On The Edge of Forward Bound

In The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, the main character is largely considered disreputable for her strange habit of going to the edge of the sea wall and staring into the distance, wondering, maybe hoping, that her past (love) might reappear on the horizon. Great change often makes me feel like I am walking the length of the seawall in my mind. That I just finished teaching Macbeth whose ghosts are notoriously haunting, or that I am preparing to teach a course on Romanticism may of course be exacerbating this feeling.

David Caspar Friedrich, Der Mönch an der Meer

I have moved in the last week, which meant that besides packing 45 wine boxes of books and rediscovering 4 I had hidden unpacked in my closet, I also sorted through the last few years of my life including postcards from museum trips I have attended, books, catalogs that I am still meaning to read, and the same things that I hide every time I move because I am still not sure whether to discard such family mementos.

The nice thing about the Romantics is that they truly understood the power of the emotional realm and both in literature and art presented the fullness of its passion. Perhaps now, it easily falls into kitsch, but after the rationality of the Enlightenment, in the context of all the revolutions at the end of the 18th century and continuing turmoil at the beginning of the 19th, the personal catastrophe of consciousness was a worthy topic.

Girodet, Ghosts of French Heroes (1801)

Without any of the same drama of that historical period, moving, change of any kind–even the best kind of change which offers the career one hoped to create, the love one hoped to find, the satisfaction of dreams and all that marvelous stuff–makes me feel like ghosts are running up and down the dusty, sepia corridors of my mind, opening and shutting doors, while I stand still at the edge of the seawall staring out into the distance.

The advantage of kitschy Romantic art is that it puts the personal melodrama into humorous perspective. I'm not really a fainting desolate mad woman, nor drifting from my body towards the heavens above. Despite the holidays, you are probably not going to lose your mind from holiday cheer, murder the masses who have forgotten your birthday/anniversary/triumph, or drown in end of year of business accounting, or dissolve under the weight of delivering packages across the world in one night, or even just your stuff to another country. If you feel like you might, perhaps a little Romantic art, even the best stuff, might make you smile:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Victoria and Albert Museum of Art, London, England
If you are in London, by all means do go to the Romanticism show at the Tate. I saw it last year and it is wonderful.

Without completely spoiling the ending of Fowles wonderful novel, she does of course create a wonderfully independent life for herself, despite the trauma she permitted herself. In fact and fiction, there is a place for acknowledging the acting out of certain kinds of melodrama, on the condition that it is in due course surpassed with far better theater, acting left behind for the directing and stage-managing of the present performance.