Dr.

Mark Raftery-Skehan
Asst. Prof, Research Co-
FRENCH
Ordinator,
Dept. of Philosophy ROMANTICIST
Ateneo de Manila
University LITERATURE
 VESITGES/ INHERITANCES -WHEN WE ARE
ROMANTICISTS WITHOUT KNOWING IT?

• Artist as tortured soul: melancholic

misunderstood, bohemian pariah
• (Middle) “East’ as mysterious, exotic, violent
(Orientalism)
• Lyric poetry as a communing with nature
(Wordsworth) – the ‘mirror of nature’
• Imagery: evocative, emotive - sunsets and
moonlit scenes, the shadowy, sombre forests
• The Novel that reaches into the soul of one
character [self-interrogation, autobiography]
• Art as the ex-pression of inner emotion or state;
artist as source of originality, as genius
• Kitsch – sentimental, ‘romance’ novels, pop
music - degraded imitation/worst excesses of
romanticism
APPARENT GIVENS, BUT…
HISTORICALLY CONDITIONED
• These determinations, inflections of art not natural or
timeless,
• …but historically conditioned by romanticism
• …while also being inner potentialities of art and
literature emphasised at time  romanticism
unearths a certain truth of art
• That we take them to be ‘natural’/given/eternal
verities testament to effect romanticism has had.
• But obliges us to interrogate the soil from which they
grew…
 OVERVIEW… AND CAVEATS
• Period: 1800-1850 - later than English and German Romanticisms
• Bookended by Enlightenment/French Revolution/Neoclassicism….and
Realism, Modernism, Formalism (l’art pour l’art)
• Impossible to treat all literary forms (Novel Lyric Poetry, Dramatic Poetry,
Essays, Travel lit. etc.)
• …across five or six decades…
• …across dozens of writers/poets,
• …amidst the most turbulent political period in French history…
• and amidst a broader movement across other art forms!!!
• Can only be a general introduction – with some representative examples
 MORE CAVEATS – ‘-ISMS’

Movement as trends,
Inherent danger in Movements not a ciurrents across
Influenced works that
labelling: as though all formula, even if its form/content relation –
were ‘successful’ and
work in a period to degeneration due to like releasing a dye into
‘unsuccessful’
conform to given ideal… becoming formulaic a stream of existing
currents

Truer: deviation, Disappointment -

Indulge in some crude
rejection of elements, authors/works not
oppositions:
problematization of mentioned… Selection a
Romanticism VS
relation to those rounded array across
Enlightenment,
‘opposed’ periods or literary forms, and spark
Neoclassicism
movements you read…

• Inheritances/Vestiges
• The word ‘Romanticism’
• Historical And Cultural Times
o – ‘Mal du siècle’ - Génie du Christianisme
o Romanticism and Neoclassicism – Painting
And Politics
• Rousseau – Revêries du promeneur
solitaire – lyrical self-interrogation in
prose
• Chateaubriand – René – The tragic,
melancholic, secretive, sensitive soul
OVERALL STRUCTURE
• Hugo – Hernani, Preface to
Cromwell – the Romanticist
‘Manifesto’- the Grotesque - end of
Beauty in Art?
• Lamartine, Le Lac: melancholic
lyricism, nature expressing a state-
of-mind
• Decline and Fall: Simmering tensions
with Modernism
o Baudelaire – Le Couvercle (modernism),
o Flaubert – Madame Bovary and
rejection/parody of romanticism
 THE WORD ‘ROMANTICISM’

1650 ‘romantic’ – 1797-

medieval or Gothic Rousseau, late 1798, Novalis (Iena Increasingly
fabulous, 1700s – romantique romanticist) adopted to
imaginative tales of – to refer to a wild coined romantisiere designate artistic
Romanesque –
chivalry written in (sauvage) and n – the poeticising and literary trends
refers to post-
Roman architecture
verse, in Romance picturesque of the world : ‘The contrasting with
languages - landscape; had world must be (neo-)classicism –
‘romance’ (lovers, had sense of ‘like a romanticised. […]’: the dominant C17
courtship) only picture’ to idealise, to bask artistic style
peripheral in nostalgia
 REVOLUTION AND LA TERREUR:
HUMANITY AND INHUMANITY
• 1789 French Revolution
• 1792-94 La Terreur – First
Republic
• Declaration of Rights of Man –
inspired by Lumières (Voltaire,
Diderot, Robespierre)
• Humanism and spirit of
criticism of Enlightenment had
inspired overthrow of
monarchical absolutism…
• But the Terror unleashed a
irrationality of man, events s
spiraling beyond control of
new institutions
TURMOIL OF C19
FRANCE
• 1799-1815 Napoléon – Empire,
expansion (Europe, Middle East,
N.Africa)
• 1815-30 Restoration of Absolute
Monarchy-overturning a millennium
of monarchy-too much, too quickly
• 1830-1848 Constitutional Monarchy
after 1830 Revolution
• 1848 Revolution - 2nd Republic
• 1852 ..before Napoleon’s nephew
becomes emperor
 Chateaubriand (1768-1848) lived through 5 kings, two
revolutions, two empires

…amidst effects of age of Industrial Revolution, and during

age of Colonisation
TUMULTUOUS Radical uncertainty, fear, violence (revolutions and wars) –
HISTORICO- polarised positions; fluctuations of hope and
disenchantment, despair…
POLITICAL AGE How art and literature to react? To return to past certainties
– HOW ART TO (neoclassicism)? To forge a new art/lit.? To offer a point of
continuity? to reflect the shift?
RESPOND? To fully engage with political events? To withdraw to art and
literature as a sanctuary and refuge?

A sense of restlessness in new ‘Romantic’ generation in

Chateaubriand..
 Celebration of Christian art (Gothic arch., medieval poetry)
over art of antiquity/pagan art

Christianity accounted for the progress in literature and art – not

emulation of classical ideal as in Renaissance ‘logic’

CHATEAUBRIAND – Appealed to belief not by rebutting the rationalist anti-

GÉNIE DU superstition Enlightenment critique, but on basis of (romanticist)
inner emotional appeal: ‘I cried and I believed’!
CHRISTIANISME
Prefigured romantic tastes/penchants – Gothic cathedral (Hugo
and Notre Dame); ruins and follies, the old chivalric tales…

Nostalgic appeal to Gothic age was made over the 18th

Century’s emulation of classicism (neoclassicism)
 • Passage I: Génie du christianisme II, III, chapitre 9.
• (Rapport with De Musset’s novel: « Confession d’un
enfant du siècle » - the tormented writer, afflicted by
the age…)
• Captures Zeitgeist of traumatised generation
stranded in-between:
CHATEAUBRIAND o past of absolutism (monarchy, Empire)…
– MAL DU SIÈCLE o yet tantalisingly close to unrealised, uncertain,
promised future of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’
(WORLD- • Undecidability: unknown whether walking on a seed
WEARINESS or debris – what pillars on which future be built?
BORN OF TIMES) • Straightforward return to neoclassicism of the ancien
régime no longer feasible
• Invention of the new potentially incendiary, fuelling
endless revolution
• Allegorical elements to be picked up in his René –
world-weary traveller passed from ancient world to
French colony in Louisiana…
 • Response less a radical, engaged politicisation of art than

o art as outlet for melancholic state, soul-searching

o a retreat into self and subjective freedom of expression
(artist’s liberté: burgeoning sense of the ‘individual’ not
the king’s subject)
o rediscover nature otherwise, escape to the exotic
(historically, geographically – couleur locale)
ROMANTICISM o emotive evocation, provocation (not simply by
presentation of the beautiful) (contra ‘disinterested
AS RESPONSE contemplation’)
o Baudelaire: ‘spirituality, the aspiration toward the infinite,
– KEY TRAITS the dream, a sense of colour’ (against values of
rationality, order, simplicity, the natural)

• Amidst spirit of contestation of old certainties (rejection of

Académie des Beaux-art as Royal institution)
• In spirit of Enlightenment critique; the right to differ, but not in
the name of reason… and to differ from a rationality
oppressive of inner emotional life of artist and from past art.
 GÉRICAULT, RAFT
OF THE MEDUSA,
1818-19
• Contemporary Scene-
scandalous news story of
shipwreck survivors
• Grand style of History
Painting
• Classical bodies,
researched, composition
• Romantic in expressive
paint-work, in spilling over
into space of viewer
• Chiaroscuro (not uniformly
lit)
• In theme (death, tragic)
• Dynamic sense of
movement, writhing bodies
• Painting’s ‘immediacy’ as
illustrative of romanticist traits
 AT A GLANCE
• Jacques-Louis David vs Eugène
Délacroix
• All massive canvases in most prestigious
genre: History Painting
• A classical Scene (Rome) – repose,
loyalty to state, clarity.
• Allegory of Corruption of Absolute Power
– Sardanapalus destroys all possessions
while awaiting defeat
• Contemporary scene (1830 Revolution)
– symbolic Marianne leads the people in
overthrowing King
 NEOCLASSICAL VS. ROMANTIC PAINTING –
AS FUNCTION OF RESPONSE TO TIMES

Neoclassical painting: Romantic painting:

• old royalist values
(monarchical power)
• classical subject-matter
• Stylistically: line,
• Not simple oppositions! geometrical
construction,
• precise drawing, stillness
and repose,
• glazed surface
concealing brushstrokes
• Republican
(revolutionary,
democratic) values
VS • contemporary subject-
matter
• Stylistically: Visible
brushstroke,
• (Evocative) color over
line, brushwork,
• dynamic movement,
curved lines
 DAVID – OATH
OF HORATII, 1784
• Jacques-Louis David (1748-
1825)
• Roman (classical) subject-
matter: extolling virtue of
honour and loyalty (State-
sanctioned value)
• Emotions of
women/children almost
off-stage – mere sub-plot;
masculine values
• Apollonian virtues: clarity,
symmetry, order
• Stage-like order, (mostly)
distinct figures – clarity of
contour, calm grandeur
• Viewer detached from
scene – behold and
admire!
 DÉLACROIX, LA LIBERTÉ GUIDANT
LE PEUPLE, 1830
• Chaotic, frenzied (albeit classical triangle
in composition)
• Symbolic Marianne – classical (‘nude’ in ref.
to origins of democracy) yet more realistic
• Colour over line – indistinct mass
• Revolution – shift to people-power over
State power (varied classes)
• Violence spilling over into our space:
involve emotions of viewer
• Baroque to Renaissance classicism, so
Romanticism to Neoclassical - Rubens –
colorist, chiaroscuro – hero to many
Romanticists
 DÉLACROIX – THE
DEATH OF
SARDANAPULUS, 1827
• Indifferent, perched
Sultan needlessly
sacrifices subjects –
allegorical critique of
corrupt absolutism
• Diagonal of red bed –
awash with ‘blood’
(colorist) – violence
spilling over into viewers’
space
• Exotic, Orientalist scene
(sex and violence)
• Classical bodies, yet
chiaroscuro
• Lit.: exotic settings, scene
of passion, tragic fates
THE APOLLONIAN
AND THE
DIONYSIAN
Nietzschean description of the
complementary forces in art:
Apollo: order, calm, serenity, repose,
symmetry, harmony
- Alexandrine, classical sculpture,
ordered nature
Dionysian: fervor, intensity, movement,
expressive emotion, chaos, exotic
- Lyric poetry, sentiment, wild nature

Romanticism as counteracting the

Apollonian, inflecting towards
Dionysian
 JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (1712-
1778)
• Precursor of romanticism - Les Revêries du Promeneur Solitaire (1776-
1778)
• Ostensibly an episodic memoir (chapters as ‘promenades’), but with
lyrical self-reflection –
• Creation of a new genre (autobiographical)
• Nostalgia for man embedded in nature, corrupted by society –
valorized solitude amidst original state of nature
• Grandfather of anthropology
 JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (1712-
1778)
• Contra scientific de-personalization, contra philosophising as valuing
impersonal objectivity of cold reason: interrogation of the self by the
self - inner self as the truth.
• The title defies Enlightenment philosophy: e.g. Kant: Critique of Pure
Reason 1781: to set philosophy on basis of (Newtonian) science),
assessing the possibilities of universal rationality (impersonal
imagination figures only as structuring experience)
• Vs R’s celebration of reverie, of inner space of subjective imagination
as key to truth of individual
 PASSAGE II: THEMES FROM
REVÉRIES CITATIONS
• Passage i: Alienation from society, but it is intimacy of interiority or self-
relation that defines us
• A melancholic disposition, tragic personal tale – all presaged romantic
sensibilities…
• “Who am I myself? It remains for me to find out.’
• Not a given, but requiring journey – literary writing - on the part of the self…
(travel writing genre in romanticism).
 PASSAGE II: THEMES FROM
REVÉRIES CITATIONS
• Second Passage: Solitude being one’s lot, it is transcendent flights of
imagination that invent a new world to dwell in
• Artist/writer a social misfit – ‘not made for this world’
• Other passages:
• Enlightenment reasoning as mechanistic, as overlooking the soul,
individuality. Nature less a universe of laws discernible through scientific
experiment than a source of inspiration, sanctuary, solace.
• Solitude and the desire to be reclusive amidst nature rather than society as a
home (Rousseau a passionate botanist)
 CHATEAUBRIAND (1718-1886),
RENÉ (1802)
• René, born aristocrat, world-weary wanderer vainly
seeking happiness, recounts his woeful tale to priest and
native American in a French colony in America - story
within a story
• Allegory of modern man: travels from ancient world,
through ‘old Europe’ to New World; dissatisfaction
• Suspense: reveals secret source of his melancholy, disgust
at world and life–his shameful secret..
• Beloved sister joins a nunnery – to his chagrin; Incestuous
desire for sister prohibited; will disrupt the ceremony
where she takes her vows…
• The priest condemns his misanthropy… but reception will
champion René’s Hamlet-like sensitivity
 ROMANTICIST FEATURES OF RENÉ
• Excerpt III, first passage: a taste of his style of narrating his tale…
• (Unwitting) celebration of bohemian outcast, misfit dreamer, brooding errant
restless soul who refuses to conform to conventional approaches to life
• Happiness eludes him, wherever he seeks refuge from a corrupt world
• Chactas reveals character : ‘only moderate that temperament which has
already done you so much harm. If you suffer the events of life more deeply
than others, that should not surprise you; a great soul must of its nature
contain more sorrow than a small one’

• Candour of storyteller; his lyrical and poetic narration endears him to the
reader
 PATHOS WITH RENÉ, HIS
PENETRATING METAPHORS
• Irony: his literary sensibility, virtuousity what renders him unfit for a harsh
unaccommodating world
• Penetrating gaze into inner self creates pathos with him …we resist the
chastising priest who bemoans his lack of pragmatism
• Tragically doomed to his chagrin: the sole solace for this tortured soul is
nature and lyrical self-expression –and they are fused together in…

• ..metaphors drawn from nature describing interiority of his soul – a

romanticist penchant for these… Excerpt III – passage ii.
 The religious
soul like the
Excerpt III:
IMAGERY – (last three
mountain
plant sending
INNER LIFE passages)
its fragrance
upward
OF SOUL
FINDS ITS Ancient lone Life,
EXPRESSION pillar in existence as
wilderness the sight
IN NATURE like thoughts before one of
rising up in a a volcanic
romantic soul abyss
 VICTOR HUGO
1802-1885
• Bataille d’Hernani (1827) – fisticuffs break out
at flagrant violation of classical rules of
composition of tragedy
• Preface to Cromwell : unofficial ‘manifesto’
• A lyrical essay, prophetic in tone rather than a
systematic aesthetics, declaring ‘the freedom of
art against the despotism of systems, codes and
rules’
• Rising against The French Academy as a Royal
Institution prescribing neoclassical rules
associated with old ancien régime
• The Law of the three unities in Dramatic poetry
(Theatre) – unity of action, of place (confined to
one place), of time (24 hours)
• Breaking the prescription of unities of time and
place.
 MIXING OF GENRES

• Merging of the genres of tragedy and comedy

• Comedy (the depiction of people worse than they are, in
which ‘all’s well that ends well’ after a ‘a comedy of errors’)
• Tragedy (ennobling representation, needless yet fated
deaths)
• ‘[D]rama draws from tragedy by the depiction of passions,
and from comedy by its depiction of characters’
• To isolate tragedy from comedy is to ‘betray the real’
• In line with ideal of opera as a the total art
• Following certain of Shakespeare’s gestures (hero of
romanticism)
 • ‘…everything in creation is not humanly beautiful, […]
the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely
beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of
the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light.’
THE END OF
BEAUTY IN • Ancients had studied nature’s beauty in only a single
aspect…Grotesque in Satyrs, in Polyphemos in
ART: ancients, but in the ‘beatified air of classicism’.

GROTESQUE • Classical Venus was beautiful…but it is the style of

AND medieval sculptures (e.g. gargoyles on cathedrals,
and latterly vampires, ogres, Shakespeare’s witches,
SUBLIME etc.) that truly explores the riches of imagination…
 • ‘the grotesque the richest form that nature has to offer
art’ and plays ‘the part of the human beast’ – importance
of man as stretched between divine and bestial

THE END OF • Modern genius born of juxtaposition of grotesque and

the sublime; mixing beauty and ugliness of nature as
BEAUTY IN truer to God, since it does not try to ‘correct nature’

ART: • ‘Antiquity could not have produced Beauty and the

IMAGINATION Beast.’ (1740)

AND • Radical departure from classicism – whatever is born of

imagination has value
MODERNISM
• Of great significance for modernist rejection of art being
necessarily beautiful or true to reality
 LAMARTINE (1790–1869),
LE LAC, 1820:
PRIVILEGE OF LYRIC POETRY
• Movements privilege genres: essays or Encyclopedias
(Lumières), dramatic tragedy (neoclassicists), the novel
(realists) – romanticists: lyric poetry
• Why? Lyrical emotive self-expression in the first person –
no effacement of poet’s persona as in dramatic poetry
(characters), not a narrative (dramatic poetry) but
direct expression of sentiment
• Le Lac: elegy: A lyrical reflection, a doleful lamentation
on:
o fleeting happiness he and mistress shared at lake
o tragic ephemerality of time, mourning
approaching death of mistress,
o the march of time stealing away their joyous times
and memories
 CONTENT: NATURE AS
EXPRESSIVE PATHOS
• Wil recruit a place (Lake) as scene,
o in personified form (interlocutor, confidante),
o as fellow witness (to lovers’ happy times),
o as potential ally (to arrest time)

• Nature –personified lake is empathetic (pathos) to his

emotional state
•  nature: source of metaphors, in sympathy with poet’s
état-d’âme – as reflecting his inner state-of-mind, the
interior paysage, the mirror of nature
• Solitude, ceaseless time and memory, death - poetry
as redemption
•  counters cold, impersonal universal truth of Lumières
• Often as having a cathartic effect on the poet – anguish
assuaged by occasioning an enduring work of art
 • Romantic lyricism = Subjective expression +
melancholic/exalted emotive pitch
(lamentation) + lyrically expressed
• If content melancholic, how do formal
elements [its prosody (rhyme and metre)]
ROMANTIC create lyrical mode of expression?
LYRICISM • Alexandrine = classical line of verse
(neoclassical dramatic poetry of Racine and
Corneille written in rhyming Alexandrines –
discursive dialogue)
 • Excerpt IV: First stanza: a rhetorical question
re the impossibility of arresting time, figured
as a river…
• Metre of 12 syllables, divided, by a caesura
(‘/’), into two symmetrical hexasyllabic
hemistiches, (two six-syllable parts)
ROMANTIC • Ain-si, tou-jours pou-ssés(6 syllables)/vers de
LYRICISM nou-veaux ri-vages (6)
Dans la nuit é-ter-nelle (6)/emp-port-és sans
re-tour (6)
• The Alexandrine metre working in tandem
with the rhyme: rivages/ages, retour/jour
 TONE AS EFFECTED BY ALEXANDRINE

• Funerary dirge…
• Ain-si tou-jours pou-ssés (= 3 2-syllable words)/Vers de nou-veaux ri-vages = 4 words:
1,1,2,2 = 6)
• Dans la nuit ét-er-nelle (1,1,1, 3 = 6)/em-por-tés sans retour (3,1,2)
• Ne pourr-ons-nous jamais (1,2,1,2 = 6)/ sur l’o-cé-an des âges (1,3, 1,1 =6)
• Jeter l’ancre un seul jour ? (6 syllable final line)
 • Languorous rhythm of Alexandrine
consonant with:
• i) an elegiac tone – languor,
lassitude, mourning, doleful,
regretful, plaintive.
• Ii) the remorseless march of time –
EFFECTS OF sense of inexorable unfolding
ALEXANDRINE towards end of line (rhyming word)
ON MEANING • The two juxtaposed, contradictory
themes: relentless march of time
(metre), desire for arresting time
(rhyme’s finality) –
• Last line of first verse: hexasllabic
line (just 6): allows for rhetorical
question’s tone of resignation
 • Stanza 2: From ‘we’ (humanity) of previous
verse to ‘you’ (lake) (personification) –
pathos: lake and poet see, remember her;
pieds adorés – adored by whom? By both –
nature reflects poet’s emotional state
• – assonance within lines
ASSONANCE
• Ô lac ! l’année à peine a fini sa carrière -
WITHIN broad vowel x 6 (3,3)
ALEXANDRINE • Et près des flots chéris qu’elle devait revoir, -
6x ‘/eh/’ (3,3)
• Assonance in harmony with metre
suggestive of monotonous, remorseless,
relenetless, inexorable march of time
 MOVING OR MELODRAMATIC?
• Implores a sympathetic nature to arrest unforgiving, ‘jealous’ time, to
retain at least the memory…
• Ambiguity: Touching or self-indulgent? Morose melodrama or heartfelt
pathos? Moving or melodramatic? Romanticism teeters on the borders
of good and bad taste…
• Bad, clichéd romanticism errs on side of what is most detested in art:
melodrama; calculated pulling of heart-strings; exaggerated emotion;
over-expressiveness of sensitive soul , etc.
• --> romanticism in decline responsible for these as derived and
maligned clichés
 DECLINE
DEGENERATION Modernism and Realism

DEVOLUTION
 • "If René did not exist, I would not write it again; if it
were possible for me to destroy it, I would destroy it. It
spawned a whole family of René poets and René
prose-mongers; all we hear nowadays are pitiful and
disjointed phrases; the only subject is gales and
storms, and unknown ills moaned out to the clouds
and to the night. There's not a fop who has just left
college who hasn't dreamt he was the most
CHATEAUBRIAND, unfortunate of men; there's not a milksop who hasn't
MEMOIRS - ON exhausted all life has to offer by the age of sixteen;
RENÉ who hasn't believed himself tormented by his own
genius; who, in the abyss of his thoughts, hasn't given
himself over to the "wave of passions"; who hasn't
struck his pale and disheveled brow and astonished
mankind with a sorrow whose name neither he, nor it,
knows".
• Bemoans affected youth wallowing in romantic
sentiment
 • Tensions between romanticism and other
new elements – realism and modernism -
would exist within two pivotal figures writing
in 1850s:
• Flaubert (novelist) – Madame Bovary
• Baudelaire (lyric poet, art critic) – Flowers
ROMANTICISM/MODE of Evil
RNISM STRUGGLE
WITHIN EARLY • Increasing emphasis on formal innovation –
MODERNISTS on l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake)
• Shift from personal expression, to reflection
on art, on form, on meaning as a function
of signs, symbols and conventions.
• Realist tendencies – Manet and Courbet
paintings
 MADAME BOVARY (1856)
ROMANTICISM TO MODERNISM IN
FLAUBERT
• Young Flaubert disposed to romantic
lyricism (in style, and choice of subject) Advised: ‘To fight that mad lyricism you
- proved his failing must choose a subject that simply can’t
be lyrical, and that way you’ll be forced
• Cured him of the “cancer of lyricism” to censor yourself. Write a novel that
and his taste for the exotic deals with normal, bourgeois subjects,
• Hit upon idea of a vulgar, trivial realist like Balzac’s Cousine Bette, and force
tale of the bored wife of a boorish yourself to use a tone that is natural and
country doctor getting into debt by familiar. Avoid digressions and
extravagant spending, having meanderings, for though they can be
numerous affairs (one with a Rodolphe beautiful, they detract from the
– clearly a parody of a ‘romanticist development of the narrative and are
hero’)… boring for readers.’
 SHIFT TO IMPERSONAL NARRATION
• Innovation in narrative style: self-effacing narrator , contra
o the sighing romanticist,
o very obvious presence of Balzacian narrator – addressing the reader
directly, intervening, interjecting with own - political - views, explaining
explicitly, etc.)
• Effacement the narrator – of the I so cherished by Romanticism. Had with
Mallarmé – ‘ceded the initiative to the words’
• Flaubertian narrator: ironising, subtle views intimated…especially on Emma
Bovary’s character as shaped by second-rate romanticist literature (somewhat
akin to ‘romance literature’ today)
• Excerpt VI, passage i: ‘If only…’ – can hear Emma sighing, but without this
being in direct speech (as if she might have said it…);
• Not a direct comment on her character; irony – complicity between narrator
and reader - at her fanciful notions, her putting on airs and graces
(‘Bovarysme’)
 ROMANTICISM PARODIED
• Second passage: describes nature of romanticist literature she had
read
• Romanticism had become formulaic – reducible to a range of clichéd,
tedious motifs – and the subject of parody
• Emma devoured the whole Romanticist imaginary, and allowed it to
open up a chasm between what she desired and what she could
realistically expect of life… - cautionary tale, no romanticising of tragic
end
• ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi!’ - Flaubert turned own struggle with
romanticism into the subject of his novel; where Emma had
succumbed, Flaubert had resisted..
• and wrote the first great modernist novel
 BAUDELAIRE – LE COUVERCLE
The Lid
• Wherever Man may go, by earth or ocean,
Beneath a sky of fire, or sun snow-cold,
Whether to Christ or Venus his devotion,
In gloomy want, or glittering with gold;

• Citizen, vagabond, stamplicker, farmer,

Be his small brain slow-witted, quick, or sly,
For this strange terror he can find no armour
Nor look to heaven save with trembling eye.

• Above, the Sky, that cellar-ceiling, stifles,

Lit up for comic farce, where struts and trifles
Each mummer on a floor of blood and mire.

• Terror of rakes, the crazy hermits' hope —

Beneath its cauldron-lid mankind must grope,
Never above its margin to aspire.

• — Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)

 LE COUVERCLE – THE LID
• No ode to the sky as a metaphor or space of
transcendence, as heavens arrayed in splendor to be
celebrated
• No personal reminiscence placing the poet’s experience
front and centre
• The sky as a lid, as cellar ceiling… - unromanticised
metaphorical descriptions
• The undecidability of the senses of the sky (terror of the
rake, the hope of the hermit) mean that modern,
urbanised man is left with potential meanings, but none
of which he can be certain –
• – only perhaps the unflattering metaphor of a cauldron-
lid under which bubbles the vain, insignificant activity of
humanity
• Existential anxiety in the face of the unknowable has
replaced the poet finding in nature a home
 CONCLUSION
• Paradox of Romanticism – draws out of art and literature some of its innermost
possibilities (the work as emotional expression, lyrical self-reflection, exoticism)
• …but these are at once, if overdone or mishandled, characteristics of bad art, poor
literature – of sentimental, saccharine, self-indulgent art…
• And its perhaps these we see in so many examples of kitsch in modernity:
Valentine’s or Christmas card ‘poem’s’ that are sickly-sweet, adopt now clichéd
romantic innovations
• In breaking with neoclassicism romanticism showed that something very other was
possible – a focus on the contemporary, and a radical reformulation of artistic and
literary conventions.
• A shift from a René to a the urban flaneur (man-about-town), melancholy to
existential anxiety, from lyrical expression to refection upon poetry and its own
conventions
• Modernism would have been unthinkable without it