ROMANTIC MODERNISM AND THE SELF


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ROMANTIC MODERNISM ESPOUSES and rests upon a
distinction between formal rationality and emotion, intuition, spirituality,
and individual expressive freedom. This distinction is reflected
in the Romantic Modernist view of the appropriate relationship
between the individual and society, which is predicated upon a distinction
between a true self and a false self, with the latter understood
in terms of the social roles that society imposes upon and
demands of the individual. This societal imposition, in turn, is seen
as a violation of the self ’s integrity and the individual’s expressive
freedom. Indeed, a “feeling of being violated by an inimical society
. . . lies at the root of Romantic alienation,”1 an alienation born of
the Romantic Modernist’s apprehensive “consciousness of the void
beneath the conventional structures of reality.”2
This premise of the self ’s violation at the hands of an “inimical society,”
however, is but the dark side of the Romantic Modernist world
view. This “negative Romanticism” is perhaps most clearly embodied
in American literature by the work of Edgar Allan Poe, whose
oeuvre repeatedly emphasizes the horrors of the age—horrors, in
turn, that resonate with the Romantic Modernist convictions that
rationalism is bankrupt and that the modern self is doomed to
estrangement, isolation, alienation, madness, and so on. Nor are
these uniquely American strains of Romanticism. Indeed, Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein is also a Romantic allegory as to the consequences
of modernity’s heedless reliance on scientific versions of
rationalism.



(Romantic) individual bears special burdens and is presented with
special opportunities as well: “a Romantic figure was first of all faced
with discovering a way to project his will upon the external world in
order to reassert the dominance of human value and thereby his
own identity.”3
This more positive strand of Romanticism is most clearly embodied
in the American Transcendentalist movement of the early nineteenth
century.4 Sharing in negative Romanticism’s dark assessment of the
emerging social structures of bureaucratic industrialism, “the
principal cause of human failure seemed obvious to [the
Transcendentalists]: it was society, that mass of forms and conventions
and institutions by which men were held captive, alienated
from their true selves.”5 Indeed, “for a Transcendentalist all social
structures can become oppressive institutions. . .that perpetuate
themselves by restricting moral choice.”