A MESSAGE FROM THE BOTTLE....

Thathari, the 23rd June 2015 

PRE-ROMANTIC ATMOSPHERES

Per chiunque possa essere interessato, condivido tre pagine sulle origini del PREROMANTICISMO INGLESE.

FROM THE AUGUSTAN AGE (Neo-classical) (1702-1760)

TO THE AGE OF TRANSITION (Pre-Romantic) (1760-1798)

The development of mystery fiction from the Gothic to E. A. Poe and the American hard-boiled. (PART 1)

One may think of the passage from one age to the next as something abrupt and unexpected, but things are rarely this way, changes always happen slowly and unadvertedly with continuous little changes that, at first at least, come unnoticed by the many, and which only thinkers, poets and philosophers are able to see, perceive or anticipate. Such is the case of the slow passing from the rationality of the first half of the 18^th century to the irrational fashions of the end of the century of “lights” and reason.

THE DIFFERENT ELEMENTS WHICH CONVERGED TO CONSTITUTE THE PRE-ROMANTIC ATMOSPHERES

Many different paths lead to the birth of the Gothic vogue, the sublime and the irrational. We could try to make a list of these different elements which anticipated and in the end all converge towards the rediscovery of feeling, emotion, sensation and imagination over reason.

Ø       the supernatural and the Gothic element in Elisabethan tragedy

Ø       the supernatural and the grand-guignol in popular poetry, tragic ballads especially

Ø       the supernatural creatures and monsters in medieval epics and romance (Beowulf)

Ø       Milton’s dark hero, Satan, an anticipation of the Romantic hero and the romantic rebel, the defeated rebel, the rebel without a hope.

Ø       anticipations of crime fiction in Defoe

Ø       the sentimental novel and the villain characters of Richardson’s novels

Ø       the new themes of Night, darkness and Death were dealt with in the cemeterial poetry of Young  Night Thoughts (1743) widely popular and fashionable all over Europe.

Ø       the philosophical ideas of Jean Jacques ROUSSEAU in France (the good savage, education, country life vs town life...the natural man...)

All these elements which were already present in the English literature, slowly catalyze around some historical and cultural events which can be identified as:

Ø       Gray’s “graveyard” or sepulcral  poetry (Elegy written in a country churchyard) (from which Foscolo’s I sepolcri took its inspiration) (1750-1757)

Ø       Edmund Burke’s rediscovery of the sublime (1756-1759)

Ø       Mac Pherson’s Ossian vogue of primitive popular poetry (1760) (enormously influencial all over Europe)

Ø       Horace Walpole first Gothic novel (1764)

Ø       the REDISCOVERY OF POPULAR POETRY and the medieval past (1765, Percy)

Ø       Thomas Chatterton suicide at 17 afdter being accused of fraud (1752-1770-1777, Rowley’s poems)

Ø       Blake’s pre-romantic poetry andf the conflict between innocence and experience

Ø       Scott’s historical novel

Ø       the picturesque and the sublime in Constable and Turner’s painting.

Ø       the rediscovery of nature and imagination and the supernatural  in Wordsworth and Coleridge

1.         Gothic and romantic, emotion and feeling.

The orderly and enlightened atmospheres of the eighteenth century rationalism were slowly giving the pace to the awareness that there were regons of the human soul whcih could not be accounted for by reason itself. All the unexplored reghions of feeling, emotions and passion were waiting for new explorers, novelists and poets.

An interest in death, dark and foggy atmospheres, the countriside and the humble as opposed to civilised life of the town, the mysterious ages of a Medieval past, the dark Middle ages, the love for the exotic and the “romantic” (pertaining to Chivalric Romance Epic) – imagination, the wonderful and the superantural, romance and courtly love – a new interest in love, night, ruined castles and abbeys, moonlight and cemeteries, all these elements became the spies of a change in taste, from the age of classical order to the age of sensibility, predominant in the literary interests of the second half of the 18^th century. It seems as if the sensibility of the period got tired with the attenpts of rationalism and the enlightenment and positivistic philosophy to accopunt for all aspects of human experience and social life in the light of reason and cold rationality.

The meaning of this new sensibility lies above all in a new attention towards the power of imagination and intuition, the importance of feelings the emotional life of the individuals. There was a new awareness that there was another world of spiritual life, mystery, suspense and reality which is coloured and enlivened by the powers and charme of imagination and individual creativity, that no rationalism could explain.

There had already been gothic atmospheres in architecture and the landscape, ruined churches and castles, medieval remains, in popular and exotic tales of terror  and the supenatural. They found one of their first expression in the Ossian poems and vogue and the rediscovery of popular ballads and poetry, the faschination of cemeteries, death and humble lives in the graveyard poetry.

The Gothic fiction, the revival of ancient poetry, the discovery of the sublime, were contemporary aspects of the same cultural and literary phenomenon: the change of sensibility, the interest in the past, the common people, nature and the countryside already threatened by the new industrial and scientific revolutions, the primitive, the medieval, the “romantic” the fight between light and darkness in society as in man’s heart.

MODERN FICTION AND HEROES DESCEND FROM THE GOTHIC

All of us are quite accustomed by television and the movies by crime fiction, detective stories, horror stories, Stephen’s King’s novels or Raymond Chandler’s hard boiled detectives. Few of us know that the origins of such popular genres are to be found in the Gothic vogue of the late 18^th century.

The passage from rationalism and the enlightenment to the pre-romantic and the vogue of sensational novels and the irrational.

PRE ROMANTIC ATMOSPHERES

concepts and definitions

Ø       picturesque vs sublime in painting (from Salvator Rosa to Constable vs Turner)

Ø       rational/vs irrational reason vs feeling and emotion

Ø       supernatural

Ø       imagination

Ø       romantic

Ø       the aesthetic of sublime (E. Burke)

Ø       Gothic sensational novel

o        tale of terror (fear caused by a vague, indefinite threat, unknown, mysterious)

o        tale of horror  (horror is the shock and disgust caused by the sight of something horrifying and quite unbearable)

Ø       Ossianism (the European vogue started by MacPherson in 1760 with the publishing of the songs of Ossian – a legendary scottish bard - , a collection of primitive mythological poems of popular origin and inspiration)

Ø       churchyard wave

Ø       revival of Ancient Popular Poetry

1.            Anticipations of Gothic.

If one looks for anticipations of Gothic atmospheres – horror and terror especially – one should certainly go back as far as the Greek and the Senecan tragedy. Without going back to classical times, the Elisabethan drama provides a good many examples of horror and mystery, at first with the revival of blood-thirsty Senecan tragedies, then with the revenge Tragedy and Webster. Evil, violence, ruthless villains, exotic castles and dungeons, ghosts and supernatural events are commonplace in this kind of popular drama. Even Shakespeare’s tragedies do offer a good deal of horror and dark atmopspheres in Macbeth, Hamlet, king Lear. Romantic tragedy itself was something the Elisabethans were the first to appreciate. And we cannot ignore the impact of Milton’s Satan, the great rebel, an anticpation of all dark-romantic-heroes, byronian types.

2.            Anticipations of crime fiction.

The Gothic novel is full of criminals and crime, villains who do not halt in front of anything evil.

Criminals and crime are a favourite theme wven with the first novels of Daniel Defoe. Many of Defoe’s protagonists are criminals: Moll Flanders, the protagonist of the novel with the same title, a prostitute and thief, Lady Roxana, a courtisan; Captain Singleton, a pirate and adventurer.

Even though the Elisabethan drama was full of of cimes and criminals, it was only with the original and adventurous personality of daniel Defoe that criminal lives became the subject of the first bourgeois novels: the realistic biographies of Moll Flanders, Lady Roxana, The history of Colonel Jack are the biographies of real, true to life criminals. They were extremely successful among the new middle class reading public.

Immediately after Defoe with Samuel Richardson’s novels, the literary type of the persecuted maiden, always in danger of falling into the hands of unscrupulous villains, was consacrated to fiction for ever. This morbid, ambiguous, dark atmospheres anticipated the gothic success of Lewis’s The Monk (1795/6).

3.         The horror and the sublime.

But it was a philosopher the first to write about the human fascination fro strong emotions ands sensations and terrors. In his famous work “A philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful” (written in 1756, published revised in 1759) Edmund Burke stated that pleasure could spring not only from the aesthetic of beauty but also from the sublime or the aesthetic of horror and terror. It is a first recognition of the importance of the role and psychology of the reader, whose desire for being excited in his basic emotions and fears will soon be exploited by hundreds and thousands of most popular novels. It is a kind of litearutre into which even some of the ebst romantic poets (like Shelley and Byron) tried their hands or expressed admiration as readers (others like Coleridge and Wordsworth were quite  critical, calling them novels of “sensation”).

The difference between the beautiful and the sublime is that the beautiful si based on a social affection – love – while the sublime is based on the egoistic need for survival.

In classical times in Longinus Treaty on the sublime – the latter was the rhetoric ability to excite passions and emotion to the highest degree in the audience by the orator.

Deprived of its rjhetorical cover the sublime became the pleasure which can be found in basic emotions as such.

4.            G.PHELPS        “ A definition of Gothic”

“The word originally implied anything wild and barbarous, a nd destructive of classical civilisation. In particular the adjective came to be applied to the pointed arch in ecclesiastical architecture between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries – and by degrees to any style of building that was not classical, and fron there almnost anything medieval. In the eraly part of the 18^th century, when classical values reigned supreme, Gohic was a term of contempt, but when the reaction against classicism set in, the word took on positive implications. It was this defiant anticlassicism taht in part explained the growing craze for Gothic architecture and ruins, actual or contrived. Indeed, the most costant feature of the Gothic novel was the presence of a medieval building of some sort, with secret corridors and labyrinths and underground passages. The other main ingredients were various supernatural manifestations: a mysterious crime, usually of the illicit or incestuous nature; a villain who in many cases pledged himslef o diabolic powers; persecuted maidens or fatal medusa-like women; charnell houses, tombs or graveyards, and nature itslef conspiring to produce effetcs of gloomy terrors”.

5          THE GOTHIC NOVEL

All these elements finally merged in the first Gothic novel by Horace Walpole, “The castle of Otranto” in 1764. In a few years the success of the Gothic novel was immense and lots of novelists dealt with the subject. Gothic fiction became a fashion and Horace Walpole even transformed his country house into a pseudo-Gothic castle.

Violence, persecutions, exotic settings, unspotted girls whose virtue was always ion danger, ghosts supernatural, villains, winds and blowing off of candles, windows set wide open and curtains agitations, thunder and lightning, romantic nature and landscape, everything in the gothic novel conspirs to build up an atmosphere of mystery, horror and suspense.

First the school of terror, then the school of horror, the tale of crime, even the science fiction, alla make their appearance in the arch of forty years, until Mary Shelley’s publishing of Dr Frankenstein’s story.

Even a romantic and sentimental bourgeois novelist as Jane Austen measured herself with the lietary genre but to make fun of its conventions and gloomy atmospheres by writing a parody of Gothic where all the ingredients and motifs of the genre are presented and overexaggerated, Northanger Abbey, which was a rational and ironic reflections about the readers readiness to be entagled into the nets of the gloomy, mysterios and improbable atmospheres of the dark Gothic novels.