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Clutch imaginary pearls, rest the

back of your hand on your
forehead, look wan and stricken,
begin to wilt, and most people will
recognize the symptoms of your
sarcasm, aimed at some
pejoratively feminized qualities
we’ve seen characters embody in
movies. The “literary swoon” as
Iaian Bamforth writes at the
British Journal of General Practice,
dates back much further than
film, to the early years of the
modern novel itself, and it was
once a male domain.

“Somewhere around the time of

the French Revolution (or perhaps
a little before it) feelings were let
loose on the world.” Rationalism
went out vogue and passion was
in—lots of it, though not all at
once. It took some decades before
the discovery of emotion reached
the climax of Romanticism and Free
Movies
denouement of Victorian
1150 Free
sentimentality: Movies
Online
Back in 1761, readers had
Free Film
swooned when they Noir
encountered the ‘true voice Silent Films
of feeling’ in Jean-Jacques Documentaries
Rousseau’s novel La Martial
Nouvelle Héloïse; by the end Arts/Kung
Fu
of the decade, all of Europe
Animations
was being sentimental in the
Free
manner made fashionable a Hitchcock
few years later by Laurence Films
Sterne in his A Sentimental Free Charlie
Journey. Then there was Chaplin

Goethe’s novella, The Free John

 Sorrows of Young Wayne
Movies
Werther (1774), which made
Free
its author a celebrity.
Tarkovsky
Films
It’s impossible to overstate how
Free Dziga
popular Goethe’s book became Vertov
among the aristocratic young men Free Oscar
of Europe. Napoleon “reputedly Winners
carried a copy of the novel with
him on his military campaign.” Its
swooning hero, whom we might
be tempted to diagnose with any
number of personality and mood
disorders, develops a disturbing
and debilitating obsession with an
engaged woman and finally
commits suicide. The novel
supposedly inspired many
copycats and “the media’s first
moral panic.”

Download
dreamstime.com

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Lessons
Arabic
Chinese
English
French
If we can feel such exaltation,
German
disquiet, and fear when in the grip Italian
of romantic passion, or when Russian
faced with nature’s implacable
behemoths, as in Kant's Sublime, Spanish
so too may we be overcome by All
Languages
art. Napoleonic novelist Stendhal
suggested as much in a dramatic
account of such an experience. Free
eBooks
Stendhal, the pen name of Marie-
700 Free
Henri Beyle, was no inexperienced eBooks
dreamer. He had traveled and Free
fought extensively with the Grand Philosophy
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Army (including that fateful march
The Harvard
through Russia, and back) and had
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held several government offices
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 Photo of the Basilica of Santa Croce by
Diana Ringo, via Wikimedia Commons

But he was also of the generation

of young men who read Werther
while touring Europe,
contemplating the varieties of
emotion. He had held a similarly
unrequited obsession for an
unavailable woman, and once
wrote that “in Italy… people are
still driven to despair by love.”
During a visit to the Basilica of
Santa Croce in 1817, he “found a
monk to let him into the chapel,”
writes Bamforth, “where he could Free
sit on a genuflecting stool, tilt his
Audio
Books
head back and take in the 700 Free
prospect of Volterrano’s fresco of Audio
the Sibyls without interruption." Books
As Stendhal described the scene: Free Audio
Books:
I was already in a kind of Fiction

ecstasy by the idea of being Free Audio

Books:
in Florence, and the Poetry
proximity of the great men Free Audio
whose tombs I had just seen. Books:
Absorbed in contemplating Non-
Fiction
sublime beauty, I saw it
close-up—I touched it, so to
Free
speak. I had reached that Textbooks
point of emotion where the 200 Free
heavenly sensations of the Textbooks
Free Physics
 fine arts meet passionate Textbooks

feeling. As I emerged from Free

Computer
Santa Croce, I had
Science
palpitations (what they call Textbooks
an attack of the nerves in Free Math
Berlin); the life went out of Textbooks

me, and I walked in fear of

falling. K-12
Resources
With the recording of this Free Books

experience, Stendhal “brought the Free Video

Lessons
literary swoon into tourism,”
Web
Bamforth remarks. Such passages
Resources
became far more commonplace in by Subject
travelogues, not least those Free
involving the city of Florence. So Language
many cases similar to Stendhal's Lessons
Quality
have been reported in the city
YouTube
that the condition acquired the Channels
name Stendhal syndrome in the Teacher
late seventies from Dr. Graziella Resources
Magherini, chief of psychiatry at Test Prep
the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital. It All Free Kids
presents as an acute state of Resources
exhilarated anxiety that causes
people to feel faint, or to collapse, Free Art
& Images
in the presence of art.
All Art
Images &
Magherini and her assistants
Books
compiled studies of 107 different
The Met
cases in 1989. Since then, Santa
The Getty
Maria Nuova has continued to
The
treat tourists for the syndrome Rijksmuseum
with some regularity. “Dr. Smithsonian
Magherini insists,” writes The New The
York Times, that “certain men and Guggenheim

women are susceptible to The Tate

swooning in the presence of great The National

Gallery
art, especially when far from
The Whitney
home.” Stendhal didn’t invent the
LA County
phenomenon, of course. And it
Museum
need not be solely caused by
Stanford
sufferers’ love of the 15th century. University
British
The stresses of travel can Library
sometimes be enough to make Google Art
anyone faint, though further Project
research may rule out other French
factors. The effect, however, does Revolution

not seem to occur with nearly as Getty

Images
much frequency in other major
Guggenheim
cities with other major cultural
Art Books
treasures. “It is surely the sheer
Met Art
concentration of great art in Books
Florence that causes such issues,” Getty Art
claims Jonathan Jones at The Books
Guardian. Trying to take it all in New York
Public
while navigating unfamiliar streets
Library
and crowds.... "More cynically, Maps
some might say the long queues Museum of
do add a layer of stress on the New
heart.” Zealand
Street Art
There’s also no discounting the Smarthistory
effect of expectation. “It is among Rembrandt
religious travelers that Stendhal’s Van Gogh
syndrome seems to have found its Coloring
most florid expression,” notes Books
Bamforth. Stendhal admitted that
his “ecstasy” began with an Free
awareness of his “proximity of the Music
great men whose tombs I had just All Bach
seen.” Without his prior education, Organ
the effect might have disappeared Works

entirely. The story of the All of Bach

Renaissance, in his time and ours, 80,000

Classical
has impressed upon us such a
Music
reverence for its artists, Scores
statesmen, and engineers, that Free
sensitive visitors may feel they Classical
can hardly stand in the actual Music

presence of Florence's abundant Live

Classical
treasures. Music
9,000
Perhaps Stendhal syndrome
Grateful
should be regarded as akin to a Dead
spiritual experience. A study of Concerts
religious travelers to Jerusalem Alan Lomax
found that “otherwise normal Blues &
Folk
patients tended to have ‘an
Archive
idealistic subconscious image of
Jerusalem’” before they Writing
succumbed to Stendhal syndrome. Tips
Carl Jung described his own such Hemingway
feelings about Pompeii and Rome, Fitzgerald
which he could never bring Stephen
himself to visit because he lived in King

such awe of its historical aura. Ray

Bradbury
Those primed to have symptoms
William
tend also to have a sentimental
Zinsser
nature, a word that once meant
Kurt
great depth of feeling rather than Vonnegut
a callow or mawkish nature. Toni
Morrison
We might all expect great art to Edgar Allan
overwhelm us, but Stendhal Poe
syndrome is rare and rarified. The Margaret
Atwood
experience of many more
David Ogilvy
travelers accords with Mark
Steinbeck
Twain’s 1869 The Innocents
Billy Wilder
Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s
Progress, a fictionalized memoir
Archive
“lampooning the grandiose travel
accounts of his contemporaries,” All posts by
date
notes Bamforth. It became “one of
the best-selling travel books ever”
Categories
and gave its author’s name to
Amazon
what one researcher calls Mark
Kindle
Twain Malaise, “a cynical mood
Animation
which overcomes travelers and
Apple
leaves them totally unimpressed
Architecture
with anything UNESCO has on its
Archives
universal heritage list.”
Art
Sentimentalists might wish these
Astronomy
weary tourists would stay home
Audio Books
and let them swoon in peace.
Beat &
Tweets
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician e-books
based in Durham, NC. Follow him Economics
at @jdmagness Education
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