d weapons. In this scene the hunters have become the hunted; the “majesty” of man’s intelligence and ingenuity is portrayed in the clumsy figures scrambling for their spears, their primitive instinct to fight the only tool keeping them alive.Another aspect of Romanticism was a fascination with the past or the exotic. Unlike the authors of the Enlightenment, who focused almost entirely on Greeks and Romans, the Romantic authors loved the Gothic, as well. They embraced medieval tales and imagery, adding stained glass in soaring cathedrals, tales of Robin Hood and his merry men, and King Arthur and his knights of the round table. This Gothic romantic theme also occurs in novels made popular by writers like Ann Radcliffe and M.L. Lewis (The Monk). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is also a Gothic romance, and in American Edgar Allen Poe adopted the genre in some of his work. In “To Helen,” he features the imagery of Helen of Troy. In “The Past,” Bryant writes of a yearning to breaking free the spirits of the past and bringing them to the present.My spirit yearns to bringThe lost ones back—yearns with desire intenseIn struggles hard to wringThy bolts apart, and pluck they captives thence.(lines 17-20)Among the Romantics, even love became a desired, yet distant and exotic experience. This view of love is apparent in the poem, “She Walks in Beauty as the Night,” in which Lord Byron writes of a beautiful woman always just out of his grasp, distant and veiled with mystery who’s flawlessness he can only compare to the sublime perfection of nature. In fact, what is often written about love is sometimes written to nature personified. Jane Austen labored with questions of love—how it was initiated, if it could be planned, whether a woman could be valued as a person or whether she must become property to be exchanged. This view is apparent in Emma and somewhat in Sens...
