The Mask of Zorro: the Romatic Tale

The Mark of Zorro: The Romantic Tale
The Mark of Zorro (1940) is an American adventure film based on Johnston McCulley’s 1924 novella, The Curse of Capistrano. During the late 19th century, when McCulley was born, the Romantic Movement in America became a period of renaissance in art and literature and redefined the fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world. Many romantic writers of the era, like McCulley, sought to create an image of the ideal hero who possessed all of the essential human qualities and taught the reader about themselves, through tales of love and honor and tragedy and triumph. The hero as rebel is an invention of romanticism. Romanticism in America helped to shift from faith in reason to faith in the senses, feelings, and imagination. In American literature there was a shift from interest in urban society to an interest in the rural and natural, a shift from public, impersonal to subjective,   and from a concern with mundane to interest in the mysterious and infinite. Mainly they cared about the individual, intuition, and imagination. The basic aims of romantic writers were various and many times there was a return to nature and to belief in the goodness of humanity, the development of nationalistic pride and the exaltation of the senses and emotions over reason and intellect. In addition, romanticism was a philosophical revolt against rationalism. The primary feature literature in the period of American Romanticism was the obsession with and celebration of individualism, which takes on particular social relevance because U.S. culture has always prized individualism and egalitarianism.   Democracy elevates everyone to the same status. One is no longer part of a traditional, old-world hierarchy and everyone has a chance to maximize one's own worth. Romanticism is a lead in today’s conception of the hero which may best be characterized by the idea of the anti-hero. Zorro, a romantic hero...