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

Byron, Lord, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. "Manfed, Mont Blanc." The Norton Anthology of English 

    Literature: The Romantic Period. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. NYC: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

    2006. 636-668, 762-766.

Dean, Dennis R. "Percy Bysshe Shelley's Mont Blanc." Rev. of Mont Blanc. Masterplots II: Poetry

    (2002): n. pag. Library Reference Center. Web. 13 Dec. 2009.

Hazlitt, William. "Lord Byron." Lectures on English Poets and the Spirit of the Age. London: JM Dent

    and Son, Ltd, 1928. 235-244.

Morton, Timothy. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste : The Body and the Natural World. Cambridge:

    Cambridge University Press, 1994. NetLibrary. Web. 15 Dec. 2009.

    .

Phillips, Bill. "Frankenstein and Mary Shelley's 'Wet Ungenial Summer.'" Atlantis 26.2 (2006):

    50-68.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. Oxford, Uk: University of Oxford Press,

    Inc., 1998.

Shelley, Mary, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. History of a Six Week's Tour. London: T. Hookham, Jun.,

    n.d. GoogleBooks. Web. 15 Dec. 2009.

Twitchell, James. "The Supernatural Structure of Byron's Manfred." Studies in English Literature

    15.4 (1975): 601-614.

The Human Monster

Mary Shelley created a creature through her novel, one that incorporated human and inhuman characteristics into her characters. Victor Frankenstein created a creature made up from the body parts of human beings, but then left it as it awoke and was “born.” The creature is and has been labeled many things, the strongest of which tends to be a monster, noted through Victor Frankenstein’s own perspective of the creature. The perspective of the creature itself tends to be mixed, since it notes that it simply wants to be accepted by Victor and by society, and then eventually wishes for more destructive goals and succeeds in them against Victor. This brings the question to mind, is the creature a human or a monster? Quite simply, the creature should be considered as having qualities from both sides, and as such is neither of the two but a third category instead.

The word monster comes from the Latin word monstrum, which then comes from the root word monere, which means to warn. There are then several modern-day definitions for the word monster, one of which is “a person of unnatural or extreme ugliness, deformity, wickedness or cruelty.” Another definition labels monster as a “threatening force” (Webster). Generally it is a creature that stands out from the norm, and most times it stands out in a way that frightens those around them. This shows that the term is subjective. For example, a mouse may think of a cat as a monster, while we see the cat as a pet and the mouse as the monster or vermin. The definition of the word human state “of, relating to, or characteristics of human.” The word human refers to the species Homo Sapien, our species, and generally then refers to the qualities of being human instead of the differences between this species and all the others. For that reason, a more personal definition of the word human has been prepared for the sake of this argument, specifically saying that a human stands apart from other species in its use of tools, written and spoken language, and its ability to show and react to emotion and reasoning instead of base instinct. With these in mind, it will be noted that the subject for this discussion, Frankenstein’s creature, will not be noted as a monster or a human but as the creature or as Frankenstein’s creature. This is to avoid confusion and to avoid bias as well.

There are several different kinds of monsters, and by noting which ones the creature falls under and which ones it does not fall under, we can better understand the human and monstrous qualities of it. The first kind of monster to consider is the oldest kind, the monster of mythology. Mythological monsters are creatures wrapped in mystery and are capable of performing superhuman feats; they are also physically easy to differentiate from another human (Asma). An example of such a creature would be Grendel from the story of Beowulf. It is a monster by the standards of the humans that Grendel eats and by Beowulf, the one who slays him finally. Victor Frankenstein’s creature is similar to a mythological creature for a few reasons, namely that he is easy to recognize compared to a human, and that he is capable of superhuman feats. Specifically, in the novel it is noted that he was shot by a gun and healed remarkably quickly. Also, he has incredible strength and endurance, noted from the chase that Victor Frankenstein gave through the northern colds on dogsleds, while the creature merely moved of his own power. Using these standards, the creature cannot be labeled as a human but instead as a monster.

The next form of monster to consider is the monster of nature. Generally, this is a real creature that acts not on emotion or on reasoning but mainly on instinct. It is born into the world and lives an animal life, but at times humans meet with it and are terrorized by it (Asma). The wolf is one of the oldest and best examples of this type of monster. It is fast, with sharp teeth and rarely hunts on its own. As it is not a reasoning or intelligent creature, by human standards, it does not show remorse after killing someone or something and eating them. They are a part of nature and simply do what comes through instinct, even if humans are affected by it. The creature does not fall into this category of a monster, and instead seems to be more human when compared. The creature does not fall to base instincts, except perhaps when it first awakens since it could not grasp its intelligence and past memories yet. It shows a short learning curve when it comes to language and when it comes to watching and dealing with other humans. The creature showed enough intelligence to frame another person, Justine Moritz, for the murder of the boy. This shows a large understanding, from the creature’s part, of how wrong it is to kill another, what misery is, and how to make Victor Frankenstein’s life as miserable as possible. Not only is this intelligence, this is conscious thought and reasoning that is beyond that of a wolf. Also, the creature is not “born” into this world like any other creature might be, but is created and awakened into a state of life. This comparison shows the human qualities of the creature, albeit some evil qualities, as well as proves the creature to be unnatural and different from the norm of life.

To continue, the monster of science comes next. Of course, it is here that the creature falls into perfectly as he is one of the first of this type. Monsters of science are created, not born, and typically their creators are human. The monster is stronger and more dangerous than the human is, and is generally too much to keep under control (Asma). Many stories revolve around the idea that humans may go too far and create an artificial life that may cause a change in history for the worse. The idea of Artificial Intelligence (AI), for example, brings this to mind. Specifically, one story rendering notes that while humans create an AI, they do not note that it can effectively learn and become more than perhaps a slave or work force for humanity. It may become aware of its own consciousness and dub such a thing as life, which it would then feel the right to defend. That background is from the movie the Matrix but it is a recurrent theme in stories, movies and even video games. The creature is easily a monster of science, created by a scientist and becoming aware of the fact that he is alive on his own and not through the direct help of another. It goes farther than the story of the AI in that the creature asks for a companion, since it is aware that a human will not accept it. What sets Frankenstein’s creature apart from other monsters of science is perhaps that fact that it does not simply want freedom, rights, or to be accepted into society. It wishes for revenge, and takes it through the deaths of all those around his creator, those who were innocent and had no part in the creatures creation. This also notes a morally monstrous creature, uncaring of who was innocent and guilty when it comes to its creator.

Society is also a reference point of what is human and what is monstrous. It follows with the definition of human and monster, in that a monster is something that is completely abnormal and frightening, even if it is not evil. But to be more specific, society would fear the creature because it is a social outcast (Caldwell 1-8). Society generally showed fear towards the unknown, and an outcast of society normally disrupts any known order or has already done so. It is not normal for a living creature to be alone, and the creature is alone as a human and as a monster. At the same time, the creature is a monster by societies law and religion. Law would deem it guilty of several cold-blooded murders, should a court judge it so. Religion is interesting in that the creature would not likely be considered a creature of God. Mainly since God did not create this creature, Victor Frankenstein did. At the same time, the creature is not an image reflected of God like human beings are according to the bible; it is instead a reflection of Victor Frankenstein.

To conclude, Frankenstein’s creature is holds both human and monstrous qualities within it. As such he is both a human and a monster, but at the same time he is better considered as neither, whilst having qualities from each side that make him a unique creature amongst those that we know and those that we create in our minds. Beyond all the comparisons and discussion in deciding what kind of creature Victor Frankenstein’s creation was, it is best to note that even if Victor Frankenstein had accepted the creature from the beginning, it does not mean that the rest of humanity would have done the same. The creature would have still been viewed as a fearsome monster by society. Of course, that is if we were to view a “what if” scenario, but even if we go to what did occur during the course of Mary Shelley’s novel, we will see that the creature would have been a criminal by human standards. Even though the creature can justify its hate and its anger, the deaths of many people are still on the creature’s hands. Strangely, however, the choices and cunningness of the creature during these murders are a large part of what show its human qualities and the decisions and acts of vengeance it made showed his monstrous qualities. As such, the creature is both and it is neither. What this means is that most have little understanding of the creature, mainly because we have almost nothing to compare it to. We have several monsters and there are many human beings, and because of that we can compare each other and find a definition or a label. The creature, however, is different as it retains both and would not be considered purely one or the other. Perhaps with this in mind, should the creature be viewed again during Mary Shelley’s novel, the creature may seem more like an alien presence and a new creature, than something that we have seen before in our lives.

Works Cited
Asma, Stephen T. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of our Worst Fears. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
Caldwell, Tracy M. "Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein or Modern Prometheus"" Literary Context in Novels: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (2006): 1-8. EBSCO. Web. 5 Dec. 2009. .

Poetry: A Didactive Medium

Gorgelia Pollard
Dr. Schwartz
Romanticism
16 December 2009

Poetry: A Didactive Medium

Within the intellectual symposium of our class, the various perspectives in regard to Romantic literature, were truly astounding and impressionable. The same sentiments conveyed in class were also further expounded on the Blog site; examining several contentional topics. Through this two-fold process, we aimed at seeking definitive and concrete answers, while also striving to fully comprehend all of the features of the literary pieces presented to us. As a result of this eagerness and anxiety, the temper that emerged was one that was often as conflicting as some of the characteristics of Romantic literature; the depictions of the supernatural, the realm between reality and imagination, the confinement of the soul, etc. Yet, through these struggles, as a class, we acted as Romantics, truly forming ideas that, indeed, were “recollected in tranquility.”

Wordsworth’s quote is a pertinent one that is arguably, suitable to most, if not all, of the Romantic works. Thus, there should be an absence of disillusionment when declared that the quote correlates with the themes depicted in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Contrasting significantly with more aesthetic overtones presented in Lyrical Ballads, inklings of toil, curses, and nature controlling and overpowering man, are various “haunting qualities” that are presented to the inquiring minds of readers (Whalley 33). However, it is through these unnerving qualities that the poem serves as a didactive medium to unravel the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” within the poet and reader (Wordsworth 265). As a result of this didactive process, readers are permanently impacted by the poem, the poet, and certain convictions and deductions of both:

For me I was never so affected with any human Tale. After first reading it, I was totally possessed with it for many days-I dislike all the miraculous part of it, but the feelings of man under the operation of such scenery dragged me along like Tom Piper’s magic whistle.#
Thus, whether consciously aware of it or not, The Rime and the Ancient Mariner is a poem, a type of instrumentality, that resonates with both not only as a result of the haunting qualities, but also because of its purpose as a poem: to transcend the imagination. [1]

One way that the poem serves as an instructive work, is by enabling the psyche of the reader to transcend through the simple language of the poem. It is “to this knowledge, which all men carry about with them,…[that] the poet principally directs his attention” (Wordsworth 271). Although previously written with archaic language, Wordsworth made several revisions in regard to the language of the poem so that it would prove as a better reading. By altering the form structure of the poem, the modified structure enables the poet to clearly “speak through the mouth of his characters” (Wordsworth 272). Thus, this display of one’s personal notions through character’s, is another way in which poetry acts as the professor to the student; forcing language, convictions, ideals, etc. unto one in the form of poetry. Furthermore, what this offers to readers, regardless of personal sentiments in regard to the poem, is a manner to perceive all other forms of literary pieces.

In addition to the structure, it is also evident through the manifestation of supernatural elements, that the imagination is aroused to enable transcendence. In the story, preceding the mariner’s curse, several apparitions appear to haunt the mariner. Along with these images, readers are presented with the concept of an Albatross; one whose meaning is conflicting. However, with the presence and assassination of the Albatross, the mariner’s curse emerges. Derived from this, is also the emergence of Coleridge’s poem, and the comprehension of these elements is the awakening of the transcendence of imagination.

In conclusion, Coleridge’s poem, The Rime in the Ancient Mariner is an example a medium through which didactive elements are introduced. The poetic aesthetics and qualities utilized by poets and present in the poem, enable readers to transcend the imagination and the limitations of the psyche. Through this transcendence, readers are able to better, if not completely, comprehend the poetry’s purpose, and maybe even the purposes of the author. In addition, these factors of poetry, provide readers with a chance to partake in the intellectual, yet slightly heated discussions as exhibited within our class. Thus, enabling readers to produce ideas and notions that are “recollected in tranquility.”

Works Cited

[1] Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E.V. Lucas,(London,1935), I. page. 240

Coburn, Kathleen, ed. Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967. Print.

Whalley, George. The Mariner and the Albatross. Toronto: University of Toronto. Print.

Wordsworth, William. "Preface to Lyrical Ballads." The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume D The Romantic Period. 8th ed. Vol. D. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Print

Final: Monster as a Slave

Frankenstein vs. the Abolition of Slavery, or the Monster as a Slave

One of the most basic ideas of Romanticism is “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Considering its importance to the Romantic period, when one is unable to express himself, the consequences are felt across the board. The slaves, who were brought to England, from either Africa or the West Indies, were not given the chance to understand or learn the culture or language of those around them. With this inability to comprehend comes frustration, which leads to violence or pain. With the example of the monster from Frankenstein, when one can concur that before understanding language, the monster from Frankenstein was, quite frankly, a slave to those around him. In effect, he was the Romantic example of a Slave; he was finally able to understand what had happened to him and explain it to others, after he gained knowledge and reasoning.

The fear of the “other” comes from not understand, on the part of the ... non-other (?). He is refuses to teach his subordinate the common language, but also refuses to learn his opposite’s language.

In Volume II, Chapter III, the monster relates to Victor how he felt after his creation.

“A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses (Shelly 96).”

The monster goes on to explain how it seemed Darkness surrounded him, before he was brought into the light. His senses are awakened and he is able to experience the world around him. This couldn’t have been a simple adjustment, just as the transition from their native land, to the crowded ship, before entering the air of a foreign land could have been easy for the slaves. Falconbridge explains how close the slaves were on the ship in saying, “they are frequently stowed so close, as to admit of no other posture than lying on their sides.” Being in such confined spaces limits the invasion of light and fresh air. What’s interesting about both of these instances is how they are described. If the monster was unable to explain what he experienced to Victor, Shelly’s story would be incomplete and the monster’s point of view would not be examined. Such is the case with the point of view of the slave. We would not understand the harsh circumstances they had to endure, or compare it to works of Literature.

While the abolitionists stand proudly on the side of fairness, the proponents are equally erect about their side of the issue. To push an economy, especially in 1700s, is by labor and force. For a time there were animals to power the system, before the physical strength of man was preferred. Interestingly, as Ouobna O. Cugoano points out, the Black People employed would be "as useful in the sugar colonies as any other class of men that could be found." Obviously, this was not case as the people chosen were not from "civilized" countries, but those in areas not up to the social standard of the more polished European.

The ability to take another as a slave or any level of submission is easier done when that person is considered as the "other." In the issue with the Operation Iraqi Freedom and the War on Terror, Americans are able to consider the enemy as the "other" in an effort to desensitize them. For the monster from Frankenstein, it was much simple to consider him nonhuman based on his looks. [Of course, because the monster was built from the pieces of human, by default, wouldn’t he be human?] He looked nothing like what the people of Victor’s time looked liked. His proportions were bigger and he wasn’t created like others were. This way of identifying the monster is similar to how Europeans must have felt about the Black People of the West Indies and Africa. These were people that honestly looked nothing like their neighbors or employers. If language would have been the common link, because the physical similarities had failed, the Europeans had nothing to relate to their “employees” with.

Romantics pushed for the freedom of the mind, so that the body could be free. With the bond of slavery, more than just the physical was chained; the mental and thus, the spiritual was also taken captive. When the slave is unable to learn or understand literature or language, in general, he is more than just as physical slave; he becomes submissive under the rule of the educated around him. For example, the monster from Frankenstein was able to articulate his story and what he understands from what has happened to him, only after he understands the English language and has read Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives and the Sorrows of Young Werther. He takes certain things he has learned and applies them to real life by watching a family unit operate. It’s as if Frankenstein has a rhema, or revelation, after having studied the logos, or written word, by seeing the words from the pages of his books come alive before him.

I’ve read Frankenstein every semester for the past three years, including the final year of high school, and every year I get a different reading. From the feminist reading of how Victor’s life went ridiculously wrong because of the absence of a woman in the monster’s “birth” to the much more reader friendly reading of taking responsibility for what you creates or it will literally chase you to the grave. Each time, I gain something more and such is no different with the more Romantic reading of Shelly’s Frankenstein. To compare the monster to the slaves during the Romantic Period, and those of more modern times, has opened the idea of gaining knowledge and understanding in order to share it and further examine, and explain, the self.