The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)

Q Compare the personalities of Faust and

Mephistopheles.

Q Why might Faust be considered the

quintessential romantic hero?

Romantic Love and

Romantic Stereotypes

READING 28.8

Q What stereotype is established by the simile

in this poem?

Q Why does the speaker experience “sweet

sadness”?

46 CHAPTER 28 The Romantic Hero

46

misgiving;

Just trust yourself and you’ll learn the art of living.

Faust:Well, then, how do we leave home?

Where are your grooms? Your coach and horses?

Mephistopheles:We merely spread this mantle wide,

It will bear us off on airy courses.

But do not on this noble voyage

Cumber yourself with heavy baggage.

A little inflammable gas which I’ll prepare

Will lift us quickly into the air. 640

If we travel light we shall cleave the sky like a knife.

Congratulations on your new course of life!

Romantic love, the sentimental and all-consuming passion

for spiritual as well as sexual union with the opposite sex,

was a favorite theme of nineteenth-century writers,

painters, and composers. Many Romantics perceived

friendship, religious love, and sexual love—both hetero-

sexual and homosexual—as closely related expressions of

an ecstatic harmony of souls. Passionate love, and especial-

ly unrequited or unfulfilled love, was the subject of numer-

ous literary works. To name but three: Goethe’s Sorrows of

Young Werther(1774) told the story of a lovesick hero

whose passion for a married woman leads him to commit

suicide—the book was so popular that it made suicide

something of a nineteenth-century vogue; Hector Berlioz’s

Symphonie fantastique(1830–1831) described the compos-

er’s obsessive infatuation with a flamboyant actress (see

chapter 29); and Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde

(1859) dramatized the tragic fate of two legendary

medieval lovers.

While Romantics generated an image of masculinity

that emphasized self-invention, courage, and the quest for

knowledge and power, they either glorified the female as

chaste, passive, and submissive, or characterized her as

dangerous and threatening. Romantic writers inherited the

dual view of womankind that had prevailed since the

Middle Ages: like Eve, woman was the femme fatale, the

seducer and destroyer of mankind; like Mary, however,

woman was the source of salvation and the symbol of all

that was pure and true. The Eve stereotype is readily appar-

ent in such works as Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen, on

which the opera by Georges Bizet (1835–1875) was based.

Set in Seville, Spain, Bizet’s Carmen (1875) is a story of

seduction, rejection, and fatal revenge. Carmen, a shame-

less flirt who works in a cigarette factory, lures the enam-

ored Don José into deserting the army in order to follow

her. Soon tiring of the soldier, she abandons him in favor

of a celebrity toreador, only to meet her end at the hand of

her former lover. Bizet’s heroine became the late nine-

teenth-century symbol of faithless and dangerous

Womankind.

At the other extreme, the Mary stereotype is present in

countless nineteenth-century stories, including Faustitself,

where Gretchen is cast as the Eternal Female, the source of

procreation and personal salvation. The following lines by

the German poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), which

were set to music by his contemporary Robert Schumann

(1810–1856), typify the female as angelic, ethereal, and

chaste—an object that thrilled and inspired the imagina-

tions of many European Romantics.

Heine’s “You are Just

Like a Flower” (1827)

You are just like a flower

So fair and chaste and dear;

Looking at you, sweet sadness

Invades my heart with fear.

I feel I should be folding

My hands upon your hair,

Praying that God may keep you

So dear and chaste and fair.

The Female Voice

The nineteenth century was the first great age of female

writers. Examples include the English novelists George

Eliot, a pseudonym for Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880);

Emily Brontë (1818–1848), author of the hypnotic novel

Wuthering Heights; her sister Charlotte Brontë, author of

Jane Eyre(hailed as a masterpiece only after her death);

and Mary Godwin Shelley, whose novel Frankensteinis dis-

cussed earlier in this chapter. In France, Germaine Necker,

known as Madame de Stael (1760–1817), was hailed by

her contemporaries as the founder of the Romantic move-

ment; a brilliant woman, if not a brilliant novelist, her

writings were widely read and admired in her own time.

And in America, the Bostonian Louisa May Alcott

(1832–1888) produced the classic novel Little Women

(1868), a semiautobiographical work inspired by a child-

hood spent with her three sisters. Some of these writers

struck a startling note of personal freedom in their lives. In

their novels, however, they tended to perpetuate the

Romantic stereotype of the chaste and clinging female.

Even the most free-thinking of nineteenth-century women

novelists might portray her heroine as a creature who sub-

mitted to the will and values of the superior male. In gen-

eral, the dominant male-generated stereotype of the

Romantic hero influenced female literary characterization

well into the mid nineteenth century.

The novels of Jane Austen (1775–1817) represent some-

thing of an exception. In Sense and Sensibility(1811), which