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 syste

m) 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 peopl

e)

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 he

ro 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 t

he 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 an

d its contradictions: – a Corsican peasant who crowns himself emp

eror– a champion of the “revolutionary ideals of li

berty, 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 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

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 Coron

ation 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 Plague-stricken 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/charweb/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 sava

ge and the mythology of imperialism. • the tricky morality:  an ethics based on the imagin

ation, emotions?

• http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/~dougt/rom.htm