Literary romanticism embodies themes such as the cultivation of emotion and sensation for their own sake, the tendency toward free thought, and the revolt against political authority and social convention among others. However, two other components of romanticism are the belief that man is innately good in his natural state and a reverence for nature. It is these two components that we most clearly see in the character of Isaac McCaslin and the action and setting of Faulkner’s The Bear. The theme underlying this story centering around Ike, a young and inexperienced hunter, is the nobility of character that can be gleaned from an existence in nature, i.e. the wilderness.
The bear, Old Ben, represents unvarnished, free, and wild nature. The story details Ike’s initiation as a hunter but more importantly it is the story of his learning the lessons of the wilderness. Old Ben symbolizes this wilderness. He is a symbol for all that is pure and wild and free in nature, a nature no man has a right to buy or sell. As typical with romanticism, Ike “divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet”, for he knows wilderness is doomed by the gnawing of men fearful of it (Faulkner 229). Ike knows the bear is a symbol of the old wilderness, raw and untamed, one that instills fear in men who vainly attempt to master it, a nature that is “an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old, dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old, wild life which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear, like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant;--the old bear, solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowered, childless, and absolved of mortality—old Priam reft of his old wife and outlived all his sons” (Faulkner 229).
Sam attempts to teach Ike that he must relinquish himself to the wilderness, which is why Old Ben won’t appear before t
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