Michael Furgiuele

HIST 616

Second Examination

Dr. R. Luehrs, Instructor

February 14, 2005

 

Define and discuss Romanticism, noting specific examples of the Romantic outlook found in Chateaubriand’s novel, Rene.  To what extent do you think Hegel was a Romantic, even though he denied being one?

 

From our lectures, readings, and study guides, we are able to interpret the ideas associated with the Romantic period and how writers like Chateaubriand and theorists like Hegel embodied its central concepts.

 

The Age of Romanticism made its greatest impact on the cultural life of Europe during the early-to-mid 1800s and “helped shape a wide range of social, cultural, and political values” (Kramer, 2001, p. 42).  Romanticism went beyond the ideas of the Enlightenment – reason, progress, and nature – to incorporate the human spirit and truth, which empirical processes alone could not explain. Romantics wrote of the human mind, feelings, and desires as a means of understanding the world.  Many Romantic writers believed that complex emotions, living outside of standard conventions, and opening themselves up for intense physical, mental, and spiritual pain was a more direct method of understanding truth.  Romantic thought applied nature in a metaphysical, almost mystical context (lecture 9).  Early Romantic writers disapproved of the classical flow of art and literature and expounded on the irrational.  Kramer points out that “romantics denied that one could define general laws for creative work; they wanted to break with traditions and pursue the unexpected” (Kramer, 2001, p.43).

 

While Romantic writing spoke of lamentations as a means of understanding life through experience, “romantic art went beyond the beautiful. It embraced the grotesque and the terrifying also” (Luehrs, 2005, p.8).  Despair, rejection, and isolation were recurring Romantic themes.  Self-reflection and self-consciousness replaced the concise and regimented scientific and mathematical understanding presented by the theorists of the Enlightenment.  Experiences were the height of knowledge.  Until they had experienced the good and bad that life had to offer, the Romantic was not immersed in true-life. Experience then developed a sense of perspective that could identify new ideas and theories regarding social and even political conscience.  At the base of these new ideas were individual liberties, another classic Romantic idea, indicating that people needed to express themselves and live without conventions, trying new ideas, traveling, and meeting new people who share their ideas and values. 

 

Germaine de Stael and Lord Byron embraced Romanticism in their writings and their lives.  Stael’s writings included commentary on politics and culture and “stressed the value of freedom” (Kramer, 2001, p.45).  Her life also exemplified Romantic living – “exile, travels, persecution, live outside marriage, a quest for freedom” (Kramer, 2001, p.45).  Similarly, Lord Byron called for personal freedoms and lived an unconventional lifestyle.  Like Stael, Byron also epitomized the “Romantic Hero” which identified young men in tragic roles often dying young (lecture 10). 

While the “Classical Hero” of the seventeenth-century was the model of conformity and self-restraint, the “Romantic Hero” went to great lengths to identify themselves “through prolonged, painful contemplation of the self” (Kramer, 2001, p.47) and to ensure that their emotions were expressed.  Their emotions and internal conflicts over non-conformity often led these characters to untimely, self-inflicted death becoming the martyrs for the cause of personal freedom of choice.  Like the works of Chateaubriand, writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Victor Hugo consistently portrayed the young, confused, and conflicted Romantic Hero’s in their works.  Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Yong Werther, which identifies that “young Werther loved nature and seemed to revel in radical mood swings in which he felt total ecstasy or total despair” (Kramer, 2001, p.48).  True to many Romantic heroes, Werther kills himself over an unrequited love affair. Victor Hugo also wrote of unreachable goals set within unusual settings and dealing with the “exotic, unusual, grotesque, and extraordinary” (Kramer, 2001, p.50).

Like other Romantic writers, poets and theorists, Chateaubriand wrote of mystical themes – isolation, despair, travel, rejection, and introspection.  In his work, Rene, Chateaubriand recounts the sad tale of the life of Rene from his unwelcome beginnings to his untimely end.   Like Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, a German theorist, who developed the idea of pantheism or “a spiritual element everywhere in nature” (Kramer, 2001, p.44), Chateaubriand projects natural themes throughout Rene. Chateaubriand wrote, “Towards the east, in the background of this setting, the sun was just beginning to show behind the jagged peaks of the Appalachians, which stood forth like azure symbols against the golden arches of the sky” (Chateaubriand, 1952, p.86).  Throughout his story, Chateaubriand links Rene’s melancholy with nature as if one affects the other stating, “I was spirited in temper and erratic by nature. As I alternated turbulence and joy with silence and sadness, I would gather my young friends around me, then leave them suddenly and go off to sit by myself watching the swift clouds or listening to the rain falling among the leaves” (Chateaubriand, 1952, p.87).

  Rene is a character who has experienced many facets of life at a young age and who grappled with self-reflection, self-pity, and complex emotions.  Rene reflected Chateaubriand’s own feeling that he “never felt at home in any society” (Kramer, 2001, p.49).  Rene embraces the Romantic passion for personal freedom and the unconventional.  Rene stated, “In my travels I especially sought out artists and those inspired poets whose lyres glorify the gods and the joy of peoples who honor their laws, their religion, and their dead” (Chateaubriand, 1952, p.91).  Rene embraced the spiritual life of the religious orders but continually sought out a happiness that came from isolation and conflict.  His emotions are “sublime, an incomprehensible yet awesome emotional overload, frightening, dangerous, and spellbinding all at one” (Luehrs, 2005, p.8).  True to the passions for experience that Romanticism embodied, Rene sought introspection as a means of escape and self-resolution.  He stated, “I grew weary of constantly repeating the same scenes and the same thoughts, and I began to search my soul to discover what I really sought” (Chateaubriand, 1952, p.95).  While Chateaubriand considered himself pious, his own rebellious spirit reflected the Age of Romanticism.  Chateaubriand was “unfaithful in marriage, mercenary in financial affairs, and insecure in his loyalty to the church” (Luehrs, 2005, p.10).  Chateaubriand did convey his religious zeal in Rene. In recounting his tale to the priest and Native American, Rene cried out

Priest of the Almighty, now listening to my story, forgive this poor creature whom Heaven had almost stripped of his reason.  I was imbued with faith, and I reasoned like a sinner; my heart loved God, and my mind knew him not (Chateaubriand, 1952, p.99).

 

Rene, playing the Romantic hero, is in love with his sister and she is in love with him.  As she takes her final vows to become a bride of Christ, she utters in confession “Merciful God, let me never again rise from this deathbed, and may Thy blessings be lavished on my brother who has never shared my forbidden passion” (Chateaubriand, 1952, p.108).  With a certain surrender to Romantic art which “probed the darker recesses of the human psyche” (Luehrs, 2005, p.9), Amelia, Rene’s sister, dies in the convent to which she withdrew to hide herself and reconcile her soul (Chateaubriand, 1952).

 

As Romanticism helped to define not only art and literature, but also politics and social behavior, “such ideas stimulated the search for historical knowledge about specific human societies” (Kramer, 2001, p.31) and enhanced the study of history as a means of identifying developing meaning and cultural systems.  Historical intellectuals went beyond the Enlightenment’s concept of structure and natural order and believed “history provided valuable intellectual resources for people who sought to explain the meaning of contemporary events or for those who wanted to challenge the legacy of eighteenth-century thought” (Kramer, 2001, p.31). It is this idea of historical significance to which Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel theorized.  Hegel believed that historical events, like life experiences, were essential for understanding truth and value of nature.  Hegel “described history as a process of endless change in which a transcendent spirit evolved with purpose and direction across time” (Kramer, 2001, p.32).  Like historical events such as war, conflicts also arise in the spirit of the individual and became “simply phases of a spirit unfolding in the world” (Kramer, 2001, p.34).  Hegel’s theory of the thesis and antithesis placed reality before a dynamic world, which then evolves into a new level of understanding.  To Hegel, this process is ongoing and remains as changing as the world itself.

 

Contradictions between good, bad, happy, and sad marked the Age of Romanticism. The Romantic writer filled his books with tales of woe and tragedy within unspeakable sadness and unattainable goals.  With the creation of the “Romantic Hero”, the tragedy intensified into introspection and a short-lived life filled with misery and self-doubt.  Chateaubriand’s Rene epitomized Romanticism and its ill-fated hero. 

 

Throughout our lectures and readings, we find the synthesis and evolution of thought from the Age of Enlightenment highlighted with the ideas of reason, progress, and nature into Hegel’s reference for understanding how an evolving history will provide an avenue of understanding truth separate and distinct from Empiricism.