Novels are fictive. Novels of the romantic genre, it seems to me, are necessarily bucolic or halcyon. Reality
portrayed isn't the sobering tragic but rather the endearing pastoral.
When the tragic occurs within romanticism, I sometimes see the
particular romanticism as 'wrong-headed romanticism'. Some how,
mistakenly, the tragic got mixed in with the romantic. The same
attitude of mine exists regarding other qualities i.e. absurdity,
deceptions, etc. It seems as though when I read romanticism, any kind
of non-romantic quality belies the romanticism. As if only idealized,
pastoral, utopian can rightfully exist within a romantic prose.
It seems plain to me that this view of romanticism is biased and
mistaken. Just as there exists
various kinds of temperaments of characters within a novel, so too do
qualities of romantic, tragic, absurd , etc exist side by side within a
novel. Of
course romanticism has a quality specific to itself; An aura of utopia; Security as opposed to
vulnerability; Perspectives which are not jaded because the
causes of jadedness have not yet occurred for the characters.
My prejudice is that in the face of the real qualities of tragic, etc. ,
I dismiss romanticism as being 'bumpkin-headed'; A pollyanna work,
fanciful. The pastoral seems 'bumpkin-headed'. It gives romanticism it's fraudulent, mistaken quality. However romanticism is just as valid as other qualities of fictive depictions.
"The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house,
and the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral.
Grandmother called my attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with
copper, which hung by a leather thong from her belt. This, she said,
was her rattlesnake cane. I must never go to the garden without a heavy
stick or a corn-knife; she had killed a good many rattlers on her way
back and forth. A little girl who lived on the Black Hawk road was
bitten on the ankle and had been sick all summer.1
The reader may ask about the above
passage; 'How, in such rural, less knowledgeable medical of the time,
is it that being bitten by a rattlesnake causes only sickness and not
death?
If the passage seems fanciful, then
maybe we should ask; 'Where is the threat of nuclear annihilation?' or
'What would Freud conclude?' since those concerns have, in today's
world, validity. It would be ridiculous - not to mention egocentric - of our time and era to ask those questions of a different era.
This
benefit to reading romanticism is in realizing this limit of our knowledge. What seems
mundane or mistaken of 100 years ago only implies that what we are
concerned with in these times will seem mundane or mistaken 100 years
hence. Maybe the issue of nuclear
annihilation will be irrelevant to the world of 100 years from now. Or
Freudian topics will be antiquated by then. In effect, those current
concerns aren't, necessarily, any more 'real' than the concerns of
romanticism. It's a temperate thought.
Getting beyond the 'antiquities'
of the past to an assaying of this 'antiquatedness'
is not very difficult. For example, in realizing that the less fashion
conscious characters self-identify based on values other than fashion,
or that a shared morality albeit more narrow-minded exists, or that a
local economy is less
demanding of resources, etc. Characters whose mindset is of
the day to day functionalities of feeding and sheltering themselves is
no less a reality than the contemporary characters of 'realism' ruminating on what life is about. We all make
choices. Some people - as exampled by the characters and settings of
romanticism - choose a less conspicuous lifestyle.
I suppose the best benefit of romanticism is it's alternativeness.
Post modernism for example is often seen as a development in literature.
Post-modernism can be more circuitous and perplexing than romanticism.
So romanticism provides an alternative way of viewing literature. As
if post-modernism were, metaphorically, a perplexing
boyfriend/girlfriend of which one decided a return to a previous
boyfriend/girlfriend of pastoral, romantic topics was a heck of a lot
more contentful and sensible.
So,
there are benefits to reading romanticism for someone like myself who
doesn't have an actual affinity for romanticism. Of course it's a bit
of a token or obligatory reading - one which replaces my preferred
choices - so I don't read much of it.
1 My Antonia, Willa Cather, pg. 16, Barnes and Noble Classics, ©2003