Romanticism and Sexuality, Respectively

If you could combine Charles Brockden Brown with Nathaniel Hawthorne and add a pinch of “The Death of a Salesman,” I think you might get something similar to Theron Ware.  I had to keep reminding myself that I was not reading Hawthorne, this was not Young Goodman Brown, and that I was taking an America Realism and Naturalism class, instead of returning to American Romanticism.  For all its naturalism, there was so much romanticism.  But for all its romance it was romanticism explained, and I think that is what constituted to the naturalism.  To me it was like watching a scary movie without the edits, and the film crew kept popping up on the screen reminding me that it was not as romantic as I had initially thought—maybe even the TBS facts bar that kept popping up and telling me that the Soulsbys were really sideshow specials.  Things happen ever so “seemingly,” the imagery of darkness and forests that we become so familiar with in CBB and Hawthorne are immediately debunked one paragraph or page later. 

And is it just me, or are all of the male protagonists consistently somewhat dense during this literary movement?  Meanwhile, you have Isabel Archer trying to save herself and save the world without being incredibly stupid.  If you had McTeague and Lapham in the same room, we might have one lazy afternoon with some Keystone Lights and a bug zapper on a front porch in Alabama, while Theron is quite another ordeal.  He is a prude, though he doesn’t seem to want to be or at best not look like he is a prude.  I think he wants to be like Celia Madden, who reminds me an awful lot of what Isabel would like to be if she had the opportunity—but, Theron is too incredibly dense.  I just can’t help but wonder what the difference with the sexes could be at this time.  The women seem to get it, but the men don’t…meanwhile, I don’t even know what it is.  In terms of naturalism and its need to scientifically break everything apart: what is science saying about the genders, and of sexuality itself? 

I know this became more of a rant, and frankly, studying literary sexuality is not my preferred Sunday afternoon, but I can’t exactly ignore the elephant anymore.  So, Mitchell: can we talk about this gender/sexuality issue?