Romantic Mood Research Articles

Troping Mood: Pfau, Wordsworth, and Hegel

AbstractDrawing on discussions of mood in Kant, Novalis, Hegel, and Heidegger, Thomas Pfau, in his recent major work, Romantic Moods, provides an innovative and philosophically nuanced approach to the study of affect. In doing so, he challenges key aspects of new historicism, arguing that history is to be found not in actual events but in the prediscursive, collective, quasi‐cognitive mood that partly registers and partly resists them. Such a mood, he argues, can never be captured directly, but is best evoked in the virtual mode of literature; as a result, rather than falsifying a material history, literature remains faithful to a bewildered historicity betrayed by the fixity of actual events. Yet Pfau's analysis of three subperiods of romantic paranoia, trauma, and melancholy tends to separate them too strictly from each other; in Wordsworth's Salisbury Plain poems, Blake's Book of Urizen, and Godwin's Caleb Williams, the literature of paranoia, by carrying out a critique of its own premises, transforms into the literature of trauma, thereby shifting from the articulation of one mood into that of another. These instances of self‐critique participate in a literary version of the dialectic, whereby feeling reflects formally on itself. Moreover, Pfau's interweaving of romantic lyric and modern philosophical reflection suggests that for him, romanticism is an exemplary instance of modernity; what he leaves out of view is the possibility that modernity itself is a trope, a strong interpretation, to which we might best respond with a nonmodern critique.

Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy 1790–1840 (review)

Reviewed by: Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy 1790–1840 Peter Höyng Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy 1790–1840. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005. 572 pp. To praise Thomas Pfau’s book as an impressive scholarly work is not a stretch considering it shares Pfau’s shrewd reading skills of German and English Romantic literature through the lens of such diverse theoretical figures as Freud, Lacan, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Adorno. The manuscript’s tripartite structure of paranoia, trauma, and melancholia attempts to provide a “psychohistorical narrative” of romanticism along the chronological axis of the French Revolution (1789–99), the Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815), and post-Napoleonic repression (1815–40) without succumbing to a traditional, linear narrative. Instead, Pfau continues to practice eloquent dialectical twists and turns when and wherever a linear argument might settle in for an all too comfortable resting point. Last but not least, the book deserves commendation if for no other reason than Pfau’s writing style that is as articulate as it is methodologically transparent. Only against new historicism does Pfau employ a polemical tone in order to ensure that his own interpretation skills shine all the more vis-à-vis “the garden-variety methods of associative or contextual rumination” (24), i.e., the alleged historicist’s inferior epistemological framework (193). Pfau’s point of departure is that emotion, and its more manifest configuration of mood, cannot and should not be reduced to an irrational expression or passion that lacks cognitive verification. Rather, he sees mood as “the deep-structural situatedness of individuals within history” (7). While Pfau concedes that mood [End Page 267] remains ontologically outside the realm of representative knowledge, a post-Freudian psychoanalysis nevertheless gives access to deem emotions and mood symptoms that simultaneously reveal and conceal historical communities. (10). In short, Pfau treats emotions as quasi-intentional and quasi-cognitive so that they “constitute a latent evaluative grid for all possible experience, as well as for discursive and expressive behavior.” (13) According to Pfau, it is aesthetic works, and more specifically, literature, that mediate “the holistic perception that announces itself as the enigma of emotion” (30). However, literature “does not simply imagine some dreamworld” (25) but looks for aesthetic expressions of the “real”/“history” while being self-conscious of being unable to deliver its ambitions, thus shattering the promise of traditional concepts of mimesis. Pfau lays the foundation of the book by looking for “a structural nexus between romantic ‘interiority’ and the aesthetics,” and “the dynamic between reflection and feeling” (30). He does so by extensively treating Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft as the key text, and in particular using sections on the sublime, as Pfau “aims to configure the punctum of empirical sensation with the durée of an interior ‘feeling’” (39). To this extent, he interprets Kant’s notion of the sublime as the traumatic birth of reason that mediates a negative pleasure (vs. a positive pleasure as a feeling of the beautiful), a reconsideration that has in common with an aesthetic idea the expression of something that “lies beyond the bounds of experience and concepts of reason” (44). This configuration, in which aesthetics simulates an experience it did not have and thus cannot express, becomes for Pfau the foundation for the Jena romantics in that their literature is “looking upon emotional life as accessible solely if and when transposed into aesthetic forms that continually reaffirm” the textual difference between the real and the ideal (62). The fact that literature rises to the status of mediating emotions in a discursive mode transforms a mere subjective feeling into a “mood” that shapes and is part of a social life. Thus, the interpretation of Kant’s notion of the sublime functions as a segue to juxtapose the philosopher with the poet—primarily Novalis. While one may wonder why Pfau ignores Schiller’s extensive wrestling with Kant’s ideas of the sublime altogether, he provides an emphatic and rehabilitating reading of Novalis’s Fichte-Studien, and the young poet’s ability to reflect on feelings as the primordial philosophical ground that in the end always remains inaccessible. Pfau finishes the first chapter by tracing mood as a dialectical figure of...

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

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...

'Pamela' in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland by Thomas Keymer, Peter Sabor

I I44 Reviews 'Pamela' in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture inEighteenth Century Britain and Ireland. By THOMAS KEYMER and PETER SABOR. Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005. x+295 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-o-52I 8I337-2. This excellent book derives fromThomas Keymer and Peter Sabor's previous joint work-The 'Pamela' Controvery: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson's 'Pamela', 1740-I750, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 200I), which provided headnotes to the facsimiles of themany pamphlets, parodies, plays, verses, illustra tions, and other printed matter generated by the 'Epidemical Phrenzy' caused by Richardson's best-seller. Providing awealth of new information in a crisp,witty nar rative, itgoes farbeyond the previous commentaries on the subject of Pamela as a phenomenon of the commercial marketplace. Chronologically and generically organized, the six chapters concern theparticular formsof publication thatemerged in thePamela/Anti-Pamela controversy. Chapter I interprets thevarious strategies employed inpromoting Richardson's novel, including Benjamin Slocock's possibly bribed praise from thepulpit at Southwark, Alexander Pope's suspiciously equivocal endorsement before thepublic atBath, and well-placed notices in theHistory of the Works of the Learned and theGentleman's Magazine. Per haps the most ingeniousmechanism ofpromotion was in matching Fielding's parodic Shamela (2April I74I) with thepuritanical Pamela Censured only a fewweeks later. Usually read as an Anti-Pamelist set piece, the authors set forth the circumstan tial evidence that allows the possibility thatRichardson himself was involved in this equivalent of fightinga fire with gunpowder, a not infrequent trickof thebookselling trade. In this same year (I74I) William Webster, editor of theWeekly Miscellany, which Richardson printed and partly financed,wrote a pamphlet, The Draper Con futed, to attack his own tractThe Consequences of Trade (I740), which went through fiveeditions in one year. Sales were apparently increased by thisnegative publicity. Chapter 2 gives a fullaccount of thebookseller Richard Chandler's negotiations to launch a sequel written by thehack JohnKelly, Pamela's Conduct in High Life (I 74 I), which rivalled the original novel to the extent that its two volumes were printed to match the size ofRichardson's foruniform binding as a four-volume set. Except for Shamela, the numerous fictional replies toRichardson's novel have received little commentary; and in their thirdchapter theauthors thrownew lighton suchworks as Eliza Haywood'sAnti-Pamela (June 174 1),Charles Povey's The Virgin inEden (I 74), the anonymous Memoirs of theLife ofLady H (I 74I ), JohnCleland's Memoirs of a Woman ofPleasure ( 748-49), and Henry Brooke's Juliet Grenville ( 774). The fourth chapter surveys the staggering array of stage adaptations ofRichard son's novel, including not only Henry Giffard's comedy Pamela (I74 ), the anony mous Pamela; or, Virtue Triumphant (1741), two ballad operas in I742, Edward Moore's The Foundling (I748), Isaac Bickerstaff's comic opera TheMaid of the Mill (I765), and Samuel Foote's puppet-show farcePiety inPattens (I773), but also stage adaptations produced in France by Louis de Boissy, Nivelle de La Chaussee, and Voltaire and in Italy by Carlo Goldoni. Besides the engravings byHubert Gravelot and Francis Hayman thatRichardson ordered for the sixth, octavo edition of Pamela (1742), and the paintings by Joseph Highmore and Philip Mercier, the fifth chapter discusses much lesser-known graphi cal representations. In the last chapter the authors document thePamela controversy thatplayed out in Ireland, resulting in such works as amock-epic poem Pamela; or, The Fair Impostor (I743) and a newly discovered farce Mock-Pamela (I750). A brief Afterword recounts the continuing debate about Pamela during the 1790s, where French Jacobins praised its revolutionary attack on class hierarchy, and not surpris inglyAnti-Jacobins deplored it for the same reason. 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...

Romantic moods: paranoia, trauma, and melancholy, 1790-1840

Pfau, Thomas. Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790-1840.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.572 pp. $65.00 hardcover. Emotions are often ascribed to private, interior realm of experience. Since the late 18th century, however, number of philosophers and theorists have pointed to the inherently social and communicative nature of emotions. In Romantic Moods, Thomas Pfau draws on this speculative to present Romantic literary writing as giving voice to pre-reflexive, historically contingent, and rhetorically sedimented structure of feeling that is best understood not in terms of momentary passions but rather as broadly shared mood. According to Pfau, speaks... to the deep-structural situatedness of individuals within history as something never actually intelligible to them in fully coherent, timely, and definitive form (7). As result, mood is mediated most effectively through aesthetic forms rather than through logical propositions. Lyric poetry, in particular, is able to convey knowledge of mood while drawing attention, through its formal structure, to the fact that such knowledge was first disclosed as feeling or emotion. Pfau describes his study as a psychohistorical narrative of European romanticism in three successive stages, focusing on paranoia, trauma, and melancholy (1). The first section, on paranoia, takes its cue from Eric Santner's analysis of the Daniel Paul Schreber case, especially Santner's emphasis on the close connection between Schreber's paranoiac memoir and the fin-de-siecle crisis of authority. Pfau locates similar crisis in the 1790s, as the British old regime underwent series of rapid and profoundly disorienting social and political transformations. In this situation, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, and William Godwin gravitated toward what might be described as paranoid style of writing, which blamed contemporary troubles on nefarious but unseen forces that had conspired against prior unspoiled condition-defined by Burke as tradition and by Blake as pre-Christian spirituality. This paranoid style was also on display during the trial of the London Corresponding Society, as prosecutors presented even the most modest efforts at constitutional reform as contributing, through complex chain of causation, to secret regicidal plot. In the second section, on trauma, Pfau interprets selected poems by Wordsworth and Eichendorff as conveying (belated) awakening to rupture or loss, thereby alerting readers to their situatedness in broader dynamic of historical change. Wordsworth's pastoral ballad Michael (1800) is particularly important in this context, for it highlights not only the destructive effects of the market on farmer's dreams of timeless property and absolute economic stability, but also the illusory and ultimately self-serving nature of such desires in the face of changing economic realities (208). …

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STATIONARY FACTOR AND VARIATIONAL FACTOR FOR GENERATING MOODS IN DRIVE

This paper discusses about the way of giving moods that people have on the route to their goal. For example, if we select thrilling route, thrilling mood will be felt. So, the people have various moods given by something that they see something of the route and experience something of the route. These moods are given by the elements of the road, such as whether the road is wide or narrow. If these elements are found, we will be able to select the routes which give moods to us, and will be able to make people feel the moods which they want on the route. And now, we temporarily select the moods that thrilling mood, romantic moods, melancholy mood, refreshing mood, and adventurous mood. And next, it is necessary to know relationship between mood and elements of road. For this, we find out categories of the road which give the mood by interview for 6 drivers who are about 22 years old. They are speed, curve, the width of the road, the landform around the road, the view around the road, and inclination of the road. Combinations of these states of each category make people feel those moods. But we have the various combinations in the same mood, because we get the same mood from difference combinations in difference situation. Therefore the combinations are not one way. To make people feel various moods, it is necessary to know various combinations. It is effective to use Rough sets to find out the combinations. We get the decision table of rough set from the questionnaire in which we ask what combination of state of each category makes us feel each mood, from the interview for examinees that are from 22 to 55years old. As the result, we get the combinations as the decision rules of rough set and it is possible to propose the route for each moods based on the combination.

Vytoki i hiniezis biełaruskaha ramantyzmu XIX stahodździa by K. I. Lećka (review)

720 SEER, 82, 3, 2004 Lecka,K. I. Vytoki i hiniezis bietaruskaha ramantyzmu XIXstahodzdzia. Hrodzienski DziarzauinyUniviersitet, Hrodna, 2003. 37I pp. Notes. Bibliography. Priceunknown. THE Romantic movement, to whose originsthis monograph is devoted, came to Belarus at a time when the tsaristgovernment had placed an almost total ban on publishing in the Belarusian language. Thus, much of the material discussed was either in Polish or published clandestinely and/or outside the country. False places of publication and dating were common, as was the confiscation of literaryworks.Partlyfor this reason, BelarusianRomanticism has been relativelylittleresearchedhithertoand the word 'romantic'hasbeen more frequentlyused with reference to the end ratherthan the beginning of the nineteenth century. The same, of course, is not uncommon with writers like Gor'kiiand Korolenko in Russian literature,and is taken for granted in thediscussionofnineteenth-centurymusic.KsienafontLecka'scomprehensive study is the firstmonograph ever to be devoted to BelarusianRomanticism. As such, thisgroundbreakingworkis to be warmlywelcomed. Afteran Introductionoutliningearlierworkand the reasonsforthe subject's relative neglect, the book falls into six main parts: theoretical aspects and methodological principlesof studyingBelarusiannineteenth-centuryRomanticism ; the preconditions for the rise of the Romantic movement in Europe; the folkloricoriginsand birthof Belarusiannineteenth-centuryRomanticism; its religious sources; the roots of nineteenth-century Romanticism in Old Belarusianliterature;and the roots of Romanticism in Belarusianeighteenthcenturyliterature .Most interestingfor Westernreaders,undoubtedly,will be the thirdto the sixth sections. Of the latter, section three contains five subdivisions:the first shoots of Romantic thinking;popular fairytales;legends and stories;folkloricballads; and popular lyrical songs. The fourth section is divided in two: the biblical origins of BelarusianRomanticism and problems of theirreception in fiction; and Belarusianspiritualpoetry in the light of Romantic aestheticsand poetics. Section fivehas threeparts:generic Romantic tendencies;a typologicalaspect of Belarusianliteratureof the Middle Ages (eleventh-fifteenth centuries);and consonant Romantic moods in Belarusianliterature of the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries. The last section is divided in two: the baroque and the formation of Romantic aesthetics and poetics; and the Enlightenment as a genetic forerunnerof the Romantic movement in the nineteenth century. This is a densely written and very thoroughly researched study with a bibliography containing nearly six hundred items. Dr Lecka shows an extensive knowledge of Belarusian written folk materials, prose and verse alike, which he is able to bring to bear on the main nineteenth-century Belarusian literary texts (an ever-expanding corpus, due to the political conditions referredto at the startof this notice), and the book is all the more valuable for the quantityof hithertolittle-knownor lost texts that he bringsto his argument.The authoralso showsan easy command of religiousmaterials, from the Psalms, the Gospels and other books of the Bible to popular chapbooksand similarreligioustextswidespreadin the Belarusianterritories, particularlythose of the Suprasl'-Hrodna region during the eighteenth and REVIEWS 72I nineteenth centuries. The section on the Middle Ages is also rich in detailed examples, from the earliest sermons and other homiletic writings to the religious polemics which brought discord to this period but also produced a number of textsthat arefascinatingnot only as historicalevidence, but also as literature. This pioneering book makes a very considerable contribution to our knowledge of Belarusian literature of the Romantic period, and of the folkloric,religious and other sourcesfor it, as well as offeringa new typology of Slav Romanticism in general. The annotation is economical rather than optimally convenient, referringas it does to the items from the bibliography by number alone. This may partlybe due to constraintsof space, as also may the regrettable absence of an index. None the less, Dr Lecka must be congratulatedon a monographthatisbound to become a fundamentalsource for the furtherstudyof Belarusianliteraturein the nineteenth century. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies ARNOLD MCMILLIN University College London Knapp, L. and Mandelker, A. (eds). Approaches to TeachingTolstoy'sAnna Karenina'. Approaches to Teaching World Literature. The Modern LanguageAssociationofAmerica,New York,2003. ix + 226 pp. Illustrations . Figures.Tables. Notes. Bibliography.Index. $I8.50 (paperback). THIScollection of essays is the latest in a serieswhose stated aim is 'to collect [.. .] differentpoints of view on teaching a specificliterarywork [... .] widely taught at undergraduate level' (p. vii). The volume consists of twenty-six essayswritten by leading American specialistsin Russian literature,and was prepared by 'solicitingresponsesto a questionnairefrom facultymembers at various [North American] institutions'(p. ix). Since this questionnaireplayed such a significantpart in the book's...

Jean-Valentin Morel (1794-1860), un bijoutier parisien à l’époque romantique

Goldsmith, jeweller and precious stones craftsman, Jean-Valentin Morel counts among the masters of the Parisian romantic jewellery, which flourished between 1830 and 1850. After having learnt all the subtleties of the art of adornment as a foreman at Fossin’s between 1834 and 1840, he became famous thanks to his partnership with Henri Duponchel, which enabled him to found his own business, Morel and Co., active from 1842 to 1848, well known, in particular, for its production of «goldsmith jewels », associating sculptured or carved figures with enamels and stones, embedding themes and styles in a romantic mood. Morel had to move to London from 1848 to 1853, where he met with some success, chiefly thanks to fashionable trinkets, but also jewels. Back in France and settled in Sèvres, he busied himself in hi» last years with the creation of adornments mixing gold and hard stones, inlaid with rubies and diamonds. Jean-Valentin Morel’s jewels, highly reputed in his time, demonstrate a high degree of know-how and a remarkable sense of innovation.

Romantic Mood Induction and Attraction to a Dissimilar Other

The present experiments examined the effects of a romantic mood induction on male subjects' attraction to an attitudinally dissimilar female. It was hypothesized and found that male subjects exposed to a romantic mood induction with such a female showed greater attraction to her on measures of liking, love, and limerence than control subjects who were not exposed to the romantic mood manipulation. Romantic mood induction subjects also perceived the dissimilar female as more similar to themselves than did control subjects.

Interpretation of the “body of water” metaphor in patient artwork as part of the diagnostic process

Interpretation of metaphoric themes in patient artwork is one of the important techniques used by art therapists in doing treatment. Some images in drawings by disturbed patients reflect inner experiences and conflicts, and it is the art therapist’s task to understand these symbolic images. However, in making a diagnosis with severely disturbed patients, symbolic content is rarely explored, and attention in art assessments is mainly given to variations in drawing style, such as primitiveness, types of defenses, and affective tone. After a one year period of art evaluation interviews on a diagnostic unit, the writer noticed a patterned usage of symbols and metaphors in regressed psychotic drawings, which was especially clear in recurring body of water images. Responses to the water metaphor in schizophrenic, unipolar depressed, and manic artwork were developed. These responses became a valued part of the diagnostic process. along with examination of drawing style. In pyschotic art, a body of water is a common image. Sometimes it is an ocean which may be threatening, fearsome, or it may be a lake, suggesting a calm or romantic mood. What the body of water symbolizes is fundamental and profound to all people. Life, sex, the mother and birth, death and the unconscious are frequent symbolic meanings. In the artwork of the psychotic patient, water always expresses important concepts. In contrast to the water images in schizophrenic patients’ drawings, the drawings of manic and depressed patients use the metaphor differently. Sexual interpretations are obvious and valid, but it has been this writer’s experience that water symbols are also part of complex metaphoric ideas which relate to symptoms as well as to underlying dynamics of the illness. In the literature, water symbols in dreams, myths and ritual are discussed. Also, a comparison is here attempted between diagnosis by mental status exam and art interview. Discussion of patient artwork include stylistic differences in schizophrenic, unipolar depressed and manic drawings. Regarding the content of drawings, particular emphasis is given to water as an important image, providing diagnostic information via its potential for expressing inner conflicts.

The Carolina Ideal World: Natural Science and Social Thought in Ante Bellum South Carolina

THE CAROLINA IDEAL WORLD: Natural Science and Social Thought in Ante Bellum South Carolina William Henry Longton A few years ago, Marvin Harris remarked on what he called "the trend toward biologization" of the social sciences in the nineteenth century, and argued that it "had nothing to do with the greater prestige of the biological disciplines" over the social sciences. "It was not," he suggested, "a matter of one discipline aping another, but rather a parallel response by both disciplines to similar ideological needs."1 It was an astute observation and there is no reason to quarrel with it in order to insist that a major feature of the century was a dynamic process of mutual reinforcement between sociocultural concepts and interpretations of biological information. Social theorists and natural scientists who shared similar kinds of assumptions about the nature of the world were in large measure committed to demonstrations of the validity of those assumptions, and they were perforce bound to borrow from and support each other. This exchange and alliance, moreover, did not ordinarily reach its limits when it trespassed on theological premises , since the same kinds of ideological requirements operated on theologians as they did on everyone else. Theology, social thought, and scientific interpretation all drew upon each other for sustenance and direction, and they each modified the others in the process so that a general harmony among them was always possible. Indeed, the fact that nineteenth-century writers placed such great importance on the harmonization of theology, science, and social theories suggests that it was their harmonization rather than any one of them alone that was crucial to the satisfaction of ideological needs. Whatever may have generated and defined such needs for others in the nineteenth century, it is scarcely a matter of conjecture that for ante bellum Southerners it was slavery. Slavery dictated the requirements for Southern world views and even those who dissented from specific theoretical suggestions rarely questioned the essential ideological structure within which their dissent was contained, because slavery was its irreducible first principle. It needs to be stressed, furthermore , that it was clearly a racist concept of slavery to which the 1 Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (New York, 1968), p. 129. 118 ideal referred. The racial inferiority and bondage of blacks to whites were the fundamental issues. Expressing an understanding of the way things really were, the ideological structure or "ideal world" involved two propositions. First, it was affirmed that events in the organic world described a course of teleological development, signifying that living beings developed under God's control and that some final end awaited all life. The second proposition was that living beings possessed certain essentially changeless characters which gave them their definitions. Developments of almost any kind notwithstanding, the "natures" of things could not change without redefining the things themselves. Together, these tenets formed the basis of the ideal world for at least thirty years before the Civil War. During that time the process of harmonization of diverse disciplines caused a major shift of emphasis in the ideal. The shift was away from what are ordinarily described as neo-classical views and toward a distinctly romantic mood, so that by 1860, while the ideal was still structurally the same as in 1830, its emphasis was quite different. In order to trace this shift in emphasis it is well to review the state of theoretical natural science at the beginning of this period. A convenient summary of the best informed opinion on the subject in South Carolina between 1828 and 1831 may be found in three articles in The Southern Review of Charleston.2 One of the writers remains unidentified , but of the other two, Stephen Elliott was the most reputable botanist in the state at the time, and Thomas Cooper was an able and knowledgeable teacher of geology at the South Carolina College. Each of these writers was a catastrophist, holding that the earth was immensely old, that its surface morphology had undergone repeated changes through the agency of paroxysms—"earthquakes, upheavings , disruptions, deluges and catastrophes"—and that these convulsions had eventually produced an environment capable of sustaining life.3...

Tennessee Williams' Persistent Battle Of Angels

WHEN TENNESSEE WILLIAMS PUBLISHED THE TEXT of Orpheus Descending which, in its first incarnation on Broadway in 1957 had lasted only sixty-eight performances, he included in the same volume the play on which it was based, Battle of Angels, which had opened in Boston in 1940 and had never reached Broadway at all. Read together, the two plays reveal a highly respectable reason for their commercial and aesthetic failure: the author's frantic ambition to make each of them a compendium of almost everything he believed about life and its artistic reflection in drama. In each of the plays, Williams attempted to amalgamate tragedy (both Greek and domestic), melodrama (both metaphysical and psychological), morality play (both frankly allegorical and subtly symbolic), ritualistic drama (with overt and covert mythic referents) and romantic mood play (both visually and verbally poetic). Each of the plays thematically attempts to depict sexual repression as the basis of religious sublimation and social hypocrisy, to portray the inability of love and sex to counteract God-given aloneness, and to sketch a portrait of the life and fate of the artist as a pariah-scapegoat in quest of meaning in a waste land. Above all, each of the plays attempts to celebrate existence as a continuous battle of the forces of light against those of darkness in which the former, though cruelly defeated (often by mutiny within their own ranks) are never totally destroyed though they appear never destined to win.

Romantic Melancholy in Chateaubriand and Kierkegaard

THE striking impact of the German romantics upon Kierkegaard is apt to obscure the important role played by French writers in determining his final appraisal of romanticism.1 It is only natural that Kierkegaard, for whom melancholy was an anguishing personal problem, should have studied a literature which contained outstanding examples of this fundamental romantic mood. In particular, the comparison between Chateaubriand and Kierkegaard attempted in this article is suggested not only by the obvious importance of melancholy in the life and work of both men but also by the fact that the second part of Either / Or has for its epigraph a quotation from Atala.2 Moreover, the unhappy narrator of Rene has such close affinities with the tormented author of Either / Or that it would be surprising if Chateaubriand were not one of the authors Kierkegaard had in mind during his examination of this typically romantic phenomenon. A confrontation of the two writers will thus help towards an understanding both of their individual work and of romantic melancholy itself. It is especially with this latter question that the present study will be concerned, although the wider issue is considered in the light of two specific attempts (Rene and Either / Or) to portray its essential characteristics. Since this article-like an earlier one on Moliere and Kierkegaard--is concerned primarily with two fundamental attitudes rather than with the more limited question of influences, it will tend to see melancholy as a definite cultural phenomenon expressed through a particular aesthetic medium and will deal only indirectly with the problem