The
Importance of the Characteristics of American Romanticism
In the early 19th century, the literature of
America shifted away from manifestos, essays, and sermons emphasizing reason
and order and influenced by Europe moved into the period of Romantic literature.
The Romantic era began in Europe at the end of the 18th century;
generally thought to have started in Germany and spread through Europe, before finding
a strong foothold in the period of the French Revolution. The literature of the
Romantic era, referred to as Romanticism, reflects the importance of individuals
and their emotions, nature and the supernatural. During the early period of the
American Romantic era, authors like Washington Irving, author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, and James Fenimore
Cooper, author of The Pioneers and other
Leatherstocking novels, became popular for their romantic writings emphasizing
these characteristics (Day 1-6).
As Romanticism grew, the emphasis on the individual and the
individual’s uniqueness in life, religion, and as part of the natural world
increased. The stories of the Romantic era emphasized the ideal of the individual,
their experience, thoughts, imagination, and emotions. The stories written revolved around a few
central characters, what they felt, and what they experienced. The Washington
Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
tells that story of Ichabod Crane and his interactions with his fellow townspeople,
as well as his penchant for the supernatural and his wild imagination. Irving’s
tale of Rip Van Winkle emphasizes the
relationship of Rip Van Winkle with his family and town and how he did things
his own way, regardless of what others, such as Dame Van Winkle, said. The Pioneers, by James Cooper Fenimore, emphasized
the individual as a part of the natural world.
Romantic novels not only explored the idea of the individual
but also the individual’s emotions. Intuition and emotions held more precedence
than the ideas of rational thought and logic. This was an important factor in
separating Romantic literature from Neo-classical literature. The character of Rip Van Winkle often relied
more on his emotional response to a situation than a practical reaction. When
being nagged by Dame Van Winkle, “his only alternative, to escape from the
labor of the farm and the clamor of his wife, was to take gun in hand and
stroll away into the woods” (Van Winkle
200) rather than working on what was causing the problem.
One of the most prominent characteristics of Romanticism
is the emphasis on nature. As America began to explore the continent that was
its home, the interest in nature began to expand and this led to more artistic representations
of nature. The natural world was viewed as more than just land and water,
separate from humanity – it became inspirational, to both writers and artists.
This new ideal led to the Romantic writers of the time creating detailed and
artistic descriptions of their books’ settings. Both Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle open their tales with
these types of descriptions of the countryside surrounding the Hudson, as does Cooper’s
The Pioneers. Irving writes in the
opening of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,
“A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to
repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is
almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquility” (12).
Not
only did these writers use detailed descriptions to convey the beauty of nature,
they also explored mankind’s position in relation to the natural world. In
James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers
and subsequent Leatherstocking novels, the relationship between man and nature is
explored in the adventures of Natty Bumppo. Natty Bumppo is a man that lives on
the boundaries of both the civilized and natural world; he respects both the laws
of the white man and the natural ways of the Indian, believing in taking only what
you need to survive from nature. He also believes that laws of man are not
always the right way, evidenced in his speech from The Pioneers towards Marmaduke Temple: “There’s them living who
say, that Nathaniel Bumppo’s right to shoot on these hills is of older date
than Marmaduke Temple’s right to forbid him…But if there’s a law about it all,
though who ever heard of a law that a man shouldn’t kill deer where he pleased!”
(Cooper 230). This statement shows the conflict between man-made laws and the
laws of survival and the Frontier, something that was becoming an increasing
concern at the time.
The
supernatural and unknown was another aspect explored in the Romantic novel. The
exploration of the supernatural was important to Romanticism because it stressed
the use of imagination and an escape from reason, both ideals that had a large
part in the Romantic era. Many of Washington Irving’s stories contained
elements of the supernatural. The Legend
of Sleepy Hollow, the entire storey revolves around the ghost story of the
Headless Horseman and his affect on the local citizens:
The
dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be
commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the apparition of a figure
on horseback, without a head. It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian
trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless
battle during the Revolutionary War, and who is ever and anon seen by the
country folk hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the
wind. His haunts are not confined to the valley, but extend at times to the
adjacent roads, and especially to the vicinity of a church at no great
distance. (Legend 13)
In Rip Van Winkle, Rip followed a stranger into the deep woods, where
he saw strange sights and people and drank the magical liquid from a keg the
stranger had carried with him and made him sleep for a very long span of years.
When Rip arrives back at the village, parts of his fantastic story are
confirmed by Peter Vanderdonk, when he agrees “that the Kaatskill mountains had
always been haunted by strange beings” (Van
Winkle 206).
The
predominance of the individual and their emotions, the natural and supernatural
world played a prominent part in the novels of the Romantic author. These
characteristics were important because they set the Romantic era apart the era
of reason and logic preceding it, the Neo-Classical era. These four
characteristics of the Romantic writings of the early 19th century
were very far from the ideals that were written in the previous literary eras
and because of this and the parallels to the actual lives and beliefs of the
readers made it a popular, important, and long-lasting form of literature.
Works Cited
Day, Aiden. Romanticism. Florence: Routledge, 1995. 1-6.
eBook.
Irving,
Washington. “Rip Van Winkle”. American Literature, before the Civil War.
Create edition, McGraw-Hill, 2011. eBook.
Irving,
Washington. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
London: ElecBook. 2001.eBook.
Cooper, James Fenimore. “The
Pioneers”. American Literature, before the Civil War. Create edition,
McGraw-Hill, 2011. eBook.
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