Romantic Nostalgia As A Method Of Self Destruction By Edna St. Vincent Millay And F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Women have loved before as I love now/ At least, in lively chronicles of the past-” (lines 1-2). These opening lines seem to simultaneously show love as something old, trite, and exciting. In “[Women have loved before as I love now]”, Edna St. Vincent Millay describes the ancient love stories of the past and how she relates to them. She writes how she used to seek out the parts which focused on love, describing the love of past women as something passionate and strong. Millay also goes on to say that out of all the women alive, she feels that only she connects with the love of the past, and that only she truly feels love. “[Women have loved before as I love now]” shows that passionate love is a joyful burden that is shared by both sexes.

Paul Newman once said, “People stay married because they want to, not because the doors are locked” (74). There is no such thing as the perfect relationship, however, being involved in a healthy relationship is essential for a person to feel valued, safe, and happy. Unfortunately, in the situation of Kelly Sundberg’s personal essay “It Will Look Like a Sunset,” and Kate Chopin’s short story “The Story of An Hour,” include extreme examples of unhealthy relationships. The essay “It Will Look Like a Sunset,” shares painful experiences of Sundberg’s physical and emotional abusive relationship with her husband Caleb, while “The Story of an Hour,” shares a rare reaction of a married woman, Louise Mallard, who explores her emotions cautiously when hearing about the death of her husband. Each woman faces their own prison created by their husbands. The two marriages represent the figurative meaning of doors being locked in a marriage. Both pieces of literature convey the theme of confinement by using the literary devices of foreshadowing, imagery, and conflict.

Margaret Elliot is “beautiful, talented, critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at twenty-four” (Great Short Works, 8). Engaged to a man she has no feelings for, life feels bleak and without purpose. She feels true love once with Eric, but just for a moment. For her whole life, Margaret “had searched the faces of men for the look that lay in his eyes. She knew that look had never shone before, would never shine for her on earth again, that such love comes to one only in dreams or in impossible places like this, unattainable always. This was Love’s self, and in a moment it would die” (Great Short Works, 29). For Willa Cather this is how love exists. Happy relationships are plentiful, but the enchanted, all encapsulating love of dreams only exists in glances. For Eric this glance is enough. He does not regret his decision or the damnation he is sure it will cause. For him “a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day” as his love lives on.

One way the poets explore the idea of love and loss is through the use of language. Christina rossetti starts her poem of with the use of the word “remember”, which evokes the sense that she will be gone and gives her lover the instructions to have her in mind when she is gone which highlights the loss that is occurring between the lovers. The use of the word “remember” creates a sense that an eternal loss is taking place between the lovers as it seems like she will become a past memory which her lover will only “remember.” the word “remember” also runs , like a refrain, throughout the sonnet through the use of repetition and seems as if the power decreases throughout the poem which portrays an image as if the voice and memory of the speaker is fading from life, further portraying the idea of loss that is occurring between the lovers.the repetition of the word “remember” also allows the reader to pay close attention to

Love and the memory could be last forever, but sometimes it is not good to hold on to the past. In the story “Bullhead”, Leigh Allison Wilson uses diction and images to portray the theme of holding to the past could hurt the present. The story is told from the perspective of the daughter which is the narrator. By using diction and images, Wilson portrays the mother’s careless to her family and deeply holding on to the past. The narrator describes the story as “simple”, perhaps because the mother tells it much time to the daughter even though she already has a family of her own (Wilson 1).

Memory is used as a powerful conduit into the past; childhood experiences held in the subconscious illuminate an adult’s perception. Harwood uses tense shifts throughout her poetry to emphasise and indicate the interweaving and connection the past and the present hold. By allowing this examination of the childhood memories, Harwood identifies that their significance is that of an everlasting memory that will dominate over time’s continuity and the inevitability of death.

Gwen Harwood’s poetry endures to engage readers through its poetic treatment of loss and consolation. Gwen Harwood’s seemingly ironic simultaneous examination of the personal and the universal is regarded as holding sufficient textual integrity that it has come to resonate with a broad audience and a number of critical perspectives. This is clearly evident within her poems ‘At Mornington’ and ‘A Valediction’, these specific texts have a main focus on motif that once innocence is lost it cannot be reclaimed, and it is only through appreciating the value of what we have lost that we can experience comfort and achieve growth.

Unlike other forms of literature, poetry can be so complex that everyone who reads it may see something different. Two poets who are world renowned for their ability to transform reader’s perceptions with the mere use of words, are TS Eliot and Walt Whitman. “The love song of J Alfred Prufrock” by TS Eliot, tells the story of a man who is in love and contemplating confessing his emotions, but his debilitating fear of rejection stops him from going through with it. This poem skews the reader’s expectations of a love song and takes a critical perspective of love while showing all the damaging emotions that come with it. “Song of myself”, by Walt Whitman provokes a different emotion, one of joy and self-discovery. This poem focuses more on the soul and how it relates to the body. “Song of myself” and “The love song of J Alfred Prufrock” both explore the common theme of how the different perceptions of the soul and body can affect the way the speaker views themselves, others, and the world around them.

No matter the era, location, or even times of the darkest personal conflict, the power of love tends to always prevail. The power behind the love of family in particular seems to be the greatest. Despite the differences in the relationships, the deep bond of brotherhood in “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin shares some of the same levels of devotion that is present in “A Worn Path” by Eudora Welty which is about the arduous trek a grandmother endures for her grandson. Although the stories differ in certain areas, both “Sonny’s Blues” and “A Worn Path” emphasizes the dedication one has both emotionally and physically and the importance of family bonds when someone they love encounters challenging and life threatening times by the displays of devotion to help the ones they love.

Gwen Harwood’s mournful laments Mother Who Gave Me Life and Father and Child explore the challenging ideas of nostalgia and mortality to provide valued texts.

People who have been deceived or let down by those they once desired or loved, often mourn and lament their past relationships. In the poem “For That He Looked Not Upon Her,” George Gascoigne addresses the complexities of a broken relationship in his analysis of grief, the fear of being hurt emotionally again, and the captivation a woman still holds despite the misery she caused. He creates this through his tone of misery and undertones of past desires. By utilizing imagery and metaphors in the mouse, melancholy related diction, and words connoted with love, Gascoigne addresses a growth in the complex attitudes of the speakers regarding his prior adoration for a lover and current growth in the lessons of fear and doubtfulness.

Death is a natural process that creeps into everyone’s lives at one point. Ready or not, the process of losing a loved one is an oppressive sense of despair. Grief is a natural response to the loss of a loved one. It is numbing and can take a vast toll on a person. How someone “formulates or represents the past shapes their understanding and views of the present” (House). The process of grief in Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter is displayed by characterization, figurative language, symbolism, and flashback.

Memories can in a way define who we are and how we progress through life. Memories can be a pathway to either follow the straight and narrow or to have us decide which fork of the road to take. Past memories can help to identify a person and can effect the future that follows. Through the journy of self discovery, Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow and Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory suggest one must relive past and present memories to find their true identity in the future.

In the words of Sigmund Freud, “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” The legendary psychologist saw dreams as an avenue to study one’s underlying motives for action. Similarly, in literature one finds striking significance from the illusions of protagonists that often predict the nature of one’s psyche. Two such examples present themselves in Blanche, from Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and the grandmother, from Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find. The former tale follows a lady without a home who finds herself reliant on her belligerent and bestial brother-in-law. The latter traces a family’s road trip South and their encounter with a wanted fugitive. Both Blanche and the grandmother find themselves tethered to their idealistic and often times hypocritical fantasies which signify their underlying mental instability and foreshadow their eventual ruinations. Williams and O’Connor examine their protagonists’ delusions through gender, clothing, and nostalgia.

Coleridge sees the effect the writings of the Romantic Era has on those who are not writers which make the assistance of memory and dreams in the writings much more significant. Along with Coleridge’s significance to the Romantic Era, William Wordsworth also contributed to the movement of memory and dreams in the writings of the Romantic Era.