Romanticism and the Sublime HUM 2052: Civilization II Spring 2014 Dr. Perdigao February 12 -19, 2014
“Violent Change” • American and French revolutions developed from convictions about the “innate rights of individual human beings” (485) • French Revolution—ideas about the “sacredness of the individual” (485), informing William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, small radical group “English Jacobins” • Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): importance of education for women • Liberty, equality, fraternity, centers of French and American revolutions; national identities created • Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), laissez-faire economics, selfregulating system; Darwin, Marx and Engels • Development of a “middle class”; negative consequences—Charles Dickens and William Thackeray, “moral mediocrity” (489)
The Romantic Experience • Inventions—steam engine, spinning jenny, cotton gin (487) • Urbanization—move to cities • Individualism: Immanuel Kant (1724 -1804) questions “power of reason to provide the most significant forms of knowledge, ” emphasizing reason as guide (487) • Self vs. society • Civilization as “agent of corruption” (491) • Social protest extends to writing, to poetry • Emotion and experience (Goethe) • Reason: feeling (485) • American Civil War, rights of African Americans, including reading and writing: slave narrative
Characteristics of Romanticism – sacredness of the individual – suspicion of social institutions – belief in expressed feeling as the sign of authenticity – nostalgia for simpler ways of being – faith in genius – valuing of originality and imagination – an ambivalent relation to science (492)
Constructing Romanticism Three generations: 1. Blake and lyrical ballads 2. Wordsworth and Coleridge 3. Byron, Shelley, and Keats Where are the women? (Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Rosalía de Castro, Anna Petrovna Bunina, Emily Dickinson [489]) • “transcendent and ideal subjects, ” “areas of critical uncertainty, ” with the aim to “rediscover the ground of stability in these situations, ” a “second-order quest for desire itself” • Truth associated with act of creation, not object • Romanticism—dissolution of boundaries between humans and God • For classical and modern philosophers—fear of this dissolution—pushing to limit but not beyond • Imitation: creation
Mary Shelley (1797 -1851) • Mary W. Godwin born in 1797 to William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft; mother dies ten days after her birth • 1801: William Godwin marries Mary Jane Clairmont who has children Charles and Jane (Claire); join Mary and Fanny • 1812: Percy Shelley begins correspondence with Godwin; visits Godwin house; eventually meets Mary • 1814: Mary returns home; starts affair with Percy; they elope, bringing Claire; Harriet Shelley gives birth to second child • 1815: Mary gives birth to daughter who dies • 1816: Mary gives birth to son William; leave England for Geneva; meet Byron ; Mary writes Frankenstein; Fanny commits suicide; Harriet Shelley drowns; Mary and Percy marry • 1817: Mary gives birth to daughter Clara • 1818: Frankenstein published in January; Clara dies • 1819: Return to Rome; William dies; Mary writes Mathilda, not published in lifetime; gives birth to Percy Florence
Mary Shelley (1797 -1851) • 1822: Mary almost dies from miscarriage; Percy lost at sea • 1823: Valperga published; second edition of Frankenstein published; Mary returns to London • 1824: Mary begins work on The Last Man; her edition of Percy’s Posthumous Poems published but suppressed • 1826: The Last Man published; Charles, Percy’s son, dies • 1830: Perkin Warbek, fourth novel, published • 1835: Mary contributes sections in Cabinet Cyclopaedia • 1836: William Godwin dies • 1837: Falkner, Mary’s last novel, published • 1839: Mary prepares and publishes four-volume edition of Percy’s Poetical Works • 1851: Mary dies in London; buried between her parents
Thematic Elements • Question of reason • Creation—scientific and religious discourses • Politics, construction of society • Role of women • Masculinist pursuits • Death, loss, and recovery
On Frankenstein • “What kinds of action can be defended as reasonable? What are we to make of the discrepancy between the ‘mad’ scientist’s reason, and the ‘Godwinian’ reason exercised by his ‘hideous progeny’? ” (Hindle xii). • Rousseau’s “unfallen state of innocence, ” connection to Godwin’s Political Justice • Godwin’s “rational philosophy”: new system based on “universal benevolence” a just and virtuous society, emerging from the “exercise of reason and free will” developed in an enlightened society that is free from “superstitions of religion, the despotisms of government and the property fetishes attached to marriage and inheritance, for all these tended towards the establishment of selfishness, division and malevolence” (xxxii), contradicts 17 th century Hobbesian view of “self-interested” man • Godwin’s “Enlightenment insight into the dangers of putting the ‘abstracted’ pursuit of knowledge before collective responsibility and happiness” (xxxiii) • “The Romantic idealism of Shelley and his ‘over-reaching’ heroes was, like all idealisms, based on a faith in man’s, or more correctly, men’s supposedly ‘divine’ or creative powers. It is Mary Shelley’s critique of where such highly abstracted creative powers can lead when put in a ‘realizing’ scientific context and then driven along by ‘lofty ambition’ and ‘high destiny’”(xxiv).
The Monster Metaphor • 18 th century French philosophes, Diderot and Condillac, following John Locke (xxxiv); tabula rasa theory • Edmund Burke’s use of the metaphor in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), monster as armed insurrection (xliii) • “During their systematic efforts to understand the Revolution and its outcome in Napoleonic despotism, Mary and Percy Shelley read not only the works of radicals like Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, but also conservatives and anti-Jacobins, among them Burke and Abbé Barruel” (xliii) • Marxist interpretation—text born of “the fear of bourgeois civilization” (xliii) • “Monster” metaphor popularized during the 1830 s with calls for democratic reform in England (xliii), but also before as warning for dangers of reform during the French Revolution and the Terror • Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, setting out for “the land of mist and snow” (xxxvi), pursuit between Creator and Creature http: //www. online-literature. com/coleridge/646/ •
Contextualizing the Monstrous • Prometheus—two versions • Greek mythology; Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound; Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound • Ovid’s Metamorphoses (she was reading in 1815): plasticator, “figure who creates and manipulates men into life, rather than ‘saves’ them” (xxviii) • Rousseau’s “unfallen state of innocence” (xxxii), corrupted by society: monster as “progeny”; connection to Godwin’s philosophy in Political Justice • Don Quixote—shared “single vision” (xxxviii): “Both Don Quixote and Frankenstein start out with the noble intention of helping their fellow creatures, but their aspirations are doomed by their pursuit of a ‘single vision’, one that takes them further and further away from satisfying the moderate needs of the community, and nearer to a personally tragic denouement” (xxxviii). • Gothic novel or science fiction? —in the Gothic tale, supernatural intact, violator punished (xl) • Mary Shelley’s account of its genesis (9 -10) • Doppelgänger (xlii)
Weird Science? • “eager desire to learn, ” “secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn, ” the “metaphysical, ” the “physical secrets of the world” (39) • Cornelius Agrippa: ancient as “chimerical” and “modern science” as “real and practical” (41), but Victor is unaware • Paracelsus (Swiss alchemist and physician, empirical observation), and Albertus Magnus (Dominican theologian, magic to pursuit of knowledge, natural science), reference to Newton • Untaught peasant versus most learned philosopher: “He might dissect, anatomise, and give names; but, not to speak of a final cause, causes in their secondary and tertiary grades were utterly unknown to him” (41)
Senior Design Ideas? • Galvanism—Luigi Galvani (1737 -98), Italian physiologist and experimenter, studied “animal electricity” in nerves and muscles of animals, experimenting with frogs (267) • Humphry Davy, electrochemistry and discoverer of potassium and sodium, experimental chemist (xxix); Mary was reading Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812) and A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry (1802), in 1816, progressive views • Conversations in 1816 in Geneva between Percy, Dr. Polidori, and Byron on the “nature of the principle of life” (xl), experimental science in physiology • 1803 Giovanni Aldini, nephew of Luigi Galvani, published a book on “galvanic experiments in public” on the body of a “freshly executed criminal” (xli)
Evolutions • 1818, 1823, and 1831 • Influence of Percy Shelley, his death in 1831 • Changes to original • Revision of Elizabeth • Account of education
Plotting • Robert Walton • Mrs. Saville, Margaret • Victor’s mother Caroline • Beaufort • Alphonse Frankenstein • Elizabeth Lavenza • Father, a Milanese nobleman, German mother died during childbirth (36 -7) • Henry Clerval • Justine Moritz • William • Ernest
Plotting • Confrontation by creature (101) • Sublime
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