Transcendentalism, Thoreau & Dark Romanticism Wednesday, 10/5 Welcome to October – Time to turn it up a notch!!!!

Thoreau Re-Cap How did the two biographical pieces differ? Did you talk about this yesterday? Why not? How did the excerpts from Walden reflect Thoreau’s life? Take your notes from yesterday, meet in your fruit groups, and talk it out. You have 7-10 minutes!

Transcendentalism Key Tenets

Key Tenets of Transcendentalism In Nature, we are able to "transcend" the truths we know in the Natural world. In other words, Transcendentalists believe in things they cannot see or touch or feel. Nature is our source to experience these truths. So things like meditation can bring us to truths that we never would have experienced using only our five senses. Materialism is bad. Striving for material goods was seen as worthless and an unhealthy pursuit. It was totally superficial and can only lead to corruption.

Key Tenets of Transcendentalism Society is the source of corruption. If we are all to follow our own free will and listen to our hearts, we would be much better off. Societal/governmental norms and rules are counterintuitive. Our intuition and natural instincts guide us to do the right things. In nature, we are uncorrupted. It is only when we let society in that we start to conform and hence, be corrupted.

Key Tenets of Transcendentalism Conformity is wrong. We should NOT follow the crowd. We should make our own way and our own decisions in this world in order to truly embrace our uncorrupted intuition. The nature of human beings is good. Again, it is society that corrupts us. Human beings left to their own devices are good.

A Reaction to The Transcendentalist Movement Dark Romanticism

Let’s Talk About…Dark Romanticism!

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore-- While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. "'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door— Only this and nothing more." From "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Dark Romanticism/Gothic Dark Romanticism's birth was a mid-nineteenth-century reaction to the American Romanticism & Transcendentalism…A STARK CONTRAST! Authors like Poe, Hawthorne and Melville, found base Romantic and Transcendental beliefs far too optimistic and egotistical and reacted by modifying them in their prose and poetry. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein defined European dark romanticism, often referred to as gothic. American dark romanticism was defined by the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

Characteristics The grotesque, the gloomy, the morbid, the fantastic-the American Dark Romantics embraced all of these illogical elements and shaped them into perhaps the most popular sub-genre of American literature. While the Romantics believed reality to be pale and empty, the Dark Romantics thought quite the opposite. Life to the Dark Romantics was colorful, capricious, and contradictory.

Comparing & Contrasting The Romantics Unlike the Romantics, the Dark Romantics acknowledged the evil of man and the horror of evil. Ralph Waldo Emerson had ignored the depravity of man, sin and Calvinist predestination, and the Dark Romantics stood to remind the world of the existence of evil. Like the Romantics and Transcendentalists, however, the Dark Romantics valued intuition and emotion over logic and reason and saw symbols, spiritual truths, and signs in nature and everyday events.

Further Contradictions We can find spiritual facts directly in nature, but those facts aren’t necessarily good- in fact, generally evil Not all evil comes from man- there is evil (and how!) in the “Divine Soul” Thus, self-reflection and “transcendence” is as likely to reveal evil as well as good. Dark Romantics are fascinated with evil, madness, murder, and death

The Gothic Tradition – American Style In Europe, Dark Romantics fascinated with creepy old castles, crypts, tombs, etc. which is reflected in American DR The key figures of Dark Romanticism included Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But America is a young country, so… Poe- based stories in Gothic European settings Hawthorne- resurrected old Historical (Puritan) boogeyman (Original sin, Puritan angst, shame, etc) Melville- pitted men vs. unknowable nature

Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe, the master of the psychological thriller and an American pop-culture icon, wrote such popular works as "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Cask of Amontillado." His mystery stories, "The Purloined Letter" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" paved the way for the modern detective story, and inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes and Fyodor Dostoevsky to examine the criminal mind in Crime and Punishment (1866).