The two main styles of literature in the nineteenth century, Realism and Romanticism, both clearly had connections to the growing modernism around them. Both literary methods aimed to show people and represent the struggles that they had in daily life, but Realism focused more on the average person in their harsh and crude settings, while Romanticism achieved this through focusing on the individual in exotic or supernatural circumstances. Frederick Douglass in his writing “Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass” strongly follows the ideals of Realism, while Nathaniel Hawthorne in “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” powerfully correlates to the commonalities of Romanticism. Realism, as portrayed in “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” by Frederick Douglass, focuses on realistic details as an attempt to create an image of the real world. Characters are depicted to be normal, average people in the respective time, and the story is majorly concerned with common problems such as …show more content…
Unusual and mysterious events are common in plots and storylines, and often include extreme exaggerations of such. In the story “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”, the author highlights that “the famous Fountain of Youth...is situated in the southern part of the Floridian peninsula, not far from Lake Macaco” (Hawthorne 3). Since a fountain of youth does not truly exist, the supernatural element of this story ties it directly to Romanticism. Anti-transcendental writers often believed that man would eventually destroy themselves due to their corrupt nature. Hawthorne emphasizes the negative lives of his characters by noting that “they were all melancholy old creatures, who had been unfortunate in life, and whose greatest misfortune it was that they were not long ago in their graves” (Hawthorne 1). His focus on the downward spiral of his characters promotes the story to be directly tied to