CHAPTER 4

THE ROMANTIC PERIOD(1820-1860)

PREPARED BY: CERNAL, JOY LOURINCE R.

 WHAT IS ROMANTIC
STORY?

.
DISCUSSION STUDENTS SHOULD BE ABLE TO:
-DEFINE ROMANTIC VISION
-KNOW GREAT ROMANTIC WRITERS AND STORIES
-RELATE ROMANTIC CONTRIBUTIONS OF TODAYS
ERA
.
 ROMANTIC

-A HEIGHTENED, EMOTIONAL, AND

SYMBOLIC FORM OF THE NOVEL.
YOU DO NOTE THAT ROMANCE WERE
NOT LOVE STORIES , BUT SERIOUS
NOVELS THAT USED SPECIAL
TECHNIQUES TO COMMUNICATE
COMPLEX MEANINGS.
ROMANTIC
-is dark and forbidding, indicating how difficult it is to
create an identity without a stable society.
-Most of the Romantic heroes die in the end.
 FAMOUS AUTHORS:

-Walt Whitman
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
-Herman Melville,
- Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and the
Transcendentalists
ROMANTIC PERIOD

-DARK FATES

- THE TYPICAL PROTAGONISTS OF THE AMERICAN

ROMANCE ARE HAUNTED AND ALIENATED
INDIVIDUALS
EXAMPLES

-HAWTHORNE’S “ARTHUR DIMMESDALE” OR

“HESTER PRYNNE” IN THE SCARLET LETTER.
EXAMPLE
MELLVILLE’S “AHAB” IN MOBY-DICK AND MANY
MORE.
 REASONS OF FICTIONAL EXPLORATION

-English novels show a poor main character rising on the

economic and social ladder

-the absence of settled, traditional community life in America.

English novelists — Jane Austen, Charles Dickens (the great
favorite), Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, William Thackeray —
lived in a complex, well-articulated, traditional society and shared
with their readers attitudes that informed their realistic fiction .
REASONS OF FICTIONAL
EXPLORATION
-moving frontier populated by immigrants speaking
foreign languages and following strange and crude
ways of life.
-In America, it is not enough to be a traditional and
definable social unit, for the old and traditional gets left
behind; the new, innovative force is the center of
attention.
TYPEE : A PEEP AT POLYNESIAN
LIFE

- THE FIRST BOOK OF MELVILLE, A

CLASSIC TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE.
LEATHERSTOCKING
- A NOVEL BY JAMES FENIMORE COOPER,
YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN
-A SHORT STORY, BY AMERICAN WRITER
HAWTHORNE.
ROMANCE
- ARE DARK AND FORBIDDING, MOST OF THE
ROMANTIC STORIES DIE IN THE END : ALL THE
SAILORS DIE EXCEPT ISMHAEL ARE DROWNED IN
MOBY-DICK, AND ARTHUR DIMMESDALE DIE AT
THE END OF SCARLET LETTER.
-
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
- One of his ancestors had been a judge in an earlier
century, during trials in Salem of women accused of
being witches. Hawthorne used the idea of a curse on
the family of an evil judge in his novel The House of the
Seven Gables.
-stories are set in Puritan New England, and his
greatest novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850),
SCARLET LETTER
-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.
-
OTHER WRITINGS
 THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES
 -
-The Blithedale Romance (1852) is interesting for its portrait
of the socialist, utopian Brook Farm community. In the book,
Hawthorne criticizes egotistical, power-hungry social
reformers whose deepest instincts are not genuinely
democratic

- The Marble Faun (1860), though set in Rome, dwells

on the Puritan themes of sin, isolation, expiation, and
salvation.
Hawthorne’s best-known shorter
stories:
-: “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “Young Goodman Brown,”
and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” casts light on one of
the most striking elements in Hawthorne’s fiction: the
lack of functioning families in his works
-Hawthorne’s stories and novels repeatedly show
broken, cursed, or artificial families and the sufferings of
the isolated individual.
.

The American Revolution, from a

psychohistorical viewpoint,
parallels an adolescent rebellion
.

THE END…