The Loss of Innocence

            The loss of innocence and the entrance into the harsh truth around you is a common theme in some Gothic Romantic works.  In William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience” we get polar different views on the city of London.  In one, Blake gives us a picture of a green area, likely a park, where there are children playing and laughing and enjoying the day.  In this poem, “The Ecchoing Green”, the scene is given to us from one of the children playing, and the atmosphere of it is overall very light and happy.  The poem opens with the lines “The Sun does arise,/ And make happy the skies” which sets the tone for something that is very upbeat and happy.  The poem itself is about children playing on “the ecchoing green” with older people sitting under a tree reminiscing happily about when they were children.  The scene is quite happy and peaceful, and the use of rhyming couplets throughout adds a childlike quality to the whole thing. 

            This is heavily contrasted by another of Blake’s poems titled “London”.  This poem takes a much darker look at London.  The speaker here is much more experienced and is saddened by the state of affairs in the city.  He describes everyone he passes as having “Marks of weakness, marks of woe.”  It seems as though the entire city here is crying out in sadness and agony.  In this collection of poems, a more innocent poem is generally connected to another poem that is fits a more experienced or depressing tone.  So we can compare “London” and “The Ecchoing Green” in terms of speaker and the type of message being portrayed about the city.  The speaker in “London” is much more jaded about the world around him and recognizes that everything isn’t a nice sunny day where you can play outside.  However, all that is seen is the dark and upsetting side of London and thus the poet in this case has lost all his innocence. 

            This loss of innocence theme can be seen in other works as well.  In Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, the fall from grace and innocence is quite important.  One of the main characters, Ambrosio, is a monk who has lived all his life away from the perils of the world.  Therefore, he is looked upon as a pillar of holiness and piety.  While seemingly untouched by the “corruption” of sexuality, Ambrosio is still not a great a pillar as people think he is because of his incredibly vanity in holding himself above those around him.  But he truly is innocent when it comes to his sexuality as he is completely inexperienced and cannot properly cope with the situations he is faced with in the novel.  Another character in the novel, Antonia, is also quite sheltered and innocent and because of it cannot see bad in the people around her, which ends up being her downfall.  The loss of innocence in this book is quite drastic and painful, and proves to be detrimental to all those who go through it.

            Another novel that covers the loss of innocence is A Sicilian Romance.  In this novel, the loss of innocence isn’t as painful an experience as in The Monk, but it still focuses around innocence being lost through sexuality.  Here the main character, Julia, has been kept inside her father’s castle away from the rest of the world, and she develops into a beautiful and intelligent woman.  However, she has had little contact with those outside the castle, and eventually sees and falls in love with a man at a party that her father throws.  She changes from an innocent, unknowledgeable girl to one who is star struck in love and comes to discover quite a lot about her family throughout the novel.  As innocence is quite important to the Romantics, especially in in Gothic tradition, it is good to recognize its use when implemented.  It can provide us with an insight into powerful character changes and sometimes provides a dialogue on the human experience.