Romanticism and the Sublime

1
Romanticism and the Sublime

• HUM 2052 Civilization II
• Spring 2015
• Dr. Perdigao
• February 23-25, 2015

2
Violent Change

• American and French revolutions developed from
  convictions about the innate rights of
  individual human beings (485)
• French Revolutionideas about the sacredness of
  the individual (485), informing William Godwin
  and Mary Wollstonecraft, small radical group
  English Jacobins
• Mary Wollstonecrafts 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 Smiths The Wealth of Nations (1776),
  laissez-faire economics, self-regulating system
  Darwin, Marx and Engels
• Development of a middle class negative
  consequencesCharles Dickens and William
  Thackeray, moral mediocrity (489)

3
The Romantic Experience

• Inventionssteam engine, spinning jenny, cotton
  gin (487)
• Urbanizationmove 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

4
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)

5
Constructing Romanticism

• Three generations
• Blake and lyrical ballads
• Wordsworth and Coleridge
• 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
• Romanticismdissolution of boundaries between
  humans and humans and God
• For classical and modern philosophersfear of
  this dissolutionpushing to limit but not beyond
• Imitation creation

6
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

7
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 Percys Posthumous Poems published but
  suppressed
• 1826 The Last Man published Charles, Percys
  son, dies
• 1830 Perkin Warbek, fourth novel, published
• 1835 Mary contributes sections in Cabinet
  Cyclopaedia
• 1836 William Godwin dies
• 1837 Falkner, Marys last novel, published
• 1839 Mary prepares and publishes four-volume
  edition of Percys Poetical Works
• 1851 Mary dies in London buried between her
  parents

8
Thematic Elements

• Question of reason
• Creationscientific and religious discourses
• Politics, construction of society
• Role of women
• Masculinist pursuits
• Death, loss, and recovery

9
On Frankenstein

• What kinds of action can be defended as
  reasonable? What are we to make of the
  discrepancy between the mad scientists reason,
  and the Godwinian reason exercised by his
  hideous progeny? (Hindle xii).
• Rousseaus unfallen state of innocence,
  connection to Godwins Political Justice
• Godwins 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 17th century
  Hobbesian view of self-interested man
• Godwins 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 mans, or more correctly,
  mens supposedly divine or creative powers. It
  is Mary Shelleys 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).

10
The Monster Metaphor

• 18th century French philosophes, Diderot and
  Condillac, following John Locke (xxxiv) tabula
  rasa theory
• Edmund Burkes 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 interpretationtext born of the fear of
  bourgeois civilization (xliii)
• Monster metaphor popularized during the 1830s
  with calls for democratic reform in England
  (xliii), but also before as warning for dangers
  of reform during the French Revolution and the
  Terror
• Coleridges Ancient Mariner, setting out for the
  land of mist and snow (xxxvi), pursuit between
  Creator and Creature
• http//www.online-literature.com/coleridge/646/

11
Contextualizing the Monstrous

• Prometheustwo versions
• Greek mythology Aeschylus Prometheus Bound
  Shelleys Prometheus Unbound
• Ovids Metamorphoses (she was reading in 1815)
  plasticator, figure who creates and manipulates
  men into life, rather than saves them (xxviii)
• Rousseaus unfallen state of innocence (xxxii),
  corrupted by society monster as progeny
  connection to Godwins philosophy in Political
  Justice
• Don Quixoteshared 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 and nearer to a personally tragic
  denouement (xxxviii).
• Gothic novel or science fiction?in the Gothic
  tale, supernatural intact, violator punished (xl)
• Mary Shelleys account of its genesis (9-10)
• Doppelgänger (xlii)

12
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)

13
Senior Design Ideas?

• GalvanismLuigi 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)

14
Evolutions

• 1818, 1823, and 1831
• Influence of Percy Shelley, his death in 1831
• Changes to original
• Revision of Elizabeth
• Account of education

15
Casting

• Robert Walton
• Mrs. Saville, Margaret
• Victors mother Caroline
• Beaufort
• Alphonse Frankenstein
• Elizabeth Lavenza
• Father, a Milanese nobleman, German mother died
  during childbirth (36-7)
• Henry Clerval
• Justine Moritz
• William

16
Plotting

• Confrontation by creature (101)
• Sublime