Romanticism, Gothicism, and American Literature

Most people who hear the term Romanticism instinctively think of love, hearts,

and all things cheesy and lovey-dovey. Ironically those who hear the name John Green

almost immediately think of the same thing. This is not at all what the word Romanticism

means, but the modern definition of the word romantic causes people to think it does.

Additionally, while on the surface John Green’s works may simply appear to center on

love and teenage folly, underneath the surface lurks a deep connection to American

Romanticism and Gothicism of the 1800’s. Romanticism defined accurately emphasizes

nature, travel, idealism, exploration of emotion, and love. On the flipside is Gothicism,

which is essentially Romanticism gone wrong as it depicts darker, prison-like nature, the

darkness in humankind, intense phantasmagoria, and the dark aspects of the human

psyche. Nathaniel Hawthorne blends both of these literary styles in his works as does

John Green. When comparing Nathaniel Hawthorne, an author of the 1800’s, to John

Green, an author of today, it becomes clear that despite their works centering on vastly

different plots and topics, the heart of their works is the same when it comes to defining

these works as American and that John Green owes to authors like Nathaniel

Hawthorne the ideals of Romanticism and Gothicism. Despite some similarities these

authors works demonstrate the fact that there is no one specific canon for American

literature because American literature is vast, inclusive, ever-evolving, and not easily

definable by any criteria and they also represent that many aspects of American

literature of the past will always continue to be prominent and thrive.

One core principle of Romanticism is travel and this core feature can be seen in

both Hawthorne and Green’s works. Along with the life-changing travel in turn comes

intense exploration of emotion, another core feature of Romanticism. In almost every

one of John Green’s novels, travel is a prominent and important feature for the entire

plot. In Looking For Alaska, the main character Miles Halter travels to an entirely new

school where his entire life changes, in Paper Towns Quentin Jacobsen has riveting

realizations about humanity as he embarks on a journey chasing after a girl he thought

he knew, and in An Abundance of Katherines Colin Singleton travels trying to escape

his dating past and his view on life and the world completely change by the end of the

novel. Despite these three stories differing greatly, they all have one thing in common,

which is that everything the characters thought they believed, their very core beliefs, are

completely shaken and changed by the end of their stories. Miles Halter from Looking

for Alaska expresses this after Alaska dies when he says,

“You can't just make me different and then leave," I said out loud to her.

“Because I was fine before, Alaska. I was fine with just me and last words

and school friends, and you can't just make me different and then die." For

she had embodied the Great Perhaps—she had proved to me that it was

worth it to leave behind my minor life for grander maybes, and now she

was gone and with her my faith in perhaps. (Green, Looking For Alaska,

172)

Miles was content with a normal, ordinary life before he met Alaska but once he did

meet her she showed him the possibility for so much more in life. Alaska instilled a faith

in him that life could be so much more than he ever dreamed it could be, that life didn’t

have to be simple and ordinary, that there was a “great perhaps” out there for him, but

once she’s gone, he laments that his faith in this is lost. This isn’t true, though, it

becomes clear Alaska truly did change him even though he proclaims otherwise and

despite her death Miles still has a new faith and belief in the immense capacity for

greatness in life that he never would have found without her and in turn that he never

would have found without travelling. Additionally, the immense grief and emotion he

goes through after losing Alaska is extremely romantic in nature as Miles feels all kinds

of emotions he never felt before because of Alaska and his journey to that school. In

Green’s Paper Towns, Quentin Jacobsen always believed the little things mattered and

he always thought Margo had it all, friends, popularity, looks, admiration, and so he

thought she was living the perfect life and he envied her for that but once she goes

missing and he embarks on a road trip with his friends to find her he looks back at his

hometown and thinks, “The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things

I’d done [there,] all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept

welling up inside me (Green, Paper Towns, 227).” Quentin comes to realize because of

the journey he goes on that the little things like popularity look good from afar but up

close they’re really nothing, they’re fake and flimsy like paper, and that what really

matters are the memories you make because those, whether positive or negative, are

real and far more important than trivial things like popularity. This too exemplifies the

exploration of emotion Quentin embarks on through his travels. Furthermore, Colin

Singleton in Green’s An Abundance of Katherines defines his whole life and existence

by simply only dating girls named Katherine and also being a genius prodigy, but by the

end of the journey he embarks on he comes to say, “I feel like I've only ever been two

things...I'm a child prodigy, and I'm dumped by Katherines. But now I'm—” to which his

friend responds, “Neither (Green, An Abundance of Katherines, 163).” Before the

journey he embarked on with his friends he thought everything he was, his entire life

was simply defined by these two markers, but afterwards he comes to realize that he is,

so much more than these things and that these things do not have to define him, that

there is infinite possibility for so much more for him. Colin also has intense emotional

ups and downs on his journey that exemplify a core feature of Romanticism. All three of

these books of Green’s can be contrasted with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman

Brown in which Goodman Brown similarly travels into a new location, namely, a forest,

and also has his core beliefs, especially his faith, shaken. This is clear when Goodman

Brown says, “My Faith is gone!" ..."There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name.

Come, devil; for to thee is this world given." (Hawthorne, 351).” In his article focusing on

evil in Young Goodman Brown, Michael Jaynes states his belief that Goodman Brown

isn’t only talking specifically about his wife Faith, but rather, that Goodman Brown is

saying that he “lost his Faith, metaphorically and literally” as he is lamenting not only the

loss of his wife but also his loss of faith in humanity and the whole world as he now

believes all is now evil, corrupted, and beyond saving (Jaynes, 67). Goodman Brown

also feels all kinds of new emotions about his wife, himself, and life in general and thus

he too embarks on an emotional exploration, furthering this works ties to Romanticism.

In all of these works travel, a core feature of Romanticism, serves as a life-defining,

emotion-filled, and changing moment for the characters, thus illustrating that these

works by Green and Hawthorne represent the significant American ideal of

Romanticism in but also that these stories are really vastly different despite having

some similarities and thus that American literature is not one specific canon.

The importance of travel, a Romantic feature, goes even farther than just shaking

faith as it also causes revelations about humanity as a whole to come to light, which

gets much more Gothic in nature. Through their travels Goodman Brown, Miles Halter,

and Quentin Jacobsen each come to recognize a new truth about humanity that they did

not know before. In his article analyzing Young Goodman Brown from a psychological

perspective Michael Tritt states that, “Through Brown’s experience in the forest, he

comes to know the duplicity of human nature (Tritt, 114). Brown sees people like the

pastor, who are supposed to pure and absolutely good, and describes how he finds

them being involved in the evil scene he has found himself in hard to believe when he

says,

...the voices, talking so strangely in the empty air, passed on through the forest,

where no church had ever been gathered or solitary Christian prayed. Whither,

then, could these holy men be journeying so deep into the heathen wilderness?

Young Goodman Brown caught hold of a tree for support, being ready to sink

down on the ground, faint and overburdened with the heavy sickness of his heart.

He looked up to the sky, doubting whether there really was a heaven above him.

(Hawthorne, 350)

That is, that Goodman Brown before believed these people to be wholly good and pure,

but upon this scene he comes to realize that there are actually two sides to humanity,

that underneath the good lies the bad so deceitfully and deceptively hidden. Barbara

Smith states in her article that Goodman Brown essentially comes to believe that, “Faith

itself/herself is impure, and so the world is in the power not of God, but of the devil

(Smith, 49). This in turn shakes Goodman Brown’s faith in God and Heaven because

since such evil exists in those who Goodman Brown thought he knew he thus finds

himself questioning everything else he thought he knew and believed in. Hawthorne

furthers his depiction of the sin and duality of man in another of his works, The

Minister’s Black Veil, which can be seen in the quote,

Why do you tremble at me alone?...Tremble also at each other! Have men

avoided me, and women shown no pity, and children screamed and fled, only for

my black veil? What, but the mystery which it obscurely typifies, has made this

piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the

lover to his best beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his

Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a

monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me,

and, lo! on every visage a Black Veil! (Hawthorne, 377)

The revelation here is that all are sinners and all of humanity is flawed and imperfect,

which correlates to Young Goodman Brown as well as some of Green’s works. In one of

Green’s works, Looking For Alaska, Miles has a similar revelation as at first he believes

Alaska is this ideal, perfect, flawless girl when he first meets her but he soon comes to

find out she is much more messy, dark, and complicated than he ever could have

believed. Miles expresses this when he says, “I would never know her well enough to

know her thoughts in those last minutes, would never know if she left us on purpose.

But the not-knowing would not keep me from caring, and I would always love Alaska

Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart (Green, Looking For Alaska,

218).” Miles is essentially expressing that while it is true that Alaska was so flawed, so

much of her was a mystery to him, and that she was not at all perfect, at the heart of it

all he still cares for her despite all the unanswered questions he has about her. Though

he still loves her, she did still force him to realize that there is a dark side to humanity in

general and that everyone is so much more than they seem on the surface. This also

occurs for Quentin Jacobsen in Paper Towns as he idolizes Margo throughout the

entirety of the story. Once she goes missing, Quentin is forced to realize he didn’t know

he like he though he did and embark on a journey that ultimately ends with his

revelation that, “Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a

fine and precious thing. She was a girl. (Green, Paper Towns, 199).” Quentin realizes

that because he put her on a pedestal and objectified her as this perfect thing he didn’t

realize that at the heart of it all Margo was still a flawed, imperfect human. In all of these

stories it becomes clear that, “...there is only human nature, and the terms “evil” and

“good” are empty signifiers that simply retard the growth of intellectual expansion and

are often based on the irrational construct of religious doctrine which tends to force

supernatural signifiers on natural phenomena (Jaynes, 69).” That is, that all of these

very different characters from these vastly different works have life-changing

realizations about humanity, specifically that humanity as a whole is imperfect and

immensely flawed. Though both Green and Hawthorne express this, in Hawthorne’s

works it seems that the darkness and corruption within humanity is the absolute worst

thing imaginable and that sin means that one is unsaveable, which Denis Donoghue

finds problematic in his article analyzing sin in many of Hawthorne’s works and to which

he says that “The theology of Original Sin does not hold that in our actual sins we are

sinners indistinguishable from one another (Donoghue, 220-221).” That is, that not all

sins are equally bad and sinning one doesn’t immediately damn someone as

Hawthorne’s characters seem to feel in his works. This can be sharply contrasted with

Green’s works in which it is apparent that humanity is definitely flawed and intensely

complex and that they cannot be summed up in such simple terms as “good” and “evil”

despite the choices they make. Green and Hawthorne both use the Romantic ideal of

travel as a life-changing and defining feature for their characters in a more Gothic way

when it comes to their realizations about humanity. Additionally, their overall messages

and results of their stories are completely different, thus illustrating that both works

share similar aspects but are actually vastly different things, which can be applied to

represent American literature in general.

A confined, spiraling, paranoid mind is a key aspect of Gothicism and is a

prominent aspect that can be seen in both Hawthorne and Green’s works. In Young

Goodman Brown the readers are trapped in a prison-like mindstate for almost the

entirety of the story. In John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down, the main character Aza

Holmes struggles with anxiety and OCD, a fact that is not immediately apparent to the

reader and a fact that makes the beginning of the book seem confusing as the inner

workings of Aza’s mind are unlike most other typical characters minds. Oftentimes

reading this book it feels like a trapped, never ending spiral of paranoid thoughts in

Aza’s mind, which is comparable to the mind of Goodman Brown. Essentially both

characters minds are confusing and polluted with, as Alide Cagidemetrio puts it in her

book in which she analyzes Hawthorne,“...the blurring of the boundaries between

illusion and reality (Cagidemetrio, 5). A quote that represents this in Turtles All the Way

Down is when Aza says to herself, “The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it

never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely. “(Green, Turtles All the Way

Down, 7). That is, that her mind is a spiral of paranoid thoughts that only get more and

more constricting, confusing, and unreliable as she follows them for both her and the

reader. Goodman Brown’s own inconsistent mind can be seen in the quote,

So saying, he threw it down at her feet, where, perhaps, it assumed life, being

one of the rods which its owner had formerly lent to the Egyptian Magi. Of this

fact, however, goodman Brown could not take cognizance. He had cast up his

eyes in astonishment, and looking down again, beheld neither goody Cloyse nor

the serpentine staff, but his fellow-traveller alone, who waited for him as calmly

as if nothing had happened. (Hawthorne, 349)

Goodman Brown thinks he’s seeing these miraculous things happen but he’s really not

sure and thus his mind state and the supposed situation he is in is very phantasmagoric

and unreliable. With both Aza and Goodman Brown everything is built up in their head

and they continue to spiral into worse and worse thoughts when nothing is actually

happening, they just believe it is and thus allow it to have a profound effect on them.

The reader is trapped in these characters minds wondering what’s really happening and

uncertain of what’s real and what isn’t, which is phantasmagoria, a staple aspect of

Gothicism. Another example of phantasmagoria that can be contrasted with these is

Green’s Let It Snow, in which the characters Tobin, Angie, who goes by the name “the

Duke,” and JP get trapped in a snowy, confused winter wonderland. Following this, the

characters dynamic changes completely and irreversibly. The three of them were the

best friends in the world, but unbeknownst to Tobin, the Duke actually always wanted to

be more than that with him. Along the crazy journey Tobin comes to think about the

Duke in a new way too which he says, “But then again (and here is one of my main

complaints about human consciousness): once you think a thought, it is extremely

difficult to unthink it. And I had thought the thought (Green, Let It Snow, 192-193).”

Tobin is expressing here that he thought about the Duke and the possibility of them

being more than friends and since he thought it he cannot unthink it. That is, that this

confusing journey they embarked on caused him to have new realizations that ended up

changing him and his relationship with the Duke forever as they both come to realize

they are in love. It took a crazy, confusing, phantasmagoric adventure through the snow

for these two characters to reveal their true feelings to each other as Tobin discovers he

too wants more in their relationship. Without the phantasmagoric adventure that blurred

the lines in all the confusion the two of them may have never become more than friends

just as without Goodman Brown’s own phantasmagoric alleged adventure he never

would have lost his faith in humanity. Green’s use of phantasmagoria is much lighter

and less serious whereas Hawthorne’s is dark and thus they may similarly employ this

strategy in their stories, but the overall content and results of their stories is still very

different, thus illuminating the fact that there is no one canon of American literature.

At first glance it’s easy to believe that literature of the past is exceptionally

different from literature of the present, but this couldn’t be more wrong. There’s always

new stories to be told, stories unlike anything yet seen, but also stories that couldn’t

have been told without the stories of authors of the past. Furthermore, as David

Cremean states in his article analyzing literature, it is important “...to recognize that to a

degree, all new literary eras—loose and overly simplistic designations that they may

be—are in part forged by reactions against the main emphases of the eras immediately

preceding them (Cremean, 6).” That is, that a common thread throughout American

literature is also that new movements emerge in response to movements of the past.

Thus, the past always helps to define the future and literature of America is no

exception. However, there is no one easy way to define what American literature is all

about as every piece of literature is unique and different in its own way despite its

tributes to literature of the past.

Works Cited

Cagidemetrio, Alide. Fictions of the Past: Hawthorne & Melville. Institute for

Advanced Study in the Humanities, 1992.

Cremean, David. “Blending Literary Eras and Forces: Romantic Naturalism in

Critical Representative Literary Westerns of the Early 1900s.” ALN: The American

Literary Naturalism Newsletter, vol. 5, no. 1/2, Fall 2010, pp. 6–12. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=55665184&site=lrc-plus.

Donoghue, Denis. "Hawthorne and Sin." Christianity and Literature, vol. 52, no.

2, 2003, p. 215+. General OneFile,

http://link.galegroup.com.ezproxy.grossmont.edu/apps/doc/A102905746/GPS?u=sdccd

_grossmont&sid=GPS&xid=439357e8. Accessed 9 Dec. 2018.

Green, John. An Abundance of Katherines. Dutton Books, 2006.

Green, John. Looking For Alaska. Dutton Books, New York, 2005.

Green, John. Paper Towns. Dutton Books, New York, 2008.

Green, John. Turtles All the Way Down. Dutton Books, New York, 2017.

Green, Johnson, Myracle, Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances. Speak, an

Imprint of Penguin Group (USA), 2014.

Jaynes, Michael. “Moving Toward an Understanding of ‘Evil’: ‘Young Goodman

Brown, University Freshmen, and Semiotics.” Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction,

vol. 7, no. 1, Fall 2006, pp. 66–77. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=23474523&site=lrc-plus.

Fay 13

Levine, Robert S. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 1820-1865.

W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.

Smith, Barbara. “The Mysterious and the Human in ‘The Murders in the Rue

Morgue’ and ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction, vol.

7, no. 1, Fall 2006, pp. 44–55. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=23474520&site=lrc-plus.

Tritt, Michael. “‘Young Goodman Brown’ and the Psychology of Projection.”

Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 23, no. 1, Winter 1986, p. 113. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=7702396&site=lrc-plus.