Social
Gothic
Ambiguity
Novel
1n
a
WYLIE SYPHER
I
NCREASINGLY
criticism attempts to determine as fully as possible
the larger references made by any literary work. Although "romanti–
cism" flourished in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pre–
cisely while the bourgeoisie were commanding economic, social, and
political power, its psychological and aesthetic contexts have so far
been more attentively observed than its socio-economic contexts.
Especially does the recent
Romanticism and the Modern Ego
by
Jacques Barzun demonstrate how a great many academic platitudes
about "rpmanticism" can be discussed, to all appearance indefinitely,
without much regard to these socio-economic contexts that identify
romanticism as a bourgeois (in contrast to feudal ) phenomenon.
Even if Barzun denies the equation of romanticism with such im–
pulses as sentimentalism, primitivism, or mediaevalism in favor of a
conception of romanticism as a creative force, his whole treatment,
like that of literary historians preceding him, ignores the criticism of
G. V. Plekhanov and those who see in the movement a superficial,
inconclusive rebellion against bourgeois civilization. According to
Plekhanov, the bourgeois-romantic senses the banality of bourgeois
existence and the deficiencies in bourgeois morality without, however,
being actually antagonistic to the social relations that give rise to this
morality.
It is true of major romantic writers, as it
is
true of all writers of
large significance, that the contexts within which they create are
more extended, less explicitly and determinately established, than is
the case with writers who evoke limited or stereotyped responses.
If
one might isolate an instance of British romanticism that is "pure" to
the point of being archetypal-an instance necessarily somewhat
stereotyped and limited in its evocations-and place it within its
socio-economic contexts, the attempt might be worthwhile simply
because it would disclose certain ambiguities arising from the incon–
clusiveness of the romantic revolt against the bourgeoisie.
