First, let's get an overview
of how the Romantic Era (1780-1830, roughly*) differs from the Age of
Enlightenment (the 18th-century).
*Note: the Victorian era,
1830-1900, begins when Queen Victoria becomes the British monarch.
The Romantic Era is often
referred to as “the Romantic Rebellion”. But don't be mislead into thinking
that everyone got up and revolted. The cultural and intellectual trajectory of
the Enlightenment continues, even within this time period, to dominate the
mainstream (the force and effects of this “trajectory” extending even into our
era): only poets and writers and artists took issue with some of the negative
consequences of the Enlightenment, “rebelling” against these consequences. And
many of these poets, writers, and artists--Wordsworth, for example--were quite
bourgeois.
| AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
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ROMANTIC ERA |
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1) IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT, WE SEE THE TRIUMPH OF RATIONALITY AND
A SCIENTIFIC ATTITUDE TOWARD NATURE
● 1687: Newton's Principia Mathematica explains laws of physics. Nature can be understood rationally
and controlled, casually, by natural laws.
● Leads to Deism: religious
philosophy that sees nature as a vast mechanism (the world is like a
super-complex clock). "Design" in nature means that there is a creator.
We may understand God best, not by reading Revelation (the Bible), but by
looking at the marvelously ordered cosmos. (Thomas Paine makes this point; you
read a brief excerpt from him at the end of the last "ENLIGHTENMENT IDEAS: THE
SEQUENCE OF OUR READINGS, LEADING UP TO THE ROMANTIC ERA" lecture.)
● Also leads to use value of nature
being emphasized (remember Locke's phrase "rationally and industriously" in
respect to land use).
● 1717 Robinson Crusoe published :
"Lockian" man, ingeniously transforms island after being castaway on it. Does not see island life as
picturesque.
● There is a strong drive to understand nature as
system; and thus knowledge is accumulated and organized, as in these examples:
● Linnaeus in his System of Nature (1735) catalogues
plants: emphasis on order/classification.
● Diderot and other scholars in France
systematically organize knowledge into compendiums = the Encyclopediasts.
●
Encyclopedia Britannica first published in 1771.
● Peale painting, "The Artist in His Museum".
● Historical overall ramification:
Science pragmatically applied = technological development = Industrial
Revolution in the late 18th century/1st 1/2 of 19th century.
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1) ROMANTICS FEAR THAT THIS DETACHED RATIONAL, SCIENTIFIC
ATTITUDE SEPARATES US FROM NATURE
● Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), German
"Idealist" philosopher: Basic philosophical premise is that we cannot
absolutely know external "reality" because it is always shaped, a priori, by the
mind's faculties.
● Nature not just an extrinsic
mechanism to be rationally understood/manipulated.
● Rather, nature evokes emotion,
and our emotion may shape and in effect create the landscape.
● Landscape valued over land per se (does Locke or Equiano ever see landscape as beautiful?).
● What is beauty? does it exist in
the subject or the object; or in between?
● Natural/organic process valued
over technology or mechanical artifice.
● Mary Shelly's Frankenstein (1818)
demonstrates the failure of the artificial or mechanical to imitate nature.
● John Keats, British Romantic poet, says in a letter: "poetry should come as
naturally as leaves to a tree": that is, the act of creation should be
spontaneous rather an act of formal labor.
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2) RISE OF MIDDLE-CLASS AND
COMMERCIAL/MIDDLE-CLASS VALUES
● Locke emphasizes the centrality
of property (and governmental powers that secure property).
● The individual increasingly is known in economic terms
rather than spiritual terms (jokingly, I said Equiano = emergence of homo
economicus).
● Franklin: "a penny saved is a
penny earned" = Protestant work ethic.
● Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations
(1776) calls England an "island of shop-keepers."
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2) ROMANTIC ARTIST TYPICALLY
ALIENATED FROM MIDDLE-CLASS AND MIDDLE-CLASS VALUES
● Romantic artists are alienated because
poetry doesn't sell very well (no longer a patronage system: Locke had a
patron).
● The Romantic artist tends to be
fascinated by:
● his/her own psyche.
● the exotic (the Orient, altered states of
consciousness) or the forbidden.
● the heroic (Napoleon).
● with visionary thinking/ with subconscious
processes/dreams.
● The Romantic artist celebrates
spontaneity over convention or the routine.
● Romantic artists are likely to value
spiritual intuitions over dogmas of established religion.
● Romantic artists are likely to be
radically egalitarian. But, again, keep in mind that all of society is not engaged in
the “Romantic Rebellion”. It is mostly an aesthetic/philosophical
counter-culture, with much variation among writers/artists who were
accepted/appreciated in their own age or not and in respect to the extent of revolt in their
personal lives (The British Romantic poets Shelley and Byron wildly pushed beyond the edge, both sexually
and politically; Wordsworth
became the consummate Victorian gentleman in his later years, quite stodgy).
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3) RATIONAL FREE-THINKING/SPECULATION ABOUT IMPROVING SOCIAL MECHANISM
● Laws of government, like
Newtonian laws of nature, can be understood and rationally implemented.
American Constitution adopted after rational discussion/public debate
(Federalist/Anti-Federalist Papers).
● Locke's 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding: tabula rasa. Knowledge gained through sensory input;
and hence
environment/education is important. According to Locke, we are not born with
innate ideas or innate corruption/sin. Locke's ideas puncture the
Christian notion of inherited sin, derived from Adam & Eve's fall.
● Human nature can be perfected if
we are in the right social environment.
● Proto-anthropology develops via
sea-exploration. Captain Cook "discovers" Hawai'i; such provides
evidence of the "progress"
of societies from "savage" to "barbarian" to "civilized," and yet also makes
some Europeans intellectuals (such as Jean Jacques-Rousseau, who inaugurates the "noble savage" idea) doubt the merits
of civilization's complications. Rousseau is both part of the
Enlightenment Era and the Romantic Era.
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3) INDIVIDUAL
(ENERGY/PERCEPTION/FREEDOM) MORE IMPORTANT THAN SOCIAL SELF OR SOCIAL STABILITY
● Subjective, unique experience celebrated over public
or objective values (Rousseau prides himself on being "different").
● "Noble savage"/ rural or
"primitive" cultures valued for simplicity and naturalness.
● Urban, commercial life deadens perception:
walk in a field, not in a street (See Wordsworth's "The World is too Much
With Us", to be read below in an e-text").
● Society corrupts: children and
childlike innocence celebrated.
● Jean-Jacques Rousseau: "We are
born free, but everywhere are in chains." Go to the e-text below to
read Rousseau's diatribe against the illness of civilization:
E-text: Rousseau
DID YOU MISS THE E-TEXT
ABOVE? |
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Romantic poets, novelists, and
artists are all unique, but we can usefully categorize them into meditative,
reflective brooders (Wordsworth & Keats) or more turbulent visionaries (Blake &
Mary Shelley):
William Blake, one of the earliest
British Romantic poets (he was also a painter), was revolutionary
in virtually everyway imaginable. He fiercely condemned
slavery and the poverty of Industrial England, and to that extent
was a social critic. And yet, paradoxically, he was
most concerned about what he called the "mind forged
manacles": the internalized ideologies or empirical philosophical
or scientific
habits that would keep us from realizing our God-like potential
for unbounded imaginative energy. The first poem--Blake's "And Did Those
Feet"--in the e-text below at once rails against the
blighting of England and calls for a revolution of the spirit.
E-text: W. Blake--Biography (just quickly note the illustration of Issac Newton on left
1/3rd down!)
E-text: Romantic Era Poems
Wordsworth rarely got as fiery
as Blake and, although as a young man committed to progressive
politics (he sympathized at first with the egalitarian goals of
the French Revolution), long before middle-age settled down to a
middle-class lifestyle in one of the most beautifully bucolic
locales in England. He did share with Blake, however, a
dislike of the Enlightenment objectification or categorizing of
nature, which if pursued obsessively he felt would lead to a dead
nature. In the short poem "The Tables Turned," he says "we
murder to dissect" when we see only with a scientific, rationalist
eye. Go to the second poem:
E-text: Romantic Era Poems
Blake looked inwardly to find infinite realms of power; Wordsworth
found sublimity in a fusion of the "ego"
and "outside world," with each dissolving into each other. In his poem “Tintern
Abbey,” Wordsworth expresses a sublime sense of
“something far more deeply interfused”--intertwining self and
nature and thereby overcoming the alienating rift between
mind (subject/no dimensionality) and what is external to
mind (objectified/3-D world--Wordsworth calls it the
"unintelligibility" of the world). Wordsworth's fusion with
nature, the absorption of his ego into the harmonious "beauteous
forms," becomes an emotional/metaphysical form of rapture (however
quietly expressed) and is, in effect, a substitute for bonding
with God/a deity. I.e., the emotions expressed in the poem,
ultimately, are spiritual/metaphysical ones. He seeks a "peak"
experience, in which selfhood is blanked out.
Reading tip: you need to read "Tintern Abbey" aloud (quietly) and
slowly. Let the rhythms feel weighty and the language seduce
you into a simulated "peak" experience (of course I'm
exaggerating, but in reading the poem you should almost get to the
sensation of fused ego/world or no ego/no world or pure "being" as
an activity of cognition without all those trivial and dramatic
narratives spinning in your brain about your schoolwork, your
career, your family, the groceries you need to buy and so on and
so forth!).
Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" is the
third poem here: E-text: Romantic Era Poems
Wordsworth's "Tintern
Abbey"--with its somber rhythm and complex syntax/long meaning
units--tries to lull us into an almost hypnotic state, in which
there is no split between "subject" and "object," just sublime
being or perceiving. Yet he also recognizes he is self-conscious
and not euphorically at “one” with nature as in his carefree,
thoughtless youth. Also, he hears the “Still sad music of
humanity”—i.e. death.
Romantics seek to inhabit
realms of bliss and beauty, but they are typically vexed by
alienation and mortality, which makes the bliss/out-of-time
sensation (Keats’ “Ode to the Nightingale” the last poem here:
E-text: Romantic Era Poems) all the more poignant. Keats' poetry is full of
flowery/Classical references, but once you "get" that he's
addressing key psychological/metaphysical issues, the floweriness
should not inhibit appreciation. Keats, in a profoundly raw
existential way, is expressing the miracle that we all get to
perceive beauty/be sentient and yet live within a world of
undeniable finitude. It is the latter (death) that makes the
former (beauty) all the more exquisite. Christian theology
and many other theologies work to console their followers with the promise of
resurrection, with the promise that life can emerge from death, or
that grace can fill one's heart. The best Romantics were not
so consoled. Keats, on his deathbed, did not think he would
be ushered into a sweet eternity. For Keats' sad biography go to
this e-text:
E-text: J. Keats--biography (read the "Life" part after opening paragraph)
Because what is being explored is
metaphysical, about the autonomous soul/self relating to the
totality of what is external to the self, social relations are not
paramount in either Wordsworth's or Keats' poems. Wordsworth refers to the hermit/vagrant, but is not
apparently concerned about socio-economic turmoil that would lead
to vagrants miserably hanging out in the woods. Keats refers
to men "hearing each other groan" but doesn't talk about, say, the
economical cause of their agony.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
attempts the impossible--to capture in novelistic form (a genre usually given to
the "realistic") outsized and unspeakable ambitions. Warning: the
interpretation of Frankenstein in this "Prof's" lecture is intended to go far
beyond the diluted understanding of the novel you sometimes get in highschool!
Keats's "Ode to Nightingale" and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" are
both relatively quiet, meditative works similar to Chopin's
piano music (click on these enhancement--i.e. you are not
responsible for--sites:
Go--Chopin Biography &
Go-Chopin Music Samples). In Shelley's Frankenstein romantic selfhood
is more willful and embattled, self-glorifying, and tragic or
melodramatic--similar to H. Berlioz's symphonic music (click on
these enhancement sites:
Go--Berlioz Biography &
Go-Berlioz Music Sample--click on the 1.2.3.4.5. selections
midpage).
After you read the novel, check out the
interpretive material in our edition that begins around page 300.
The lecture notes below
follow the themes there, but I've tweaked them to get at more
disturbing/profound aspects of Romanticism and identity issues,
most particularly the fundamental problem of being human--which is
to have both a mind and a body.
1. MOTHERHOOD
ANXIETIES/BOURGEOIS FAMILIES
● Enlightenment-thru-19th-century:
property/inheritance secures the bourgeois family as the fundamental
meaningful unit.
● But Romantic rebels tend to find little
solace or meaning in the family (Wordsworth's and Keats's poems
are about autonomous selves; Mary Shelley and her husband and
their pal Lord Byron were very non-conventional, living in exile
from England; William Blake,
although married, did not want to put any constraints on
expressive energy/desire).
● The structure of Frankenstein
indicates that one's selfhood/sexuality/ambition/etc. are
antithetical to the family unit:
1st third:
Victor Frankenstein leaves family to create monster/follow his egotistic
ambition and will.
2nd third: Monster
recounts story of being only a voyeur upon the cottage family.
3rd third:
Victor Frankenstein leaves family again to chase monster (monster
destroys family).
● Romantic writers are
obsessed with the self being subsumed into something larger than
the self, which could mean a fascination with the power of titanic
historical figures (Napoleon) or vast, turmoiled vistas (the Alps)
or exotic travel (Victor chasing the monster) or quiet harmonious
scenes of nature (Wordsworth & Keats).
● But to seek such peak
experiences/grandiose bloatings of the self (or self-surrender to
the natural scene) requires becoming detached from social
relations … forsaking the family.
● Anxiety about the value/meaning of the
family is compounded, in Frankenstein, by anxiety about
mothering: the monster as an ugly offspring, the tearing apart of
the monster's mate which resembles an aborted fetus or
miscarriage, the death of Victor's mother, etc.
2. MONSTROSITY/BODY
PARTS
● Extrapolate away from the monster's
description at the beginning of Chapter 5. What makes him
monstrous?
● When we are in the womb, presumably we are
"at one" with our mother's body; we do not have a separate
identity.
● Infants, although physically separate from
mommy, do not yet have a sense of the totality/surface of their
bodies (an infant doesn't know his/her arm belongs to
himself/herself).
● The child grows, and gains a sense of
autonomy, of selfhood, of identity largely defined by the integral
physical contours of the body/skin.
● The body should be inviolable; we live,
complacently, within the intact shell of our skin.
● In gothic/horror films, what
repulses/fascinates is the revelation of the inside ... of blood
spurting out/of bones protruding thru the flesh, or, perhaps, the
internal viscera per se; shards of flesh, body parts. That is,
any flesh not animated: which is to say death. Which is, if you
think about it, the big anxiety in the novel (why is it that
Victor keeps dreaming of his dead mother?).
● To demonstrate the latter point, open up this photo-shop image
that reveals ... (warning: disturbing image ahead
Go-enhancement site).
● The monster's stitched together body,
comprised of dead body parts, shows the body in fragments rather
than being cohesive and integral. Most disturbing and ugly and
taboo-breaking, as is also the case with all inside fluids when
they inappropriately get outside in the form of spittle, blood, etc.!
● Bliss-out Romanticism (Keats and
Wordsworth) involves some sort of harmonious non-body rapture, of
oneness with the cosmos, of pure perceiving/being (no
subject/object dichotomy).
● Gothic Romanticism (Shelley) focuses on
disharmonious body parts and on turmoiled, contradictory
emotions. See Fuseli painting below.
3. SECRECY/INTERIORS/TURMOILED PSYCHES
● Romantic writers are
almost always fascinated by
secrets and interiors (a prime example, in U.S. literature, are E.A.
Poe's stories of tormented psyches imprisoned in gothic spaces,
e.g., "The Fall of the House of Usher").
● Victor seeks to discover the secrets of the
flesh/nature in his experiments.
● But the entire narrative structure is also
one that proceeds through a box within a box within a box
sequence: Captain Walton's frame story . . . interrupted for Victor F's
story, which is inside it . . . which is interrupted for monster's
story, which is inside it.
● We
don’t linger mimetically (an art theory term for "realistic" art) on a
stable exterior geography or bourgeois space or locale, but
move rapidly thru one exotic locale after another. Shelley is not
attempting to mirror reality, but rather is providing an
imaginative vision unto “realities” that have nothing
to do with day-to-day life, except that the family is obsessively
returned to and evaded, as if family/nurturance is at once
desired and spurned.
● The monster
continually manifests longing & hate, a desire to be embraced by
his father-creator and a desire to destroy him. As for Victor:
what if the point of Victor's creating the monster is not so much
creating him, but the subconscious sadistic/aggressive pleasure of
spurning him (and later tearing apart his mate)?
● Victor loves his
wife Elizabeth; but rather than a night of libido, when he marries
her, there is a
night of murder. The story merges what Freud will call
eros (sexual love) and the death
instinct (a desire to destroy/be aggressive).
See the parallel Fuseli painting
below. What is being depicted:
imaginative rape or seduction by dark demon forces; is
this a nightmare or a dream of desire?
Johann
Heinrich Fuseli: The
Nightmare
(1781) Oil on canvas
Click links below if embedded image isn't visible:
http://encarta.msn.com/media_121627059_761573163_-1_1/Fuseli%E2%80%99s_The_Nightmare.html
http://artyzm.com/obrazy/fuseli-nightmare.jpg
4. TEXTS/LANGUAGE
● What do you think of the
prose style? Notice how the description of the landscape or
internal mental states is oftentimes given in
absolute/catastrophic/extreme terms. Romantic/gothic literature,
in contrast to prosaic Realistic novels, is always over-the-top,
with the phrasing trying to express the inexpressible. Extreme
states of terror, ecstasy, hate, and sublime peak experiences tend to
be beyond our capacity to articulate them.
We've covered a lot of
intellectual/cultural territory in the last three or four weeks. Please
read the summation below to help you get a sense of the Big Picture: From
Enlightenment Through Romanticism.
● From
Locke to Equiano: We studied
the emergence of a “possessive selfhood,” a self defined in terms
of the delights (and protection) of property and a self, which by
objectifying the world, gains rationalist mastery over it.
● Wordsworth,
Keats, and Shelley’s Frankenstein: The
Enlightenment bequeaths the Modern age
(in the West) the emphasis
on property/inheritance (Locke) and stable selfhood. We believe
that the family should be entrepreneurially free to pursue its
self-interest, free from the tyranny of kings or religious
enthusiasts (who would prescribe a particular theology).
Bourgeois spaces, however, are critiqued in the Romantic Rebellion
Era for a more profound metaphysical need (Wordsworth’s disgust
with "getting and spending" and yearning for “something far more
deeply interfused” or Keats’s longing to be out-of-time in his
garden with the bird) or in recognition of inward/turmoiled
psychology, i.e., Victor’s/the monster’s mix of love and hate,
anticipating Freud.
● Our
next set of writers, after the Romantics, will
add the new concept of evolutionary/geological “deep time”
(Darwin)
or a concept of social forces/relations changing over vast
historical stretches of time (Marx)
or layered-time/memories within (Freud). The
Enlightenment thinkers believed in progress and perfectibility.
Progress, however, was seen less in
temporal evolutionary or dynamic terms than in the elimination of prejudice
and partial perspectives, of tyrannies of the mind and
the social/political sphere (Paine's loathing of all authority and
dogma).
