Category: Research

So, without further adieu, I will discuss the two working axioms and further elaborate on my reasons for loving the Romantics.
1. They were audacious and/or eccentric (perhaps I should just say “outrageous.”)
Some representative statements and exploits should suffice.

• Coleridge and Southey‘s desire to establish a pantisocracy in America. Who does this? But how noble and grand that before Marx, some people did (or proposed doing it): an egalitarian commune. Wow. And these people are those we now call the Romantics.
•  Coleridge on Hume (after the young Hazlitt asks for his take): “‘Hume? He stole his essay on miracles from South’s sermon!’ replied Coleridge. ‘He can’t even write. He’s unreadable’” (Wu 6). Yes, one of the 18th century’s greatest philosopher is summarily dismissed by the young Coleridge. Only someone with immense belief in their own talent would say such a thing and at the end of the 18th century when Hume’s status as a world-class philosopher was by then established.
• The actress and writer Mary Robinson’s outrageous dalliance with the teenaged prince regent. Playing the role that made her famous, Perdita, in an adaptation of The Winter’s Tale, she speaks the following lines at a royal command performance: “… how to put on/This novel garment of gentility…/ …I shall learn/ I trust I shall with meekness, and an heart/Unalter’d to my Prince, my Florizel.” (Byrne 99). Her performance draws tears from the prince, as well as several bows–and his heart. After suffering bad press (though her ability to manipulate it was uncanny) due to her romantic attachments to the prince and to other powerful men (whom, it does not appear, the press smeared for their indiscretions though certainly for their politics), she is audacious enough to re-invent herself as a master poet and novelist. Of her, Coleridge said, “She is a woman of undoubted Genius…I never knew a human Being with so full a mind” (Byrne Epigraphs). From one genius provocateur to another.
•  Lady Caroline Lamb, the ultimate femme fatale. She is known for writing the famous lines that have immortalized Byron: “[He was] mad, bad, and dangerous to know” (Hay 13). After their romance comes to an end (for Byron, that is) the aristocratic Caroline will not be ignored *cue Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction*. She forcefully makes herself known by breaking in to Byron’s residence and inscribing the following words in his copy of Vathek (an action filled with significance given Byron’s championing and practice of Greek Love and Beckford and his novel’s notoriety): “Remember me! Remember me!” Oh, and she also writes the novel Glenarvon–the titular character is a Byronic hero who is actually based on Byron…(wait, how does that work?)–quite possibly the first tell-all book written in the Gothic mode. Byron claimed that, upon her betrayal of him, he would pursue Caroline like Falkland had pursued Caleb. It appears that Lady Lamb turned the tables on this scenario.
• Claire Clairmont, the not-so-famous family member (but look at the competition, though). I had always assumed she had been introduced to Byron by Mary and Percy in Switzerland but no: she wrote him before the famous trip. In an intrepid fan letter to Byron, the eighteen year old Claire commits the following lines to paper: “If a woman, whose reputation has yet remained unstained…if with a beating heart she should confess the love she has borne you many years…if she should return your kindness with fond affection and unbounded devotion could you betray her, or would you be as silent as the grave?” (Hay 78). He takes her up on her offer, though I’m not sure he didn’t betray her. But still, her letter and its fine sentence constructions render her boldly interesting.

2. They were pretty good writers too.
Whatever the criteria used to establish literary merit, their writing can be sharply ironic, lyrical, polemical, rhetorically persuasive, and often multi-generic. I’m not saying that each Romantic writer totally evinces these qualities (though I think some do) but, certainly, each exhibits mastery of at least one genre, if not two (or more). And even those that are associated with one genre, such as Wordsworth (though the 1802 Preface is pretty masterly as an essay if you ask me), are top-notch in that genre. As such, on any given day, I read the Romantics purely for their aesthetics or politics, though when writing papers, for both. But the point is that their writing is always engaging, wholly absorbing, whatever its genre, content, and politics.
(Is there an un-interesting Romantic writer? I’ve yet to find her or him. Let me know, though I suspect whoever this enigmatic figure is, something of major interest will be found in terms of their biography, writing, or political affiliations, watch.)
Politics: Conservative or liberal, Tory or Whig, the manifest political tendencies in the writing of several authors show Romantic writing to be irrevocably enmeshed with the political concerns of its day. Whether we are discussing Burke’s defense of the French monarchy (all monarchy, really) or Wollstonecraft’s Reflections on the Revolution in France or Byron’s impassioned poetic defense in “Song of the Luddites,” the intersection between history, polemical writing, and aesthetics is tightly welded together: one cannot have one without the others.
Lyricism: I was struck by Wordsworth’s lyricism. Now, I know about the sort of anti-Wordsworthian turn in Romantic studies (or so it seems to me). Or, I think scholars are perhaps reacting to the once powerful, institutionally-sanctioned equivalence between Romanticism and Wordsworth (or any of the Big Six at different times). I get it. But still. Never mind his so-called “conservative turn”: his poetry is so lyrical. The first lines of the Intimations Ode are etched in my memory: “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream…did seem/apparell’d in celestial light….” And it gets better: “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” Wow. This longing for the luminosity of the past. Beautiful. (And I’m aware of the French Revolutionary undertone but, nevertheless, I still sometimes just want to read it for its cadence and beauty, its power to stir something melancholy and ineffable in me…) And I am one to be seduced by style, easily, as my obsession with Ayn Rand in my early twenties proves. She, by the way, wrote a book titled The Romantic Manifesto…talk about misreading (though Rand and my eventual turning from her writings and teachings are subjects for another day. Suffice to say that I do not consider her a Romantic nor do I now consider myself a Randian.)
Anyway, to conclude I’ll say that as with all obsessions, scholarly and otherwise, I believe they originate in some primal scene, in a trauma experienced during one’s formative years. Discussing what such primal scenes might be in my life are beyond the scope of this blog, though I have no aversion to discussing them—ask me at a conference sometime. I will say, however, that I am continually propelled and assailed by contradictions, that is, I am almost always besieged by contradictory impulses. For instance, some days, I want to live in a world where transcendence is possible. On such days, I happen to believe in extraterrestrials and want to experience what some UFO specialists designate as Theophony (a connection with all and with God) which occurs in one of the stages following an alien abduction. I’ve even thought about camping out and keeping a night’s watch for sight of aliens. I sometimes converse with my ancestral deity, Ometeotl Moyocoyani (“He who invents or gives existence to himself”), as if I were chatting with my neighbor about the weather. And I’ve also thought about reading Hermetic scrolls in order to discover the ritual, symbolic steps I need to take in order to lose consciousness of myself while entering into communion with the plenitude of the Universe. Transcendental knowledge. Yes, I seriously have thoughts about this. And, so, there are the Romantics whose lyricism and content provide somewhat of transcendental moments.
On other days, the political unconscious aggressively asserts itself: not only Romantic texts but also newspaper headlines, advertisements, the idea of transcendence, and the unjust social order all scream out their ideological construction. It is with Jacobinical fervor that I begin to re-focus on political and economic crises and on the privations suffered by various underclasses. When I do, my pursuit of transcendence seems a tad misguided and quietistic. I struggle, always, with my decision to pursue graduate school while several communities I hold close to my heart continue to struggle, while I’m writing seminar papers on Percy’s “Alastor”. But I’m ok with this. Now. And this is because the Romantics are (incredibly!) with me on all these issues, as well. In fact, I audaciously venture to say that the Romantics speak not only to these contradictory impulses but to every desire (earthly or transcendental), impulse (political or artistic), occurrence–momentous or mundane–under the sun.
Folks, I can’t wait to start the English PhD program this fall.
 

Works Cited

Byrne, Paula. Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson.

           New York: Random House, 2004. Print.

Hay, Daisy. Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest  

          Generation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Print.

Wu, Duncan. William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

         2008. Print.

As a recently admitted student to a doctoral program in English, for my first blog I figured I would reflect on why I am pursuing the study of British Romanticism. Be forewarned: some of my reasons are un-academic, wildly emotional even, and in some ways flagrantly partake of the Romantic ideology (See McGann). But I’m ok with this.
I will organize my reasons for my love and pursuit of Romantic studies around two working axioms: 1) “The Romantics were audacious and/or eccentric” and 2) “Their writing is pretty good, too.” I will conclude by reflecting on my (almost) libidinal reasons for my attraction to the Romantics–(you have to read up to the ending, see?)
Before elaborating on each axiom, I will first discuss how I stumbled across the Romantics and then proceeded to fall wildly in love with them and their writing. As a junior Honors English major, I had a day left before deciding on an honors elective seminar. The following course title leaped out at me: “Sex, Drugs, and Rights: Experimentation in the British Romantic Era”–with a course title like that, who wouldn’t be immediately intrigued by the Romantics? I signed up right away. I showed up to class and we began to work our way through the “Rights” portion of the syllabus. We read William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Mary Hays’s Victim of Prejudice against the backdrop of the so-called Pamphlet Wars: Burke contra the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft contra Burke, and so on. The idea that the political and the aesthetic and their intersectionality were at this period so urgently and publicly debated grabbed a hold of my imagination.
Moreover, being a double major in Chicana/o Studies, the idea that civil rights and reformist politics were not solely an American 1960s phenomenon, threw off my sense of a progressive sense of history–an aporia: before the 1960s, the British (of all people!), were in the vanguard of reform and demanding civil rights for women, the working class, etc? And as far back as the 1790s? The thought was staggering and led to more questions, one being: what happened to civil rights reform in England and the U.S. in the 1790s—1960s interval? These types of historical questions set the tone for the rest of the semester and have continued to inform my studies of the Romantics and of Civil Rights history & literature, generally. (I recently discovered the concept of “postmodern Jacobinism” in Orrin Wang’s Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory which provided me with the means for theorizing the link between the French Revolutionary 1790s and the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s.)
We also read De Quincey’s Confessions and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and William Beckford’s Vathek. (Here, I will only discuss De Quincey). Wow. Though De Quincey’s elaborate and operatic drug-induced hallucinations fascinated me to no end, the first half of the book–the “sober” portion–also grabbed my attention. Here was this son of a merchant who though materially impoverished, knew his Greek and Latin (something he reminds his reader of continuously and at one point, I think, claims to know better than an uppity man of the cloth). De Quincey’s self-representations were contradictory but intriguing. On the one hand, he is quick to remind readers of his classical learning; while on the other, even as he strains to define himself against London’s lumpenproletariat, there is a sense of empathy for the disempowered, evidenced especially in his sympathy for his friend, the prostitute Ann, and for the orphan girl. Of course, his drug use and its mental effects were interesting too, filtered as they were through orientalia and grotesquely beautiful imagery, all interspersed with philosophical ruminations. All these elements combined to give a sense of a troubled but brilliant mind (his syntax was so fine, too, so precise yet poetic). In short, the class whet my appetite for more of the same: complex and disturbing political material packaged in pleasing (to me) aesthetic form.
After finishing up the class, I then took several other Romanticism courses (with Romanticist Ranita Chatterjee), such as a “The Construction of Romanticism: Wordsworth and Shelley” and “The Traumas of the Godwin-Shelley Circle,” and continued to read primary and critical texts during my free time. I read Percy’s “The Mask of Anarchy” and De Quincey’s satirical essay “On Murder Considered as a Fine Art.” As far as criticism, I perused sources diverse in their ideological orientation, such as Wang’s book, M.H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, Frances Ferguson’s Solitude and the Sublime: The Romantic Aesthetics of Individuation, and Tilottama Rajan’s Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice. These not only helped me engage with the changing conceptions of what constitutes Romantic Literature but also to become aware of the extent to which critical methods enable these and other scholars  to read, extend, and problematize Romantic Literature. It seemed to me that Romantic texts were somehow inherently capable of generating new readings, inexhaustible in their capacity to stretch and bend to the probing eyes of scholars who used novel theoretical lens.
Once, while reading Mary Shelley’s The Last Man under a canopied tree on my campus, I had the thought that Romantic Literature, through its aporias–in Mary Shelley’s novel, the narratological disjunction caused by the prologue which mentions that the “last” man’s ensuing narrative is edited by two tourists—was like this organic, mystical clay that continuously took on amorphous shapes, receptive to the critic-claymaker’s deft touch. Yes, I had this very strange thought that is very Romantic and a little screwy. (But it only certifies—makes me certifiable?—that I’m pursuing the right literary period.)
Romanticism, on a bad day, makes me grumble, “These interesting writers are nuts.” On a good day, reading these writers stimulates my own inner-Romantic lunacy.

Work Consulted

McGann, Jerome J. Introduction. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. By McGann Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. 1-20. Print.

 Stay tuned for Part II…