Romanticism in Literature and Politics

Romanticism in Britain and Germany did indeed begin in the late 1790s as the young intellectual generation's response to the great hopes and correspondingly crushing disappointments of the French Revolution. The German Romantic poet Novalis wittily referred to the revolution, meaning his generation's reaction to it, as a puberty crisis. But if it was, the Romantics unwittingly revolutionized Western adolescence by inventing a new ideal of the self, which would become the maturational ideal of truly free and fully self-aware moderns. The first Romantics comprised an actual demographic generation; all were born within a few years of 1770, all came of age around the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, all were its ardent partisans. They came to it out of personal motives of rebellion against hierarchical societies and paternalistic families on behalf of freedom of vocational choice and sexual self-expression. Implicitly already political and social, their rebellion found in the Revolution the larger framework of socio-political analysis and universal ideals that enabled them to generalize it into an ideological worldview.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven," Wordsworth famously wrote of the Revolution. Heaven did not last long, but while it did, he and others pushed the Revolutionary ideal of freedom beyond anything the revolutionaries themselves had conceived, beyond freedom guided by reason to freedom that accepted no restraints from nature, history or any "general laws," only the "light of circumstances / flashed / Upon an independent intellect." In Germany the philosopher Fichte, explicitly generalizing from the political ideals of the Revolution, went beyond Kantian rational freedom to theorize the self as an infinitely striving subjectivity that in principle knows no boundaries except those of its own finitude, which it experiences as a goad to constant transcendence.

This vision of unbounded freedom could not survive either the dilemma of relativism that it generated or the perversions of tyranny and exploitation in both revolutionary politics and personal life that it seemed to produce. The first generation (with the exception of Hölderlin) turned away from radical politics while retaining the idea of infinite freedom in the sphere of the creative imagination. It was at this stage that August Wilhelm Schlegel, in Athenaeum Fragment 116, propounded his famous definition of romantic poetry. But even as an aesthetic doctrine, infinite freedom—Keats's famous "egotistical sublime"—threatened anarchy and isolation. Recoiling from the imperial self, the young rebels created Romanticism by reconnecting the self with that which was greater than it, the infinite, embodied in an entity, whether nature, the beloved, or more abstractly, the Absolute, with which it could unite. As feminist critics noted, this entity was virtually always figured as feminine. But the Romantics' relationship to the feminine infinite was not simply conquest and subordination, but a complex, and contradictory, mixture. On the one hand, the mind was dependent on the infinite, safely harbored in its sheltering matrix and, as in Wordsworth's explicit metaphor of infant and mother, connected through its greater power to the rest of the world. On the other hand, nature was but mind's partner and cocreator of the vision of the unity of all things, in Wordsworth's words, the "genuine counterpart" of the "glorious faculty / Which higher minds bear with them as their own." Thus the infinite was at once the mind's external superior and mind's own equal capacity; in Coleridge's famous formulation, the poetic imagination was the repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite "I am." Another version of the Romantic paradox, Schleiermacher's description of the self's two basic but opposite urges, presented a different face of contradiction. On the one hand, he wrote in On Religion (1799, 1806), the self "longs to expand … outwards into the world, and so to permeate everything with itself … to penetrate everything and fill everything with reason and freedom." On the other hand, "the opposing drive is the dread fear of standing as a single individual alone against the whole; it is the longing to surrender and be completely absorbed in it, to feel taken hold of and determined by it." The Romantic self was driven at once by the desire for infinite self-assertion and the desire for complete subsumption into the infinite.

Before deconstruction, many Romantics were aware of the impossibility of this conjunction. Schlegel's central concept of romantic irony was the expression of his insistence that every claim on the part of a Romantic work to totality was necessarily false because of the finitude of the self and of its creations. One strove to create knowing that one had to destroy the thing one loved in order to continue creating. And the German Romantic sense of infinite longing, Sehnsucht, epitomized in Novalis's yearning poems of love Hymns to the Night (1800), testified to the awareness that haunted all of Romanticism, that the infinite was beyond human reach and could only be the achievement of wish-fulfilling dreams of eternal love.

The gendered contradictions in Romantic metaphysics between maternal symbiosis and partnership, and between surrender and penetrating mastery, parallel literary depictions of Romantic love as well as real relations among the Romantics. Friedrich Schlegel's representative, quasi-autobiographical novel Lucinde (1799) describes a series of relationships with women that enable the male protagonist to mature into a centered, creative artist. His harmonious wholeness is achieved through the experience of being loved, and his unified personality in turn makes possible the organic form of his artistic work, which does not need to rely on classical rules for its unity. The relationship with Lucinde (a barely disguised if idealized version of the author's lover and later wife, Dorothea Mendelsohn Veit) is described contradictorily both as reciprocal—"Only in the answer of its 'you' can every 'I' wholly feel its boundless unity"—and unequal: Lucinde, while an independent woman and an artist, is finally the mirror in which Julius sees his own unity and power reflected, the moon to his sun. Dorothy Wordsworth played an analogous role for William not only in life, but in poems like "Tintern Abbey," where she serves as the guarantor for the poet's vision of the unity of all things. While it was necessary for the feminine to be seen as independent, even omnipotent, to make possible the Romantic imagination of the unity of personality, it was precisely the exclusion of women from the public sphere, sparing them the conflicts and imperfections of striving, that made it plausible for the male Romantics to see the feminine as already achieved wholeness. The maternal role best symbolized feminine self-containment and selflessness, even as the male Romantics demanded that women be autonomous, indeed creative, intellectual companions.

The women of that first generation were, consciously at least, mostly content to fill the roles assigned them. Though Dorothy Wordsworth wrote poetry, she refused to think of herself as a poet, even referring to her poems as mere verses or rhymes. Conflicting assessments of her work suggest that it was either thwarted in its effort to follow her brother's sense of the Romantic self by her felt exclusion from its masculine authority, or that it registered a different relation of self to community from that suggested by the visionary imagination, one in which the self had its place though not the privileged one of the male visionary. Her sense of community, however, was in fact no different from the ideal that William himself suggested in the chastened agrarian republicanism and later increasingly Burkean traditionalism of his postrevolutionary social vision. Visionary imagination and the celebration of the common life were not mutually exclusive in the poetics of Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800), but were rather in fact mutually entailed. Dorothea Schlegel, unlike Dorothy Wordsworth, published the work she wrote, the novel Florentin (1801), but its hero was the questing young male Romantic seeking the ideal woman who could complete him.

There is no critical consensus as yet, however, about the women poets of the time whose work critics are rediscovering in the early twenty-first century. Some critics like Mellor and Marlon Ross (1989) see in it a distinct feminine sensibility that offers a countertradition to that of the egotistical sublime, one that emphasizes local experience and sensibility rather than vision. Yet, as Isobel Armstrong argues, women's poetry shared with male Romantic writing the valorization of emotion and the language of the sense as well as the explicit self-consciousness about both long held to be one of Romanticism's chief characteristics. What does seem clearly to be the case, as Stuart Curran and Gary Kelly point out, is that in the first decade of the nineteenth century at the height of the Napoleonic wars women writers like Hemans and Edgeworth moved like their male counterparts away from radicalism to a celebration of domesticity which entailed the negative representation of "excessive selfhood." In this respect they participated in a consensual "discourse of Romanticism."