The%20Romantic%20Hero

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Chapter 28

• The Romantic Hero

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Romanticism

• Nature
• Emotion sentimentality // nostalgia //
  melancholy
• Imagination exotic // ecstatic // fantastic //
  gothic

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Romanticism

• The sublime
• Subjectivity
• Spontaneity
• Mysticism

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• While Enlightenment writers studied the social
  animal, the romantics explored the depths of
  their own souls.
• (Fiero 705)

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• I am made unlike anyone I have ever met I will
  even venture to say that I am like no one in the
  whole world. I may be no better, but at least I
  am different.
• (Rousseau, Confessions
• quoted in Fiero 706)

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• Nationalism

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Nationalism

• an ideology (or belief system) grounded in a
  peoples sense of cultural and political unity
  (Fiero 705)

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Nationalism ? Liberalism

• After the first French Revolution (1789)
• nationalism
• political change
• freedom

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Nationalism ? Conservativism

• An appreciation/veneration of the past
• Demanding the sacrifice of individuals freedom
  for the common good

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National Identity

• Nation
• narration
• an imagined community
• a system of cultural
• signification (Homi Bhabha)

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National Identity

• Creation of national institutions
• Participation of national rituals (holidays,
  festivals)
• Identifying with a national community
• National imagery heroes

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Nationalism Romanticism

• Romantic writers insisted on the uniqueness of
  cultures by idealizing history and community.
• Germany
• the Volk (the common people)
• Volksgeist (the spirit of the people)

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Nationalism Romanticism

• The state was itself a natural historic organism.
  Future rested on understanding a nations past.

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Extreme nationalism

• German racial nationalists
• Like their Nazi successors, Volkish thinkers
  claimed that the German race was purer than, and
  therefore superior to, all other races. (453)
• --Taken from W.C. by Marvin Perry

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• The Romantic Hero

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The Romantic Hero

• Gifted with intellect and imagination, the hero
  is at odds with the common herd of mankind.
• The heros desires are insatiable his is a will
  not satisfied with ordinary things.
• The Promethean hero an over-reacher who
  unsettles traditional moral categories.

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Types of the Romantic Hero

• The Faustian hero Goethes unique treatment of
  the Faust myth (the fact that he never finds
  satisfaction on earth is what ultimately redeems
  him) Victor Frankenstein
• The abolitionist see Frederick Douglass
  defense of stealing from his slave-masters The
  morality of free society can have no application
  to slave society.
• The Byronic hero aristocratic, darkly handsome,
  manly, brooding, brilliant, erotic, melancholy,
  indomitable.
• The Gothic villain-hero
• http//www.georgiasouthern.edu/dougt/hero.htm

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Napoleon Bonaparte

• An example of the Romantic hero and its
  contradictions
• a Corsican peasant who crowns himself emperor
• a champion of the revolutionary ideals of
  liberty, fraternity, and equality (Fiero 30) who
  yet went on to wage an imperial war against
  nations of Europe

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Napoleon Bonaparte

• a brilliant military tactician who over-reached
  himself in the Russian campaign (lost 500, 000
  men!)
• an individual with petty habits and towering
  egotism
• http//www.georgiasouthern.edu/dougt/hero.htm

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Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Great
Saint Bernard Pass, 1800
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Ingres, Napoleon on his Imperial Throne 1806
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Jacques-Louis David. Consecration of the Emperor
Napoleon I and Coronation of the Empress
Josephine on 2 December 1804. 1808.
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Jean-Léon Gérôme, Napoleon and His General Staff
in Egypt, 1867
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Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting
the Plague-stricken at Jaffa, 1799
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Food for Thought

• What makes Napoleon a Romantic hero?

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The Promethean Hero

• Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or, The Modern
  Prometheus

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The Gothic Novel

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
• Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
• Features
• Anti-rationalism (horror the supernatural)
• A revived interest in the medieval past

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Food for Thought

• Who is the modern Prometheus in Mary Shelleys
  Frankenstein?

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The Byronic Hero

• Childe Harolds Pilgrimage (1813-1814)
• Don Juan (1819-1824)

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The Byronic Hero

• A rebel
• Isolated from society
• Moody by nature or passionate about a particular
  issue
• Arrogant, confident, abnormally sensitive and
  extremely conscious of himself
• Rejects the values and moral codes of society

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The Byronic Hero

• Characterized by a guilty memory of some unknown
  sexual sin.
• A figure of repulsion as well as fascination
• http//www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/eng/classes/434/
  charweb/CHARACTE.htm

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• Goethes Faust

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paradox and problems

• the conflicted political background and legacy
• what does this mean for women?
• scrutinizing romantic mythmaking  the noble
  savage and the mythology of imperialism.
• the tricky morality  an ethics based on the
  imagination, emotions?
• http//www.georgiasouthern.edu/dougt/rom.htm