Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790-1840 by Thomas Pfau

Abstract

MLR, I02.4, 2007 I I45 Paradoxically, asmuch as thisbook's dazzling command ofhistorical evidence ren ders indepth thewhole complex dynamics of eighteenth-century cultural production, until some overlooked archive suddenly appears we still have little idea of how much money Richardson earned fromhis blockbuster. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN JOHN A. DUSSINGER Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, andMelancholy, I790-I840. By THOMAS PFAU. Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press. 2005. xii + 572 PP. $65. ISBN 978 o-8oI8-8I97-8. This is a long and densely argued book thatmakes unusually heavy demands of its reader, as even Thomas Pfau and his copy-editors seem to have found: the book is riddled with repetitions and embarrassing misprints such as the reference to Wordsworth's poem 'Heart-Leap Well'. But for all its blemishes this is an im portant, timely, and original contribution toRomantic Studies. Like many earlier scholars, Pfau divides theRomantic period into three-the Revolutionary years, the Napoleonic wars, and thepost-war years. Pfau's originality lies inhis contention that the threeRomantic phases are each governed by a singlemood: successively, paranoia, trauma, and melancholy. Mood forPfau isnot something thatprompts a textor an emotion that isexpressed within it.Rather it isproduced by a particular historicalmoment, isembodied in form asmuch as content, is shared rather thanprivate, and, since it iswhat allows theworld to be known, itcannot itselfbecome an object of knowledge. Pfau imposes a heavy workload on theword, rather asColeridge does on theword 'symbol', and forsimilar reasons.Mood may be aword fora particular disposition, a grammatical term for a formof a verb, and an attribute of awork of art, as in theexpression 'moodmusic'. By activating theword's various possibilities Pfau isable to reconcile subject with object, inwardnesswith the social, and ahistoricistwith a formalistcriticism. It is,then,a cru cial instrument forPfau as he sets about his taskof 'redrawing theextended, insecure, borderline between literary,historical, and psychoanalytic modes of explanation'. In his discussion of the paranoid I79os Pfau is at his most convincing. In theRe flectionsBurke exposes an astonishingly widespread Jacobin conspiracy, ina narrative thatwas at once denounced by Burke's opponents as paranoid. But to identifya rival narrative as paranoid is inevitably tobetray one's own paranoia. Hence paranoia be comes a pandemic, with Wollstonecraft reading themale language of sentimentality as 'a conspiracy against female enlightenment', and Blake charging 'Sr Joshua & his Gang ofCunning Hired Knaves' with engaging in a conspiracy to depress art. In the treason trials theprosecution traced an elaborate plotwhich thedefence denounced as an equally elaborate delusional fantasy.The jury's taskwas simply tochoose between rival paranoid narratives. Godwin, who so firmlyrecognizes 'the radical interdepen dence ofwriting and surveillance' (p. 125), becomes inevitably the decade's central writer, and Caleb Williams itscentral text. The traumamemorialized in 'Michael' is produced when the shepherd realizes that the idea by which he has lived his life, that his own hard work might secure the independence thathe had inherited fromhis forefathersenabling him inhis turn to bequeath it to his son, is no longer operative, and he has become vulnerable to an economic system over which he has no control. But it is a predicament inwhich Wordsworth is himself implicated as he transforms an oral tale into a written text, making of ita commodity, an item thatcirculates within an economy that isas alien to thepoet as the shepherd. Eichendorff's trauma, by contrast, isproduced by Prussia's catastrophic defeat byNapoleon, which has effected 'a traumatic disjunction of past I I46 Reviews and present, memory and experience' (p. 236). The two traumas seem only loosely linked. Keats and Heine write out of amelancholy sense of their own belatedness, con demned to reproduce Romantic tropes so thatwhat was once a spontaneous overflow becomes a tissue of quotations. Both write from 'an intrinsically exiled perspective' (p. 43 i),Heine as a Jew,and Keats as aCockney. Pfau succeeds in this, thebook's final section, inbringing together an English and aGerman poet so that thework of each rather strikingly illuminates thework of theother, and the effect is todemonstrate the value of the 'broader European focus' (p. 25) thatPfau brings toRomantic Studies. UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW RICHARD CRONIN Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style. By CONSTANCEW. HASSETT. (Victorian Literature and Culture Series...