Professor Janelle Schwartz
Romantic Literature
Friday December 18, 2009
Final Essay
Romantic Literature: The Fault and the Unfulfilled
There are many themes throughout Romantic literature. From death and destruction to reminiscing and internalizing, both the authors of Romantic literature and the characters within Romantic literature create worlds which exude dark perspectives on reality. One of the most important Romantic themes is the fault in imagination. It is a character’s immeasurable passion of their imagination that drives the story line to destruction. Unlike other genres of literature, the Romanic imagination is so powerful that not only does it cause destruction, but it actually denies both the author and character(s) any release from the destruction. Therefore, because of the fault in imagination, Romantic literature remains Romantic because it will always be unfulfilled.
Seen within different types of Romantic texts from poetry to prose, there are constantly main characters that carry the intense imagination. The imagination of each character is seemingly harmless at the beginning; at times the imagination is actually a good thing. However, as the imagination grows throughout the story, readers see that the imagination is the driving factor that turns the plot into foreboding directions. While intentions maybe are good or even neutral, main characters are consumed by their desires and it soon reveals the destruction behind something that is supposed to be beautiful. This is the fault in the imagination – the boundlessness of the Romantic mind and therefore destruction caused by their passions.
In William Blake’s, The Book of Thel, the imagination is consuming to Thel, the main character. Thel represents the image of purity and beauty, much like what imagination is supposed to be. However, as she sits as an immortal in the Vales of Har she wonders what the meaning of life is (as well as her own life). Her imagination grows and calls for her to know what is beyond her home and her flock. As a result she meets the personified Lily and Cloud. Talking to each, they direct her to the Worm because she still is unsatisfied. Seeking out the Worm, Thel is better shown what life really means, but first sees the external ugliness of him. Thel describes the Worm as an object beneath her and all others, “Image of weakness, art thou but a Worm?/…I see thee lay helpless and naked, weeping,/ And none to answer, none to cherish thee with mother’s smiles” (Greenblatt 101). This observation probably causes Thel to wonder even more. After speaking to more attractive creatures like the Lily and the Cloud it is daunting to her why the ugly Worm would have the answer she is looking for and they did not. Through the Clay, the Worm describes his existence and his great purpose. Despite what Thel wants to hear or expects to hear, the Worm shows that his life’s work is more important than that of the Lily or the Cloud because he is death and life. The Worm shows that he is the destruction of all beings and the rejuvenation of all beings. When Thel is then presented with the gates of Hell it is described that, “…[Thel] saw the secrets of the land unknown./ She saw the couches of the dead, & where the fibrous roots/ Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists:/ A land of sorrows and of tears where never smile was seen” (Greenblatt 101). Here, Thel experiences the terror and reality of life which is death. Her response is to hurry back to the Vales of Har screaming.
Some theories suggests that she goes back to the Vales of Har unsatisfied and forever traumatized with the Worm’s presentation of the underworld. Other theories suggest that Thel is so traumatized that she actually forgets what happened. In this case, because she forgets what happens with the Worm, she is doomed to repeat the process over again. Especially because of her immortality, she is hurting herself for eternity. So, just as the Worm is a transitory symbol for life and death, Thel is caught in a transitory state with no hope of escape. Since could not stop her curiosity from questioning life, her fault in her imagination causes her destruction to herself. This cycle denies her closure or an ending to her story. This causes her to remain a Romantic character.
From Romanticism: A Critical Reader, edited by Duncan Wu, William Blake’s ideas on the sublime are related the passionate imagination, like that of his character Thel. According to Blake, the experience that a character feels when their imagination’s desires are at the point of satisfaction is apart of the sublimity in the discovery. “As the moment of astonishment, where the power of the sublime manifests itself, the mind becomes utterly open to the influx of what it beholds, and yet this flood of power into the mind produces no kinetic transfer of energy to the mind’s faculties, but rather the reverse - a suspension of internal motion, a total arrest. As first appearing entirely permeable, the mind instantly becomes impenetrable, like a container packed to the choking point” (Wu 19). This is why Romantic characters feel such desperation to fulfill their imagination’s needs to the point of disregarding all others. Their minds go into “suspension” and they are so enveloped in their wish fulfillment that they do not even realize what kind of destruction they have done to themselves.
Like Thel, another infamous Romantic character uses his imagination to go farther beyond the limits of where any man should. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a Romantic novel that follows the plot of a man whose creativity and intelligence cannot be contained and therefore revealing his fault. Victor Frankenstein, like Thel, is a character that at first is presented with positive regard. Frankenstein is seen as intelligent, worldly, and ambitious. However, his imagination leads the story into very dark places because he goes so far as to play God. This fault, in creating the monster, leads him to depression, his family and friends to die, and his life to have an unintended meaning – a warning to other imaginers. Instead of gaining the respect and honor that he intended to have from his scientific discoveries, his life has become twisted and unnatural. The point that he crosses, the moment the monster is created, makes him aware of what his imagination really sought after. Since the monster is created as mirror image of Frankenstein, as man is the image of God, the monster also has access to these magnified feelings. After years of abandonment the monster and Frankenstein finally meet and the monster shows surprising insight, “Of what strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling; but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain…” (Shelley 146). Frankenstein, also knowing this, at several points even tells the captain of the ship that saves him, Robert Walton, why he should take Frankenstein’s story and implement it into his own life. This way Frankenstein may achieve some form of redemption by helping save Walton from his own imagination. Explaining this fault in the imagination, the introduction on Victor Frankenstein’s character by D.L. MacDonald and Kathleen Scherf says, “Instead of slowly endeavoring to life up the veil concealing the wonderful phenomena of living nature; full of ardent imaginations, they [the characters] have vainly and presumptuously attempted to tear it asunder” (Shelley 24). The imagination in the novel spends little time on when Frankenstein actually crossed the line, but rather, it shows the slow destruction and tearing resulting in that crossing. Even at the end, when Frankenstein finally dies and the monster has his last words, there is still no closure. The monster – the tangible essence of the fault in Frankenstein’s imagination – concludes that he will commit suicide. However, because readers never actually see the death of the monster, the fault in the imagination still lives when the novel concludes and readers are left with dissatisfaction. Unless the monster had killed himself within the confines of the text, Shelley’s characters, audience, and Shelley herself would have been given closure.
Finally in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, not only is one Romantic character is responsible for the fault or the unfulfillment, but two. Catherine and Heathcliff are doppelganger figures who can neither live with each other nor live without each other and so the novel beings at the end of their story with a continuum of what already happened to these two characters. Catherine is dead and Heathcliff is left lonely, heartbroken, and malicious. The reason the characters are at that point is because of their imagination towards each other. Their passions consumes them, causing them to make poor decisions which lead them to the point when the novel beings. Much like the style of Frankenstein, Bronte shows that the consequences of the fault in the imagination are much more important to Romantic literature than when the fault occurred.
Both Catherine and Heathcliff make bad decisions; Catherine chooses a life that Heathcliff cannot follow and Heathcliff decides to leave Wuthering Heights. This moment in the novel is where their breaking point was. Specifically Catherine’s imagination of Heathcilff convinces her that she is beyond loving him, but rather she the very essence of him. To Nelly, the maid, Catherine says, “My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always in mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don’t talk of our separation again…” (Bronte 82). This point in Catherine’s imagination, directed through Love, is the moment that the fault is brought to light. It is odd because Love’s essence is traditionally thought of as a connecting or a bringing together of souls. In Bronte’s Romantic idea of Love however, it is turned into the essence of consumption and eradication. As James Phillips, author of the article “The Two Faces of Love in Wuthering Heights”, “Wuthering Heights is an analysis of love. Almost clinically the novel sets apart what is intertwined and clarifies what is confused. The process of distillation engenders insupportable tensions and cruelties, as the contingent and empirical are played off against the necessary and – in Kantian terms – transcendental. Emily Bronte goes to extremities, not or order to indulge Romantic hyperbole and histrionics, but rather in order to exhibit the distinct components of love whose individual nature might otherwise go unrecognized” (Phillips 97). It is the very nature of Catherine and Heathcliff’s love that destroys all happiness of their lives and ultimately poisons the lives of their offspring within Wuthering Heights.
This fault of their imaginations not only causes such poison, but unrest for the characters. After Catherine’s death she is doomed to be an apparition, haunting the grounds of Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff’s death is intangible at first, coming far before his physical body decays. He lives a life of torment and regret, and is further pushed into oblivion by Catherine’s haunting. Because while Catherine is dead, her coming back results in feeding off of each other’s brooding, never allowing it to die with her, but living within Heathcliff like a parasite. This passion is so powerful that even at the very end, though Heathcliff finally does physically die, the Romantic story is strong enough to live on; villager’s claim that they see both their ghosts, young Catherine and Hareton are about to marry and possibly enter into destruction as well, and the story of Catherine and Heathcliff is dwelled on by Lockwood, Nelly, and Joseph far after it should have ended. Because of these aspects, the story of Catherine and Heathcliff, like their ghosts, will never find rest or come to an end. This is why the fault in their imagination causes the unfulfilled Romantic Love story.
Through these stories like Catherine and Heathcliff, Frankenstein, and Thel, the pain and the cyclical patterns of Romantic literature are apparent. None of these characters find a settling point because they led themselves down a path where eventually all they find is hopelessness. As Thel is bounded by her immortality and trauma, Frankenstein is bounded by his monster, and Catherine and Heathcliff are bounded by their Love. This binding, caused by the fault of the imagination, carries them into endlessness and unfulfillment. As Frankenstein says, “The cup of life was poisoned for ever; and although the sun shone upon me, as upon the happy and gay of heart, I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me” (Shelly 206). I wonder if he knew that those two eyes were the fault and the unfulfillment.
Bibliography
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004.
Fulford, Tim, Debbie Lee, and Peter J. Kitson. Literature, Science and Exploration in
The Romantic Era, Bodies of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Greenblatt, Stephen, M.H. Abrams ed. [et al]. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume D: The Romantic Period. New York: W.W. Norton and Company
Ltd., 2006.
Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: W.W.
Norton and Company, 2008.
Phillips, James. “The Two Faces of Love in Wuthering Heights.” Bronte Studies, Volume
32. (2007): 96-105. EBSCO Host. University of New South Wales., (accessed December 15, 2009). <http://web.ebscohost.com/
Shelly, Mary. Frankenstein; Or The Modern Prometheus, Second Edition. Ed. D.L.
MacDonald and Kathleen Scherf. Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999.
Wu, Duncan. Romanticism: A Critical Reader. Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1995.
I am very much intrigued by the idea that “Romantic literature remains Romantic because it will always be unfulfilled,” as it dovetails nicely w/ the notion of boundlessness (as we discussed in class). But I am curious: is curiosity, as you present it, truly to be deemed a “fault in [the] imagination”? I suppose the larger question is why you have chosen to read this “fault” as negative/destructive, rather than positive/destructive. This is not to suggest that one approach is more appropriate than the other; rather, I want to know precisely why you chose the approach you did—laid out in plain view, w/ definitive terms and stakes articulated at the top of your post. Perhaps the most telling quote that you cited in your post came from Frankenstein: “Of what strange nature is knowledge! …but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain.” Might this not suggest precisely the stakes of your argument: that you wish to reveal a kind of malignancy intrinsic to Romanticism? Clearly, you have provoked in me a desire to ask more questions about your topic. And the line, “this binding, caused by the fault of the imagination, carries them into endlessness and unfulfillment,” as it appears in your closing paragraph, reveals an intriguing paradox at the heart of your argument: the boundlessness you see in Romanticism occurs, according to your articulation, as a result of restriction. And the closing image of the creature’s “two eyes” as an illustration of this paradox works very nicely.
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