LECTURE 7. American Literature of the 19th century

Very early in his Autobiography, Ben Franklin describes in great detail how he left his home in Boston and journeyed to Philadelphia. An examination of the details of a particular journey can tell us a great deal about the sensibility of the traveler and the age in which he or she lives. The significance of Franklin's journey is clear—it is a journey away from the constraints of his family (a declaration of independence) and toward a city where he might prosper. Without stretching things too greatly, we may see in Franklin's journey not only his personal goals but the goals of eighteenth-century America as well: independence, prosperity, commerce, and urbane civilization.

The section of the Autobiography that recounts Franklin's journey was written in 1771. In 1799, Charles Brockden Brown described a quite different journey to Philadelphia in a novel called Arthur Mervyn. In this tale, the young farm-boy hero leaves his home for a plague-ridden Philadelphia, where he is plunged into a world of decay, corruption, and evil. Arthur Mervyn is seldom read now, but it illustrates the differences between the views of Franklin's era and that of the Romantic period. For Franklin, a journey to the city was an opportunity; for the Romantics, such a journey might be filled with unexpected dangers.

In Romantic literature, the city, far from being the seat of civilization, was often a place of moral ambiguity and, worse, of corruption and death. The countryside became associated with independence, straightforward moral certainty, and health. This was especially true in America, where the idea of the frontier had taken on great importance. In the nineteenth century, this geography of the imagination—town, country, frontier—played a powerful role in American literature and life, and it continues to do so today.

The characteristic journey of the nineteenth century is the journey away from the town or city to the world of nature. Countless poets seek the beauties of nature. Each of these journeys is a flight both from something and to something. An understanding of this pattern of the "journey" in nineteenth-century American literature will take you a long way toward an understanding of American Romanticism.

America's first truly popular professional writer was also one of the first New World Romantics. He was so successful in depicting an escape from the constraints of civilization that his story has made him immortal. The author was Washington Irving, and the escape was that of Rip Van Winkle. In order to understand some of the differences between Romanticism and rationalism, it is useful to contrast the fictional character of Rip with the historical figure of Ben Franklin.

Although both men have become almost mythical in the American mind, Rip is a kind of anti-Franklin figure, a do-nothing rather than a do-gooder. He has absolutely no ambition (other than to be free of his wife's nagging). He would rather "starve on a penny than work for a pound." His wife's attempts to force him into a Franklin-like sense of responsibility only drive him away from home and into the mountains.

Whereas Franklin found freedom and prosperity through a journey to a great town, Rip's most urgent efforts are directed toward escaping from the town and the domestic concerns of his wife. His journey from civilization begins in a familiar mountain landscape that soon becomes mysterious. Rip is given something to drink by a ghostly crew of Dutchmen, and he falls asleep. He wakes up twenty years later to discover that his wife is dead, that the American Revolution has taken place, and that he is, both literally and symbolically, a free man.

Irving's story is a whimsical fairy tale, much of it borrowed from a German source. But "Rip Van Winkle" contains a number of the attitudes and tendencies associated with American Romanticism: a distrust of "civilization," nostalgia for the past, a concern with individual freedom, and interest in the supernatural, and a profound love for the beauties of the natural landscape.

The Romantic sensibility is not easy to define, because Romanticism was a movement that went beyond national, chronological, and artistic boundaries. Its first stirrings were felt in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century. Romanticism had a strong influence on literature, music, and painting in Europe and England well into the nineteenth century. Romanticism came relatively late to America, and took different forms.

What is Romanticism? In general, though, Romanticism is the name given to those schools of thought that consider the rational inferior to the intuitive. For the Romantics, the imagination, spontaneity, individual feelings, and nature were of greater value than reason, logic, planning, and cultivation. Romanticism developed in part as a reaction against rationalism, as people realized the limits of reason. The Romantics believed that the imagination was able to discover truths that reason could not reach, truths usually accompanied by powerful emotion and associated with beauty. The Romantics did not flatly reject logical thought as invalid for all purposes. But for the purpose of art, they placed a new premium on nonrational experience.

Poetry was the highest work of the imagination for the Romantics. They often contrasted it with science, which was seen as destroying the very truth it claimed to seek.

The Romantic sensibility sought to rise above "dull realities" to a realm of higher truth. It would do this in two principal ways: first, by exploring exotic settings in the more "natural" past or in a world far removed from our sooty and noisy industrial age; second, by contemplating the natural world, until dull reality falls away to reveal underlying beauty and truth.

The Gothic novel, with its wild landscapes and mysterious castles, is one example of the first approach.

The second Romantic approach, the contemplation of the natural world, is evident in many lyric poems. In these, the poet views a commonplace object or event. A flower found by a stream or a waterfowl flying overhead brings the poet to some important, deeply felt insight, which is then recorded in the poem.

This contemplative process is similar to the Puritans' habit of drawing moral lessons from nature. The difference is one of emphasis and goal. The Puritans' lessons were limited by their religion. They found in nature the God they knew from the Bible. The Romantics found in nature a far less clearly defined divinity; their experience is usually recorded as a more generalized emotional and intellectual awakening.

The typical hero of American Romantic fiction is likely to have some or all of the following characteristics: youth (or childlike qualities); innocence; a love of nature and a distrust of town life; a corresponding uneasiness with women, who were usually taken (by male writers) to represent civilization and the impulse to "domesticate"; and the need to engage in a quest for some higher truth in the natural world. Although American Romantic poetry was heavily influenced by European writers, American novelists soon discovered that the subject matter available to them was very different from European materials. The novel in America moved toward a wilderness experience that Europe, so long settled, simply did not possess. The development of the American novel coincided with westward expansion, with the growth of a nationalist spirit, and 'with the rapid growth of cities. All these factors tended to reinforce the idealization of frontier life.

If the Romantic novelists looked for new subject matter and innovative themes, virtually the opposite tendency appears in the Romantic poets, they wanted to prove that Americans were not unsophisticated hicks but were as knowledgeable and polished as Europeans.

Each of the American poets, also, looked backward-over his shoulder, as it were—at established European literary models. But these poets used their talents fruitfully. Each wrote a few great poems, and each wrote many other poems that for generations were the staple of home and school reading.

In fact, the Fireside Poets, as the Boston group of Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and Whittier was called, were the last great popular poets in America. They were called "Fireside Poets" because their poems were so often read aloud at the family fireside as family entertainment. The works of the Fireside Poets appealed to the ordinary, literate man and woman, and their subjects—love, patriotism, nature, family, God, and religion - secured for these poets a well-loved place in almost every American home.

Nevertheless, their attempts to create a new American literature relied too reverently on the literature of the past. The Fireside Poets were unable to recognize the poetry of the future, which was being written right under their noses.

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