During the Romanticism period authors such as Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson, attempted to show specific themes. Popular themes in the Romantic period are conflicts of a puritanical mandated patriarchal society, moral conflicts, evil in society, conflicts with how women are held to a double standard to men, and faith. The website: http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/ent/A0860797.html, which gives a precise definition of the “basic aims of romanticism.” The aimes are “various” but are generally described as, “a return to nature and to belief in the goodness of humanity; the rediscovery of the artist as a supremely individual creator; the development of nationalistic pride; and the exaltation of the senses and emotions over reason and intellect” (http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/ent/A0860797.html). In addition, romanticism also was seen as a “philosophical revolt against rationalism” – a theory that through reason alone we are able to arrive at truths about the world (http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/ent/A0860797.html).
Art during the Romanticism Period was described by a Philosopher of the time, Hegel, to represent “genuine beauty” (Stephen Houlgate). Hegel sums up Romantic Art nicely, “romantic art gives expression to a freedom of the spirit whose true home lies beyond art. Romantic art can be compared to the human face which discloses the spirit and personality within. Romantic art actually discloses the inner spirit” (Stephen Houlgate). Features of romantic paintings could include spiritual beauty, a specific virtue such are love, loyalty, self-determination. William Blake is a well known poet and artist of this period. The following is a poem by William Blake:
SONGS OF INNOCENCE by WILLIAM BLAKE
DIVINE IMAGE
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
All pray in their distress,
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is God our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is man, his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face;
And Love, the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine:
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew.
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too. (William Blake)
Blake's biblical art work is his most famous. His most famous paintings are the four depictions of Satan in the “Book of Revelations,” from the Bible. The group of paintings are titled “The Great Red Dragon” (pictured below), ("Artcyclopedia").
Realism is just as the name suggests, what is real and needs no interpretation. The subjects in both literature and art are characters of every day life with everyday problems. Science played an integral part during this time especially in Philosophy. There were many technological advances which also influenced literature. Many writers wrote about life with complete honesty. They wrote on the brutalities of life, human suffering, and applied new discoveries of technology in their writings as part of the cause of suffering, ie; the railroad expansion project. Realism shed light on controversial issues of the time, such as oppression of women, and women's rights. At the end of the Realist movement Modernism exploded onto the scene.
Modernism is characterized as experimentation, manipulation of form, gapped, fragmented and by the realization that there are no truths. “Marx, Freud, and Darwin had unsettled the human subject from its previously secure place at the centre of at least the human universe, and had revealed its unwitting dependence on laws and structures outside its control and sometimes beyond its knowledge” (Christina Howells). The loss of the center and universal truths is imbued in modern literature. There is also a parallel to History that affect modern literature. The modernism is the questioning on how we got to that point in History, death, and destruction. The answers artists and authors give is meant to cause uneasiness on their readers and observers. The main historical events occurring at the time of Modernism are both the World Wars. Modernism was the anti-war, and anti-art movement in both literature and art.
The anti-war, anti-art movements are placed into a subcategory of Modernism titled Dadaism. The social outrage circumventing the wars spawned Dadaism. Artist of this period rejected the war, and “felt that art was the intellectual byproduct of a civilization and if the world was making this horrible war then the art of these terrible cultures should be eradicated. Dadaism was created to end art, to end painting, to end writing and to end music” (Jeff Robin). One of the most well known Dadaist authors of the time was Tristan Tzara. Tzara wrote a titled, “Dada Manifesto.” In the following passage of his manifesto Tzara leaves no question as to what Dada is and what it represents:
Tzara opened the door for Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. The main character Jake a war veteran wounded regards the war as “a calamity for civilization” (Hemingway 24). Dada is anarchy. Literature, such as Hemingway's, Sun Also Rises, is anarchical. The reader is not given introductions when characters other than the narrator are going to speak. Each character in Hemingway's book represent different aspects of hatred. Robert Cohn, is characterized as Jewish, a romantic, and someone who freely shares his emotions. He is the most hated character in the novel. Just as modernism was about hating or rejecting all conventionalities of romanticism, so too were the characters of The Sun Also Rises. Tzara says, “Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada...” Lady Brett Ashley, represents the rejection of love, because the war caused the loss of her true love. Tzara speaks of Dada as the “trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record,” and the word Hemingway uses is Jew, when Mike, who is Scottish, who hates the English, says to Cohn, “Take that sad Jewish face out of here” (181). The novel is “spontaneity” is every time the characters jump from one place to another. The reader is never able to feel settled because the characters in the novel never feel settled. The same goes for Dada art. Artists of the Dada movement were generally WWI veterans “who had grown cynical of humanity after seeing what men were capable of doing to each other on the battlefields of Europe. They created art in which chance and randomness formed the basis of creation. With the order of the world destroyed by World War I, Dada was a way to express the confusion that was felt by many people as their world was turned upside down” (http://www.huntfor.com/arthistory/C20th/dadaism.htm). A painter of Dada art is Max Ernst. Ernst served in a German artillery brigade. He painted watercolors such as the untitled one below. Ernst paints a plane and 2 soldiers carrying another soldier who has lost his legs (seen below).
(Tristan Tzara)It is said that “Ernst wasn't just a dadaist, he was part of the war machine to which dada responded” (Tyler Green).
By the dawn of World War II, many of the European Dadaists who remained had fled or been forced into exile in the United States, some died in death camps under Hitler, who personally disliked the kind of radical art that dada represented. The movement became less active as post-World War II optimism led to new movements in art and literature” (http://www.artinthepicture.com/styles/Dadaism/). Although the dadaists thought of their movement as the annihilation of art, and literature, they actually provided the springboard to Surrealism, where many Dadaist artists continued on their creative ideas.
”L'Ange du foyer ou Le Triomphe du surrealisme”, by Max Ernst
Surrealism is another subcategory of Modernism. It is categorized as a release of the “mind that emphasizes the critical and imaginative powers of the unconscious” (http://www.linkism.com/visual_artists/famous-artists/surrealism/surrealism.htm). One of the most prominent painters of Surrealism is Salvadore Dali (pictured bottom left, "Persistence of Memory"). His paintings have dreamlike objects and is like being in a fantasy atmosphere. Other painters, such as Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, who was mentioned above as an artist of Dadaism, made the move to Surrealism as well (pictured top left). Surrealist literary authors, such as Gertrude Stein, were “interested in the associations and implications of words rather than their literal meanings; their works are thus extraordinarily difficult to read,” (http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/surrealism.aspx). Surrealism is still prevalent today, and can best be seen in advertising (http://www.toffsworld.com/art_artists_painters/surrealist_surrealism_art_movement.htm).The shift from Romanticism to Modernism was a shift felt all over the world. The ideals of faith, the patriarchal society, and oppression of women are gone. We are still feeling the impact of war, as was evident on September 11, 2001, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Art is still being affected by such devastations on humanity. Art is our escape from such devastation, and maybe that is why Harry Potter is so popular. In Harry Potter, we are given a world that is full of magic, where good always prevails, and there is no question as to who is evil and who is bad. In the real world there are no certainties, all there is, is fragments of peace pieced in between fragments of war. As long as humanity is at war the collage of life will be in a continual process of broken fragements.
Works Cited:
"Artcyclopedia The Great Red Dragon Paintings of William Blake." Artcyclopedia. 2007. John Malyon/Artcyclopedia, Web. 27 Sep 2009
C.D. Merriman, . "Literature Network William Blake." The Literature Network. 2005. Jalic Inc., Web.27 Sep 2009.
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