Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790-1840

Pfau, Thomas. Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790-1840.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.572 pp. $65.00 hardcover. Emotions are often ascribed to a private, interior realm of experience. Since the late 18th century, however, a number of philosophers and theorists have pointed to the inherently social and communicative nature of emotions. In Romantic Moods, Thomas Pfau draws on this speculative tradition to present Romantic literary writing as giving a voice to a pre-reflexive, historically contingent, and rhetorically sedimented structure of feeling that is best understood not in terms of momentary passions but rather as a broadly shared "mood." According to Pfau, "mood speaks... to the deep-structural situatedness of individuals within history as something never actually intelligible to them in fully coherent, timely, and definitive form" (7). As a result, mood is mediated most effectively through aesthetic forms rather than through logical propositions. Lyric poetry, in particular, is able to convey a knowledge of mood while drawing attention, through its formal structure, to the fact that such knowledge was first disclosed as feeling or emotion. Pfau describes his study as "a psychohistorical narrative of European romanticism in three successive stages," focusing on paranoia, trauma, and melancholy (1). The first section, on paranoia, takes its cue from Eric Santner's analysis of the Daniel Paul Schreber case, especially Santner's emphasis on the close connection between Schreber's paranoiac memoir and the fin-de-siecle crisis of authority. Pfau locates a similar crisis in the 1790s, as the British old regime underwent a series of rapid and profoundly disorienting social and political transformations. In this situation, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, and William Godwin gravitated toward what might be described as a paranoid style of writing, which blamed contemporary troubles on nefarious but unseen forces that had conspired against a prior unspoiled condition-defined by Burke as "tradition" and by Blake as a pre-Christian spirituality. This paranoid style was also on display during the trial of the London Corresponding Society, as prosecutors presented even the most modest efforts at constitutional reform as contributing, through a complex chain of causation, to a secret regicidal plot. In the second section, on trauma, Pfau interprets selected poems by Wordsworth and Eichendorff as conveying a (belated) awakening to rupture or loss, thereby alerting readers to their situatedness in a broader dynamic of historical change. Wordsworth's pastoral ballad "Michael" (1800) is particularly important in this context, for it highlights not only the destructive effects of the market on a farmer's dreams of "timeless property and absolute economic stability," but also the illusory and ultimately self-serving nature of such desires in the face of changing economic realities (208). …