ROMANTICISM, INDIVIDUALISM AND IDEAS OF THE SELF

While critics suggest various dates for the age of Romanticism and some reject the notion of Romanticism as a period altogether, most describe the Romantic condition as intimately tied to individuality and notions of selfhood. This seems to fit the phenomena of Romanticism, ranging from the celebration of fantasy and irrationality to inwardness and Romantic love, and from political disinterest to the solitude in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings. However, this emphasis on individuality is only half of the story of

a condition at whose core can be seen, rather than an actual self, the mere compulsion to have a self. No preceding age had placed such pressure on the individual to have, experience, exhibit, prove, live and perform his or her selfhood. For the Romantics, the self is not simply there, but is yet to be brought about by the individual, each individual facing the task of institutionalizing his own self. While Romanticism is certainly not a united front, the overall Romantic element in this response is the conceptualization of a spectral self—a self that, at least to some degree, is understood to be comprehensible by means of perception. As the optical metaphor of reflection indicates, the Romantic self is, in its essence, a matter of appearance. Thus, proving the existence of the self (even to oneself) requires some externalization and phenomenalization of the self that allows an observatory, perhaps even visual, relationship to it. While this emphasis on the visual and modes of appearance explains the underlying connection between Romanticism, the arts and aesthetics, it also has distinct implications for political, legal and economic thought, ranging from discussions surrounding political representation and equal rights to the legal assurance of individual property rights.

Entries A-Z 555 Especially in the early Romantic period, the intellectual centres can be localized in

time and space. In both of the key sites, namely in the German states and England, but also in France, the years between 1797 and 1800 were decisive. These years mark the flourish of the philosophically attuned Jena Romanticism or German Early Romanticism (Deutsche Frühromantik) (the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Tieck and, along with them, Schleiermacher), fuelled also by the atheism accusation against Fichte, which led to the 1797 suspension of his professorship in Jena. Geographically close to Jena, the Weimar classicism of Goethe and Schiller was seen for a long time as standing in opposition to Romanticism, although many scholars have doubted the heuristic value of a rigid border between classicism and Romanticism. German Idealism (SCHELLING, Hegel [see HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM]) was also a close relative of Romanticism. In 1798, Wordsworth and COLERIDGE—referred to, along with SOUTHEY, as the Lake Poets due to their later residence in the Lake District—travelled to Germany, where they were exposed to Kantian philosophy. It was here that Wordsworth began work on the Prelude. Romanticism also reached some writers of the previous generation: for example GODWIN’S Enquirer (1797) marked the radical anarchist’s move to the aesthetic. Curiously, all of the key earlier Romantics (CHATEAUBRIAND, Coleridge, CONSTANT, Hölderlin, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Novalis, FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL, Schleiermacher, DE STAËL, Tieck and Wordsworth) were born in the years around 1770. Other centres of Romantic thought include London, Berlin (E.T.A.Hoffmann and Varnhagen von Ense’s circle, including the Humboldts), Paris and Bayreuth (Jean Paul [Richter]), while some Romantics such as Walter Scott favored the countryside (‘Abbotsford’, Scotland). In France, the notion of Romanticism marks less of a distinct period, although several key writers have been considered Romantics (in addition to Chateaubriand and de Stael: Baudelaire, Hugo and George Sand). In Italy, Romanticism arrived delayed by means of an essay by Madame de Staël in 1816, an essay urging the Italians to follow emerging German ideas at a time when parts of Italy were occupied by

a German-speaking power. It should not come as a surprise that key thinkers (Manzoni, Leopardi) remained at a distance to what they perceived as Romanticism. Romanticism also came a little later to Russia and Poland, but became a major movement often tied to national ideals (Lermentov, Pushkin; Mickiewiz, Slowacki). In the USA, Charles Brockden Brown, followed by Melville and Poe, discovered the mental space in correlation with the geographical open space of the Americas.

ROMANTICISM, INDIVIDUALISM AND IDEAS OF THE SELF