Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790-1840 (review)

Although it is something of a truism that romanticism was dominated by passions and emotions rather than by the faith in reason espoused by the Enlightenment before and by positivism after it, few have undertaken analyzing just what that means or meant. Thomas Pfau is to be congratulated for this erudite, insightful, and provocative attempt to write a history of the feelings that shaped and gave substance to English and German romanticism. While readers of Seminar may be less interested in his illuminating discussion of events in England (particularly good are the linking of Godwin's Caleb Williams with the conspiracy trials of the 1790s and the contextualization of Wordsworth's Michael), everyone working on German romanticism will need to grapple with Pfau's detailed readings of texts as well as with his theoretical presuppositions.

The book is not an easy read, but no study dealing with the topic could be. The introductory chapter makes the difficulties apparent. First, there are terminological problems that are also epistemological ones. What are we to call the domains of awareness that lie outside the received boundaries of knowledge: passions, emotions, feelings, intuition, Stimmungen, Gefühle? Pfau opts for "moods," well aware that any choice will remain provisional and open to debate. Second, there are procedural issues. How and where can moods be localized and documented? Again, the option – to concentrate to lyric poetry as a traditional repository of emotions – is both pragmatic and open to discussion. Finally, there is the matter of which moods to investigate. Pfau argues that the period from 1790 to 1840 can be subdivided into three phases, each characterized by one predominant mood: paranoia (from the French Revolution to 1815), trauma (to 1819–1820), and melancholy (1820–1848, more or less coinciding with what used to be called Biedermeier and Vormärz).

Pfau has not selected texts from the German and English archives evenly. The section on paranoia draws mainly on English materials, even though pertinent German examples are available (Hölderlin and Kleist come to mind). For trauma the German side provides most of the texts (Brentano, Arnim, and especially Eichendorff) as it does for melancholy (mainly Heine). Pfau is a perceptive and subtle reader, and his interpretations of individual poems prove rewarding. Considerable hermeneutic skill is required in order to disclose the connections between the ambient mood and a specific textual moment. Not everyone will agree with each reading. The revision of Eichendorff's notoriously elusive lyrics, taking them as affective responses to the shock of modernization imposed in the wake of the French Revolution, is convincing.

Pfau's efforts at resituating Heine's Buch der Lieder as part of a program of subversive wit deployed against the melancholy induced by the sense of political and social powerlessness in the decades before 1848 is less persuasive. The problem is the hypothesis that melancholy was the dominant mood of the time. Not only does this fit awkwardly with the history of melancholy, which had its heyday when the theory of the four humours still predominated in medicine, but it also ignores a significant alternative mood. Whether one calls it materialism or sensualism, this was a profound shift in the awareness of the body, represented by the emergence of gymnastics. The scandal of Heine was that he introduced the body into literary texts both as content and as performance. Pfau detects this quite well in his close readings, as when he observes that "the furtive gestures and monosyllabic expressions sketched with great economy reveal a complex substratum of passion, sensuality, even rage" (418).

The occlusion of the body in the Vormärz is reinforced by Pfau's reliance on Benjamin, Freud, and Kristeva in developing a theory of melancholy, with a concomitant distancing from tangibles. Thus the earlier insight that "melancholy is to be situated within a historically specific economy of pleasure" (318) gives way, in the case to Heine, to a strangely abstracted model: "Such a mood articulates modernity...