Romanticism & Gender & Melancholy

Abstract

1. Romanticism & Gender & Mellor IN INFLUENTIAL PUBLICATIONS, FROM MARY SHELLEY: HER LIFE, HER Fiction, Her Monsters (1988), through the pioneer anthology, Romanticism and Feminism (1988), and on into the brisk polemics of Romanticism & Gender (1993), the field-changer (co-edited with Richard Matlak), British Literature, 1780-1830 (1996), the history-shifting Mothers of the Nation: Women's Political Writing, 1780-1830 (2002), and a mother-lode of articles, further editions, plenary lectures, and collegial conference talks, Anne K. Mellor has been remapping the zone marked Romantic, showing the difference that gender makes, to the canon and the canonicals. My essay honor of her work tests a blue/s-print for this difference the field of Despite a mirror the first three letters, this mood does not spell the warmth and good humor of a Mehor, though its issues have been her devotions. 2. Romanticism & Melancholy: The Spirit of the Age It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, the superlative degree of comparison only. This memorably brilliant volley is the opening paragraph of Dickens's Tale of Two Cities (1859), (1) set 1775, before everything exploded France at the dawn of the literature we have come to call Romantic, hallmarked by unities and fragments, identity formation and identity crisis, hopeful revolution, despondency and dispossession. Melancholy is the big tent for this oscillation--and durably forever like the present. In the Romantic era, haunts idealism as its shade of disillusion. Here's Wordsworth writing about one of Dickens's cities 1804. Although he tells Coleridge that he regards himself (and his poetry) as composed by two natures ... joy the one, / The other the horror of Paris the civil war that succeeded the revolutionary hopes of 1789 gives all to melancholy, its force still felt deeply years on: Most at that time, O Friend! Were my thoughts, my dreams were miserable; Through months, through years, long after the last beat Of those atrocities (I speak bare truth, As if to thee alone private talk) I scarcely had one night of quiet sleep, Such ghastly visions had I of despair ... (2) Resonating from bare to scarcely to despair, this poetry sounds a prelude to Freud's iconic essay, more than a century on, on melancholy. Freud proposed that whereas in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; melancholia it is the ego itself. (3) But such refinement eluded the Romantic generation, eluded even its icon of the egotistical sublime, Wordsworth. (4) More than any personal, self-hollowing loss, his nightmare is an arrest of historical consciousness, a melancholy waste of hopes o'erthrown (2:448-49), as vast and as heartfelt for the poet writing 1804 as it was for the hope-dashed young man of 1792. By 1804, even everyday Lakeland could fall to a sensation of this waste: the miner, man, / That works by taper-light, while all the hills / Are shining with the glory of the day (8:508-10). (5) Wordsworth could hear anywhere. Touring the Highlands, he listens to a Lass at a distance, Reaping and singing by herself .../... a strain: her plaintive numbers evoke old, unhappy, far-off things, / And battles long ago, or Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, / That has been, and may be again! …