UPDATE: Page correction Childe Harold and Don Juan

Apologies--I thought I had corrected the page numbers.  Here are the correct ones for the readings:

Childe Harolde's Pilgrimage: 617-622; 628 (Switzerland)-635.

Don Juan: 704 (Don Juan and Haidee)-731.






Childe Harold is on something like the Grand Tour--a ritual for Brit young men of family and wealth, traveling the continent for education and pleasure--

And Childe--well, yes, a prince in waiting, but also suggesting a child.  Thoughts on how the construction of a child-like sensibility looks here, maybe as compared to Blake's work in the Songs?  The passages in Switzerland and the account of the shaping of imagination are one place to start.

It has often been remarked that the Romantics elaborate a poetics of ruin.  The scenarios range from ancient castles to fallen monuments of antiquity to, maybe, various ruins and wrecks of humanity.  We might catch the Gothic side here--ruins often speak of the downfall of traditional powers and tyrannies (the castles, ruined abbeys, and so on).  Ruins may also speak to Gothic interiority--as in Williams' reading of the Mariner, fragmentation and disorientation, a breakdown of self-identity and mastery, some flux of the pre-Oedipal or a similar contact with otherness/alterity.  (Terror and especially horror are attendant emotions, closely linked to the Romantic and Gothic sublimes).  

Any points of contact in Childe Harold? (Consider Waterloo, e.g.)

Manfred provides a great contrast for Childe Harold.

Another issue.  Call it one of sovereignty.  A post-Enlightenment subject breaking free from old authority, from Christian religion and hereditary power and privilege.  Essentially, the free man of liberty, equality, and fraternity,  (as for woman--well, we know it's a complicated tale, starting with Wollstonecraft and Radcliffe).

Man his own sovereign--no god, no master.  How does he situate himself now?  Does he still need the sacred, or has he given all that up in favor of reason? 

We might read Childe Harold performing this free subject, freely traveling, meditating, pondering Europe and history and his own place in the world.

And we might read Manfred doing the same, but in a heightened dramatic treatment and setting.

One potentially frightening and interesting thing--if man is free and sovereign of himself, he makes the rules.  And he gives himself meaning.  But can he do this on his own or does he still need something beyond himself?

So we get sublime fireworks, spirits and the Witch of the Alps and all the rest.  And the role of woman--the notion that as man's other she completes him.  With Byron, this may be interesting given his intense attachment to his half-sister Augusta.  We have reference to her in Childe Harold and in Manfred we see the incest/narcissism scenario intensify.  But is it really narcissism? 

Williams would see this as Male Gothic.  The Romantic Male Gothic exile, in search of a meaning, of a grounding to his unmoored self, comes to woman.  Must "woman" die in some fashion so he can secure an identity?

And of course many things we can say about Byron's voice, style, and language.  Compared to Blake or Coleridge, significant differences.  His facility with verse and verse forms (the Spenserian stanzas, etc.) was and is impressive, brilliant.  So from the technique and craft side, much to consider if you are inclined.
How does the Childe persona get constructed, and how does verse technique play a role there?  And the same for Manfred.

Byron's Don Juan offers further grounds for comparison--our reading there is pp. 704-31.

Goethe Vampire Poem, The Bride of Corinth

Another classic example from the German RomanticsThe Bride of Corinth

Wake Not the Dead (Bride of the Grave), "Tieck"

German Romantic Vampire Tale

Byron's Vampire Tale Fragment

Byron's Vampire Tale

Birth of the Romantic Vampire: Polidori, The Vampyre; and Byron

birth of the british vampire: john polidori, the vampyre

a gothic treat

thoughts on the gothic wordsworth

All of it is brilliant, earnest, inspiring, convincing--unlike, say, Coleridge, also brilliant, but with loose ends showing, fragments and rough edges, sometimes protesting too much...

Male-Gothic, according to Williams and others, runs along the following lines--

Core fantasies of maternal horror--anxieties about overwhelming, engulfment, being devoured by the powerful "mother" (this is a fantasy of the mother, of course, based on infancy and early childhood)...

Systems and paranoias--godlike Faustian genius, access to secret knowledge, powers over life and death (compensatory in light of that maternal fantasy-horror?), at the borderline of madness or over it...

Violent, objectifying, near-pornographic fantasies of controlling and victimizing women.... (see The Monk)

Tales of exile, wandering, alienation from family and society (Frankenstein monster, the Wandering Jew, the vampire)...

Homophobic fantasies of persecution and conspiracy (overlap with paranoia).

Horror effects--material, physical abominations--filth, contagion, blood, dismemberment.  "Fissions"--things fragmenting, swarming, multiplying (like rats, flies, crowds of faces).  "Fusions"--things usually separated are superimposed, overlapped, unnatrually conjoined (monsters and nightmares of many kinds).   

The sublime in the Gothic mode--its excesses and intensities unsettling and unmooring self-identity rather than being brought back around to its affirmation.

Fragmented, unfinished, sometimes incoherent texts (Christabel? The Monk, again)

Though Wordsworth's powerfully synthetic literary rhetoric seems to handle various negations with ease, might we still catch traces of the Gothic in his work?

If nothing else, maybe we can mark how the wilder side of Gothic is disarmed and domesticated?  As if Wordsworth, tremendously resourceful, can pull the emotive intensities of Gothic into his system and put them to his sort of constructive work? 

It would be interesting to find a point or points where such employment doesn't quite take, loose threads in the tight weave he makes... 

Dorothy with those shooting-lights wild eyes--the engulfing Nature of his younger years which cannot be painted--the ghosts of sex and violence that haunt in The Thorn (instead of being staged dramatically)... That ravaged/ravished grove in "Nutting"--

The Wordsworths: the early years