How do you make a decision? Do you carefully weigh all the outcomes until you come to a clear choice, or do you think about how you feel and go with your emotions? The 18th century was full of Enlightenment thinkers who did the former, carefully analyzing every factor in an argument and looking at the world with dispassionate eyes. The people who reacted with emotion were viewed as fools or simpletons... that is, until more people started to consider that what was in their hearts might be more important than what was in their heads. This led to the start of the Romantic movement.

BEFORE Romanticism

While Romanticism began during the Enlightenment movement of the late 1700s, it took a while to coalesce into a singe movement. As the Enlightenment encouraged more nationalism and political involvement, most countries had policies of isolationism and several were going through political revolution. This led to each country forming their own version of proto-Romanticism. One of these transitional movements was the Gothic movement. The Gothic movement focused on horror but set its novels in beautiful old castles and filled theirs stories with literate and lovely protagonists driven by their passions. Englishman Horace Walpole kicked off the movement with his dark mystery The Castle of Otranto (1764), while Johann Wolfgang von Goethe established the main tropes of the movement through his plays and novels, including the principle of Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Drive").

Gothic Romanticism lasted for over a century (and, as some argue, is still going strong through Southern Gothic literature as well as Gothic Revival novels like Twilight and Interview With a Vampire), it was not very widespread. Though this movement produced some of the most beloved novels in literature (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Hunchback of Notre Dame), few authors made a living from it. For example, Edgar Allen Poe, America's only major Gothic writer, died in penury with little popularity. Most Gothic authors were either literary one hit wonders with only one successful book (Walpole, Shelley, Stoker) or only wrote a single Gothic text and found success with more popular writing (Dickens, Hugo). While Gothic literature never became a major movement, its emphases on character emotions and beautiful scenes of horror directly connect it to Romanticism.

Another precursor to the Romantic movement are the ironically named Romantic poets. Led by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, these poets rejected the emphases on form over substance popular with the Metaphysical poets and sought to use poetry to depict grand and beautiful narratives in the vein of the epics of Homer, Dante, and Milton. While these poets became widely read, the movement suffered from infighting among the major poets in the movement (Lord Byron famously rejected Wordsworth as 'Turdsworth') and the sudden deaths of most of the movement's most read poets (Byron, Blake, Shelley, and Keats) in the 1820s. This spark of Romanticism in England only lasted around forty years, as British prose went straight from the Enlightenment of Henry Fielding and Walter Scott to the Victorian movement (which is a fascinating fusion of the Romantic and Realist movements). Only one truly Romantic English author is still remembered today, and she was unpopular and barely noticed in her time: Jane Austin.

The Birth and Popularity of Romanticism

So if Europe sidelined Romanticism to strictly Gothic novels and poetry, where was Romanticism big? America. During and after the American Revolution, the newly formed country was hopeful and optimistic. While Enlightenment ideas on government and the rights of man were still popular among the new nation, the first generation of Americans born after independence cared more about the idea of the new nation--the boundless frontier and adventure that American liberty promised to all its citizens. The authors sought to establish for the new nation an "American mythology" that would give it the perceived legitimacy of European countries. Early writers like Washington Irving took American history and mythologized it: George Washington now chopped down a cherry tree and a war widow named Betsy Ross created our flag while a man named Rip Van Winkle slept and a Headless Horseman stalked the forests of Sleepy Hollow. Like all mythologies, these tales were fanciful and sometimes outrageous--and people loved them. After decades of purely reasonable and objective writing, audiences craved writing that appealed to their emotions. These early efforts created Romanticism.

​Romanticism modeled itself of these early mythologies and focused around features that would echo the ideals of the new American republic. For example, stories focused on the individual as opposed to the group mindset of the Enlightenment. The new frontier led to a reverence for beauty, and pride in winning the recent war led to a romanticizing of the colonial past. This became the first American literary movement, and after the fall of Napoleon in 1815, Europeans began to purchase and enjoy American literature for the first time. The first major novelist to break through after Irving was James Fenimore Cooper with his Leatherstocking Tales, followed by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Romantic poetry became popular with Americans, and the Fireside poets (Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Lowell, and Bryant) became household names. Meanwhile, Walt Whitman became "the Bard of America" with his epic Leaves of Grass, and a young poetess named Emily Dickenson wrote volumes of Romantic poetry that wouldn't be published until after her death.

One group of Romantic writers--the transcendentalists--embraced the ideas of self-reliance and individualism of the Romantics but still held onto the objective rationality of the Enlightenment. While transcendentalists essayists like Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau made only a small literary impact, they helped make huge changes in American culture. Emerson's essays on faith led to the growth of Unitarianism and atheism in the United States; Thoreau's essays on self-reliance and civil disobedience was cited by Southerns wanting to secede from the Union; and Fuller's poems and essays on the rights of women and slaves inspired a growing abolition movement. Soon, Whitman and the Fireside poets started identifying with transcendental ideals, slave narratives like that of Frederick Douglas became widely read, and a young woman named Harriett Beecher Stowe published an antislavery novel called Uncle Tom's Cabin that, in the eyes of several historians including Abraham Lincoln himself, was the spark that lit the eventual flame of civil war.

The End of romanticism

While Romanticism had a nebulous beginning, it has a very clear end: the American Civil War. It became nearly impossible to romanticize American virtue while the country tore itself apart. The war was the first to have early camera technology, and as folks at home saw the carnage of the battlefield--or had the tragedy of war come to their front door--there was a shift from romantic optimism to a desire to see the world how it really was so to prevent future tragedy. This movement became Realism.

The primary feature of Romanticism is sentimentality, or the reliance on feelings to guide thoughts and reactions. While the Enlightenment authors valued reasoning over emotion, the Romantics embraced emotion. And they embraced ALL emotions, even unpleasant ones. Whitman muses that grass is "the uncut hair of graves" in Leaves of Grass, Dickenson expresses that because she "could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me," and Poe and the other Gothic writers thrive off the terror of their characters. For Romantics, the nature of art was to tap into the heart rather into the head, and several authors used this idea to get readers in a time of widespread racism to sympathize with minority characters. While Jackson was orchestrating the Trail of Tears, Cooper and Sedgwick made readers sympathize with their Mohican and Pequod characters. As debates about slavery raged in Congress, Stowe's depiction of the kind Uncle Tom being beaten by the vile Simon LeGree made readers sympatize with the abolitionist cause.

Romanticism's reliance on sentimentality also means that family is at the forefront of these stories. Uncle Tom's Cabin reached widespread readership not because it was a slave story but because it was a family story. All of Hawthorne's novel involve families struggling with their secrets and their pasts. For the Romantics, family were the people closest to one's heart, and the closer the family member is (e.g., a sister over a cousin) the more important the relationship is. You celebrated your family. You defended your family. You married your family.

Hold on... what was that last one?

A common plot point of Romantic novels is marriage between family members. That is, tasteful marriage. While these novels avoided overt incest for the obvious reasons, Romantic literature is full of relationships between cousins, in-laws, and psuedo-siblings that are not actually related but were raised in the same household. Take Emma: the titular character of Emma Woodhouse ends up marrying Mr. Knightly, who is the brother of her sister’s husband and thus her pseudo-brother. In another of Austen's novels, Elizabeth Bennett is pursued by her cousin Mr. Collins. Victor Frankenstein weds his adopted sister Elizabeth Lavenza, while Everell Fletcher is romantically desired by Hope Leslie and Magawisca, who are both his adopted sisters. As sentimentality is a trope shared by Victorian literature, these relationships also occur in those novels.

One of the core beliefs of early America was manifest destiny, or the idea that America was meant to expand across and dominant the continent. While some believed God had blessed American expansion and others believed that American expansion was logical and inevitable, the dominant narrative in politics was summed up by Horace Greeley: “Go West, young man.” With the Louisiana Purchase, annexations of Florida and Texas, the Gadsden Purchase, and the lands won in the Mexican War, Americans developed an every-expanding frontier of new possibilities.

The frontier allowed for the rise of escapism in American literature. While colonial literature warned against the dangers of the godless wilderness and the Enlightenment extolled city life, Romanticism encouraged Americans to escape the cities of the East and escape into the frontier. Like the Old World plays of Shakespeare and Plutarch, the city is corrupt and full of problems, while the frontier offers an escape. This true of William Fletcher’s escape from London to the wilds of Massachusetts, Rip van Winkle’s epic nap, Ishmael’s voyage with Ahab, and Thoreau’s arrival at Walden Pond.

Romanticism also offers metaphorical escapism. Most early Romanticism depicted not the contemporary frontier but the original American frontier of colonization. This allowed for the escapism from the contemporary issues of slavery debates, Native American genocide, and near-constant warfare with England, Spain, Texas, and Mexico. True, some authors used the distance in narrative to provide social commentary on the treatment of women, Native Americans, and slaves, but a majority of political narratives like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Moby Dick were set contemporaneously instead of in the past—the colonial setting was typically reserved for emotional escapism.

As Americans started exploring the new wild frontier, they discover the natural beauty of America. The purple mountain majesties. The deep green forest. The grandest of all the canyons. Part of the justification of manifest destiny was that America was God’s promised land to Americans—that’s why it’s so beautiful. This is aestheticism: the idea that the world is beautiful and that this beauty should be appreciated.

Everything is beautiful in Romanticism. The settings are pristine forests that have not been cleared for cities, open seas without bounds, and sprawling plains with no other person in sight. These settings are the subject of deep, descriptive imagery in Romantic novels. These vistas also became the subjects of Romantic art: painters like Thomas Cole epitomized aesthetism in their painting of vast and seemly endless natural settings where humans, if they are even present, are dwarfed by the immensity of nature.

Characters are also beautiful, from the strong and brave Natty Bumpo to the stunning Hester Prynne. Even Gothic villains are beautiful: both Frankenstein and Dracula are described as strangely beautiful men despite the former’s scars and the latter’s effeminate demeanor. The same goes for everyday objects: Moby Dick famously has an entire chapter describing the beauty of a gold coin and how it inspires each man to dream. Other famous moments of Romantic aestheticism described in detail include Esmerelda's hanging in The Hunchback of Notre Dame... and Whitman's observation of a suicide in Leaves of Grass... and the crushing of a baby's skull in Hope Leslie...

Uh, you sure about this whole beauty thing?

According to aestheticism, everything is beautiful if it evokes emotion, even it's terrible. Even war. Even murder. Even suicide. Even dismemberment. So long as these acts are done in sincerity and connect emotionally to a reader, they are beautiful. Now, the Romantics did not endorse killing, rape, sickness, or torture, but they acknowledged that these horrible things were sometimes necessary to reveal a character's true beauty--to challenge them to become more (and if that sounds like an excuse the Romantics made to justify the continued warfare, killing, and enslavement that went on throughout the period, you aren't wrong.)

While the beauty and escape of the frontier appealed to many Americans, in reality, frontier life was very hard. Traveling the untamed expanses and struggling against the elements of nature led to many a death, and those who did survive had to pretty much fend for themselves: they had to build their own shelter, sew their own clothing, and either hunt or grow their own food, and if they needed anything that they themselves could not provide (such as a doctor), they had to travel a great distance to get it.

This harsh reality inspired Romantic literature to feature self-reliance as a common motif. Characters often shun the help from others in order to be independent and strong against the elements of nature. The common man who works hard and makes his own way in life became the hero of the literature (Natty Bumppo, Miles Coverdale, George Harris, D'artagnan, Digby) while villains primarily came in the form of those who embraced high culture and depended on the work of others to survive (Doctor Roger Chillingworth, lawyer Sir Philip Gardiner, Cardinal Richelieu, Professor Westervelt, plantation owner Simon LeGree). While most Romantic novels also featured love stories, most of its ingenues resist or reject marriage: Elizabeth Bennett, Hope Leslie, and Emma Woodhouse all reject potential suitors in order to remain independent, while Hester Prynne's loveless marriage becomes a prison for her.

The strain of independent thinking running through America at the time also reflected its faith. Colonial America was dogmatically Christian, while the Enlightenment started to espouse more theist, pantheistic, and atheistic doctrine. While the Colonials were sinners in the hands of an angry God, the Enlightenment was making Pascal's wager that, even if God were not real, it would be better to pretend he was rather than potentially face Hell.

Romantics rejected both these ideas by embrace a middle path of faith. Unlike the Enlightenment, the Romantics were sure that God existed, as the founding of America was truly a miracle. Yet unlike the Colonials, the Romantics believed in a kind and loving God and (thanks to their self-reliance) didn't need a church to worship Him. Noble characters who have strong religious convictions can be found throughout Romantic literature, while characters that embody traditional religious severity (like ministers and bishops) are shown as hypocritical or even malevolent.

So if Romantics shunned tradition, where was their church? Nature. Earlier in aestheticism, it was mentioned that Romantics were sure that God loved America because America was so beautiful. This idea is called the sublime, that one could become closest to God by becoming close to nature. More church services moved outside, as did weddings (before this point, marriage outside a church building was highly frowned upon). Furthermore, Romantic writers shifted religious dialogue from community salvation to having a personal relationship with God: Whitman's Leaves of Grass, for example, is full of religious epiphanies made while camping in the woods or swimming in the ocean.

Oh, and notice how I keep saying God and not Jesus While a majority of Americans were Christians and still believed in the divinity of Jesus, there was a growing wave of Unitarianism during the Romantic period. Rather than sticking to religious dogma, Unitarians took inspiration from multiple religious beliefs (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and even atheism) and blended them together into a single faith in a loving yet nondescript God. While most Americans were not Unitarians, a large number of Romantic authors were Unitarians and their ideas are what come through in the literature.

So if the Romantics eschewed the conventional wisdom of Colonialism (religious adherence) and the conventional wisdom of the Enlightenment (strict objectivity), where did they find wisdom? The Romantics found wisdom in two unconventional sources: in youth and in the past.

Romantics cherished the wisdom of youth as an extension of the sublime. People, the Romantics argued, are in their most natural state when they are born and lack any of the culture and education of society. Thus, the younger a character is, the wiser the character is by their connection to the sublime. Most protagonists of Romantic novels are young and idealistic, and children in these stories are treated as precious and important. So how can a child be wise? Through their questioning of societal truths (Hey! Rebellion!). For example, when Whitman discusses the nature of grass and its relationship to man in "Song of Myself," it is prompted by a child asking "What is the grass?" To Romantics, innocence and even naivety is the cure for social corruption and outdated ideas.

In addition to youth, Romantics celebrated wisdom learned from the past. As a young country, America had very little history. We've already looked at how early authors like Washington Irving were writing literary myths at the turn of the century, but other authors tapped into America's colonial past for their settings and plots. Often in these tales, Romantic authors depict Native Americans as more noble than their colonial counterparts because they were an older society that was more in-touch with the natural world. This character is even called the noble savage, and while it is considered a racist caricature by today's standards, the noble savage was considered progressive as it acknowledged the value and legitimacy of Native American culture (like I said earlier, these were very racist times).

Novelists

• Washington Irving: A History of New-York by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), "Rip Van Winkle" (1819), "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820), The Life of George Washington (1859)
• Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey (1818)
• Catherine Maria Sedgwick: Hope Leslie (1827), Clarence (1830), The Linwoods (1835)
• James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: "The Minister's Black Veil" (1832), "Young Goodman Brown" (1835), "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844), The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852)
• Alexander Dumas: The Three Musketeers (1844), The Count of Monte Cristo (1846),
• Herman Melville: Moby Dick (1853), "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853), "Bento Cereno" (1855)
• Harriett Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)

The gothics

• Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)
• Johann Wolfgang Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Faust (1808)
• Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
• Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)
• Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831)
• Edgar Allen Poe: "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842), "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842), "The Black Cat" (1843), "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843), "The Purloined Letter" (1844), "The Raven" (1845), "The Cask of the Amontillado" (1846), "A dream Within a Dream" (1849), "Annabelle Lee" (1849)
• Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol (1843)
• Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)

The transcendentalists

• Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Nature" (1836), "Self-Reliance" (1844)
• Margaret Fuller: Summer on the Lakes (1844), Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
• Henry David Thoreau: Resistance to Civil Government (1849), Walden (1854)
• Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (1855-1900), "I Hear America Singing" (1860), "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" (1865), "O Captain! My Captain!" (1865), "O Me! O Life" (1891)

the romantic poets (BRITAIN)

• Lord (George Gordon) Byron: "She Walks in Beauty" (1813), Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818), Don Juan (1824)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley: "Ozymandius" (1818), Ode to the West Wind (1819), Prometheus Unbound (1820)
• William Blake: "A Poison Tree" (1794), "The Tyger" (1794),
• John Keats: "Sleep and Poetry" (1816), Hyperion (1818), "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819), "Ode to a Grecian Urn" (1819), "To Autumn" (1819)
• William Wordsworth: "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways" (1800), "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known" (1800), "Daffodils" (1807)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Kubla Khan (1797), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Christabel (1800)

the fireside poets (america)

• William Cullen Bryant: "Thanatopsis" (1817), "To a Waterfowl" (1821)
• Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.: "Old Ironsides" (1830), The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), "The Chambered Nautilus" (1858)
• John Greenleaf Whittier: Moll Pitcher (1831), The Song of the Vermonters (1833), "Song of the Negro Boatmen" (1861), Snow-Bound (1866)
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “A Psalm of Life” (1839), “The Reapers and the Flowers” (1839), “The Village Blacksmith” (1840), “The Wreck of the Hesperus” (1842), Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), “Haunted Houses” (1858), “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1861), “The Children’s Hour” (1863)
• James Russell Lowell: A Year's Life (1841), Under the Willows (1869)