Megan Lynch
Today we started off class by reviewing what we ended with on Thursday. We discussed with our groups romantics and their views on being absolute. To be "absolute" with a characteristic means that a person is 100% that way, and can not change. An example of that would be in fairytales. The villain never has a loving side, and the hero never has flaws. They are portrayed as pure evil or good. In stories a characters traits that are absolute are prominent and shown through their actions and tones. For instance, in "Rip Van Winkle", Rip's wife is a negative character who he hates, and we know this because of the way she nags Rip. After our review we were asked the question, "What tone do the stories develop about romantic qualities? How? How are these absolute?". We then thought about this question in regards to "Rip Van Winkle" and "Tell Tale Heart". Both stories have very romantic ideals, yet are on opposite sides of the spectrum, with one story having a really positive tone and the other being incredibly negative. There is never a point in "Tell Tale Heart" where the reader thinks, "Oh maybe he is not such a bad guy, maybe this murder he committed was justified.". The whole story shows a crazy, paranoid man who praises his own evil actions. To further prove this the class searched for evidence on a google document of each story, finding the 10 characteristics of romanticism which we have went over. Some groups were assigned the odd number characteristics to look out for, and other were assigned the even numbered. After finding a characteristic it was decided whether it was used positively or negatively. Generally, all the negative examples came from "Tell Tale Heart" and the positive from "Rip Van Winkle". Class was ended by ranking the characteristics presence in each story.

More examples of romantic absolutes