british literature romantic period

2 0 I T H E R O M A N T I C P E R I O D

autobiography of The Prelude, Percy Shelley's "lyric drama" of cosmic reach, Prornetheus Unbou.nd., and (in the field of prose) the "historical novels" of Scott and the complex interweaving ofletters, reported oral confessions, and interpolated tales that is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

In this context many writers'choice,to portray poetry as a product.of solitude and poets as.loners'might be uriderstood as a.means of reiirforcing the individuality of their vision. (The sociability of the extrovertednarrator of DonJwan, who is forever buttonholing "the gentle reader," is exceptionsl- Byron's way of harkening back to the satire of the eighteenth century.) And the appeal that nature poetry had for many writers of the period can be attributed to a determination to idealize the natural scene as a site where the individual could find freedom from social laws, an idealization that was easier to sustain when nature was, as often in the era, represented not as cultivated fields but as uninhabitable wild wastes, unploughed uplands, caves, and chasms. Rural commwnity, threatened by the enclosures that were breaking up village life, was a tenuous presence in poetry as well.

Wordsworth's imagination is typically released, for instance, by the sudden apparition of a single figure, stark and solitary against a natural background; the words "solitary," "by one self," "alone" sound through his poems. In the poetry of Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron (before Don Juan launched Byron's own satire on Byronism), the desolate landscapes are often the haunts of disillusioned visionaries and accursed outlaws, figures whose thwarted ambi- tions and torments connect them, variously, to Cain, the Wandering Jew, Satan, and even Napoleon. A variant of this figure is Prometheus, the hero of classical mythology, who is Satanlike in setting himself,in opposition to God, but who, unlike Satan, is the champion rather than the enemy of the human race. Mary Shelley subjected this hero, central to her husband's mythmak- ing, to ironic rewriting in Frankensteiu Victor Frankenstein, a "Modern Prometheus," is far from championing humankind. For other women writ- ers of the period, and for Shelley in her later novels, the equivalent to these half-charismatic, half-condemnable figures of alienation is the woman of "genius." In a world in which-as Wollstonecraft complained in the Rights of V,/e74en-t(a,ll women are to be levelled by meekness and docility, into one character of . . . gentle compliance," the woman who in "unfeminine" fashion claimed a distinctive individuality did not gain authority but risked ostra- cism. As for the woman of genius, in writings by Robinson, Hemans, and Landon particularly, her story was often told as a modern variation on ancient legends of the Greek Sappho, the ill-fated female poet who had triumphed in poetry but died of love. Pressured by the emergent Victorianism of the 1820s and playing it safe, Hemans especially was careful to associate genius with self-inflicted sorrow and happiness with a woman's embrace of her domestic calling.

W R I T I N C I N T H E M A R K E T P L A C E A N D T H E L A W C O U R T S

Even Romantics who wished to associate literature with isolated poets holding mute converse with their souls had to acknowledge that in real life the writer did not dwell in solitude but confronted, and was accountable to, a crowd. For many commentators the most revolutionary aspect of the age was the spread of literacy and the dramatic expansion of the potential audi-

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