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Chapter 28 The Romantic Hero Romanticism • Nature • Emotion: sentimentality // nostalgia // melancholy • Imagination: exotic // ecstatic // fantastic // gothic Romanticism • The sublime • Subjectivity • Spontaneity • Mysticism • “While Enlightenment writers studied the social animal, the romantics explored the depths of their own souls.” (Fiero 705) • “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) •Nationalism Nationalism = • “an ideology (or belief system) grounded in a people’s sense of cultural and political unity” (Fiero 705) Nationalism ↔ Liberalism • After the first French Revolution (1789) nationalism = political change = freedom Nationalism ↔ Conservativism • An appreciation/veneration of the past • Demanding the sacrifice of individual’s freedom for the common good National Identity • Nation = narration = an imagined community = a system of cultural signification (Homi Bhabha) National Identity • Creation of national institutions • Participation of national rituals (holidays, festivals) • Identifying with a national community • National imagery: heroes 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) Nationalism & Romanticism • The state was itself a natural historic organism. Future rested on understanding a nation’s past. 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 •The Romantic Hero The Romantic Hero • Gifted with intellect and imagination, the hero is at odds with the “common herd” of mankind. • The hero’s desires are insatiable; his is a will not satisfied with ordinary things. • The Promethean hero: an over-reacher who unsettles traditional moral categories. Types of the Romantic Hero • The Faustian hero: Goethe’s 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 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 Napoleon Bonaparte – a brilliant military tactician who overreached himself in the Russian campaign (lost 500, 000 men!) – an individual with petty habits and towering egotism • http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/~dougt/hero.htm Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Great Saint Bernard Pass, 1800 Ingres, Napoleon on his Imperial Throne 1806 Jacques-Louis David. Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon I and Coronation of the Empress Josephine on 2 December 1804. 1808. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Napoleon and His General Staff in Egypt, 1867 Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting the Plaguestricken at Jaffa, 1799 Food for Thought • What makes Napoleon a Romantic hero? The Promethean Hero • Shelley, Prometheus Unbound • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 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 Food for Thought • Who is the modern Prometheus in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? The Byronic Hero • Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1813-1814) • Don Juan (1819-1824) 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 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/char web/CHARACTE.htm •Goethe’s Faust 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