Melancholy, Trauma, and National Character: Mme de Staël’s Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Revolution française

Abstract

Melancholy, Trauma, and National Character: Mme de Staël’s Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Revolution française Eric Gidal (bio) Eric Gidal University of Iowa Eric Gidal eric Gidal is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum (2001) and related articles on eighteenth- century and romantic period poetry, aesthetics, and visual culture. His current scholarship explores melancholy and social theory in the literature and philosophy of the European Enlightenment. Footnotes 1. The Poems of William Cowper, vol. 2., ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) 5.460–64, 473. All subsequent quotations from this work are given parenthetically in the text by book and line numbers. 2. See Eric Gidal, “Civic Melancholy: English Gloom and French Enlightenment,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37.1 (2003): 23–45. 3. The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) 2: 215. W. B. Hutchings offers a more comprehensive and detailed consideration of Cowper’s politics and poetry during this period in “William Cowper and 1789,” The Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989): 71–93. See also Tim Fulford, “Wordsworth, Cowper, and the Language of Eighteenth-Century Politics” in Thomas Woodman, ed., Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998) 117–33. 4. The Speeches of the Right Honourable Charles James Fox in the House of Commons (London, 1815) 4: 427. 5. The Origin and Progress of Kings; a Poem; by the celebrated Mr. Cowper. And The Progress of a Divine (London, 1798?). 6. Vincent Newey, in his subtle and far-reaching reading of The Task, spends only a page and a half on these “promulgatory” lines (Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment [Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1982] 141–42), and Richard Feingold characterizes this “digression” as an intrusion which “adds little to the conclusions implicit in the mythical narrative” that “points only to the realm of grace, in which natural and political evils are transcended rather than resolved” (Nature and Society: Later Eighteenth-Century Uses of the Pastoral and Georgic [New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1978] 181–83). 7. Mme de Staël, Considérations sur la Révolution française, ed. Jacques Godechot (Pans: Tallandier, 1983) 542. All quotations and citations from Staël’s work in the main body of the text refer to this edition. All translations of the Considérations are taken from the newly revised edition of the 1818 English translation, Considerations on the Principal Events of the french Revolution, ed. Aurelian Craiutu (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009) cited by page number, in this instance, 673. 8. For the relation between the idealized vision of English culture presented in the Considérations and Staël’s actual knowledge and encounters from her visit in 1813–14, see Beatrice W. Jasinski, “Madame de Staël, l’Angleterre de 1813–1814 et les ‘Considérations sur la Révolution Française,’” Revue d’Histoire littérairc de la France 66.1 (1966): 12–24. For a thorough documentation of her Anglophilia throughout her career, see Robert Escarpit, L’Angleterre dans l’œuvre de Madame de Staël (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1954). 9. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 3.17 (Sept. 1818): 633. For the authorship of this and other related articles in Blackwood’s, my source has been Alan Lang Strout, A Bibliography of Articles in Blackwood’s Magazine 1817–1825 (Texas Technological College, Lubbock Library Bulletin 5 [1959]). 10. Roberto Romani provides an extensive analysis of these shifting ideological motivations, as well as a detailed chapter on Mme de Staël, in National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002). 11. Ian Duncan, “Blackwood’s and Romantic Nationalism” in David Finkelstein, ed., Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition 1805–1930 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006) 83. 12. Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005) 23. In erudite readings of Keats’s early Poems of 1817 and Heine’s Buch der Lieder of 1827...