influences were strong, American romanticism exhibited from the very outset distinct feature of its own”[ii] it was different from its English and European counterpart.

1. American romanticism was in essence the expression of “a new experience” and contained an alien quality because the spirit of American was radically new. For instance, the American experience of pioneering into the west proved to be a rich found of material for American writers to drown upon.

2. Due to the impact of Puritanism, American moral values were essentially puritan. Public opinion was overwhelmingly puritan.

3. What in connection with American romanticism was the “newness” of the American as a nation. American writers and critics placed too much emphasis on this “newness”.

4. American romanticism was both imitative and independent. Writers like Irving, especially the group of New England poets tried to model their works upon English and European masters. (American).

• Nathaniel Hawthorne

 
     Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) drew upon Enlightenment philosophy, and Coleridge’s views on imagination to define the genre of romance fiction as a locus where the real and the imaginary intersect and influence each other, in a unified vision. For Hawthorne, recognition of textual history and the history of American institutions is just an integral element of such a vision as is nature. Both Hawthorne and his friend and admirer Herman Melville reacted, like the other American Romantics, against the mechanism and commercialism at the core of American life. Striving to attain the passion and originality to develop a national literature, they yet recognized that the modern fragmented world defied the attempts of romance and imagination to achieve a harmonious and comprehensive vision of life (High 50). 
      Hawthorne writes about man in society rather in nature. His characters usually have some secret guilt or problem which keeps them at a distance from other people. They are troubled by pride, envy or the desire for revenge. One of his works is The Minister’s Black Veil in which a minister puts on a black veil as a symbol of the evil hiding in every human heart.
        Many of Hawthorne’s stories are set in Puritan New England, and his greatest novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850), portrays 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. Hester is forced to wear a red letter “A” on her dress. The novel questions the theme of sin in the Puritan society.  (High 50-51)
      The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne exemplifies Dark Romanticism in its themes of imposed judgment and punishment for those who commit sin, resulting in alienation and self-destruction. Hawthorne's most famous novel examined the human soul. He believed that for all of our weaknesses, hypocrisy and suffering, "the truth of the human heart" usually prevails.

•  Herman Melville

 
      For Melville, life at sea is his most important material for his books and the voyages of his heroes are always searches for the truth. Moby-Dick or, The Whale, Melville’s masterpiece, is the epic story of the whaling ship Pequod and its “ungodly, god-like man,” Captain Ahab, whose obsessive quest for the white whale Moby-Dick leads the ship and its men to destruction. This work, a realistic adventure novel, contains a series of meditations on the human condition. Whaling, throughout the book, is a grand metaphor for the pursuit of knowledge. Realistic catalogues and descriptions of whales and the whaling industry punctuate the book, but these carry symbolic connotations.
   Although Melville’s novel is philosophical, it is also tragic. Despite his heroism, Ahab is doomed and perhaps damned in the end. Nature, however beautiful, remains alien and potentially deadly. In Moby-Dick, Melville challenges Emerson’s optimistic idea that humans can understand nature. The novel is modern in its tendency to be self-referential, or reflexive. In other words, the novel often is about itself. Melville frequently comments on mental processes such as writing, reading, and understanding (High 54). 

• Edgar Allan Poe

      His fiction belongs more to the Southern literary tradition than to the New England one, reflecting a preference for mood, emotion, and aristocratic ideals rather than moral or social reform. This is especially evident in works like The Fall of the House of Usher and The Black Cat, where the focus is on psychological depth, strangeness, and the supernatural.
     Poe believed that strangeness was an essential ingredient of beauty, and his writing is often marked by its exotic quality. His stories and poems frequently feature doomed, introspective aristocrats, characters who isolate themselves from society and dwell in decaying castles filled with symbolic elements such as bizarre rugs and dim interiors that conceal the brightness and clarity of the outside world. These figures rarely work or engage with others, embodying Poe's fascination with alienation and decay.
     In poetry, Poe prioritized sound over content, crafting verses that were musically rich and emotionally evocative. He did not believe that poetry should convey truth; instead, he argued that the goal of poetry is pleasure. However, for Poe, pleasure was not the same as happiness a good poem should evoke a feeling of gentle sadness, touching the reader through melancholy beauty. (High 54-55)
      Ultimately, Poe's work reflects a movement of emotions and beliefs, rather than a rigid philosophical system. His focus on mood, psychological exploration, and aesthetic form set him apart as a unique and influential figure in American literature.