Frankly, Franky, you Frighten me.

George Levine seems to have hit the nail on the head when he said, “ It is so common place now, that everybody talks about Frankenstein, but no body reads it,” (Levine, 3)
Prior to our in depth study of it in class, I was one of those everybodies. When we first started reading the novel, I was astonished at how radically different it was than all the previous notions of “Frankenstein” I had known. Growing up, I recall watching Boris Karloff, and his rendition of the “wretched daemon,” as an illiterate oaf, fumbling about with cumbersome awkward movements, green skin, and bolts coming out of his neck. As a little girl, I was under the impression that this was where they charged his battery pack, and Franky wasn’t much different than the energizer bunny, except that in contemporary pop culture, he is lumped with the likes of Dracula, and the ghosties and ghoulies of Halloween.
Initially, I was taken aback at how much I disliked the novel. I was on a 13-hour train ride home for Thanksgiving, trapped alone with my thoughts, and Victor Frankenstein’s narrative. He was like one of those passengers that sits next to you, someone you recognize as slightly famous, someone you think you have heard of, can’t believe you are sitting next to. When you say in passing, “Hi, Mr. Frankenstein is it? I think I have heard of you, how are you doing? How is your work?” he proceeds to elaborate and embellish his entire life story of litany and woe to the point you are sorry you asked. “Geeze,” you think to yourself, “I thought he’d be an interesting guy, but damn!” I felt icky, and had to excuse myself from the conversation numerous times to go to the dining car and catch my breath, call my mum, and scream a little. I don’t think he noticed. His entire person rubbed me the wrong way. His story amplified all too many negative human characteristics; he oozed narcissism, self-centeredness, and pride to name a few. I wanted to like him, but just got more and more frustrated with his drama. It seemed that all of his troubles were of his own crafting, literally, and I wanted to sit him down with a Zen Buddhist manual, some Zoloft, and introduce him to pragmatism. “Here, study this!” Still I could not stop thinking about the novel, and talked about it almost persistently. As much as I wanted to forget the sensational over-dramatization of Victor’s retelling, its influence endured, and I realized sometimes you learn more from something, or someone you dislike, than something you fancy.
That this story—not necessarily the novel—has gained such notoriety, and maintained such a legacy in Western culture is a telling sign of its fascination and appeal. When you Google “Frankenstein”, you get sixteen million hits, sixteen MILLION! Five major motion pictures have been made that pertain, in some fashion, to the monster of Frankenstein, and four hundred editions have been printed since the books anonymous inception in 1818.
What puzzled me most with this, and what I was continually asking myself, was “What is this staying power of Frankenstein? What lessons does this little horror story render that speak so poignantly to the subsequent generations that have encountered it, and why did the book, for me, create such a greater and deeper reaction of horror and distaste than all the movies and preconceived notions of Frankenstein I held, combined.”
Watching Boris Karloff , and the idea of a monster coming to life in some wacked out scientific laboratory didn’t scare me much as a little kid; a little spooky, yes, interesting, entertaining, but it was just make believe, and could never really happen. What is the most horrific feature of Mary Shelley’s novel is not the monstrosity of the creature itself; his watery eyes, or yellowish skin, that barely stretched over the muscle—though the thought of seeing that is rather distasteful. No, more terrifying is the subtle psychological implications (and warnings) the book reveals so well. (1) The monster represents the abject, and is a metaphorical archetype of the creation and externalization of our internal fears; a scape-goating of our internal monsters. (2) The grandiose nature of these fears—and their consequences—are augmented when isolated from society, having to face the extremes of your own nature alone, and (3) in returning to Levine’s initial conjecture, these lessons are slightly amiss when we think we understand the admonitions of Shelley’s Frankenstein from the movie renditions, with out ever having read the novel.
According to Elizabeth Young in her book Black Frankenstein, the story has a long history of being used as a political metaphor. “Consider, for example,” she says, “critiques of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. In ‘We Finally Got Our Frankenstein,’ filmmaker Michael Moore compares Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to the Frankenstein monster.” “We had a virtual love fest with this Frankenstein whom we (in part) created,” Moore states in the film. Moore considers Hussein one of the many monsters created by the U.S. government, including Osama bin Laden. “[He is] our other Frankenstein,” he says. “We like playing Dr. Frankenstein. We create a lot of monsters—the Sha of Iran, Somoza of Nicaragua, Pinochet of Chile—and then we express ignorance or shock when they ran amok and massacred people.” (Young,1) Perhaps it is not ignorance, as Moore states, but more the horror of our own evil possibilities, and the fear of confronting them.
In a 2005 U.S. Gallup poll, teens between the ages of thirteen and fifteen were asked what they fear, and one of the most frequently cited fears was terrorism. (Gallup, 350) The terrorists, we are made to believe, represent those external monsters that insight fear and “terror” and must be put down. We are still creating monsters according to Moore and Young, and since fear,in psychology is often linked with behaviors of escape and avoidance, (cite) the United States' war on terror provides a prime example for the cultural archetype of this external scape-goating of responsibility that is present in Frankenstein. Give Saddam “weapons of mass destruction” to fight the Russians and assume no culpability when he decides to alter his course of attack. Victor's obsession of his creation, literally “love fest” with his work, is soon abandoned when he realizes when he has done. He falls ill for months, and abandons his laboratory, perhaps hoping his nightmare was really just a nightmare, nothing more.
Beyond the fear of terrorism, and even more acute in humans is the fear of pain Is it is easier to create a monster external to us on which to place blame and conquer, than the fear of the pain we will endure of confronting the monsters with in the self, or owning up to the responsibility of them. Though Victor Frankenstein was in part schizophrenic in dealing with responsibility of the creature, he at one point stated “I am blameless,” (cite) for the destruction wielded by his creation, thus he tried to hide. When our monsters, as horrifying as they may be, lay outside of us, it becomes easier to disown them as part of ourselves, and blame them for all our tribulations than to accept our own culpability. At certain points through out the novel Frankenstein seems to accept his responsibility for his creation. Specifically with the murder of his younger brother William, and later the innocent death of Justine, Victor expresses the deepest grief and remorse. The night before her execution, Elizabeth and Victor visit Justine in prison. As Elizabeth speaks to Justine, trying to console her, Victor is despondent, and stuck grappling with his own self-designed horrors, to which he says he finds no avail:
During this conversation I had retired to a corner of the prison-room,
where I could conceal the horrid anguish that possessed me.
Despair! Who dared talk of that? The poor victim, who on the morrow
was to pass the dreary boundary between life and death, felt not as I did,
such deep and bitter agony. (114)
Fears, and perhaps our innate“evil” tendencies (to try and live beyond our human limitations), as illustrated by Victor Frankenstein are augmented by isolation from society and community. Not only does Victor create in secret, with no witness but his the pages of his journal, he also never admits to his folly to any of his closest friends or family members. He avoids admitting his guilt because he fears the pain it would create. Still in not admitting his guilt, he is eaten alive by the monster of lonely anguish it create inside of him. After destroying the pieces of his second creation he says, “I left the room, and locking the door, made a solemn vow in my own heart to never resume my labours; and then with trembling steps I sought my own apartment. I was alone; none were near me to dissipate the gloom, and relieve me from the sickening oppression of the most terrible reveries” (191) It is when he is left alone to to his own devices that he is able to create such horror, with no external voice of reason saying “Victor, should you really be doing this? Are you prepared for the consequences of your actions?” With out the presence of community he is able to equivocate his responsibility, letting it fester internally. Victor was more able to hide his hideous monstrosity because in the novel, no one was there to witness it,thus never had to fully take responsibility for it. It is when he is alone that he fashioned these creatures, and alone he had to deal with the internal turmoil they presented to him.
(3)The American Library Association and the National Library of Medicine have designed a new traveling exhibition that explores the literary, scientific, and cultural legacy of Shelley's novel. The exhibition examines Shelley's world and the evolution of the monsters as a cultural myth. “One of our goals,” says ALA project coordinator Susan Brandehoff, “is to encourage people familiar with the popular image of Frankenstein to read Shelley's novel. We'd like people to understand the original book as totally different from what's been done with the plays and films.” What is non-existent in the 1931 film by James Whale, the film that propelled Frankenstein into a cultural icon, is the juxtaposition of the isolation versus the community that is so overt in the novel. The film opens with “Henry” Frakenstein and his hunchback assistant “Igor” collecting “materials from a graveyard. Elizabeth, a university professor, and “Victor”—representing Henry, are all present when the monster comes alive. Frakenstein actually states, “One creator, three very sane spectators.” The monster is in the film also lacks the intelligence, moral character, and emotional complexity of the almost human monster in Shelley’s horror story. The near humanness of the monster makes him that much more horrifying because he acts as the doppleganger to Victor himself, and not merely some implausible science fiction character . In the novel we can observe this contrast between Victor, and the isolation he creates around himself, and even with in his community. The film is an inversion of Shelley's novel; almost an entirely different story with a different premise. The lessons of responsibility and isolation are not present in the film the way they are in the book.
What we learn from the novel is much more terrifying. Levine states that, “while Frankenstein is a phenomenon of popular culture, it is so because it has tapped into the center of western feeling and imagination...Frankenstein has become a metaphor for our own cultural crisis... it has become a vital metaphor, particularly appropriate to a culture...neurotically obsessed with 'getting in touch' with its authentic self and frightened at what its discovering ” (Levine, 3) Perhaps we are frightened at the recognition that we can not help ourselves to continually create monsters, and that we fear the culpability of our actions. But that this novel is, has tapped so deeply in western feeling, and such an exquisite metaphor for our own cultural crisis, a crisis that may never have a resolution, is what has kept this novel at the epicenter of western imaginations.

I resolved with more respect for Mary Shelley's monstrosity that when I initially ventured into the story.

* * * * *


Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 2nd ed. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2001. Print.

Levine, George. The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1979. Print.

Young, Elizabeth. Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2008. Print.

Gallup, Alec. The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 2005 . Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2006. Print.

Phenomenology Climbing Mountains: A Critique of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” via Merleau-Ponty’s “The Primacy of Perception”

Calvin Monley

English A427-Romanticism

Final Research Paper

12 / 16 / 09

Phenomenology Climbing Mountains: A Critique of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” via Merleau-Ponty’s “The Primacy of Perception”

Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” is one of two notable compositions the poet produced in the first half of 1816 (Reiman 26). Written in July of that year and inspired by Shelley’s view of Europe’s tallest mountain from a bridge spanning the River Arve in the valley of Chamonix in southeastern France, the poem is a rich debate and synthesis of much enlightenment epistemology. Shelley capitalizes on an inherent tension between “questions about the human mind, its powers, and the limits of knowledge” and “the sheer destructive power of the mountain” (Norton 763) that flows out his experience of viewing such an overwhelming sight. The poet resolves this tension by distilling the idea of a universal mind, a prime mover external and apart from the world, a power that goes unobserved, symbolized by the top of Mont Blanc. This mind is sublimely beyond human comprehension, though Shelley’s idea of poetic inspiration offers at least some people a way to tap into universal knowledge and to see as the mind sees. As Dr. Schwartz points out, there is a tension, too, in this resolution because the universal mind is decidedly disinterested in the world it has created, poetic genius is necessarily engaged in that world. However, this is acceptable because if Romantic poetry is about anything, it’s tension and contradiction.

The ideas “Mont Blanc” presents are interesting and philosophically import in so far as they are characteristically romantic. However, the role of this paper is not to defend them, but to critique them in the light of French phenomenology, specifically the philosophy of perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. We will begin by fleshing out the epistemology and poetic theory that “Mont Blanc” presents us with, comment on its philosophical context, and then go to town on it, armed with ideas presented in Merleau-Ponty’s “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences.” In doing so, we find that the existence of human consciousness is in no way dependant on any universal mind, and that the universal mind is in no way necessary for the mutually exclusive paths of “awful doubt” (77) or “faith so mild” (77) to present themselves. Poetic inspiration has its root not in participation in the universal mind, but in the mystery of being revealing itself through perception.

“Mont Blanc” is a poem of 144 pentameter lines, irregularly rhymed and divided into five separate sections which taken together form a cohesive argument (Reiman 26). In outlining this argument, we will rely heavily on the summary offered by Shelley scholar Donald Reiman. In part I,

Impressions of the “universe of things” (external nature, the world outside the human mind) flow through the passive universal mind, as a great river flows through a ravine; the stream is fed by two active forces, of which the “source of human thought”...is to the great “universe of things” as “a feeble brook “(7) is to a “vast river” (10) (Reiman 26).

Part II finds Shelley giving an apostrophe to the ravine of the River Arve, representing the universal mind (Reiman 27). The world flowing through it is symbolized by the River Arve (Reiman 27). The human mind, “my own separate phantasy” (36) and “Once legion of wild thoughts” (41) is characterized by self-consciousness, the human subject reflecting on himself (Reiman 27). This is the meaning of “[floating] above [the] darkness [of the Ravine]” (42) (Reiman 27). Self-consciousness is “feeble and limited” in its search for knowledge, so much so that it can only discover “the secrets of nature” through a “plunge back into the unconscious pool of the universal mind” (Reiman 27). This is where poetic inspiration is useful. Only in the “still cave of the witch Poesy” (44) can images “of all things that are” (46) be accessed (Reiman 27). Poetic inspiration makes recollected images return to “the breast/ from which they fled,” (47-8) making things real again (Norton 764). The universal mind is the source of poetic inspiration and poetic inspiration is the only way to access the universal mind. Hence, because not everyone has poetic genius – humanity needs poets to illuminate the depths of the universal mind so that ordinary people might understand their world and make sense of their lives.

True to the Kantian idea of a limit, Mont Blanc poses a problem to human understanding, but it is a problem poetic genius can transcend. Hence, Shelley is surprised at first by his ability to “see for the first time the meaning of Mont Blanc” (Reiman 27). He wonders for a while whether divine illumination or some mental capacity unlocked only in dreams has brought him thus far (Reiman 27). Mont Blanc is “still, snowy and serene” (61). It is uninhabited and unobserved. Though it was created by geological processes, it does not show it (Reiman 27) for as Shelley says, “all seems eternal now” (75). The mountain’s raw power to, through its glaciers, destroy the homes of both men and animals, uproot and crush trees, and shift massive amounts of land leaves human consciousness in awe and with only two options. Either we despair at nature’s indifference to human existence or we reconcile ourselves with it via the humility of “a faith so mild” (77), the celebrating of our own insignificance and mortality. The power has the capacity to overthrow tyranny (Reiman 27), but the voice of the power is only audible to those who have the capacity and patience to listen, like poets. The message that the power communicates is that every living creature “Within the daedal earth” (86) is subject to a cycle of birth and death, to creation and destruction. This includes man. The power itself dwells apart and “is not mortal and not subject to change” (Reiman 28). Thus,

God is not simply a very big man. [There] is an unbridgeable gulf between everything that man experiences with natural creation and the originating “Power” that exists beyond the limits of human cognition” (Reiman 28).

The cycle, and thus the power, is as much creative as destructive. The devastating glaciers “are also the source of the River Arve, which is “breath ad blood of distant lands” (124) (Reiman 28). Part V described the power itself, again symbolized by the summit of Mont Blanc (Reiman 28). This power creates much to be observed, but itself goes unobserved (Reiman 28). It is indifferent to human existence, above it and beyond it. However, the final three lines invert this and give primacy to the human imagination, especially the poetic imagination. As Reiman says, “The prismatic human imagination, however, has the ability to reflect and refract the cold blank whiteness of benighted snow into the beautiful colors of the rainbow, giving joy to men during their lives and a hope for survival beyond the grave” (Reiman 29).

Tracing the different sources of the epistemology of “Mont Blanc” and evaluating the originality of Shelley’s ideas would itself make an interesting paper. For our purposes it is enough to talk briefly about the broad philosophical context Shelley was writing in. Romanticism, as a philosophical and artistic movement, grows out of and in reaction to enlightenment philosophy, particularly philosophy of subjectivity. We are not talking of subjectivity in a moral sense, but in an epistemological one. To be a subject is to possess consciousness, awareness of self and of the external world. A pivotal moment in western philosophy is the “subjective turn” beginning with the publishing of Descartes’ Meditations in 1641. In the second meditation Descartes proclaims “cogito ergo sum” and turns philosophy away from inquiry into the objective, external world and towards what it means to be a thinking and knowing subject. Descartes asserts that to doubt the world and even one’s own existence is itself an affirmation of one’s own existence. Doubting is an act of thinking, and one cannot think unless one exists. From then on, philosophers become intensely interested in the conditions of knowing, of whether knowledge arises out of experience or pure thought, and whether anything can be known with certainty. Some such as Leibniz and Spinoza assert that knowledge comes from categories of pure reason independent of experience while skeptics like Hume believe that all we can know is sense experience. The most significant enlightenment figure writing on the conditions of subjectivity is, without doubt, Immanuel Kant. Kant wisely strides a middle ground between empiricism and rationalism, between realism and idealism. Kant posits that knowledge begins in sense experience, but is not reducible to it. The moment we experience anything though our senses, categories of a priori knowledge flow through our consciousness and give order to our sensations. Through this process a posteriori knowledge is constituted. Especially relevant to our analysis is the Kantian idea of a limit. A limit concept is a wall beyond which human knowledge cannot reach – the summit of Mont Blanc. It is a point at which knowledge (sensation ordered by understanding) fails. For instance, we cannot picture a universal mind because we know only our particular minds and cannot conceptualize independently of them. However, the idea of the sublime, of sublimity, is that which can step to the other side of a limit, can look back on itself inside the limit. This is the role Shelley would assign to poetic genius. As Professor Schwartz says, through the idea of “Mont Blanc” Shelley is able to summit Mont Blanc the mountain and give primacy to the poetic imagination.

Now, a bit about phenomenology. Phenomenology is a significant twentieth century philosophical movement developed in both reaction to and synthesis of the legacy of the “subjective turn” in western philosophy, the entire enlightenment tradition, and the modern social sciences. The movement develops out of the transcendental, post-Kantian philosophy of Edmund Husserl and goes in a wide variety of directions, but a few core ideas remain common to every philosopher properly called a phenomenologist. These are: the primacy of lived experience, eidetic essences, and intentionality and they will be explained as they become relevant to our criticism of “Mont Blanc.” French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “The Primacy of Perception” is a classic phenomenological work. It explains in fifteen pages his fundamental phenomenological conviction that perception is the “original modality of consciousness” (MP 12). Humans, before any abstract thought or reflection, simply perceive. Perception, like all phenomenological consciousness, is characterized by intentionality. I cannot grasp pure perception. I can only grasp an object which is external to my own consciousness. Conscious states are never empty. I dream a dream; I think a thought. Consciousness is always related to that which is not itself. Objects present themselves as wholes in my perception. I always grasp them from a limited perspective, but they are wholes. I can change position and see things from new perspective, but no amount of movement will exhaust an object. The unseen side of an object, too, is grasped by perception, grasped in its absence.

I grasp the unseen side [of a lamp] as present, and I do not affirm that the back of the lamp exists in the same way that I say the solution of a problem exists. The hidden side is present in its own way. It is my vicinity (MP 14).

Perception is my window to the external world. I perceive via my body in the world and the world itself appears to me as possibilities for action. Merleau-Ponty, like Kant, walks a middle line between idealism and realism, rationalism and empiricism. There is an external world, but our mind shapes it through structures of consciousness presenting the first level perception. Perception is not simple sensation, nor is it pure understanding. It is a seamless blend of sensation ordered by understanding. We exist in a world with others, and we access their subjectivity via our perceptions. In short:

By these words, “the primacy of perception” we mean that the experience of perception is our presence at the moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us; that perception is a nascent logos; that it teaches us, outside all dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself (MP 25).

With all this in mind we are finally in a position to critique “Mont Blanc.” Note that we are not claiming the privilege Merleau-Ponty gives to perception to be complete truth. The paper is simply entertaining that privilege for the purposes of a lively and interesting critique of Shelley. Merleau-Ponty would, above all, take issue with the primacy “Mont Blanc” gives to the universal mind. For Merleau-Ponty, our individual consciousnesses are our primary knowledge of the “Everlasting universe of things” (1) that is the external world. We gain knowledge not by some mysterious participation in a greater intellect that our own, but simply through the structures of our own consciousness. Self-consciousness does indeed arise from an interaction “between mind and matter’ (Reiman 27), but that mind is our pre-reflective perception of the world. Our self-consciousness is as intentional to raw perception as are objects in the world. Sartre, another phenomenologist, terms this “the pre-reflexive cogito.” Merleau-Ponty would probably like the feeble brook” (7) to “vast river” analogy because perception, while it does access being, is never exhaustive and a single perception always opens wider doors. But he would not agree with the passivity Shelley assigns to the human mind. Perception, for Merleau-Ponty, is an intentional, active grasping of the external world. We perceive as living bodies and the perceived world always opens up possibilities for action in thought, word and deed.

For Merleau-Ponty, “Mont Blanc” the poem ideally would serve to celebrate the infinite and beautiful perspectives the mountain offers, perspectives ”pregnant with form” and meaning (MP12). The twin perspectives on man’s place in nature that the poem offers: “awful doubt” (77) or “faith so mild” (77) are not contradictory truth-values. Rather, in the process of perception by which meaning and truth reveal themselves, these are reconcilable contradictions.

There is a vain form of contradiction which consists in affirming two theses which exclude one another at the same time and under the same aspect. And then there are…contradictions present at the very heart of time and of all relationships…the justified contradictions of transcendental logic. The objection…would be admissible only if we could put a system of eternal truths in the place of the perceived world, freed from its contradictions (MP 19).

Indeed, Merleau-Ponty would probably celebrate the contradictions and tensions between irreconcilable ideas present in romantic literature, because these contradictions are unavoidable realities of the perceived world and the meaning it reveals. Merleau-Ponty might very well place poetic inspiration at the point where the perceiving subject searches for a way to totalize and unify perception and the meaning therein. Thus romantic poetry would be a poetic ideal because it is riddled with contradiction and process, just like any attempt to unify perceptions in the world. But all this is pretty speculative.

The final question in our analysis, and one this paper does not claim to answer, is what to do with the Kantian Sublime. Note that this paper is entitled “Phenomenology Climbing Mountains,” not “Phenomenology Summiting Mountains.” As Angela Leighton points out, “ it is the purpose and greatness of ‘Mont Blanc’ to dare the unimaginable…[to] quest for origins; for that Power which, through infinitely apart, might nonetheless be apprehended by the imagination” (Leighton 70). Shelley’s solution is a sublime transcendence of the limits of the particular mind into the depths of the universal mind. Merleau-Ponty would take issue with the universal mind, but what he would make of speculation on a deistic God, a power apart from and cause of the external world we perceive – this is an open question. Is the sublime necessary for apprehension of such of power, or is human cognition capable of it alone? All that can be said with certainty is that, whatever position Merleau-Ponty would assign the sublime and whether he would think it accessible only through poetic genius or not, it would all be apprehended through perception. To try to envision the top of Mont Blanc, to try to envision of universal mind or first mover, is to perceive them in our imaginations, is to make ourselves present before them. As Merleau-Ponty says:

I cannot even for an instant imagine an object in itself. As Berkeley said, if I attempt to imagine some place in the world which has never been seen, the very fact that I imagine it makes me present at that place (MP 16)

Works Cited

Leighton, Angela. Shelly and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems. Cambridge

UP: Cambridge, 1984.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences”.

James M. Edie translator.

Reiman, Donald H. Percy Bysshe Shelly. Updated ed. Twayne Publishers: Boston, 1990.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D The Romantic Period. Jack Stillinger and

Deidre Shauna Lynch ed. W.W. Norton and Co: New York, 2006. (Please note that this

source references supplemental material to “Mont Blanc”, namely footnotes.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Mont Blanc”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D

The Romantic Period. 8^th ed. W.W. Norton and Co: New York, 2006. (Note that this

source will be intertextually cited without author and by line number).

Romantic Literature: The Fault and the Unfulfilled

Caitlin Smith

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/ehost/pdf?vid=10&hid=9&sid=d1e98bee-ea8b-40d3-965d-37f850975130%40sessionmgr13>

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.

The Influence of the French Revolution on Romantic Literature

Romanticism neither has a set beginning or end, but it does have an inspiration point for many early romantic authors. Enlightenment ideals of human rights and liberty led to the French Revolution, which resulted in Counter-Enlightenment and opened the doors to a new literary movement known as Romanticism. The influence the French Revolution had on Romanticism is clear in many well-known Romantic authors texts including William Blake, William Wordsworth, Edmund Burke, and Percy Shelley. The high hopes going into the French Revolution and the devastation that occurred internalized in these creative minds resulting in a new literary genre inspired by disillusion and false hope.
The French Revolution began in 1789 and lasted until 1799. During this time there was radical political and social changes being made a fought for. The French Revolution marked a time in history when France went from having an absolute monarch to a republic to a constitutional monarchy and also ruled by two different empires. The French Revolution has many suspected causes but historians still debate whether or not there is a specific one. The main causes recognized by historians are the Ancien Regime, economic disparity, financial crisis, and social and political factors that people didn’t agree with.
The Ancien Regime also known as the Former or Old Regime was established in France during the Valois and Bourbon dynasties. Under this government system, known as “absolutism,” France was divided into three groups of people known as the Estates of the Realm. The First Estate was the Roman Catholic clergy, the Second Estate was the French nobility, and the Third Estate included the rest of the population without any recognition of national citizenship. France was united under the slogan “one king, one law, and one faith.” At the end of the 18th century the clergy made up about zero point five percent of the population and the members of nobility made up about one to one point five percent of the population leaving 98 percent of the population to feel inferior. Since the Parliament of Paris met at Versaille and was always kept private, this caused turmoil with the people who were left in the dark in relation to decisions of their country. When Parliament decided to increase taxes to pay off their debt from multiple wars fought by Louis XV, the already poor population became inspired to take control of what was going on in government.
Other then the unbalanced government system, widespread famine and malnutrition was taking place across France. Although famine spread to other parts of Europe, the French people were already upset with the way government was set up and were able to use this as motivation to demand or force a change in the government.
Inspired by the Enlightenment, ideals such as absolutism were resented, along with nobility and clergy having privileges and control over public life, but eagerness for freedom of religion, mainly by Protestants, liberty and republicanism for France.
After a long and devastating Revolution filled with highs and lows for the people France concluded to function as a constitutional monarchy where the king would share his power with an elected Legislative Assembly. They met for the first time in October of 1971 but a year later the new government system failed leaving France again in a state of confusion.
William Blake saw the results of the French Revolution in London, a city where he spent most of his life. Blake wrote “London” in 1792, which portrayed a society that was distraught over the status quo. The picture that is painted for the reader is one in which “all souls and bodies were trapped, exploited and infected.” (Korner) In the very beginning of the poem Blake says that the streets and the river Thames are “charter’d” showing the reader the early capitalistic nature of government, that the streets and river are privately owned. He describes the people as visibly weak and showing signs on sickness and misery. In the second verse Blake really pushes his point of the common suffering by all by repeating the word “every” five different times. He says:

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear:

Then he goes on to describe specific examples of what people were dealing with at the time. The chimney sweep, in lines 8-9, was a figure that was known for multiple reputations including one of crime and lawlessness. Because their work was seasonal they were often known to beg or commit crimes and the church saw them as a menace and were fearful of what they were capable of. Another interpretation is that Blake was making a stand against the Catholic Church who was known to take part in child labor, many of them being sweeps. The final verse shows the cycle that seems never ending of misery being passed down. The young harlot, like the young chimney sweep, is deprived of loving her baby because the child was conceived as a result of commerce not love and this misery will be put on her child and their child, etc,. Along with her misery being passed to the child, she passes on disease to the wealthier men who she works for, who then pass it on to their wives. The seemingly never-ending cycle of misery and emptiness that the people in the poem portray are a direct reflection on the failure of the French Revolution to inspire hope like it was supposed to.
Another famous romantic author who was inspired by the French Revolution was William Wordsworth. His fourteen part Prelude, a reflection on his life experiences, he spends time discussing his time in France and the effects of the Revolution. In 1790, one year after the storming of the Bastille, Wordsworth traveled to France to witness the spectacle of “human nature being born again.” He begins his time in France in Book Ninth Residence in France and takes the reader through his journey visiting the historical sights of the Revolution. Wordsworth says, “I saw the Revolutionary Power, Toss like a Ship at anchor, rocked by storms.” He recognizes the power of it, but also the fact that it wasn’t exactly what people had planned. Storms weren’t predicted but happen in any case, and although the revolution sparked change, storms leave a mess behind just as the revolution did. He later states in Book Tenth that the “truth is most painful to record!” Wordsworth demonstrates the false hope people had in Book Tenth in line 400:
“Such ghastly visions had I of despair,
And tyranny, and implements of death,
And innocent victims sinking under fear,
And momentary hope, and worn-out prayer,
Each in his separate cell, or penned in crowds
For sacrifice, and struggling with forced mirth
And dungeons where the dust
Was laid with tears.”
In this section Wordsworth gives life to the people in history books, he shows the reader what they were feeling by such vivid descriptions and thorough passion. The time Wordsworth spent in France contributed immensely to his most acclaimed work of his life-time. Not only does Wordsworth recap what he experienced in France at such an interesting time of history but he uses his creative mind to bring to life the people who lived through this period of turmoil and change.
Percy Bysshe Shelley also made his contribution to literature in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Shelley’s England in 1819 portrays the kind of society that came out of the failure of the French Revolution. He talks about the kings saying they are
“Rulers who neither see nor feel now know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.”
Shelley shows the rulers being disconnected from their people, not caring about them but sucking the life and worth out of them until there isn’t anything left. The people are left with nothing, barely the land they walk on while the rulers are blinded by their wealth and don’t feel any repercussions from their selfish behavior.
Many more of the romantic authors were inspired by the events of the French Revolution. The devastation that was felt when the revolution didn’t equate to immediate improvement for the average person was deeply internalized by these authors because they couldn’t do anything about it physically. With these ideas of revolution but no means to attain it, they were able to produce passionate works of art through literature and express the feelings that other people couldn’t get across.



Works Cited

Stillinger, Jack, Lunch, Deidre Shauna,
Greenblatt, Stephen, Abrams, M.H., eds.
The Norton Anthology, English Literature: The Eight Edition, Volume D: The Romantic Period

Korner, Simon. “William Blake’s London.” http://21stcenturysocialism.com. January 8th 2008.

Woods, Alan. “British Poets and The French Revolution. Part Two: Wordsworth and Coleridge The Death of an Ideal.” www.marxist.com/ArtAndLiterature. July 2003


Neely, Sylvia. A Concise History of the French Revolution. Rowman & LittleFieldPublishers, Inc. 2008. Print.

Danny Garrett

December 15, 2009

Dr. Schwartz

Romantic Cultures Research Project

 

The Beauty of Blakean Contraries in “The Little Black Boy”:

Why the Romantic Blake Opposed Slavery?

 

“Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.”- William Blake

 

            Whenever a well-seasoned Romantic student hears “William Blake” and “slavery” paired together, the mind automatically envisions Blake’s provocative and gruesome slave-execution engravings published in John Stedman’s Narrative (1796).  The particular image of a young Samboe female leaves an indelible mark: against her precious will, both of her wrists are tightly tied to a tree; she would be fully naked were it not for a thin piece of cloth covering her genitalia; her facial expression is of pure fear; and lacerations cover her dark flesh from head to ankle. This engraving, along with 15 others (some of which were no less horrifying), awoke the British public out of a morally degraded slumber, a state-of-mind ignorant to the British slave trade’s horrors.

The slave trade of Great Britain, and those of other European countries, transformed the indigenous African and surpassed the Muslim trades. Exporting roughly “2.5 million out of 6.13 million slaves in 1701-1800,” in response to the expanding demand of British plantations and sugar colonies, Britain became the largest national trade (ORO). At the time, economic arguments in support of the system reigned supreme, attesting to the investment capital the trade brought, which contributed to Britain’s industrial revolution. Such arguments did not go unnoticed by abolitionists from William Wilberforce in Parliament to Thomas Clarkson in the pulpit. Charged with fervor, their anti-slavery arguments were intellectually influenced by religious revivalism and the secular Enlightenment. Religious thinkers opposed slavery based on religious egalitarianism; whereas, Enlightenment thinkers opposed slavery based on a basic Lockean concept that society was composed of distinct, self-governing individuals, where society’s primary function was to provide the optimum conditions for the individual pursuit of enlightened self-interests. This gave birth to concepts of freedom and equality. The abolitionist arguments eventually won out. So, by 1807 the British Parliament (through the Slave Trade Act) prohibited British vessels from participating in the trading of humans. And in 1833 (through the Slavery Abolition Act) slavery in all British territory was ended. But where do the Romantics, especially Blake, fit in this history? What is the relationship between Britain’s greatest artists and the epic violence of slavery, described so astutely by Coleridge in 1808 as “the wildest physical sufferings” combined with “the most atrocious moral depravity?” Or by Shelley as “the deepest stain upon civilized man.” What did raped African women; restrained and tortured male and female slaves by iron shackles, handcuffs, thumbscrews with torture keys, three-feet long muzzles, and collars; and lynched or burned-alive Africans—ultimately humans being treated as property and livestock—have anything to do with a Romantic writer’s peaceful reflection in a grove or sublime reactions to Mont Blanc or magical lands like Xandu?

The enslavement of Africans struck the dynamic, hopeful, and radical Romantic poets of England as the most blatant example of human oppression. Though their poetry and prose is blatantly anti-slavery in message—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and Shelley—did not take quick political action. These writers, given the failed French Revolution, viewed political solutions as inevitable failures, and political poetry as philosophically vacuous, for it is unable to uncover deeper truths about the human condition. Also, a majority of English radicals likely viewed the oppression of the English working class and the hellish life of the laboring masses during the Industrial Revolution as more important. However, the Romantics were still vocal. In substance, they did not simply advocate Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Rather, and quintessentially Romantic, the writers sought for a society of unfettered imaginative possibility. Slavery is diametrically opposed to the liberated imagination. For Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, as well as Byron, Shelley, and Keats, slavery was not only morally wrong and politically despotic but also psychologically destructive to the enslaver and to the enslaved. According to Romantic scholar Debbie Lee, the Romantic imagination is not “self-centered; it produces a decentralized self with extremely weak ego boundaries, which involves a denunciation of the self in order to understand, with compassion, nature” (Lee 3). In other words, imagination is empathy. Blake’s notion of “self-annihilation” and Keat’s claim that the poet has no “self” espouses this idea. This empathetic theory of imagination produces a powerful humanitarian sentiment and focus on the Foucaultian other, specifically the physical and mental suffering of African slaves. William Blake’s imagination does precisely this.

Contraries or contradictions are usually frowned upon. In logic, they are an incompatibility between two or more propositions. Contraries plague the thoughtful metaphysician and the pensive epistemologist in their cramped university offices. But in Blake’s “Little Black Boy,” published in the Songs of Innocence (1789), contraries deserve a poetic royal seat from ideas and ideology, propaganda and poetry, white and black, civilization and savagery, good and evil, enlightenment and darkness, to Christian and heathen. For Blake, Man is a source of contraries, institutionalized religion, socially imposed forces, and alterable perception—a sense-imprisoned being that only sees imitations, never originals. This description includes all of humanity, even the well-to-do, upper-class English parliamentarian. If someone of this privileged status has such a atrocious, innate nature, what exactly is the African slave, which on top of this innate, negative nature is physically and mentally tortured and colonized? Recent studies have not done justice to the anti-slavery ideological context in “The Little Black Boy,” perhaps because this poem in appearance seems to reflect the racist assumptions underlying much of anti-slavery writing during Blake’s time. In actuality, Blake addresses the racist attitudes informing most anti-slavery literature of the period by opposing it with subtle abolitionist messages in the poem.

Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is a perfect compass to guide one through the philosophical underpinnings and textual dubiousness of “The Little Black Boy,” as both poems possess thoroughly ironic vocabulary and innate trickery. In Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” children possess ever-expanding energy, imagination, unfettered innocence, and a malleable mind. Not yet a sense-imprisoned being, the child is the main image for Blake, an essential role model for Man. In the late eighteenth century, The Religious Tract Society and its offshoot, the British and Foreign Bible Society, distributed small religious treatises in foreign countries as well as throughout British society. In 1814, they published a series of children’s books to indoctrinate the poor British children into believing basic religious principles and the perfection of the present societal order for the English working class and non-white people. The children of Blake’s time were the “subject of an internal colonization program unprecedented in British history, designed to contain the threat of an educated reading public through programs of mass education” (Richardson 239). It was also a popular tract industry aimed at silencing intellectual radicals. As an added discomfort, children were viewed as primitive and uncivilized humans that needed to be properly trained and educated if they were to fit into the industrialized society. For Blake, this was mental colonization of the child’s mind. This explains why Blake situates “The Little Black Boy” in the tradition of children’s religious poetry, representative of such writers as Watts, Smart, Wesley, and Barbauld, using didactic characters and mass distribution for publication.

The anti-slavery literature of Blake’s time reached its peak, in terms of publication, in 1788. It heavily relied on the constant description of Africa and Africans as culturally “benighted,” savage, uncivilized or “untutored,” unenlightened, and dark. The image of Africa as the “dark” continent metonymically extended the blackness of African skin to African culture. In Anne Yearsley’s “Inhumanity of the Slave Trade,” an enslaved African father is described as “horrid,” “dark,” and “unenlightened” (qtd. in Richardson 247). In Leigh Richmond’s “The Negro Servant,” a children’s book distributed by the Religious Tract Society, the African servant changes from “the once dark, perverse, and ignorant heathen” to a “now convinced, enlightened, humble and believing Christian (qtd. in Richardson 247). Exemplifying the “simplicity and sincerity of real Christianity, he testifies: “God let me be made slave by white men to do me good… He take me from the land of darkness, and bring me to the land of light” (qtd. in Richardson 247). European condescension plagues these works.

The first stanza of  “The Little Black Boy” should shock the reader, for it seems to confirm the racist stereotypes propagated by contemporary anti-slavery and slavery literature, describing Africans as born in a savage “southern wild,” with a negative, evil black skin color “bereaved of light” opposed to an angelic, innocent white skin pigment, which happens to be the color of souls. The African child’s own speech confirms the Eurocentric attitude pervading anti-slavery discourse of Blake’s time. Cleverly, Blake is setting up the opposing forces between racism and non-racism, as he does with Heaven and Hell in the “Marriage” to make a larger point. It is only in the second stanza where one begins to sense Blake’s true ideas on Africans. During Blake’s period, the phrase “untutored savage” held currency in the poetic world to describe Africans, so Blake’s emphasis on the African mother’s teaching “underneath a tree” is extremely significant, dispelling European myths about Africans. Even David Hume believed that Africans were untaught and uncivilized, according to his infamous remark: “no ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences” (qtd. in Baum 6). The great empiricist must have never experienced Hausa’s intricately designed mosques and palaces, Igbo masks and sculptures, Mbari architecture, Atilogwn dance troops, or Nri Kingdom bronze castings. Hume’s views were not uncommon among Europeans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Africans were frequently portrayed as a people without a civilization, language, law, tradition, and rationality; they were culturally backwards and mentally defective.

In stanzas three through five, the mother’s religious ideas seem to reflect a natural theism, juxtaposing a single God with the “sun,” “flowers,” “trees,” “clouds,” and “groves.” Teaching that God lives in the “rising sun,” though, may link to pagan sun worship, a conventional attribute of the “noble savage.” Once again, Blake may be experimenting with contraries. In this line, Blake could be surreptitiously comparing Christianity to Mithraism, a Persian sun-god religion. Assuming this is so, would not that fact make the Europeans “savages” in their attempt to Christianize the Africans? Still running with the “sun” as God and His Kingdom metaphor, the mother’s description of Africans having “black bodies” and “sunburnt faces” implies that black people are closer to God, for these bodily characteristics develop when exposed to the sun’s rays. To protect Africans from this divine, excessive light, black skin acts as a “shady grove.” Though the child quotes his mother’s African teaching, he still has Christianity ingrained in his mind, which he probably learned from missionaries, slave masters, plantation mission schools, or in England by way of previous enslavement in the West Indies. Displaced from the “southern wild” to a region where he is exposed to European racist ideas, the black child fortunately retains his mother’s African teaching--which did not present blackness as a negation or “bereaved of light” but as a “shady grove.”

In typical Blake fashion, “The Little Black Boy” is structured as a Hegelian dialectic, composed of a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis: the thesis is the child’s iteration of the eighteenth-century racist stereotypes alive in Europe in the first stanza; the antithesis is the mother’s African teaching, as quoted by the child; and the synthesis is the child’s ability to create a culturally, autonomous mixture of African and Christian teachings without the colonialist chains in the last two stanzas. The poem’s two concluding stanzas move beyond the missionary propaganda in the first stanza and the mother’s African teaching in the middle stanzas by collapsing blackness and whiteness together as twin attributes of “cloud,” which annihilates the hierarchical relation of the black and white child. As is apparent, these notions were not received through Sunday school or plantation missionary efforts. In typical Blake fashion, the whole picture is inverted, similar to when Hell writes Proverbs in the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” The African child is now an instructor and authority to the English child: “And that I say to little English boy.” At this point, the African boy synthesizes pro-slavery colonialist ideology and his mother’s African teachings to produce a self-affirming discourse or autonomous perspective of his own. In this synthesis, the imposed hegemonic Christian beliefs are emptied of its content, and supplanted by the African religious doctrine taught by his mother. As a result, the African boy is no longer inferior to the English boy. The black boy’s protective, brotherly shading of the English boy from the heat implies that the English boy’s pale skin is not used to the divine heat from “God’s love,” as a consequence of the English’s cruel treatment to Africans. However, the synthesis becomes a message of transcendental, spiritual freedom where humanity is united “when I from black cloud, and he from white cloud are free." In this transcendent synthesis, white and black skin are equally opaque since the physical human body does not exist, and ideology, whether pro-slavery or anti-slavery, does not exist since the physical mind does not exist.

Given this analysis, it is no secret that Blake is harshly criticizing the hypocrisy of the anti-slavery movement with its colonialist language and pathetic religious tracts in this poem. In “The Little Black Boy” the African child is treated as an equal human being. Blake’s job, as the poetic genius, in the “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” was to bring Man out of existential confusion and reveal what is hidden beneath through intellectual reform. He did so by playing with contraries. Blake does the same thing in “The Little Black Boy.” Blake’s Romantic imagination, which is the essence of empathy, allowed him to see past the frivolous pro-slavery arguments during his time, and see human oppression at its worst. Not wearing mind-forg’d manacles, he pushed for the end of slavery once and for all.  

Works Cited

Baum, Joan. Mind-Forg’d Manacles: Slavery and the English Romantic Poets.

     Connecticut: Archon Book, 1994.

Lee, Debbie. Slavery and the Romantic Imagination. Pennsylvania: University of

     Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Oxford Reference Online. British Slave-trade. 12 Jan. 2008 <http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.loyno.edu/views/ENTRY.html?entry=t43.e31           81&srn=2&ssid=887100897#FIRSTHIT>.

Richardson, Alan. “Colonialism, Race, and Lyric Irony.” Literary Reference Center

(2002).     <http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.loyno.edu/lrc/detail?vid=5&hid=107&sid=7d35a732-c385-4b14-b4ce 2557e15d4c9e%40sessionmgr113&bdata=JnNpdGU9bHJjLWxpdmU%3d#AN9610220150-10>.

Alpine Intervention:

The Effects of the Swiss Clime on the Works of Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, and Percy Bysshe Shelley

The assumption that Romantic poetry and prose presents nature and the natural world in an ornamental, delicate manner is both naive and misinformed. The works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley disprove any such supposition with vivid portrayals of nature which work to displace the relation of nature and man as one of object and observer. Instead, nature appears in their works Mont Blanc, Manfred, and Frankenstein as an active subject; a force by which mankind can be irreversibly affected and a presence from which humankind should learn to reevaluate themselves. A certain lack of control of the natural world permeates these works and as the pieces' prime human movers struggle against such an idea, man is presented in all his follies. Yet such revelations are meant to be transformative and are integral to a revolution in one’s own perception. Nature gives man a sort of ultimatum: stop fighting the cycle and find solace in the natural world, a place which will foster sustainable human progress, or continue on a destructive path which leads to eventual digression.

The aforementioned poets, Lord Byron and the Shelley’s, are well-known for their communicative literary circle and their summer spent on Lake Geneva in 1816, from which great works were spawned. Byron’s residence, Villa Diodati became an intellectual haven, protected from the violently shifting weather that the Alpine surroundings seemed to be casting down upon them. Their brief travels in and around the mountain region exposed to them a captivatingly concentrated diversity of ecosystems and natural landforms which they had never before conceived. For their unpolluted imaginations, a “youth [that] has been past as theirs in pursuing, like the swallow, the inconstant summer of delight and beauty which invests in the visible world…the freshness of a diviner nature,” a summer like the one at Villa Diodati was exactly the poetic stimulation these writers needed (P. Shelley iv). The most revealing factual record from that summer, History of a Six Weeks Tour, which illuminates the immediate sentiments felt by Mary and Percy Shelley upon exploring the Swiss Alpine region. In the history’s main text, Mary Shelley describes the landscape:

Range after range of black mountains are seen extending one before the other, and far behind all, towering above every feature of the scene, the snowy Alps. They were an hundred miles distant, but reach so high in the heavens, that they look like those accumulated clouds of dazzling white that arrange themselves on the horizon during summer. Their immensity staggers the imagination, and so far surpasses all conception, that it requires an effort of the understanding to believe that they indeed form a part of the earth (94).

The magnitude of the setting, reflected in the gravity of Mary Shelley’s language indicates the momentous effect the setting was having upon them. The Alpine setting acquainted the writers with a new sort of relationship between man and his surroundings that was far from what they had known in England. Suddenly they found themselves in a landscape where man had to mold to the confines set by nature, where civilization had to adapt to life in the rich enclaves of narrow valleys lay between stark rocky inclines, and where the weather could change in an instant, possibly heaving avalanches of rocky snow down upon human populations. Their descriptions of the villages they stayed in are often curt while their depictions of the natural setting are lengthy and verbose, confirming that the impersonal, commanding presence of the natural setting had all but completely seized their attention.

What is not commonly known about that “wet ungenial summer” of 1816, which was spent mostly indoors, is that the inclement weather was caused by the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia, which discharged such quantities of dust into the stratosphere that the entire world noted darker skies and noticeably cooler temperatures for a three year span (Phillips 61). The group would have been aware of the catastrophic natural phenomenon, and the combination of the weather and the looming mountain clime must have made them feel rather insignificant, while the natural environment seemed to be growing all the more insurmountable.

Such reflections become significant when placed alongside the literary works that were inspired by the Swiss mountain region, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Mont Blanc being the most immediate reference to the sojourn on Lake Geneva. Shelley’s immediate veneration of the colossal mountain quickly spirals into a complex interweaving of perceptions as the poet stands upon a bridge over the river Arve which seems to flow “through the ravine as influences from the material world flow through the mind” (Dean 1). The query then becomes who is affecting whom; is the natural scene imposing on the poet’s consciousness, or is the poet projecting his perceptions onto the natural scene which reflect them back to him? Lines from the poem would indicate that the natural setting is not simply an inactive mirror for the human mind, but itself an essential participant whose actions go mostly unnoticed. References to “The secret strength of things/ which governs thought” and the wilderness’s “mysterious tongue/ which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild” seem to point toward the underlying goings-on in nature which are always ready to teach man its wisdom, he must only dip into a universal natural consciousness to access it (ll. 76-77, 139-140).

Shelley’s recapitulation of viewing Mont Blanc in the History of a Six Weeks Tour indicates how momentous the occasion was for him:

I never knew—I never imagined what mountains were before. The immensity of these aerial summits excited, when they suddenly burst upon the sight, a sentiment of ecstatic wonder, not unallied to madness…and black with its depth below, so deep that the very roaring of the untamable Arve, which rolled through it, could not be heard above -- all was as much our own, as if we had been the creators of such impressions in the minds of others as now occupied our own. Nature was the poet, whose harmony held our spirits more breathless than that of the divinest” (Shelley 152).

Importantly, he finishes by naming nature as the poet, right after he implies that it was as if the observer himself was creating the impressions that the scene before him creates, countering his own statement. It is evident then, that when the lines of the poem that read “The everlasting universe of things/…where from secret springs/ the source of human thought its tribute brings,” that inevitably, nature is working to impress upon man certain knowledge which is manifested in the beauty and immensity of its worldly presence (ll. 1, 4-5). By the fourth stanza, the poet is realizing, through the image of gray clouds covering the mountain’s summit, that he may never be able uncover the beginning of the mountain, reaffirming its eternality, while the artificial world created by man can be easily wiped away with the mountain’s icy glaciers. He also states in History of a Six Weeks Tour that “One would think that Mont Blanc, like the god of the Stoics, was a vast animal, and that the frozen blood for ever circulated through his stony veins (Shelley 151). The image then reaffirms, that “the natural and the necessary, figured as the gross and determinate body, win out over the artificial and human,” that nature will always have something to imbue upon man, he simply must be consciously available to receive it (Morton, 211).

Lord Byron’s Manfred more complexly addresses the natural, in the form of a narrative poem showing man’s attempts to overcome that which is larger than him, but it inevitably becomes a narrative of man’s fall. Manfred’s declining mental state seems derived from the ever-escalating distance he places between the natural and himself in a pursuit of the unworldly, which he believes will expose to him the secrets of existence. The ominous feel of the natural setting, the dizzying beauty of jagged Alpine peeks, removes Manfred just far enough from a world with which most readers are familiar to become the realm of the Gothic and the supernatural. Evil in the poems is evidenced as not being derived from the natural and perhaps not even the supernatural, because it only exists when it is conjured by Manfred; he manifests the evil and it seems to come from within him, negatively affecting the surrounding natural world (Twitchell 602). As Manfred finds no solace in both the material world of man and the realm of the supernatural, he often withdraws into nature, wishing that he could end his life in the same way all other natural things are allowed. But Manfred has transcended his natural existence and now cannot die a natural death; even a mountain prevents him from leaping onto its jagged crags so he can “stain not our pure vales with thy guilty blood” (I.ii.ll. 111).

The first spirits he encounters are simply references to the natural forces, air, mountain, ocean, earth, wind, and night, which “have no forms, beyond the elements” and they emphasize that they are “immortal, and do not forget,” yet feebly, they seem to be at Manfred’s will when he calls upon them (I.i.ll. 182, 149). We discover that this is not quite true when he asks them to perform what is beyond their natural conduct; he simply cannot be obliged and becomes enraged that nature would imply that natural entities should not and cannot overstep their limitations, especially since that is all he is attempting to do for the entire poem. In a description of the poet, written by William Hazlitt around the time of the poet’s death, Lord Byron appears to “scorn all things, even himself. Nature must come to him to sit for her picture—he does not go to her” (235). This also seems to be the case with the character of Manfred and because of this, nature denies him his death wish, proving that the natural world is more powerful than Manfred, even in its seeming powerlessness. In a letter to John Murray discussing his poem, Byron had explained that in Manfred, “almost all the persons—but two or three—are spirits of the earth and air, or the water…who appear to him [Manfred] and are of no use” (Byron). The elemental spirits may simply “productive and operative executors of nature,” but it is this realization by man, his understanding of how they operate as a part of the unity of all life, that will give him access to their invaluable wisdom (Twitchell 606).

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein becomes a culmination of many of these concepts, finally materializing the provocative fireside discourses at Villa Diodati into a novel of man’s betrayal of a world that is not his to own. It is important that the story of Victor Frankenstein and his monstrous creation takes place far from the industrialized society, in “a rural world dominated by scenes of sublime natural beauty” and valleys where “high snowy mountains were immediate boundaries” (Phillips 64, Shelley 73). Taking the climate at the time of the novel’s inspiration, it would seem as if the natural world was intentionally forcing the writers indoors, prompting them to reflect upon the doom and gloom around them, and forcing the horrible visions of Mary Shelley out into its quasi-human form. In this wild locale, far from the sanity of civilization, amongst the fury of turbulent unpredictable climes, “a flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me [Victor]” exposing to the creator, and mankind alike, the horrors of which only man is capable of creating (Shelley 76).

In his scientific studies, Victor found the same kind of power and control over the natural that Manfred found in supernatural magic: “new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows” (M. Shelley 64). By harnessing the ultimate power, the unnamed “spark of being,” Victor finally violates the natural order in which man is not the creator of his own kind. As a synthesis of the parts of once naturally existing elements, a patchwork replica of man made from the dead components of men, the monster becomes the ultimate enemy of the species he was born to imitate. From his inception, the monster has no place in humanity and he must retreat into the lifeless glaciers of the Alps knowing that by moving “perpetually mountainwards and northwards, towards the cold barren places where human survival, indeed life itself, is threatened, and ultimately extinguished,” that “the caves of ice” will be the only locale “which man does not grudge” (Phillips 66, M. Shelley 146).

Interestingly, the monster is neither human nor natural, yet, his composition of entirely natural human parts is somehow hideously unacceptable, and so he grows to be a supernatural manifestation of nature’s response to Victor’s wrongdoings. The monster becomes part of the natural setting while Victor is punished by it; for the first time, the monster has found a way to directly harm his maker. Provocations from the monster to Victor such as: “Follow me; I seek the everlasting ice of the North, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost, to which I am impassive” show that the monster is using the natural world to perform his vengeance (M. Shelley 248). Ultimately, an emphasis is placed on the creation’s indifference toward humanity; he murdered the innocent apathetically and he will do the same to his master, much like nature heaves destruction upon humanity uncaringly. The environments in which Victor must pursue the monster become increasingly hostile, and they finally enter the artic circle with the chase culminating on the remotest patches of ice that break off and float aimlessly out into the freezing Arctic Sea.

In a letter in the History of a Six Weeks Tour, Percy Shelley writes, “In these regions every thing changes, and is in motion. This vast mass of ice has one general progress, which ceases neither day nor night; it breaks and bursts for ever: some undulations sink while others rise; it is never the same” (154). This image greatly reflects the ideology that went into the literary works that came out of that summer sojourn that these three young British writers took into a natural environment that was very foreign to them. The poets would go on to write many more ecologically inspired pieces about the ever changing cyclicality of the natural world and man’s ignorantly linear way of thinking; a resistance to the natural order of things which results in catastrophe. Percy Shelley once wrote, “Do we not see that the laws of nature perpetually act by disorganization and reproduction, each alternately becoming cause and effect?” The characters of Manfred and Victor Frankenstein purposefully did not, and they act as examples against which the natural retaliates against the narcissist ignorance of one of its own species. The Alpine setting which inspired these stories certainly struck fear and awe into the consciousness of the writers, and made for a surreal natural environment in which nature actually has a strong enough presence to fight back. Perhaps the most romantic of these ideas comes about in the ultimate message of these stories: human society and culture at large are negations of the natural, but the solution is not a return to nature, but an entire reconstruction of society as something which is part of a larger natural entity and an acceptance of man’s slighter place on the hierarchy of a very grand scale.

WORKS CITED

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