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Romanticism and Mortal Consciousness Romanticism and Mortal Consciousness The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Johnston, Richard Rutherford. 2013. Romanticism and Mortal Consciousness. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10973927 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA © 2013 Richard Rutherford Johnston All rights reserved. Dissertation Adviser: Professor James Engell Richard Rutherford Johnston Romanticism and Mortal Consciousness Abstract The Romantic period coincides with a fundamental shift in Western attitudes toward death and dying. This dissertation examines how Romantic poets engage this shift. It argues that “Romantic mortal consciousness” – a form of mortal reflection characteristic of English Romantic poetry – is fundamentally social and political in its outlook and strikingly similar to what one might now call a liberal social consciousness. During the Romantic period, mortally conscious individuals, less able or willing to depend on old spiritual consolations, began to regard Death not as the Great Leveler of society but rather as a force that sealed social inequality into the records of history. Intimations of mortality forced one to look beyond the self and, to quote Keats, “think of the Earth.” This dissertation considers the development of Romantic mortal consciousness. Death’s transformation from the Great Leveler of social inequality into its crystallizing agent is evident in the Romantic response to Graveyard School poetry. This is the subject of my first chapter, which focuses on Gray’s “Elegy” and Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage.” Chapter Two examines Lord Byron’s Cain, where mortal consciousness transforms Cain’s personal lament about mortality into a protest on behalf of a doomed race. Cain anticipates death studies by dramatizing the shift from what Ariès calls the “death of the self” to the “death of the other” and by recognizing that mortality is essentially a cultural construct. However, the other idea of mortality as a solitary reckoning with death does not disappear entirely. Poems by Hemans and Keats, the subjects of my third and iii Dissertation Adviser: Professor James Engell Richard Rutherford Johnston fourth chapters, show how the “death of the self” flourishes as the other side of Romantic mortal consciousness. Romantic mortal consciousness has centripetal and centrifugal aspects. It exhorts the ruminative soul to engage sympathetically with the suffering of others. At the same time, it turns the soul inwards, bringing the fate of the self into focus. One aim of this dissertation is to unify these aspects through an analysis of the sublime. In Chapter Five, which focuses on Byron and Smith, I illustrate the connection between mortal consciousnesses, social or political consciousness, and aesthetic awareness. iv Table of Contents Contents - v Dedication - vi Acknowledgements - vii Introduction: The Construction of Mortality - 1 Chapter One: Gray, Wordsworth, and The Romantic Graveyard School - 15 Chapter Two: Byron, Cain, and the Birth of Mortal Consciousness - 83 Chapter Three: Hemans, the Death of the Other, and the Life of the Self - 129 Chapter Four: Keats, Mortal Consciousness, and the Vale of Soul-Making - 185 Chapter Five: Byron, Smith, and Sublimity – The Aesthetics of Mortal Consciousness - 259 Coda - 319 Bibliography - 325 v Dedication Family, friends, mentors, colleagues, and students. vi Acknowledgements I could not have completed this dissertation without the unflagging support of my advisers Jim Engell, Elaine Scarry, and Isobel Armstrong. I would never have begun it were it not for the many teachers who instructed and inspired me: Susan Wolfson, Erik Gray, Fiona Stafford, Duncan Wu, and Lucy Newlyn. Graduate school was not the easiest of adventures. I would like to thank my friends Jacob Jost, Ingrid Nelson, Suparna Roychoudhury, Yulia Ryzhik, and Sarah Wagner-McCoy. I especially wish to thank Cabot House and the many friends I made there while serving for five years as Resident Tutor: Michael Aktipis, Stephanie Aktipis, Michael Baran, David Byers, Jill Constantino, Fiery Cushman, Monalisa Gharavi, Cheryl Harris, Jay Harris, Jess Joslin, Rakesh Khurana, Stephanie Khurana, the late Susan Livingston, Beth Musser, Amanda Pepper, and Stephen Vider. I would also like to thank the many, many students who made Cabot House the best part of my graduate schools. Semper cor. Andrew Howe and Ian Merrifield deserve a special word of thanks, as does the late Ariel Shaker: “Farewell, Angelina.” While completing this dissertation I have had the pleasure of teaching at the United States Military Academy at West Point. I would like to thank my friends and colleagues in the Department of English and Philosophy, especially Dave Barnes, Scott Chancellor, Sean Cleveland, Ian Fishback, Karin Gresham, Erin Hadlock, Jason Hoppe, Pete Molin, Kevin Schieman, Scott Krawczyk, Mike Stoneham, Nick Utzig, Barrett Ward, and Joe West. Alina Schieman and Katie Schieman have my most heartfelt thanks. vii Before going to graduate school, I had the pleasure of teaching for one year at Wofford College and would like to thank Dan Maultsby and my friends in the English Department, especially Vivian Fisher and Jim Neighbors. I would like to give special thanks to Marilyn Gaull. Finally, I wish to thank Princeton University, the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission, Oxford University, St. John’s College, Harvard University, the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program, and West Point. viii Introduction: The Construction of Mortality Toward the end of January 1818, Keats composed what was to be his last sonnet. The poem reads: When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain, Before high piled books, in charactry, Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain; When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the fairy power Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink. (1-14)1 “When I Have Fears” is fundamentally a poem about death. It is also about literature and love – about the literary and erotic pursuits that death may, at any moment, put an end to. These themes are deeply intertwined, for the “high piled books” the speaker imagines never writing are works of “high romance,” a genre about which Keats had already grown deeply ambivalent precisely on account of its “unreflecting” quality, that is to say, its detachment 1 John Keats, The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (London: Heinemann, 1978). from the darker aspects of human experience. Indeed, just a few days previously, Keats had composed another sonnet bidding farewell to “golden-tongued Romance” (1), peremptorily ordering it to “shut up [its] olden pages, and be mute” (4) because he had other literary business to attend to: Adieu! for, once again, the fierce dispute Betwixt Damnation and impassion’d clay Must I burn through; once more humbly assay The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearean fruit. (5-8) The “fierce dispute” (5) to which the poet refers is the one dramatized by Shakespeare in King Lear, a tragedy I shall have reason to assay later in this project. I have begun my project with Keats’ sonnet “When I Have Fears” because it exemplifies the intrusion into everyday life of something I shall define as mortal consciousness. The poem evokes those moments when our awareness of mortality arises from the background noise of life and, suddenly standing there “plain as a wardrobe,” speaks to us in somber tones, reminding us of the irrevocable truth that our lives are finite and we shall die.2 I believe Keats’ sonnet also expresses a particular manifestation of mortal consciousness that one frequently encounters in British Romantic literature, and which, for this reason, I shall call Romantic mortal consciousness. This is an intimation of mortality that, besides simply drawing one’s attention to the inexorable fate of the self, also encourages one to look beyond the self, engage sympathetically with human hardship and suffering, and critically examine the forces causing, aiding, or abetting it. A world, as Keats would later describe it sixteen months later in “Ode to a Nightingale,” marked by “the weariness, the fever, and the fret / […] where men sit and hear each other groan” (23-4). 2 Philip Larkin, “Aubade,” in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). 2 There are, to be sure, instances of what I call Romantic mortal consciousness prior to the Romantic period. When Lear, alone on the heath, says O, I have ta’en Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just (3.4.33-7)3 he is expressing an idea that will become a leitmotif in Romantic poetry. Lear realizes that he has failed as King to attend to and remedy or assuage the socioeconomic inequality of his kingdom, thereby contributing to a vast, unwritten legacy of poverty and suffering. In Chapter Four, which attempts to trace the development of Keats’ mortal consciousness, I shall argue that Keats was thinking about Shakespeare’s humbled king while composing his famous letter of May 3, 1818. In this letter, Keats develops his famous metaphor of life as a “Mansion of Many Apartments” in which the thinking individual, declining from innocence into experience, gradually becomes aware of the “dark passages” of human experience in fallen world.
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