Engaged Romanticism
Engaged Romanticism:
Romanticism as Praxis
Edited by
Mark Lussier and Bruce Matsunaga
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Engaged Romanticism: Romanticism as Praxis, Edited by Mark Lussier and Bruce Matsunaga
This book first published 2008
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2008 by Mark Lussier and Bruce Matsunaga and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-84718-914-8, ISBN (13): 9781847189141
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 1
ENGAGED ROMANTICISM
MARK LUSSIER
CHAPTER ONE .............................................................................................. 7
ROMANTIC PRACTICES — PRACTICING ROMANTICISM
STEPHEN C. BEHRENDT
CHAPTER TWO ........................................................................................... 22
“AMBER DOES NOT SHED SO SWEET A PERFUME AS THE VERIEST
TRIFLES TOUCHED BY THOSE WE LOVE”: ENGAGING WITH COMMUNITY
THROUGH THINGS IN BERNARDIN DE ST. PIERRE'S PAUL ET VIRGINIE
AND ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE’S GRAZIELLA
JILLIAN HEYDT-STEVENSON
CHAPTER THREE ........................................................................................ 41
FEELING FOR BARBARITY: THE IRONIC MINSTRELSY OF WALTER
SCOTT’S WAVERLEY
DANIEL ROBERT BLOCK
CHAPTER FOUR .......................................................................................... 58
“A FINE BEGINNING OF A ROMANCE WITH A SHIPWRECK”:
ALLUSIVENESS AND COSMOPOLITANISM IN MARIA EDGEWORTH’S
PATRONAGE
JEFFREY CASS
CHAPTER FIVE............................................................................................ 69
ACTIVATING “TINTERN ABBEY” IN 1815
BRIAN BATES
CHAPTER SIX.............................................................................................. 82
“TINTERN ABBEY’S” ENVIRONMENTAL LEGACY
SCOTT HESS
vi
Table of Contents
CHAPTER SEVEN ...................................................................................... 100
THE NATURE OF ECOLOGY IN WORDSWORTH’S EARLY POETRY
BRUCE MATSUNAGA
CHAPTER EIGHT ....................................................................................... 113
THE DISOBEDIENT DISCIPLE: SHELLEY’S DIVERGENCE
FROM GODWIN’S GUIDANCE ON HISTORY AND POLITICAL PRACTICE
MICHAEL DEMSON
CHAPTER NINE ......................................................................................... 128
CHARLOTTE SMITH’S AMERICAN INDIAN ENCOUNTERS
CHRISTINA A. VALEO
CHAPTER TEN .......................................................................................... 143
FROM MISSOLONGHI TO HARPER’S FERRY: SAMUEL GRIDLEY HOWE
AND THE ETHICS OF SELF-SACRIFICE
JOE LOCKARD
CHAPTER ELEVEN .................................................................................... 157
(POST)MODERN PSYCHOANALYSIS: A RE-VIS(ION)ING OF EDGAR
ALLAN POE
KIRSTI COLE
CHAPTER TWELVE.................................................................................... 178
THE SKETCH AND THE IMAGINATION IN THE TRAVEL NOTEBOOKS
OF ROMANTIC PAINTERS
VERÓNICA URIBE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN ................................................................................. 196
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG – MODERNIST OR ROMANTICIST?
SABINE M. FEISST
CHAPTER FOURTEEN ................................................................................ 209
FORM AND PHANTASM: THE POETRY OF BLAKE’S ETERNAL(LY)
SLENDER BODIES
ANGIE O’NEAL
CHAPTER FIFTEEN .................................................................................... 229
ROMANTIC PRAXIS: TEACHING BRITISH ROMANTICISM WITH DRAMA
MARJEAN D. PURINTON
Engaged Romanticism: Romanticism as Praxis
vii
BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................... 243
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ........................................................................... 264
INTRODUCTION
ENGAGED ROMANTICISM
MARK LUSSIER
“. . . You ask why I came up amongst the Greeks? It was stated to me that
my doing so might tend to their advantage in some measure in their present
struggle for independence, both as an individual and as a member for the
Committee now in England. How far this may be realized I cannot pretend
to anticipate, but I am willing to do what I can.”1
The wintry wind of Milwaukee blew us into the bar at our conference
hotel. We had all come to deliver papers at the 2003 International
Conference on Romanticism (ICR), and the conversation among Alan
Richardson, Ian Balfour, Julie Kipp, and me, unlike the weather outside,
was warm, even slightly heated in the best discursive way. Prior to the
conference, I had spent time researching ‘engaged buddhism’ for my own
paper2 and had become convinced that a re-examination of Romanticism
as a mode and movement (what Badiou might term a coincidence of being
and event) rather than as a period returned to something essential, since
the question of engagement implicates those of us critically engaged
with/in Romantic Studies, for the appellation of the literature urges us “to
discover what possibilities for change remain open now.” 3 Having agreed
to run the International Conference on Romanticism in 2006, I speculated
aloud as to the possible theme for the conference, and I placed ‘engaged
romanticism’ on the table after the first two rounds. Julie immediately
endorsed the idea that the multimedia, multiform, trans-disciplinary, transnational and trans-active phenomena we explore in Romantic Studies
could and should be examined from this vantage, and after some resistance
1
Byron, Byron’s Poetry, 336.
For a short but sure discussion of this movement in the contemporary practice of
Buddhism by H. H. the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Gary Snyder and others,
please see the Engaged Buddhist Reader.
3
Badiou, Being and Event; Christensen, Romanticism and the End of History, 12.
2
2
Introduction
and some clarification, Alan and Ian agreed that the theme itself would
generate somewhat unusual reflections for ICR 2006 at Arizona State
University.4 The essays that follow confirm the degree to which the
conference, “Engaged Romanticism: Romanticism as Praxis,” did indeed
generate an impressive and wide-ranging interdisciplinary analysis of
Romantic Studies from the perspective of “engagement” and “praxis,” a
critical tendency so much a characteristic of the ICR itself and one
reflected in the diverse works that follow.
The term “engaged,” in several later connotations of the word, is wellsuited to describe precisely how one can recognize the idiom of interaction
between artists and the systems within which they contend, and as the
broad sweep (multi-genre, multi-national, multi-disciplinary) of the essays
here suggests this idiom can be felt along what Blake might term the
‘pulsations of an artery’ and can, in fact, be engaged across the spectrum
of semiosis called Romanticism (a rhythmic, bodily presence to match the
spirit of the age). Interestingly enough, the first connotation in the Oxford
English Dictionary concerns economic “pledges,” which quickly connects
in the second and third with an exposure “risk” and intended “marriage”.
In Romantic thought, notions of engagement seem significantly shorn of
these fiscal risk, and I think specifically of Shelley’s pledge to intellectual
beauty, accompanied by the query “Have I not kept my vow,” where
Shelley offers a modern usage of “engage”: “To bind by moral or legal
obligation.”5 As well, whether examining the novel, poetry, drama,
painting, or music, the Romantic idiom evoked here exhorted individuals
to entangle themselves, to combat through commitment, to act and in
acting translate theory into practice (to combine the eighth, ninth, twelfth
and seventeenth connotations of the term “engage,” therein articulating an
ethos of action in the field of the other).
Returning to the Sonoran desert of Arizona to undertake the work of
the conference and contemplating what or who best emblematized
Romanticism as a mode (of writing, of thought, of life) and as an ethic (an
ethos of otherness and action), my thoughts constantly returned to Byron’s
involvement in various revolutionary causes and its crescendo in Greece.
Indeed, Byron alone among the writers of European Romanticism became,
as the “author” in its contorted Foucaultian sense,6 “a tremendous cultural
4
Julie read a paper at the conference that explored ways that, as teachers, this
constant call to engagement, could be used to advantage to engage subsequently
students in those aspects of Romantic thought beyond the walls of the classroom
and the pages of our texts.
5
The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, I.866.
6
Foucault, “What is an Author,” The Foucault Reader, 101-20.
Engaged Romanticism
3
force that was life and literature at once,” and this force (or I would
contend fields of force), in Jerome McGann’s well-wrought phase,
“captured the Euro-American aesthetic and intellectual scene for over a
hundred years.”7 For this reason, the conference adopted as its visual form
of engagement a reproduction of Theodoros Vyrzakis’ 1861 painting
“Lord Byron’s Arrival at Messolongi” (now in the Greek National
Gallery), which appeared on the call for proposals, the webpage, and the
program. The work, like the copious statuary scattered across the Greek
peninsula to honor the poet of the age, pays aesthetic tribute to Byron’s
willingness, for any number of apparent and hidden reasons, to die
fighting for Greek independence and thereby to embody the revolutionary
tendencies often figured in his poetic and dramatic heroes.
Like those heroes most often associated with Byron’s influential
archetype (e.g. the Giaour, the Corsair or Manfred), Byron was an
imperfect mirror within which to see what I have elsewhere termed an
ethos of otherness, although in his sense that involvement with the Greek
Committee and the Greek revolution “might tend to their advantage in
some measure in their present struggle for independence” does reflection
such an ethical stance. As well, in the literary work, Manfred’s reticence to
exchange places with the Chamois Hunter and his protection of the Abbot
even at the moment of his own death manifest this ethical stance in the
archetype’s highest figure. The willingness to act in the world, the
characteristic perhaps most associated with Byronic heroes and critically
associated with Byron himself, establishes a praxis, a mode of action to
pursue the embodiment of ethical commitments in the world. Byron’s
earliest Oriental tale, “The Giaour,” combines historical and contemporary
conditions into an allegory that, finally, become the conditions of his
actual death. In the process (a movement from poem to act), Byron
provides an exemplary praxis that engages aesthetic, historical,
intellectual, personal, and political energies as a way of interacting with
and intervening in the ‘age’ for the expressed purpose of direct and
indirect transformation of the public and private spheres. For Byron, the
Greek revolution engaged (in several senses of the term) the Ottoman and
British empires, which Byron staged dramatically in “The Giaour” at the
beginning of his career (as Marilyn Butler and Jerome McGann have
discussed).8 As Bergen Evan suggests, Byron’s death resurrected the poet
as “liberty’s champion” He had once been liberty’s champion but had long
been thought of as sunk in cynicism and debauchery. But suddenly this
7
Frye, “Lord Byron,” 53; McGann, Byron and Romanticism, 291.
Butler, “Byron and the Empire of the East,” 63-81; McGann, “The Book of
Byron and the Book of the World,” Bloom’s Biocritique, 112-3.
8
4
Introduction
had been revealed as a mask hiding the old aspirations. A shudder of
excitement passed over Europe. Young men wore mourning and began
planning barricades.”9 In the end, Greece was precisely the stage upon
which Byron’s engagements were concluded, becoming the event that
generated future engagement, and if the age had a legislator of Shelleyean
capacity, Byron was that figure.
And so, I adopted Byron as the best embodiment of an engaged
Romanticism, primarily due to the complex convergence of so many
competing fields of force, yet Shelley as well, in Ireland and elsewhere,
also sought to engage social and political injustice. Poets like Hannah
More and Robert Southey joined preachers and prophets to engage and
eventually overthrow the entrenched interests of the slavery and its trade.
Blake engaged (confronted) the limits of textuality and of theology, and he
engaged (combated) religious hypocrisy, and political tyranny. The poets
Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as the painter John Constable, engaged
nature and natural process in unmediated fashion and attempted to recreate
the intensity of such engagements in their poetry (where the inability to so
capture these engagements leads to crisis poems of crushing intensity,
intellect and sentiment). And so, the simply question became: “Is there
some way for the conference itself to embody the type of ‘Engaged
Romanticism’ pursued in its widely divergent forms by the subjects of our
scholarship?”
Given this question and its “infinite” possibilities, one overt concern
moved to the foreground, focusing on the degree to which, as a “unified
multiplicity [or set]” of Romantic Studies scholars, we are implicated in
what we profess. 10 After all, can one teach relentless opposition to petty,
profound and plentiful tyrannies in the work of Byron and then not heed
the appellation of action emerging from that work? As I stated directly to
my Byron seminar last semester in the context of ethical conflict on
campus, the lessons Byron teaches can be hard to acknowledge and
embody, yet any reading of “the book of Byron” (to borrow Jerome J.
McGann’s phrase) would necessitate the act and acceptance of the events
thereafter. As a collective attempt to pursue such engagement in realworld terms, the conference adopted two historical sites directly connected
with Romantic Studies (the English and Protestant cemeteries in Florence
and Rome, respectively) and created avenues for those attending to offer
direct support through the conference itself.11 Of course, paths of
engagement are diverse, and across the last decade, I had the individual
9
Evans, “Lord Byron’s Pilgrimage,” Byron’s Poetry, 350.
Badiou, Infinite Thought, 13.
11
The link to both sites remains active on the conference website.
10
Engaged Romanticism
5
opportunity to perform volunteer work and organized financial resources
for the English Cemetery in Florence while teaching with ASU’s Summer
Abroad program in Italy. The year of the conference itself, graduate
students in my transatlantic Romanticism course (the single most engaged
group of my teaching career) provided primary research on the British and
Americans buried in the cemetery, and after revisions, I sent the short
biographies to Sister Julia Holloway (the on-site curator), who published
them as a CD sold for upkeep and maintenance of the grounds. That same
semester, my undergraduate Romanticism class volunteered for the
conference, wrote reports of what they heard, and then discussed the ways
that current critical concerns in Romantic Studies could be successfully
used to engage contemporary issues and to stimulate volunteer activities in
the community. While the sequence of engagements might seem modest
relative to Byron’s activities “among the Greeks,” they in fact had positive
impact wherever theoretical concerns moved into the world as a praxis to
assume a body of active engagement, which was precisely what Byron
sought in his willingness “to do what I can.”
The essays included in this volume are organized in particular fashion
to capture the spectrum of the conference’s concerns for forms of
engagement, extending from Stephen Behrendt’s opening analysis of how,
during the period, writers both practiced Romanticism and established
what might be termed Romantic practices to Marjean Puriton’s closing
assessment of the potential pedagogical uses of Romantic drama to engage
(involve) students with contemporary social and political issues and
practices. Essays by Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, Daniel Block, and Jeffrey
Cass explore the ways that Romantic novels both encode and engage
(confront) the world’s cultural systems. William Wordsworth’s continued
relevance as an empowered vehicle for ecological issues and the
emergence of an ecocriticism, both during the period and in our own
situation of crisis, concerns essays by Brian Bates, Scott, Hess, and Bruce
Matsunaga, while Michael Demson’s essay charts how Percy Shelley’s
poetry directly engages (critiques) the influential thought of William
Godwin. In a relatively recent critical development, Romantic Studies has
increasingly turned to transatlantic engagements, and the essays by
Christina A. Valeo, Joe Lockard, and Kirsti Cole offer astute analyses of
this emergent trend. Finally, the volume concludes with an examination of
engaged Romanticism as its moves into other disciplines, with Veronica
Uribe Hanabergh, Sabine Feisst, and Angie O’Neal assessing,
respectively, Romantic painting, music, and textual production from the
position of engagement. While no collection can capture the full range of
any conference’s concerns, the essays published here trace some of the
6
Introduction
most prominent ways that engagement and activism during the period can
provide strategies of engagement for those us still laboring in Romantic
Studies.
CHAPTER ONE
ROMANTIC PRACTICES —
PRACTICING ROMANTICISM
STEPHEN C. BEHRENDT
Part One – Romanticism and Praxis
Let me begin with a story. Not long ago I directed a graduate
symposium on William Blake. Typically for my department, my roster
included an eclectic variety of MA and PhD students. Among the thirteen
were only two whose main interest lay in 19th-century British studies; one
was working on Percy Shelley and the other on George Eliot. The others
included two students in Composition and Rhetoric and three in Creative
Writing (all fiction), as well as two local teachers (including a French
woman who teaches English composition at a local community college).
There was also a Renaissance Studies student who was about to begin his
dissertation on Milton, a woman who is an attorney for the Omaha City
Prosecutor’s office, and a senior staff member for Nebraska’s most
conservative U. S. Congressman. And finally an older woman who is the
only woman ever to serve as an engineer on a main-line steam locomotive
for the Southern Railway and who is now studying Irish women poets.
Perhaps it is the nature of my department’s graduate program that
produces a seminar with such demographics. But I believe this sort of
phenomenon reflects the infinite “draw” of Romantics studies among
students of diverse backgrounds and interests, even in today’s corporatementality academic institutions. For sixteen weeks, this eclectic group
checked their egos at the door, sat around a table, compared notes,
impressions, and critical and theoretical approaches with remarkable
generosity, and simply helped one another get from Point A to Point B in
their thinking, not just about Blake but about a host of interdisciplinary
literary, theoretical, and cultural issues. None of this would have
happened, I’m convinced, were it not for the sense of community that the
8
Chapter One
study of Romantic-era literature and culture always seems to generate,
even among students who would seem to have no academic or even
personal interests in common.
Recent years have witnessed a dramatic revision of the ways in which
scholars now think of the Romantic era in Britain. Central to this revision
has been the recovery of a Romantic writing community. Not that it was
ever entirely absent from the scene, but over the better part of two
centuries an over-simplified version of literary history implanted the false
notion that British Romanticism was primarily about a small group of
male authors, mostly poets, whose lives and works seemed in many cases
to have been conspicuously separated from the everyday life of the British
public. That there were not just dozens but literally thousands of writers
publishing in Britain during the Romantic period, and that a very
substantial number of these were women, seemed to have vanished from
everyone’s view. A popular image arose of the detached and selfdistancing Romantic writer (usually a poet) whose self-indulgent and
effete writings reached few readers and affected still fewer. The image was
wrong, of course, both historically and culturally: Romantic-era writers
participated in a diverse and often acrimonious writing community in
which many of them not only knew one another’s works surprisingly well
but also assumed – rightly, in most cases – that their readers would also
know those other works. Knowing this, we have begun to rethink not just
what we know – or thought we knew – about Romantic-era writers, but we
have also begun to revise how we talk and write about them and how we
teach them.
Because all of this revisionist thinking about the Romantic literary
community involves praxis in one way or another, it makes sense to begin
with the terminology itself that furnished the organizing principle for the
annual meeting of the International Conference on Romanticism held at
Arizona State University in November 2006. When Mark Lussier
organized the conference, he suggested as the conference’s rubric:
“Engaged Romanticism: Romanticism as Praxis.” “Praxis” is one of those
words that has become increasingly familiar in critical discourse in recent
years. And yet when an undergraduate asks, in class, what it means, many
of us equivocate and hope for the bell.
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “praxis” is an esoteric
word for an action or a practice. Moreover, it denotes a habitual action, a
widely accepted practice or custom. It is what Wordsworth was talking
about in “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” in other words, when he wrote
about how the old man had become the living “record which together
binds / Past deeds and offices of charity, / Else unremembered” (ll. 89-
Romantic Practices — Practicing Romanticism
9
91)1. This living record, Wordsworth insists that we understand, is shared
among the community of otherwise unrelated individuals whose only
connection is the beggar’s recurrent passage among them. Within that
public space, Wordsworth writes, “Where’er the aged Beggar takes his
rounds, / The mild necessity of use compels / To acts of love; and habit
does the work / Of reason” (98-101). Only a few years earlier, in “Tintern
Abbey,” Wordsworth had sounded the same theme, equating “that best
portion of a good man’s life” with “His little, nameless, unremembered,
acts / Of kindness and of love” (33-35).
In what follows, I want to examine in an at least preliminary fashion how
the notion of praxis that Wordsworth presents in these two passages brings
together key elements of what we usually think of as Romanticism. “Habit”
is certainly one of these elements, but Wordsworth is unquestionably
thinking of the habit of benevolence, of sympathetic identification with
others, of a mature and wholly instinctive selflessness. Wordsworth
pointedly associates this quality with Love, which the poet sees manifested
publicly in acts – or actions – of human benevolence. His contemporary,
William Godwin, to whose Political Justice Wordsworth was indebted as
early as 1794, had written there about the instinctive benevolence that
develops when we discover that “we are surrounded by beings of the same
nature with ourselves.” Because they “have the same senses, are susceptible
to the same pleasures and pains” as ourselves, Godwin writes, “we are able
in imagination to go out of ourselves, and become impartial spectators of
the system of which we are a part.”2 A quarter century later, in A Defence
of Poetry, Percy Shelley echoes Godwin when he writes that “[t]he great
secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an
identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought,
action, or person not our own.”3 It has grown increasingly unfashionable
in our cynical post-modern world to associate art and morals, in part
because that term – “morals” – has so often been coopted by the narrow, the
intolerant, the paradoxically immoral ideologues who are anything but
benevolent and selfless. In fact, it sometimes seems to have grown
unfashionable any more to see many of the connections among aspects of
human society and culture that were not just visible but in fact cultivated
in Romantic-era Europe. But there they were; and there they still are for us
– and our students – to see and to think about.
Shelley also said, we need to remember, that not only is Love the great
1
Wordsworth, The Poems, I:262-68.
Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice, I:427. See also Gill, William
Wordsworth: A Life, 85.
3
Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 517.
2
10
Chapter One
secret of morals, but, furthermore, that “the great instrument of moral good
is the imagination.”4 For Shelley, poetry – and by extension all art – aims
(or ought to aim) to renovate society and culture by renovating the
individual. Northrop Frye once wrote that the most comprehensive and
central of all Romantic themes involves “the attaining of an expanded
consciousness” because for the Romantic artist “the real event is no longer
even the universal or the typical historical event but the psychological or
mental event, the event in his own consciousness of which the historical
event is the outward sign or allegory.5 It is no accident that so many
Romantic-era authors, from the canonical to the newly recovered to the asyet-unrecovered, committed themselves so wholly to initiating among
their readers just such an expansion of consciousness, whose prototype
they found within their own individual experiences. For many of them,
this hoped-for awakening was rooted in the political. Beginning in the
1790s, in a work like Maria deFleury’s 1790 British Liberty Established
and Gallic Liberty Restored; or, The Triumph of Freedom6 or in the efforts
on behalf of the “bloodless fight / Of Science, Freedom, and the Truth in
Christ ”7 that Coleridge exerted in 1796 in The Watchman and elsewhere,
and continuing through the Regency and afterward, in works like William
Cobbett’s take-no-prisoners journalism and the slashing Radical satires of
William Hone and Thomas Wooler, one after another Romantic-era writer
insistently prodded the slow-to-respond in Britain. We need only to think
of how many called, as the anonymous author of the “Lines by a Female
Citizen” (1793) did, for Britons to “awake” and to “arise,”8 or as Shelley
did in The Mask of Anarchy, for them to “Rise like lions after slumber / In
unvanquishable number” (ll. 151-52, 368-69). And then there is Blake,
who early on interrupts Jerusalem to announce in his own voice:
Trembling I sit day and night; my friends are astonish’d at me.
Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the Immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.
(Plate 5:16-20)9
4
Ibid., 517.
Frye. A Study of English Romanticism, 36-37.
6
de Fleury. British Liberty Established, and Gallic Liberty Restored, LXXXIX.
7
Coleridge, “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement.” Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, 31.
8
“F. A. C.” “Invocation to the Genius of Britain,” reproduced in Scrivener, Poetry
and Reform, 129-30.
9
Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 147.
5
Romantic Practices — Practicing Romanticism
11
References to awakening, from the natural to the apocalyptic, are in fact
pervasive in Romantic-era verbal and visual art.
When we take the term “praxis” further and situate it within a
historical context, we discover that it means more than simply a habitual
action or custom. In 1838 the Polish philosopher August von Cieszkowski
used the term to identify a deliberately willed action that converts an
abstract theory into a concrete social actuality.10 Karl Marx soon
appropriated the concept to explain how abstract knowledge could produce
practical power.11 So while I initially linked “praxis” with habitual action,
this more refined definition invests “praxis” with both knowledge and will
– or conscious volition – in its workings. For Marx, “praxis” was a
transformational power that synthesized thought and action and that
produced real effects – real consequences – in the real, temporal world.
More to the point, it was the mechanism by and through which Marx
envisioned the oppressed becoming actively involved in the historical
processes of change.
Here, then, is the true significance of “engaged Romanticism.” What
we mean by “engagement” in Romanticism involves both deliberate
actions within the public sphere and an often unconscious habit of mind
that is nevertheless somehow responsible for those actions. In a recent
review essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Chronicle Review,
Todd Gitlin wrote that “the academic left is nowhere today” because “its
faith-based politics has crashed and burned.” “It specializes in detraction.
It offers no plausible picture of the world.”12 Gitlin attributes much of this
bleak picture to what he considers to be the unintentional selfmarginalization of contemporary academia generally, partly as a result of
precisely the sort of narrow professionalization and specialization against
which William Godwin warned readers of his Political Justice already in
1793.13 Now, while Professor Gitlin does not mention Godwin, he raises a
useful point when he claims that many of us academics have put ourselves
out of business – intellectually, politically, and morally – by straying from
genuine engagement with the real world and instead indulging ourselves in
10
The concept appears in Cieszkowski’s Prologomena zur Historiosphie. See
Lawrence S. Stepelevich, “August von Cieszkowski: From Theory to Praxis,”
History and Theory, 39-52
11
See especially “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie” in DeutschFranzösische Jahrbücher (1844).
12
Gitlin, “The Self-Inflicted Wounds of the Academic Left,” The Chronicle
Review, B6-B9; B9.
13
See Political Justice I:285-300, for example, where Godwin considers how such
narrowness cripples political associations.
12
Chapter One
increasingly unengaged abstract theorizing. We have left the community
of community, in other words. To the broader, public, “real” world
represented by televison, talk radio, and tabloid journalism, much of what
we do apparently no longer “matters,” as our students and our critics
regularly let us know. I believe that as teachers we need to confront this
dilemma, regardless of our individual subjects. For the Romantic period
may have marked the last time that poems – and the arts in general – were
so widely engaged in meaningful cultural discourse, taking their place near
the discursive center rather than occupying the periphery to which they
have subsequently been consigned, in part by their own choice – and ours.
I was a student at the University of Wisconsin during the late 60s and
early 70s, when political “theory” was taken out onto the streets,
physically, on a virtually daily basis and when writing – all writing –
seemed to be inherently political. Why this seems no longer to be so, even
in these socially and politically treacherous times – or why it is so in such
a very different way when such a profound “disconnect” seems to exist
between one’s intellectual and socio-political commitments and one’s
public actions – also figures into the subject of the “engaged
Romanticism” which is this essay’s subject. For I am convinced that we
need to think more creatively about the social and cultural commitments
that drove activist authors two centuries ago. In the process, we need to get
ourselves – and our students – back to the primary literary and artistic
materials themselves in new and reinvigorated ways, for reasons that the
following anecdote may serve to illustrate. I was chatting recently with
one of the graduate students whom we had recruited most heavily for our
program. Having settled in to his program of studies, he explained to me
that he planned to specialize in theory because, as he put it with surprising
candor, “I don’t like literature and I don’t want to have to read it any
more.” I thought of the undergraduate Education major who proudly
reported to me, several years ago, that she was going to be able to finish
her minor in English without having had to read any poetry, which she
declared she always found boring. Nevertheless, she was planning to go
out and teach English, perhaps someday to my daughters. One wants to
say that such students have failed, somehow, but of course to do so is
simply to shift responsibility. Blame ourselves? Blame the culture? Blame
theory? Blame whom?
If literary studies is – or has become – the dusty museum that so many
of our students seem to think it is, perhaps that is so because we have been
bad curators. In a sense, the situation is not unlike the difference between
the disreputable old zoos that brutalize their animals by entombing them in
tiny cages in dim and smelly buildings, on one hand, and the zoo-as-
Romantic Practices — Practicing Romanticism
13
habitat arrangements we see in world-class zoos like those in San Diego
and Omaha. In thinking about “Practicing Romanticism,” therefore, I
envision an interactive approach aimed at igniting among our students
some of the passion that many of us felt so strongly in our own student
years that it inspired us to make the interactive study of Romanticism not
just a career but a profession – in every sense of that word.
Part Two – Romanticism and Community
At the beginning of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens insists that we
bear in mind that Jacob Marley’s death is a fact. “There is no doubt that
Marley was dead,” the narrator tells us. “This must be distinctly
understood, or nothing wonderful can come of this story.”14 Any effective
tale requires that its hearer – and its teller – be able to distinguish between
what is and what merely seems to be: Ebenezer Scrooge must learn this as
surely as Hamlet had to learn it. When it comes to assessing the literature
written and published in the British Isles during the Romantic period, it is
neither less useful nor less imperative that we separate what we know from
what we only think we know. Several decades of scholarship and
numerous waves of theory have produced the wholesale reassessment of
“British Romanticism” that is transpiring as scholars, teachers, and
students rethink a literary and cultural “movement” that was for nearly two
centuries stereotyped in terms of a small group of male poets. The
consequences of this over-simplification were many, as we now realize.
While poetry, especially by men, was lionized, for example, institutional
academe routinely marginalized the other literary genres. Few took time
seriously to consider the novels that numbered into the thousands, the
innumerable chapbook redactions, the works intended for children and
young readers, the diverse writing for the theatre, and the print journalism
of all sorts, “literary” and otherwise. While what was published and read
may have been a barometer of literary taste(s), it was also a reflection of
the era’s publishers’ shrewd assessment of their market. They swiftly
figured out the considerable economic rewards that followed from
producing cheap editions for the market created by the spread of literacy
and by the moral earnestness promoted both by the evangelical movement
and by the reactionary political right. And they understood for the first
time that the merchandising of writing was fully grounded in a
consumerism that was not necessarily an “educated” one.
What is true of Romantic literary genres is no less true of Romantic-era
14
Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 39.
14
Chapter One
ideology. It is instructive to remember that in terms of both politics and
poetics the majority of the Romantic era’s writers did not occupy the leftof-center ground upon which we usually think the canonical writers stood.
For one thing, literary history (like cultural history) has always been fond
of retrospectively heroizing its controversial or oppositional figures.
Frequently myopic when it comes to genuine talent and enduring value,
the “popular” critical establishment represented in the mainstream mass
media (then as now) often praises what eventually proves to be ephemeral
and mediocre at the expense of greater talents that are permitted to
languish under inattention or, perhaps more often, withering criticism.
Then, afterwards, of course, things change and praise is forthcoming –
often, paradoxically, when the artist is no longer alive to appreciate it.
Canonical and non-canonical writers alike understood that the odds were
almost always against them; for the few – like Scott or Byron, Hemans or
Landon – who attained fame in their lifetime, there were always the many
who labored in ignominy and obscurity, consigned alike by public whim
and critical disapprobation to history’s dust-heap. Martha Hanson, who
published her poems in 1809, saw in the fates of the starving Otway, the
dying Collins, and the suicidal Chatterton what she called “the absurdity of
expecting to obtain the suffrage of publick approbation” in a nation that
“recognises not her Writers, as worthy of regard, till long consigned to the
silent tomb.”15
Still, when we reflect upon the large body of Romantic writing that is
resurfacing and that seems at first glance to represent a very different
vision of “Romantic literature,” it becomes hard any longer to tolerate –
much less to justify – monolithic terms like “Romantic literature” or even
“Romanticism,” both of which presume a uniformity or consensus far
beyond what facts will support. Jerome McGann was on the right track
when he warned us that such all-encompassing ideological categories are
themselves illusory constructs formulated by the participants “to hold back
an awareness of the contradictions inherent in contemporary social
structures and the relations they support.”16 A quarter of a century old,
McGann’s admonition is still valid today. In many respects, the way to deconstruct these largely academic and therefore artificial constructs is to reimagine a Romantic community of discourse that is profoundly dynamic in
nature and that is inherently conversational. Romantic-era writers of both
genders, and from across the economic, political, and ideological
spectrum, understood themselves to be part of an interactive community of
15
16
Hanson, Sonnets and Other Poems, xi.
McGann, The Romantic Ideology, 134.
Romantic Practices — Practicing Romanticism
15
writers and readers.17 Theirs was a common, shared enterprise, as they saw
it, and not the solitary, introverted activity caricatured in the alternative
images of the flower-sniffing Wordsworthian wanderer, on the one hand,
or the rebellious Byronic misanthrope, on the other. These writers
committed their lives and their art to collective, community-building
activities that were sometimes patently nationalistic and at other times
humanistically non-partisan. In his “Old Cumberland Beggar,”
Wordsworth demands that his readers acknowledge the human dignity of
even the most humble citizen, for, he writes, “We have all of us one
human heart” (153). We are to recognize ourselves in the beggar, of
course, but we are also to recognize ourselves in the spontaneous acts of
benevolence which his appearance initiates among a diverse citizenry
whose gestures are activated not by the calculating mind but rather by the
“one human heart” that unites beggar, poet, and reader in this larger
community.
Later, writing toward the end of the era in Erinna (1827), Letitia
Elizabeth Landon says this: “Ay, fair as are / The visions of a poet’s
solitude, / There must be something more for happiness; / They seek
communion” (247-50).18 Landon locates the value of art not in solitary
acts of contemplation and creation but rather in the shared activities of
consciousness-raising that come with consuming art – with reading – as
part of an interactive community. For Landon, “communion” is the
objective of artistic activity (and the aesthetic experience), an activity that
implicitly includes reading, and it is surely no accident that Landon’s noun
also names a sacrament. For both poets, writing is more than an
occupation: it is a vocation, much as the term is understood among
religious communities.
What we discover when we move beyond stereotypical views and look
with care and discrimination at the full range of Romantic writing
undermines the sort of facile categorizing that the academic world can
make so seductive to beginning students and to senior scholars alike. We
like the security of having our bearings, of knowing the ground. Neatness
and cleanliness are preached to us as literary and cultural scholars no less
than they are to us as children whose rooms (and academics whose offices)
are frequently a shambles. But “cleaning up,” often means “putting away,”
17
Duncan Wu observes of Romantic writers generally that “most are aware of the
work of their contemporaries” and that they regard themselves both as “part of a
community” and as “participants in a shared culture.” “Introduction,” Romantic
Women Poets, xxiv.
18
“Erinna,” The Golden Violet with its Tales of Romance and Chivalry: and Other
Poems (London, 1827); see Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Selected Writings, 87-99.
16
Chapter One
and not infrequently it means also throwing away. Such operations may be
well intentioned; certainly they are expedient. But expediency ignores the
discontinuities, the dissonances, the failure to “fit” that characterizes real
life no less than it does the real literary landscape of Romantic-era Europe.
Responsible scholarship (like responsible teaching) requires that we
rethink our paradigms. When we recognize both the poetics and the
politics of the writers who have been canonized to be generally liberal and
progressive rather than conservative and reactionary, that recognition does
not therefore give us license to ignore what was happening in other writing
than theirs. Indeed, it suggests why we need to pay greater attention to that
other writing. For that other writing traces the broader socio-political and
cultural scene that was occupied by the majority and that scene is therefore
as essential to defining the non-conforming authors as it is to delineating
the nature of their non-conformity. After all, that body of ideologically
conservative writing – and the cultural conditions to which it points –
often triggered the literary expression of the alternative visions that inform
many of our most cherished (and sometimes most mistaken) Romantic
stereotypes.
Happily, we no longer need to be reminded of women’s presence and
influence on the British Romantic literary scene. In poetry alone, the
number of women who published books is well over five hundred when
one includes also Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Among these, several were
in their lifetimes as popular as – and in some cases more popular than –
their subsequently canonized male contemporaries. According to the
contemporary British press in 1793, for example, “no living poet could
hold a candle to Lady Catherine Rebecca Manners, and Mrs. Mary
Robinson was probably the greatest poet of all time.”19 Meanwhile,
Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets had by the time of the author’s death in
1806 progressed through some nine editions since its first appearance in
1784. Moreover, Smith was repeatedly celebrated in print, both before and
after her death, by numerous poets – male and female alike – who
acknowledged her skill and celebrated her reputation, both of which they
sought (with varying degrees of success) to emulate.
Nor was the poetry of the latter part of the period so wholly dominated
by Byron as was once thought. That view conveniently forgets (or simply
ignores) the popularity and commercial success of Sir Walter Scott’s
poetry and novels and Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies. It overlooks, too,
Robert Bloomfield’s enormously popular The Farmer’s Boy (1800), which
sold more than forty thousand copies over the course of its various
19
Werkmeister. A Newspaper History of England, 311.
Romantic Practices — Practicing Romanticism
17
editions. It also overlooks women’s achievements. Both Byron’s sales and
his popularity were subsequently rivaled and occasionally eclipsed by the
immensely popular poems of Felicia Hemans, the nineteenth century’s
most published woman poet, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, whose
astonishing literary output earned her a fortune. Furthermore, just as many
of these women poets read, learned from, and responded in their own
poems to their male contemporaries (as both Hemans and Landon did
relative to Byron), so too did those male poets clearly read, learn from, and
respond in their poems to the women poets. A comparable case may be
made for novelists, where this sort of literary conversation in print is
likewise evident, as it is in Jane Austen’s famous list of Gothic novels in
Northanger Abbey (1798; published 1818) and in the “Literary
Retrospection” with which Sarah Green’s satirical Romance Readers and
Romance Writers (1810) opens. The reality, then, is that British
Romanticism is a richly inflected cultural phenomenon, both in its artistic
productions and in the cultural circumstances that surrounded those
productions and their consumption.
Nor is the complex intertextuality of Romantic discourse so genderspecific as is sometimes assumed. Anne Mellor has written that “women
writers participated in the same discursive public sphere and in the same
formation of public opinion as did their male peers,” and they considered
themselves to be “particularly responsible for defining the future direction
of public policy and social reform.”20 So while they “asserted both the
right and the duty of women to speak for the nation,”21 they took it also as
a right and a responsibility to speak to that nation, as Anna Letitia
Barbauld did in 1793 when she published Sins of Government, Sins of the
Nation, signing herself “A Volunteer.”22 By the end of the eighteenth
century, women poets like Hannah More and Anna Letitia Barbauld, Anna
Seward and her bete noir Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and Amelia
Opie, were all laboring in “the engine-room of cultural change,”23 where
they were actively engaged in a very public discourse on matters of
genuine social, political, and economic importance. Moreover, their
participation in this discourse was in fact welcomed in many quarters. As
Paula R. Backscheider observes, activist women poets “had become a
deliberative body, a group that perceived in their writing, and were
perceived themselves, as having a right to intervene in national life and its
20
Mellor, Mothers of the Nation, 2-3, 9; Davidoff, Worlds Between, 239. For
Habermas, see especially The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
21
Ibid., 9.
22
A Volunteer [Anna Letitia Barbauld]. Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation.
23
Wu, xxix.
18
Chapter One
debates.”24 Indeed, because women and men writers occupied both
overlapping and competing (or alternative) discursive spheres, a good deal
of ground was actually defined by the no-person’s-land that lay within the
intersections and interstices among these variously configured spheres.25
Part Three: Practicing Romanticism
Another of the key Romantic practices had to do with that era’s
characteristically free discourse, a discourse facilitated by the growth of
the print media, the expansion of literacy, and the exertions especially of
reformist thinkers and politicians, who appreciated the truth of Godwin’s
observation in Political Justice that “the real enemies of liberty in any
country are not the people, but those higher orders who find their
imaginary profit in a contrary system.” “The error,” Godwin continued
there, “lies not in tolerating the worst forms of government for a time, but
in supposing a change impracticable, and not incessantly looking forward
to its accomplishment.”26 One remarkable fact about Romantic-era writing
is that so much of it was political, whether explicitly or more covertly so.
Politics was as much a subcategory of morals as Shelley later claimed
poetry to be, and its aims were widely thought to be much the same, for as
Godwin also asserted, “the cause of justice is the cause of humanity. . . .
We should love this cause; for it conduces to the general happiness of
mankind.”27 This is a politics of universals, not of local particulars. But the
Romantics understood that the avenue to the former lay through the latter,
which is why Blake admonished his readers to “Labour well the Minute
Particulars,” for “it is in Particulars that Wisdom consists & Happiness
too.”28 They understood that all renovation must begin with the local,
whether in the temporal social community or in the individual self.
Along with this free discourse, of course, came contentiousness. In
some ways, the Romantic era would have been fertile ground for talk
radio, given the snide, the mean-spirited, the quick-to-judge that
characterizes so much of both. Nor was the name-calling only on one side,
as we are reminded by poets like Percy Shelley and Anna Liddiard, by
24
Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and their Poetry, 8.
See, for instance, Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, and Backscheider and
Dykstal, “Introduction,” The Intersections of the Public and Private Spheres in
Early Modern England.
26
Godwin, Political Justice, I:104.
27
Ibid., II:547.
28
Blake, Jerusalem 55:51; A Vision of the Last Judgment [page 82]; Complete
Poetry and Prose, 205,558.
25
Romantic Practices — Practicing Romanticism
19
reviewers like John Wilson Croker, and by journalists like Cobbett,
Wooler, and Hone. In practicing Romanticism ourselves, and with our
students (and indeed with one another), we need to revisit this
contentiousness and examine the ways in which our writers responded to
and even appropriated both the tenor and the terms of much of this printmedia abuse. At the same time, we need to moderate our own knee-jerk
critical and theoretical intolerance, bred alike of departmental politics and
public culture wars, to both the terms and the agendas of culturally
reactionary discourse, if only so that we may assess it fairly, and on its
own terms, for what it is and what it reveals.
And then there is that matter of humanity, again. Cultivating a
humanitarian view, a sort of Godwinian public benevolence, was central to
the Romantic agenda: practicing humanity was both the most noble and
the most attainable of goals, for it was within everyone’s reach. It
ennobled Shelley’s Prometheus, for example, who had to teach everyone
in that great lyric drama that revenge and recrimination are unacceptable
motives precisely because they violate the requirement that we relieve
suffering rather than add to it. But it also dignified the sympathetic
responses elicited from readers of countless anti-war poems and essays
whose point was, again and again, that in devastating the family unit war
and war-making devastate the nation as well by violating its essential
humanity. The many lower-class figures who people Romantic writing,
including outcasts of all sorts – from widows to orphans, to maniacs, to
convicts, to a whole roster of marginal and culturally-alienated figures –
are there precisely so that the reader should see them. Ignoring them,
walking past them on the streets without looking at them, denying them
the respect due them as human beings, was no more acceptable from the
Romantic humanitarian perspective than is ignoring or vilifying the
homeless, the addicted, the socially-unregenerate in our own contemporary
culture. For to do so was to deny that fundamental truth that “we have all
of us one human heart.”
Indeed, a powerful social and political activism is another familiar
hallmark of Romantic-era writing. This is no less so for conservative and
reactionary writers than for liberal and progressive. For both sides –
indeed for those positioned at every point along the ideological continuum
– much was at stake. Whether the French Revolution would usher in a new
and better world or simply bathe the old one in fresh blood; whether
government in Britain would – or even could – be reformed or simply
perpetuate the old elitist oppressions; whether or not there would be a
place in the emerging industrial, imperialist nineteenth century for art and
culture, those last instruments for softening and humanizing a people
20
Chapter One
seemingly preternaturally prone to brutality and self-interest — all these
were questions fraught with an urgency that is almost inconceivable to us
today. But this heightened Romantic sense of “the urgency of the
moment,” which is part and parcel of the Romantic sense of historicism
about which James Chandler wrote in England in 1819, is itself a
“practice” that we need to reclaim in our work and with our students.
On a perhaps more immediately practical, pedagogical note, I believe
that we also need to involve our students more fully in the hands-on work
that we do as scholars and teachers of Romanticism. At a time when
literary and cultural recovery projects of all sorts are taking place, there is
no reason not to have our students work with some of the many littleknown texts that reside in various archives (including college and
university libraries) so that they can learn about the questions that such
recovery work involves and about how one goes about finding answers.
They can prepare annotated editions, for instance, individually or in
groups, or they can prepare electronic editions. They can also generate
electronic apparatus materials of all sorts and mount them on line, and
they can of course engage in primary archival work. My own
undergraduate and graduate students do all of these, and I have discovered
that they genuinely enjoy doing something that is not only different from
what they do in their other courses but that also contributes materially to
the worldwide rethinking of Romanticism by providing new materials. It is
not a vice to let them see – and do – what we do as Romanticists; it is a
virtue, and it pays real dividends.
There is something else, too, something that relates to those two
disheartening conversations with English students who blithely professed
their aversion to literature. We need to get ourselves – and our students –
back to the literature itself, back to the written word in all its diversity and
nuance, all its impetuosity and its elegance, all its incongruities, its
craziness, and its sheer power. That is, after all, what got most of us into
this profession, and it remains fundamental to both the scholarship and the
teaching that most of us do.
Still, I am increasingly struck by the difficulties that students – even
what we tend to call “good” students – have when it comes to reading
texts. They struggle to understand historical, cultural, and intellectual
contexts dating back some two centuries, and I fully understand that
twenty-first century North American students in fact cannot be expected
somehow to reconstruct Romantic-era Britain in any case, especially when
their lives are filled with competing personal pressures, anxieties,
obligations, and distractions. What our students can do, though, is what
the majority of Romantic-era authors made themselves so adept at doing:
Romantic Practices — Practicing Romanticism
21
they can learn to be insightful, responsive readers attuned to the variety
and malleability of language – first as something in itself, something
purely aesthetic in nature, and then as a vehicle for something else,
something that we may call political or ideological but which is directed at
engaging the readers, at moving them by expanding their consciousnesses.
A recent project has required me to go back and reread Percy Shelley’s
writing very carefully, and to study his words and how they work together
in the complex rhetorical and syntactical arrangements and sequences he
employed in poems like The Triumph of Life. The technician in me is able
to take it all apart and see how he achieves the effects he does, and that
produces a certain empirical satisfaction. At the same time, the poet in me
is awed by the artistry, which washes over me like so many waves of
music. As writing, it is simply astonishing. At the same time, when I look
at a text like Melesina Trench’s extraordinary and moving 1816 poem on
the death of her daughter,29 I am no less struck by its combination of
technical sophistication, verbal artistry, and aesthetic effect, even though
the poem is entirely different in its nature, intent, and assumed audience.
My point, then, is that at this historical moment perhaps the most
valuable Romantic practice that we can practice – both in our research and
with our students – may very well turn out to be an essentially textual one:
a refocusing upon the words and how they work within culture, both at the
level of objective, intellectual sense, and at the more insubstantial level of
subjective, metatextual communication. This is something we simply must
do, almost as a precondition to anything else we may wish to do, whether
aesthetic, critical, or theoretical. And I suspect that in doing so we will
find ourselves reminded of many of the reasons that we chose to be
Romanticists. I often tell my students that when we “read” poetry we are
in fact “performing” it. I tend not to tell them that in many cases it seems
to me that the poetry performs us as well: that it makes and re-makes us,
refashioning us into more and better attuned readers but also into more
sensitized and, finally, more humanized citizen readers, into actors in
dramas in which we all have our roles to play, even today. Those roles, it
seems to me, have been assigned us by our Romantic authors and by the
intellectual and spiritual imperatives that motivated their own engagement
with their world – and with our own. It is a subtle praxis – and a
thoroughly Romantic one.
29
Trench, “On the Loss of Elizabeth Melesina Trench, an only Daughter, in her
fifth year,” Ellen, 39-46.
CHAPTER TWO
“AMBER DOES NOT SHED SO SWEET A
PERFUME AS THE VERIEST TRIFLES TOUCHED
BY THOSE WE LOVE”: ENGAGING WITH
COMMUNITY THROUGH THINGS IN
BERNARDIN DE ST. PIERRE'S PAUL ET VIRGINIE
AND ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE’S GRAZIELLA
JILLIAN HEYDT-STEVENSON
I
The arrival of pink taffetas from Tonquin and the grass-green silks of
China forewarn of the tragedy that will follow Virginia’s exile from
paradise to Paris. Because Virginia is happy in the coarse blue cloth of
Bengal and miserable in satins and gauze, we are led to believe that before
this moment, consumption and the possession of things in the novel’s
petite society have not borne the stigma of alienation that they do in urban
society. I’d like to explore both the tragic failures as well as the visionary
moments where the novel strives to create a social contract based on the
notion that what distinguishes a stable and liberating community – one that
resonates with both magic and utility – is the human engagement with the
things of daily life.
Such an engagement is predicated on acknowledging first, the
permeability between objects and subjects, and second, the potential for
harmonious productivity that this acknowledgment achieves when enacted
in everyday circumstances. I would like to trace in this essay the
transformation by which a Thing becomes a thing–that is the movement,
respectively, from connection to alienation, a movement predicated on a
dualistic view of the world and of others. The novel, while protesting
slavery and its conditions, also, inadvertently perhaps, reaffirms it. This