Studies in Romanticism

The title of Zoe Beenstock’s recent book—The Politics of Romanticism— cannot be faulted for its lack of ambition. After a wave of criticism that sought to position Romantic authors in terms of their flight from history and politics, recent studies have endeavored in various ways to reconstruct the precise nature of the political ideas and engagements of Romantic authors. Beenstock’s book clearly places itself within this development, focusing on how Rousseau’s idea of the social contract continued to fuel Romantic critiques and conceptions of community. The Politics of Romanticism addresses an important lacuna in the field; while Rousseau’s general influence on Romanticism is well established, the influence of his social contract theory remains underexamined. One issue with Beenstock’s approach, however, is hinted at already in the generality of her title, which simply cannot be sustained over the course of her study, constantly threatening to outrun the focus on Rousseau that she attempts to maintain throughout. Her study is at its best when it painstakingly traces the ways in which Rousseau’s social contract theory is disseminated, refracted and rethought in specific Romantic texts. It is less effective when it sets about to survey in broad terms Rousseau’s legacy, and to exhaustively catalogue all the possible ways in which Rousseau lives on in the Romantic period.

A good example of the latter tendency is evident in Beenstock’s first chapter, where she juxtaposes Rousseau with a variety of other thinkers of the social, including Hobbes, various Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, and German Idealists. As this would be a tall order in a larger study, much less in a single chapter, Beenstock is thus forced to start from a highly general basis of comparison, arguing that “the common ground among these otherwise varied ideologies is the new understanding of society that begins with individuals in a state of nature, who form agreements to serve their private interests” (17). In short, the question that unites them, in Beenstock’s account, is how cohesion between individuals is achieved, how sociability is established, in the midst of the emergence of conflicting and potentially agonistic demands within the polis itself. For Beenstock, each tradition reconciles what Rousseau calls the individual with the general will, providing various accounts of how this is possible, and of the difficulties and dangers involved. While her first chapter yields some important insights (such as the claim that Rousseau inherits Hobbes’s focus on the fragmentation of the social, which is held together by a surreptitious violence) its focus is simply too diffuse to provide an effective introduction to what follows. On a single page, for example, we move from a discussion of [End Page 143] the Enlightenment philosophies of Ferguson, on to Mandeville, and then to Hume, in the space of three paragraphs (25). The result reads more like a broad survey of a set of tendencies than a focused argument about how aspects of these writings remain germane to our understanding of the politics of Romanticism.

The book acquires a sharper focus in the second chapter, which is devoted to what Beenstock calls Rousseau’s “literary politics.” The chapter’s task is twofold. First, it shows how “an alienated persona migrates from Rousseau’s political theory, through his literary texts, and into Romanticism” (45). Second, it shows how literature, in Rousseau, “replaces the society which has produced such a passionate need for fragmentation and aesthetic withdrawal, forming a new contract among its members” (51). The first aspect of this twofold task sets up what will become the main focus of the chapters that follow—namely, how Rousseau’s Romantic literary and philosophical descendants adhere to or disavow Rousseau’s conception of the social contract. The second aspect constitutes one of the book’s most promising and interesting claims: that literature itself becomes the site for rethinking this problematic, for developing a new form of “contract” that supercedes or replaces the social one. Beenstock’s close readings of some of Rousseau’s more literary works, such as Julie, are profitably juxtaposed with his political works by emphasizing the way Rousseau’s literary generic experimentation subverts the individual/general will problematic that he examines in the Social Contract. The chapter also paves the way for a discussion of why it is literature, rather than philosophy, that becomes the arena in which Rousseau’s political ideas are addressed in Romanticism. Beenstock’s claim is that, for Rousseau, “poetry, novels, rococo landscaping, and other aesthetic forms . . . provide the only means of articulating an individual perspective . . . in a society which consumes its members by subjecting them to arid Enlightenment standards of coherence” (54). While this would seem to place literature squarely on the side of a defense of the individual against the general, it also suggests a focus that might profitably guide a reading of the legacy of Rousseau’s “literary politics” in Romanticism.

The chapters that follow on Coleridge and Wordsworth don’t always address this aspect of Rousseau’s legacy, preferring instead to return to the more traditional problem of the influence of Rousseau’s ideas on a range of different texts by each author. The chapter on Coleridge explores this through brief close readings of Coleridge’s conversation poems, as well as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with passing references to his prose works. The attempt is a sweeping account of the various ways in which Coleridge grapples with the problem of the individual’s relation to the social by either directly or indirectly channeling the issues raised in Rousseau’s [End Page 144] social contract theory. The highlight of the chapter is Beenstock’s reading of Rime, where she argues that the poem formally enacts the isolation of the mariner without any reconciliation with the community from which he has been exiled. Unfortunately, the twin imperatives of her study start to interfere with each other here, since a great deal more could be said about how the formal dimensions of Coleridge’s poetry enact a different conception of the social contract. By the end of the chapter we are left with a broad claim that attempts to encompass a wide swath of Coleridge’s oeuvre: “Coleridge’s use of hybrid literary forms that combine poetry and philosophy, encompassing the lyrical/theoretical prose of The Friend, his conversation poems, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, suggests his concern with gaps between individuals and the social body which he does not try to mend into a greater whole” (95).

The same could be said for Beenstock’s fourth chapter on Wordsworth, which focuses on a reading of Rousseau’s influence on the second half of Wordsworth’s Prelude, specifically the latter’s examination of how “love of nature” is supposed to lead to “love of Man.” This chapter makes a clear case for understanding Wordsworth as an heir of Rousseau, though here, too, its exhaustive approach is more suggestive than diagnostic. Beenstock reads Wordsworth’s critique of Godwin, for example, as an “exaggerated version” of a criticism directed, in fact, at Rousseau (122). These important local insights about the poem’s Rousseauvian background, along with their consequences for understanding Wordsworth’s poem as its own form of literary “social contract,” are unfortunately dropped in favor of a brief reading of The Excursion that only reinforces similar points made earlier in the chapter. In both the Coleridge and Wordsworth chapters, a less exhaustive, more focused approach would likely have yielded a more convincing account of the specific ways in which Rousseau continues to haunt both authors, clandestinely or not.

These tendencies do not affect the last two chapters, which turn to Rousseau’s legacy in key prose works of the period—specifically Godwin’s Fleetwood and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The final chapter on Frankenstein in particular is a focused analysis of how the monster’s desire for sociality, along with his reduction to total isolation stage a critique of Rousseau’s notion of the general will. By reading the monster as a stand-in for the “elements of society that are left out of the social contract” (161), Beenstock convincingly argues that the novel’s focus on his exclusion from any community is a riposte to Rousseau’s understanding of the conditions that produce social cohesion. This time, however, Beenstock persuasively demonstrates the way the literary work under examination does in fact develop a “literary politics” distinct from Rousseau’s influence, since the chapter analyzes the monster as a nightmarish version of Rousseau’s general [End Page 145] will, a body composed of singular elements that allegorizes the monstrous notion of the in-organicism of the amalgamated body politic itself. In doing so, Frankenstein is shown to advance a different conception of the social contract altogether.

To conclude, The Politics of Romanticism is inherently ambitious but uneven. While doubtless an informed and thoughtful contribution to our understanding of how Rousseau haunts Romanticism, it has the effect of leaving one wishing for even further pursuit of the consequences of its specific local insights about, and close readings of, Romanticism’s “literary politics” and its legacy. [End Page 146]