Romanticism and Transcendentalism
Analyze individualism, nature, intuition, reform, and symbolism in Romantic and Transcendentalist texts.
A lesson of English 11, in American Literature Foundations, about 10 minutes.
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to identify the key features of American Romanticism and Transcendentalism, analyze representative texts, and explain how these movements responded to Enlightenment rationalism.
American Romanticism
American Romanticism (roughly 1800–1860) responds to Enlightenment rationalism by elevating emotion, intuition, imagination, and nature over pure reason and systematic thought.
Key features:
- Nature as a source of truth and transcendence
- The individual hero (often isolated, in conflict with society)
- The importance of imagination and intuition
- Fascination with the supernatural, the gothic, and the dark
- Nostalgia; the past as more authentic than the present
The "Dark Romantics" (Poe, Hawthorne, Melville) question the optimism of their contemporaries: what if human nature is not perfectable? What if the dark is always lurking beneath?
Key Texts of Romanticism
Edgar Allan Poe: "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Fall of the House of Usher" — the unstable narrator; the gothic; the horror of subjectivity.
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter — American Puritanism's legacy; guilt; social hypocrisy; the impossibility of escaping the past.
Herman Melville: Moby-Dick — obsession; the limits of human knowledge; the inscrutable universe; the white whale as the unknowable.
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism (1830s–1850s) shares Romanticism's reverence for nature and individual intuition but is more optimistic — it believes in the inherent goodness of human beings and the possibility of direct spiritual experience without institutional mediation.
Key features:
- The "oversoul": a universal spirit connecting all beings
- Individual self-reliance and non-conformity
- Civil disobedience when law conflicts with moral truth
- Nature as the purest expression of the divine
Emerson and Self-Reliance
Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance" (1841):
"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string."
"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think."
Key argument: society and institutions corrupt the individual; the self's intuition is the highest authority; conformity is spiritual death.
Thoreau and Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" (1849):
Context: written in response to the Mexican-American War and the Fugitive Slave Act, which Thoreau believed were immoral.