La Questione Romantica > Mito/Storia
Gary Kelly
Alexander Pushkin’s “The History of the Village of Goryukhino”; written in 1830, burlesques several ways in which myth and history were used during the Romantic period, especially in literature. In Pushkin’s text an uneducated and barely literate provincial squire describes how, as a young man inspired by the flowering of a national Russian literature and driven by his «natural inclination», he had embarked on a literary career. He started at the top of the historic and conventional hierarchy of genres and attempted an epic, but one with a Romantic nationalist design, based on the half – mythical, half – historical figure Rurik. The patriotic would-be author abandoned this grand scheme after three verses, however, to write a tragedy on the same subject, then abandoned that for a ballad, and finally managed to complete merely a verse inscription to Rurik’s portrait. Feeling that he was «not born to be a poet» but still desiring to be a writer, he then «felt the urge to descend to prose». At first he essayed the expressive and romantic genre of the pensées, but only one thought came to him, and that was banal even in his own eyes. He then turned to creating fictional stories by embellishing some anecdotes he had collected from various sources – in fact Pushkin’s burlesque of several kinds of Sentimental and Romantic short story, The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin (St Petersburg, 1832) – but his stock of anecdotes was soon exhausted.He then became excited by the idea of attempting a great work in the Romantic mytho-historic vein: «To be the judge, observer and prophet of epochs and nations struck me as the summitof achievement for a writer». Again, however, his ambition quickly faltered as he realized his lack of education, the achievement of others who preceded him, and the inherent difficulties of such a task. He steadily lowered his sights, from a grand history of the world in the vein of Enlightenment «philosophical history», to a national history in the vein of Romantic nationalism, to a local history in the vein of late eighteenth-century antiquarianism practiced in many parts of Europe by petty gentry and local clergy. Finally, however, inspired by the accidental discovery of some fragmentary documents of local chronology, he actually embarked on a history of his own estate’s village of Goryukhino. The text of this work follows and contains the conventional elements of the socio-economic local surveys used at that time to promote economic, social, and cultural modernization. There is a list of sources, a description of the regional topography and economic resources, a cultural and sociological account of human inhabitants, and a historical narrative, apparently incomplete. The narrative briefly exemplifies the history of Russia experienced at the local level, from «legendary times», which were apparently a mythical golden age of equality and prosperity, through a pre-modern period when the peasants went their own way, to imposition by absentee landlords of an extortionate regime that brought the estate to the brink of ruin. The narrative seems to break off just as it would have to recount the resulting peasant rebellion – a potentially dangerous topic during the politically early reign of tsar Nicholas I.
Pushkin’s text burlesques the relation between the use of myth, history, and literature in the Romantic period, in Europe and in its colonies and former colonies. What I argue here is that this use of history and myth, in themselves and in literature, was political in being deisgned to promote the interests of groups struggling for dominance in a rapidly changing social, economic, and political order. To varying degrees and at slower or faster pace in different countries, that order was being reshaped, from some form of monarchic and often multi-ethnic state to some form of the modern liberal nation-state. In various ways, myth (with the emergent discipline of mythography) and historiography were increasingly applied to this project. Literature, however, had even greater usefulness because of its wider social distribution. In order to serve this project, however, literature had to be reformed in certain ways. It had to be embodied in what was supposedly the national language but that was in fact a written dialect of certain classes and only recently constructed or in the process of being constructed. In order to do its cultural and ideological work, literature was also allied with print capitalism and marketed as a form of prestigious cultural consumption. Literature was also increasingly policed and promoted by a professionalized critical establishment, through a range of professional yet commercial periodical publications. Literature re-formed in this way was a powerful and effective means for envisaging, communicating, and promoting the interests of those who wrote and read it.
They were in fact a small minority of the people, comprised predominantly of middle-class professionals, intellectuals, and administrators, in some countries including an element of nobles and gentry. In both their vocations and avocations, these were the groups in society most likely to require a standardized language and to be familiar with print culture. In various parts of Europe and its colonies and ex-colonies, these people began to refashion literature so that it would serve their interests better than did either the earlier patronage-based and gentrified belles-lettres or the «merely» commercial, entertaining, or utilitarian forms of print. Literature in the new formation could serve the interests of its producers and consumers in several ways. It was a major vehicle for ideological communication among a group widely scattered across the country. It enabled them to represent themselves in an idealized form, embodied their interests, and represented various (though often conflicting) visions of social, cultural, economic, and political transformation. It enabled this class to constitute themselves as a (or the) national class, to achieve hegemony as such a class, and to refashion the state and the public sphere, including high culture, in their own interests and image. During the Romantic period in particular, literature in this new formation was widely used to promote new, post-Revolutionary models of the nation and state, or nation-state.
Myth and history, separately but often together, were and continue to be central to the formation and the political uses of literatures of this kind; recent studies provide examples from eighteenth-century Wales
[MORGAN 1981], eighteenth- to twentieth-century Scotland [WOMACK 1989], eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain and Europe [TRUMPENER 1997], the early nineteenth-century United States [CLARK 1984], the nineteenth-century German states [HOHENDAHL 1989], the twentieth-century Caribbean world [WEBB 1992], and mid twentieth-century Spain [LABANYI 1989]. Of course myth and history are different, complex discourses, and historically have had diverse and changing definitions, forms of expression, and uses. Myth and history may coexist in the same society over the same period, and may coexist yet have different functions in different groups, as in «low» and «high» culture. Myth and history have their own histories, and it is important to specify the particular forms, uses of, and relationship between them in particular times and places.
Nevertheless, myth and history may also have similar social and cultural functions. Myth and history have been importantly embodied in language and narrative, but from ancient times to the present they have also been embodied in other linguistic forms, from folksong to drama; in visual and spatial forms such as painting and sculpture; in other arts both high and low; in religious and public buildings; and in ritual practices and social conventions of many kinds, from organized religion to public ceremony. Both myth and history may have the function of distributing and reproducing the values, beliefs, and practices required by particular societies at particular times for social cohesion, social and cultural stability or change, and – especially in the modern world – state formation. Myth and myth-making, or what Hans Blumenberg calls «work on myth», may be understood as a central means by which cultures, societies, and states are constituted as such historically, in various times and places, in the interests of particular social groups or classes within a region or nation, or on behalf of a region or nation as a whole. Historiography can be seen as having the same functions [de certeau 1975; cohen 1986], and in this sense, history and historiography may be subsumed under both myth and literature [FRYE 1957; WHITE 1972]. Myth and history may not only represent and reproduce hegemonic values and practices, but also serve as sites of struggle over those values and practices between different social groups, or as sites of resistance by one group against another. The Romantic period, broadly understood, can be seen as a major turning point in the understanding, practice, and relationship of myth and history [BREISACH 1983, pp. 261-262; FELDMAN 1972, p. 297], and in their appropriation by literature [BUSH 1937; BEHRENDT 1990; HARDING 1995]. During the eighteenth century the relationship of myth and history came to be seen structurally and temporally as a double binary, with myth as a fictive discourse originating in oral culture and in prehistory, that is, before the advent of writing, and history as factual and written discourse, more particularly designated historiography, displacing or perhaps subsuming the cultural and social functions of myth. Myth became associated with «primitive» and plebeian cultures, history and historiography with «advanced» and elite cultures [LINCOLN 1989, pp. 23-24]. Myth and history came to be seen as different kinds of discourse performing similar ideological, cultural, and political work in different and historically successive kinds of societies, with history generally superseding myth. Very broadly, this was the understanding of the relationship of myth and history that prevailed among producers and consumers of literature during the Romantic period.
Myth itself was used in Western cultural discourses from the late seventeenth century in an ostensibly descriptive but actually political sense to signify a fictitious or fictionalized narrative embodying the beliefs or ideology, often religious, of a particular historical culture, usually in the past and especially of classical Mediterranean antiquity. This sense was steadily extended during the eighteenth century to apply to other cultures around the world, past and present, from Scandinavia to India, from the Scottish Highlands to the New World [FELDMAN 1972, p. xxi]. By the late eighteenth century myth was also coming to be equated by elite or learned culture with what subsequently came to be called folklore, at that time in Britain called «popular antiquities» [DORSON 1968]. These were understood as the inherited «traditionary» beliefs, usually handed down orally, of the common people, maintaining and reproducing customary culture and its economic, social, and cultural practices [BUSHAWAY 1982]. In Catholic countries this «traditionary» lore was usually regarded as a relic of pre-christian belief and opposed as such; in Protestant countries such lore was often seen as incorporated in Catholicism and thus a relic of pre-Reformation belief. In both cases, myth in this sense was usually seen as helping to sustain an older, semi-feudal order, and as an obstacle to modernization, or the transformation of customary economic and social relations to those based on the rational application of capital and a wage economy.
In order to be removed, this obstacle had to be understood, however. The result was the increasing collection and study of myth in all cultures, ancient and modern, or mythology as the body of all myths. The disciplinarization of myth in mythography and what later came to be called folklore was one aspect of modernization, designed to subdue the belief systems of unmodernized plebeian peoples in Europe and pre-modern or «primitive» peoples in Europe’s colonies. Materials of these belief systems, ranging from popular ballads to archeological evidence, were collected, analyzed, and interpreted in many countries, in a wide range of works, including ballad collections such as Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), scholarly editions of medieval Spanish popular romances, translations of the myths and ancient literature of India, studies of ancient laws as embodiments of social values and beliefs, and the kind of socio-economic survey burlesqued by Pushkin in “The History of the Village of Goryukhino”. Another important example is the series of texts, each subsumed in the next, from Henry Bourne’s Antiquitates Vulgares (1725), incorporated in John Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities (1777), an amplified version of which was edited and published by Sir Henry Ellis in 1813, with revised editions in the 1840s. That these researches were designed to support modernization as a revolution in culture, society, and economy is indicated by the fact that an early act of the French Revolutionary government was to gather information about plebeian language and beliefs in the regions, as preparation for state policies designed to integrate the people and provinces in a modern revolutionary nation-state; the initiative was repeated under both Napoleon and the restored monarchy [REARICK 1974, p. 6].
There was another major use of popular mythology, however. Anticipated and called for by Giambattista Vico in his Scienza Nuova (1725), this kind of work was being conducted in many parts of Europe and its colonies and ex-colonies by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The aim of this activity was to establish the distinctiveness of local, regional, or national identities, especially as rooted in history, and usually against some metropolitan or external cultural and political hegemony. A related aim was to establish the predominantly middle-class and professional collectors, editors, translators, and imitators of such materials as mediators and masters of this popular culture and thus of «the people». Characteristically, these mediators were themselves often marginalized socially or geographically. Scotland, with its isolated professional middle class, and dominated by England, produced a great deal of such work, including James Macpherson’s Ossian fabrications, which became the single most influential work of myth in the Romantic period. Walter Scott was only one professional man who made an avocation of collecting and imitating popular mythology, but he was unusual in going on to make a literary career fictionalizing such material in best-selling poems and novels. Similarly, in the German-speaking lands, fragmented into numerous states often with francophile monarchies, administrations, and elites, popular mythology was promoted and imitated to create a German national culture where the national state was lacking. J. G. von Herder’s avowedly nationalistic work in this field included promotional essays, collections and anthologies, and translations of and commentaries on parallel kinds of popular literature and myth from other cultures, such as the Ossian texts of Scotland and the romances of El Cid from medieval Spain. In Europe’s colonies and former colonies, indigenous myth of various kinds could be used for political purposes, too. In India, William Jones and his circle of professional colonial administrators collected, translated, and interpreted the ancient myths, literature, and laws of the country. This antiquarian and scholarly enquiry was designed partly to facilitate a more effective, professionalized administration of India, with consequences back in Britain. Jones and his circle intended a professionalized and informed colonial administration to displace the actual regime of exploitation and plunder by which fortunes amassed in the colonies were taken back to Britain and used to corrupt politics, state institutions, and society there.
Through the Revolution and early nineteenth century, popular mythology was also promoted by various reformist movements led mainly by middle-class professionals in the name of «the people». For example, Joseph Ritson edited and published (1795) historic popular print materials on the already legendary figure of Robin Hood, and pointed out the use of such materials in exposing the injustice of the feudal system. In the Revolutionary and Napoleonic aftermath the political significance of such materials tended to be made less explicit yet they were promoted more vigorously as the remains of an original national culture shared by all classes, and they were appropriated more intensively in literature to create a new national literature and culture. In England, for example, the reformist William Hone turned from an energetic career as popular poet and polemicist to the apparently less political activity of his Every-Day Book (1825-27), a massive compilation of folklore arranged according to the annual calendar and published in both serial and collected volume form to reach a wide middle-class readership. Significantly, writers and historians who were themselves of plebeian background often had an ambivalent attitude to the recording and celebrating of «popular antiquities», realizing that this material was being appropriated for a supposedly national culture that in fact served middle-class values and interests. Nevertheless, this wide range of activity around popular myth was extensively and increasingly quarried by literature, as in the use of Ritson’s Robin Hood material by novelists, poets, and dramatists [KNIGHT 1994, chh. 5-6].
In some cases, appropriation of popular mythology during the Romantic period was part of a critique, often conservative and even reactionary, of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, Revolutionary modernization, and Napoleonic imperialism. In other cases, such appropriation continued to serve reformist or revolutionary critique of absolutist regimes. After the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the pre-Revolutionary order, popular mythology was increasingly used by movements of resistance to such rule. In these cases, popular mythology formed part of these movements’ claim to speak for «the people» against foreign rule (in Austrian-controlled parts of Italy and slavic lands, or Russian-controlled Poland), cosmopolitanized and especially Frenchified local rule (in the German states, Russia, or Spain), colonial or ex-colonial rule (in Latin America or the new United States), or domination of regions by a self-established centre (in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales in the United Kingdom, or Ukraine in the Russian empire). As with Macpherson’s Ossian poems, where such forms of indigenous popular myth did not exist, they were often fabricated to a greater or lesser extent. In Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a group of Czech professional men forged the necessary Czech parallel to Ossian. Clearly, the next step was to provide such necessary cultural and ideological legitimation in avowedly fabricated form, in literary genres of all kinds, but claiming some kind of authenticity from mythic tradition, especially as collected, edited, and historicized by middle-class writers.
For history and historiography were used extensively during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to complement and parallel these uses of myth and mythography [GOOCH 1952; PEARDON 1933; REARICK 1974]. In some cases, historiography was even merged with myth, to take on characteristics of myth-making and the Romantic ideology of writing as mythopoeisis. In this way some historiography was brought into a new relationship with literature [GOSSMAN 1990]. Again, however, history as a discourse was developed for general and particular political aims of those who produced and used it, as some examples, mainly from Britain, can show. Throughout the period, too, writers of literature who increasingly used historians for various purposes could signal their own politics according to which historians they cited.
Certain political uses of historiography were well established by Enlightenment «philosophical historians» from Voltaire to Edward Gibbon, who used history to critique court monarchies and their ecclesiastical and popular supports, especially by showing that such regimes were historical human constructions and thus not divinely ordained or natural. These uses continued into and beyond the Romantic period, and were widely appropriated in literature. By the late eighteenth century, however, other historians were using their subjects to attack reform movements and revolution. William Mitford’s History of Greece (1784-1818), for example, was designed to discredit Greek culture, including its mythology and supposedly democratic institutions, which had been promoted by classical republicans since the Renaissance. Mitford’s history also explicitly attacked the American and then the French Revolution and their British sympathizers, who invoked the classical republican tradition.
Political motives also influenced the subjects that historians took up. Because of their political aims, Enlightenment philosophical historians turned with new interest to the supposed foundations of eighteenth-century aristocratic hegemony and court monarchy in the Middle Ages. This interest would develop and expand rapidly in the Revolution debate and its Romantic aftermath, and would provide the basis for Romantic literary medievalism, and for what Mark Girouard has described as the Victorian «return to Camelot». Enlightenment historians of the period from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century aimed to demystify and critique the historic chivalric culture and feudal social, economic and political order of what was still the dominant social class and the hegemonic order in many countries. Historians such as David Hume and William Russell depicted this order as an obstacle to modernization. Historians such as George, Lord Lyttelton, Gilbert Stuart, and Richard Hurd aimed to retrieve, appropriate, or subsume certain elements of chivalric culture in an emergent upper middle-class identity and culture, in which the status of «gentleman» and «lady» was based not on merely social culture and inherited or ascribed rank but rather on subjective attributes and personal merit.
Enlightenment historiography furthered modernization by showing how court governments and politics had hindered it and, by implication, continued to do so. Historiography of past and «surviving» popular culture and society extended this project, and included antiquarian histories, statistical and topographical surveys, local histories of the kind spoofed in Pushkin’s “History of the Village of Goryukhino”, and even local natural histories such as the Rev. Gilbert White’s enormously influential The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1788, dated 1789). Such historiography critiqued plebeian culture as «irrational» and «superstitious» and thus both undermined popular participation in the hegemonic order and implicitly or explicitly promoted re-education of the common people according to middle-class values and practices. Such historiography also served modernization by discrediting plebeian knowledges and promoting their eradication. Later on, such historiography also explained the mentality motivating plebeian political protest, including revolutionary mobilization, and thus it addressed middle-and upper-class anxiety about a plebeian cultural space where alternative political agendas, such as those of the revolutionary «mobs», could be constructed.
The Revolution debate in particular produced an intense interest in history and historiography, as polemicists and observers ransacked history for analogies to, explanations for, and causes of what many considered to be an unprecedented historical event. History was also used in attempts to predict the course and outcome of the Revolution, and to address the contemporary crisis directly and polemically [PEARDON 1933, ch. 7]. For example, the nature and effects of supposedly feudal institutions became a central topic in the Revolution debate, since the French Revolution claimed to abolish feudalism. The counter-revolutionary view of feudalism was advanced in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Though not an avowed work of history, it was designed, like much historiography of this time, to intervene in what was perceived as a historic crisis, and thus to use history to make history. Reflections had a profound and immediate effect on the Revolution debate, and a long-lasting influence on historiography, political philosophy, and literature. Writers such as William Belsham, sympathetic to reform in Britain and to the early phase of the French Revolution, continued the Enlightenment practice of using historiography to critique the monarchic order and its ecclesiastical supports. Historians with counter-revolutionary motives, such as John Adolphus (in 1802) and Robert Bisset (in 1796 and 1803), produced chauvinist, francophobic, and often religiously pious histories of England and its institutions and culture. In 1792 Thomas Somerville published a history promoting Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 against the French Revolution of a century later, and then in 1798 a patriotic history of Queen Anne’s reign celebrating an earlier period of British military victory over the French. T. H. B. Oldfield promoted the caused of reform in histories (1792, 1797, and 1816) of political representation that celebrated ancient Britons’ and Anglo-Saxons’ democratic institutions.
An area of growing interest to historiography during the Revolution debate and after, moreover, was cultural and social history, and this provided a wealth of material for historical novelists, dramatists, and narrative poets. It, too, had political implications, however. This kind of historiography continued a strong interest of the Enlightenment historians, as they considered cultural and social differences and their relation to political institutions in various times and places. Writers of such historiography aimed to relativize the cultural and social values and political structures of their own time and place, exposing them as humanly constructed and not divinely ordained, and thus opening them to change. Such arguments acquired new force in a Revolution debate that had much to say on the applicability of the French Revolution to other countries, cultures, and societies. The issue was given impetus by Burke’s argument in Reflections for the uniqueness of English (or British) political institutions and culture, celebrated as tradition, against the foreignness of French Revolutionary ideas. In fact, the Revolution and its aftermath can be seen as the founding moment of the modern practice of inventing traditions of all kinds [HOBSBAWM 1992], a practice for which literature was even more suitable.
Social and cultural history could also serve local and regional interests, even when not dealing directly with the authors’ or readers’ own time and place. William Roscoe, a leading Liverpool reformer, published biographies of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1795) and Pope Leo X (1805) that were in effect social and cultural histories of the Italian Renaissance. The political purpose of these histories was to celebrate the convergence of commercial interests, intellectuals and artists, and political power to produce a high state of civilization, peace, and prosperity in Renaissance Italy. This was precisely the kind of coalition that Roscoe wished to forge in Liverpool, and other reformist groups wished to forge in provincial centres such as Norwich, Bristol, Birmingham, and Manchester, against the political, social, economic, and cultural dominance of London, capital of the state and of the hegemonic order. As the Revolution debate turned into a great patriotic war against Napoleonic France, this use of social and cultural history was extended to call for national unity, even if unity in diversity, by reconstructing a historic national identity, culture, and destiny. One aim of such historiography could be to suggest the continuing need for reform if national unity were to be achieved by moving beyond the confrontations of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. Another aim could be to retrieve (or invent) a historic national character and culture of «the people», supposedly different from and superior to those of other nations. Such historiography could be conservative or retrospective, promoting a defensive national identity associated with a historic monarchic government and state religion. For example, Nikolai Karamzin’s History of the Russian State (begun 1804, published 1819-26) promoted identification of Russianness with the tsarist state and opposed reforms based on ideas of the French Enlightenment and Revolution. In Britain, works as different as Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799-1805), Joseph Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), and William Godwin’s Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1803) took the characteristically post-Revolutionary line by showing how social divisions had been and thus could again be overcome through a distinctive (though now implicitly middle-class) national identity and culture. Such history was widely fictionalized in plays, novels, and narrative poems, which were often supplied with notes identifying relevant historiography and primary documents.
In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, with the restoration of court monarchies in many parts of Europe and the continuing instability of many of these regimes, history was again invoked to legitimize conflicting political institutions and programs. The emergence of liberalism in particular stimulated a closer relationship between history and literature, seen in the influence of Jean de Sismondi, a member of Germaine de Staël’s circle. His history of the Littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813) was quarried by numerous Romantic writers interested in promoting the role of literature in national identity and culture and the progress of civilization, in contrast to the futile exercise of military and political force still in progress and comprehensively represented in Sismondi’s Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge (1818). This work was useful to emergent nationalist liberalism in showing the futility of struggles between the medieval Italian city-states, their internal factions, and their various foreign backers, and thereby offering a parallel to the liberals’ view of the situation in post-Napoleonic Italy and elsewhere in Europe and the New World.
In Britain, historians similarly aimed to move beyond the political confrontations of the previous quarter century while sustaining particular political programs. As in the Revolution debate, the period of the Stuarts and of the English Civil War and Commonwealth were recurring topics offering analogies to the post-Napoleonic situation of the nation. George Brodie attacked Hurne’s representation of the Stuarts, and William Godwin attempted to insert the ideas of the Commonwealth period into the reform debate of the 1820s. Women historians in particular, such as Lucy Aikin and Elizabeth Benger, represented the periods they wrote about much as Sismondi had presented the history of the medieval Italian republics – a record of conflict, bloodshed, and destruction that was futile in the long view of history. Women historians also represented women as victims of this kind of masculine history, thereby implying that, if the future were not to repeat the past, the public and political spheres must accommodate women and the domains of value they commanded. More important, since such domains had been left out of history and historiography, and were largely undocumented, literature could seem better suited to representing them.
In general, the view of history as a record of the futility of force and conflict was especially useful to emergent liberal ideology, which was being constructed in reaction to totalizing and coercive regimes, including absolutist monarchies both prior to the Revolution and after the fall of Napoleon, the Revolutionary Terror, and the Napoleonic imperium. Nineteenth-century liberalism aimed to found the state on the individual as sovereign subject, with a subjectivity that is authentic and inviolable by the state, nurtured in spheres of private life, private property, and civil society that are almost as inviolable. Unlike absolute monarchy, revolutionary regimes, or centralized empires, the modern liberal state was supposed to be sustained less by state power to direct or coerce its subjects than by the fact that the state is internalized in the subjectivity of each citizen, and in a sense constitutes his identity – modern liberal states were slow to include women in this double subjecthood. Furthermore, the nation-state, which was invented in the Romantic period as a particular form of the modern (though not always liberal) state, ascribes individual identity less to participation in a comprehensive public sphere that has the right to direct personal and private life and civil society and more to membership in a nation with some kind of (usually invented) essential character, culture, history, and destiny [THOM 1995]. This nationhood was supposedly found in both myth and history, broadly understood and as described earlier. Myth and history could not, however, provide the reading public – in liberal ideology equivalent to the political nation – with representations of the modern liberal subject, since that subject was invented in or just before the Romantic period itself. Increasingly, literature represented that subject, combined with particular uses of the myth and history that supposedly guaranteed the national identity. Literature could project this representation of the subject back into the past, and thus legitimize it and imply that it also had a future. Furthermore, this representation of the subject as national and historical was in fact class specific yet implicitly over-rode or transcended actual social differences and conflicts within the nation-state.
It is not surprising, then, that the Romantic period saw extensive use of myth and history in literature. Since classical antiquity, myth and history had been used in literature for several purposes: to validate new works by reference to established and prestigious knowledges, to assimilate new subjects to the supposedly common knowledge of an educated and elite readership, to critique contemporary issues indirectly, and to suggest analogies between contemporary issues and supposedly universal, transcendent, or actual historical examples. In the Romantic period, myth and history continued to be used in literature for these ends, but they were also used in various new ways to reconstruct literature in the image and interests of those who wrote and read it, as a brief and partial taxonomy can suggest. Often the same writer drew from myth or from history, as well as earlier literary uses of both. Often, too, the same writer used both history and myth (especially as popular legend or folklore) in the same work. The commonest uses of myth included rewriting of particular myths from a wide range of cultures, pastiche and imitation of mythology and folklore (or fakelore), use of myth for setting and decoration, outright forgeries, and the creation of new myth. History and historiography were similarly rewritten, imitated, faked, forged, and fictionalized, but especially appropriated for fictional representation of what the historical record did not or could not represent – the subjective and private lives of historic individuals or of fictitious common individuals placed in significant historical events or eras.
Such a taxonomy, even if made exhaustive, however, cannot indicate the subtlety and variety of literary uses of myth and history, or show how an understanding of the political uses of myth and history may bring out new aspects of even familiar texts, as a very few examples may suggest. It is well known, for example, that Percy Shelley’s dramas Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci use classical myth and Renaissance history, respectively. Yet understanding of the political uses of myth and history during their time indicate how these plays may be read and read together as critiques of the regime of post-Napoleonic restored court monarchies and implicitly, through the mythological and historical examples, of such regimes in all and any times and places, in human experience from mythic pre-history through to Shelley’s own day. Walter Scott’s use of history is also well known and was spectacularly influential in world literature long past his own time. He is thought of as a Tory, «anti-Jacobin», anti-Revolutionary loyalist, yet awareness of the engaged nature of historiography, including antiquarianism and study of popular mythology, in his time can suggest that his formulation of the historical novel through use of these discourses offered readers a powerful representation of the future liberal nation-state.
William Blake’s very diverse use and invention of myth and history are well known, too. Set in the context of the wide political use of these discourses in his time, however, his use of them seems designed to challenge historic class-based cultural boundaries, with revolutionary implications. Blake’s appropriations of myth and history, together with the physical form given these appropriations, implicitly claim access for his own fraction of the working class, the artisans, to the broad public political sphere as well as to a democratic yet high art. His fusion of verbal and visual mythic representation indicates the right and ability of the «mere» artisan to appropriate and originate visionary or mythic high art. His works also unite the historically artisanal production of engraved illustrations with the historically intellectual and professional production of literature. Blake’s unique and highly wrought visual-verbal books manifestly aestheticize and transcendentalize the historic reading matter of people of his class – the chapbooks of street literature, which were decorated (rather than illustrated) with pictures and which had circulated plebeian culture, including remains of popular «myth», over centuries. In his prophetic books Blake appropriates and extends the Ossianic mythic mode into the era of the North Atlantic revolutions, suggesting continuity between the heroic and mythic but dying world of Ossian and the heroic new world struggling into existence against forms of decadent and despotic modern patriarchy. He also blends Biblical mythic archetypes and apocalyptic discourse with Ossianic language and form to evoke another long tradition of myth used for revolutionary purpose in English culture, especially popular and populist political protest, since Milton’s epoch of the English Civil War – an epoch with which the French Revolution was often compared.
As with Blake, it is well established that John Keats appropriated both classical myth and popular myth in complex, various, and subtle ways, and the political implications of these uses is being established. The language, style, and verse forms in which Keats embodies these appropriations, however, were associated at the time with the politically, culturally, erotically, and formally transgressive work of the Della Cruscans and their followers, who wrote on the threshold of the French Revolution and who were made figures for the dangerous intertwining of literary-cultural and social-political insubordination. Keats’s appropriation of myth in literary language and forms having such associations implies that myth may be used to create a high literature that is alternative or opposed to an official, established, or dominant literary art serving an established social and political order. That alternative is, as was recognized at the time in infamous reviews, to create a high literary art in the service of a culture and politics that are «Cockney», or plebeian and lower middle-class – precisely the kind of social coalition feared by supporters of the established order. Even Keats’s poetic interest in the so-called «Elgin marbles», or Parthenon sculptures brought to England by Lord Elgin and acquired by parliament for the nation, and the representations in them of a mythic Hellenic world, has particular political significance. For the sculptures, the world they were seen to represent, and the manner of their acquisition by Britain were widely discussed within a complex of related cultural-political issues. These included Britain’s position as the post-Napoleonic world power, like Athens in the Mediterranean world, the nature and relevance to Britain and the post-Napoleonic world of ancient Greek «democracy», and liberal sympathy for Greek independence.
One example will have to suffice to show how understanding of the political uses of history and myth in Romantic literature can open up important meanings especially in little known texts. Felicia Hemans is an almost forgotten writer now, but she was the most widely read woman poet in the English-speaking world through the nineteenth century. She came from Liverpool, centre of a major example of the provincial urban Enlightenments that were designed to legitimize and heroize middle-class culture through a wide range of references to historic and semi-mythic cultures. As a young woman she followed the Napoleonic wars with intense interest and, like Blake, Shelley, and many others, was strongly impressed by the apocalyptic discourse circulating at the time. Like most women writers, she turned more to history than to myth to construct her literary interventions in public culture and politics, aware that claiming mythopoetic power, already invoked by male writers to legitimize and valorize their work, could risk defeminization in the eyes of critics and the reading public and thus disable her public voice and her power to make history (as well as a career and a living) through literature. Accordingly, she developed a variety of techniques that enabled her to continue as a public poet responding to political issues into the 1830s.
In her longer poems of the Napoleonic period, she addressed the national and international crisis as women poets had since the period of the American Revolution – by emphasizing the conventionally acceptable «feminine» themes of the effect of conflict on women and the domestic sphere and the desirability of peace and prosperity. In her first major post-Napoleonic poems, “The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy” (1816) and “Modern Greece” (1817), and she addressed the situation of Britain and its empire in terms of a semi-mythic historical cycle of the rise and fall of civilizations, and from the acceptably feminine viewpoint of concern for art and culture. The poems, like all of her later major ones, are heavily annotated with references to works of historiography, with a leaning to those that could serve an emergent liberal ideology. In her first major collection, Tales and Historic Scenes (1819), she fictionalizes a wide variety of turning points in the history of races, nations, states, and regimes, from the viewpoint of female or feminized male victims of «masculine» history, especially political conflict within and between states, races, nations, and empires. Furthermore, the effect of this collection as a whole is to invoke a mythic, transhistorical vision of history as the cycle of civilizations in human time.
In her historical verse dramas The Siege of Valencia and The Vespers of Palermo (both 1823), published after the trial of Queen Caroline had brought Britain to the brink of revolution, Hemans examines the relation between gender roles, internal factional conflict and conspiracy, and the need to defend the state against external powers. In her next major work, a historical narrative poem entitled “The Forest Sanctuary” (1825), Hemans engaged with another semi-mythic cycle of history, that of the Spanish empire, from the conquest of the New World to, implicitly, the liberal Spanish revolt of the early 1820s, with its echoes in other parts of Europe and the Americas. This time, the mythic cycle of history is clearly set under a providential design which is implicitly to culminate in the emergence of the modern liberal state. Though Hemans’s work fell out of favour early in the twentieth century, and has been regarded as merely popular and sentimental, reading her work through Romantic literature’s use of myth and history discloses not only a broad political vision but also reasons for her enormous popularity through the nineteenth century – the century of founding modern liberal states. Perhaps, more than any other Romantic poet in English, Hemans gave the readers of her own day and after, who were liberal subjects in the making, the sense of their own mythic and historical inevitability.
Recently, with the end of the Cold War and of the potentially cataclysmic confontation of superpowers in our time, that sense has been turned into another myth – of the end of history [FUKUYAMA 1992], or the termination of historical process in the global triumph of the modern liberal state. Pushkin’s “The History of the Village of Goryukhino”, with its burlesque of such grandiose mytho-historico-literary visions in his own time, can warn us against such visions in ours. Significantly, Pushkin’s text breaks off; did he lose interest in his burlesque, or was he wary of having to take up what was the politically sensitive topic of the peasant rebellion? Perhaps the text doesn’t break off after all, but only seems to do so, in order to remind us that lived history cannot in the end be subdued to the closures of historiography, myth, or even literature.
Nevertheless, myth and history may also have similar social and cultural functions. Myth and history have been importantly embodied in language and narrative, but from ancient times to the present they have also been embodied in other linguistic forms, from folksong to drama; in visual and spatial forms such as painting and sculpture; in other arts both high and low; in religious and public buildings; and in ritual practices and social conventions of many kinds, from organized religion to public ceremony. Both myth and history may have the function of distributing and reproducing the values, beliefs, and practices required by particular societies at particular times for social cohesion, social and cultural stability or change, and – especially in the modern world – state formation. Myth and myth-making, or what Hans Blumenberg calls «work on myth», may be understood as a central means by which cultures, societies, and states are constituted as such historically, in various times and places, in the interests of particular social groups or classes within a region or nation, or on behalf of a region or nation as a whole. Historiography can be seen as having the same functions [de certeau 1975; cohen 1986], and in this sense, history and historiography may be subsumed under both myth and literature [FRYE 1957; WHITE 1972]. Myth and history may not only represent and reproduce hegemonic values and practices, but also serve as sites of struggle over those values and practices between different social groups, or as sites of resistance by one group against another. The Romantic period, broadly understood, can be seen as a major turning point in the understanding, practice, and relationship of myth and history [BREISACH 1983, pp. 261-262; FELDMAN 1972, p. 297], and in their appropriation by literature [BUSH 1937; BEHRENDT 1990; HARDING 1995]. During the eighteenth century the relationship of myth and history came to be seen structurally and temporally as a double binary, with myth as a fictive discourse originating in oral culture and in prehistory, that is, before the advent of writing, and history as factual and written discourse, more particularly designated historiography, displacing or perhaps subsuming the cultural and social functions of myth. Myth became associated with «primitive» and plebeian cultures, history and historiography with «advanced» and elite cultures [LINCOLN 1989, pp. 23-24]. Myth and history came to be seen as different kinds of discourse performing similar ideological, cultural, and political work in different and historically successive kinds of societies, with history generally superseding myth. Very broadly, this was the understanding of the relationship of myth and history that prevailed among producers and consumers of literature during the Romantic period.
Myth itself was used in Western cultural discourses from the late seventeenth century in an ostensibly descriptive but actually political sense to signify a fictitious or fictionalized narrative embodying the beliefs or ideology, often religious, of a particular historical culture, usually in the past and especially of classical Mediterranean antiquity. This sense was steadily extended during the eighteenth century to apply to other cultures around the world, past and present, from Scandinavia to India, from the Scottish Highlands to the New World [FELDMAN 1972, p. xxi]. By the late eighteenth century myth was also coming to be equated by elite or learned culture with what subsequently came to be called folklore, at that time in Britain called «popular antiquities» [DORSON 1968]. These were understood as the inherited «traditionary» beliefs, usually handed down orally, of the common people, maintaining and reproducing customary culture and its economic, social, and cultural practices [BUSHAWAY 1982]. In Catholic countries this «traditionary» lore was usually regarded as a relic of pre-christian belief and opposed as such; in Protestant countries such lore was often seen as incorporated in Catholicism and thus a relic of pre-Reformation belief. In both cases, myth in this sense was usually seen as helping to sustain an older, semi-feudal order, and as an obstacle to modernization, or the transformation of customary economic and social relations to those based on the rational application of capital and a wage economy.
In order to be removed, this obstacle had to be understood, however. The result was the increasing collection and study of myth in all cultures, ancient and modern, or mythology as the body of all myths. The disciplinarization of myth in mythography and what later came to be called folklore was one aspect of modernization, designed to subdue the belief systems of unmodernized plebeian peoples in Europe and pre-modern or «primitive» peoples in Europe’s colonies. Materials of these belief systems, ranging from popular ballads to archeological evidence, were collected, analyzed, and interpreted in many countries, in a wide range of works, including ballad collections such as Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), scholarly editions of medieval Spanish popular romances, translations of the myths and ancient literature of India, studies of ancient laws as embodiments of social values and beliefs, and the kind of socio-economic survey burlesqued by Pushkin in “The History of the Village of Goryukhino”. Another important example is the series of texts, each subsumed in the next, from Henry Bourne’s Antiquitates Vulgares (1725), incorporated in John Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities (1777), an amplified version of which was edited and published by Sir Henry Ellis in 1813, with revised editions in the 1840s. That these researches were designed to support modernization as a revolution in culture, society, and economy is indicated by the fact that an early act of the French Revolutionary government was to gather information about plebeian language and beliefs in the regions, as preparation for state policies designed to integrate the people and provinces in a modern revolutionary nation-state; the initiative was repeated under both Napoleon and the restored monarchy [REARICK 1974, p. 6].
There was another major use of popular mythology, however. Anticipated and called for by Giambattista Vico in his Scienza Nuova (1725), this kind of work was being conducted in many parts of Europe and its colonies and ex-colonies by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The aim of this activity was to establish the distinctiveness of local, regional, or national identities, especially as rooted in history, and usually against some metropolitan or external cultural and political hegemony. A related aim was to establish the predominantly middle-class and professional collectors, editors, translators, and imitators of such materials as mediators and masters of this popular culture and thus of «the people». Characteristically, these mediators were themselves often marginalized socially or geographically. Scotland, with its isolated professional middle class, and dominated by England, produced a great deal of such work, including James Macpherson’s Ossian fabrications, which became the single most influential work of myth in the Romantic period. Walter Scott was only one professional man who made an avocation of collecting and imitating popular mythology, but he was unusual in going on to make a literary career fictionalizing such material in best-selling poems and novels. Similarly, in the German-speaking lands, fragmented into numerous states often with francophile monarchies, administrations, and elites, popular mythology was promoted and imitated to create a German national culture where the national state was lacking. J. G. von Herder’s avowedly nationalistic work in this field included promotional essays, collections and anthologies, and translations of and commentaries on parallel kinds of popular literature and myth from other cultures, such as the Ossian texts of Scotland and the romances of El Cid from medieval Spain. In Europe’s colonies and former colonies, indigenous myth of various kinds could be used for political purposes, too. In India, William Jones and his circle of professional colonial administrators collected, translated, and interpreted the ancient myths, literature, and laws of the country. This antiquarian and scholarly enquiry was designed partly to facilitate a more effective, professionalized administration of India, with consequences back in Britain. Jones and his circle intended a professionalized and informed colonial administration to displace the actual regime of exploitation and plunder by which fortunes amassed in the colonies were taken back to Britain and used to corrupt politics, state institutions, and society there.
Through the Revolution and early nineteenth century, popular mythology was also promoted by various reformist movements led mainly by middle-class professionals in the name of «the people». For example, Joseph Ritson edited and published (1795) historic popular print materials on the already legendary figure of Robin Hood, and pointed out the use of such materials in exposing the injustice of the feudal system. In the Revolutionary and Napoleonic aftermath the political significance of such materials tended to be made less explicit yet they were promoted more vigorously as the remains of an original national culture shared by all classes, and they were appropriated more intensively in literature to create a new national literature and culture. In England, for example, the reformist William Hone turned from an energetic career as popular poet and polemicist to the apparently less political activity of his Every-Day Book (1825-27), a massive compilation of folklore arranged according to the annual calendar and published in both serial and collected volume form to reach a wide middle-class readership. Significantly, writers and historians who were themselves of plebeian background often had an ambivalent attitude to the recording and celebrating of «popular antiquities», realizing that this material was being appropriated for a supposedly national culture that in fact served middle-class values and interests. Nevertheless, this wide range of activity around popular myth was extensively and increasingly quarried by literature, as in the use of Ritson’s Robin Hood material by novelists, poets, and dramatists [KNIGHT 1994, chh. 5-6].
In some cases, appropriation of popular mythology during the Romantic period was part of a critique, often conservative and even reactionary, of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, Revolutionary modernization, and Napoleonic imperialism. In other cases, such appropriation continued to serve reformist or revolutionary critique of absolutist regimes. After the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the pre-Revolutionary order, popular mythology was increasingly used by movements of resistance to such rule. In these cases, popular mythology formed part of these movements’ claim to speak for «the people» against foreign rule (in Austrian-controlled parts of Italy and slavic lands, or Russian-controlled Poland), cosmopolitanized and especially Frenchified local rule (in the German states, Russia, or Spain), colonial or ex-colonial rule (in Latin America or the new United States), or domination of regions by a self-established centre (in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales in the United Kingdom, or Ukraine in the Russian empire). As with Macpherson’s Ossian poems, where such forms of indigenous popular myth did not exist, they were often fabricated to a greater or lesser extent. In Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a group of Czech professional men forged the necessary Czech parallel to Ossian. Clearly, the next step was to provide such necessary cultural and ideological legitimation in avowedly fabricated form, in literary genres of all kinds, but claiming some kind of authenticity from mythic tradition, especially as collected, edited, and historicized by middle-class writers.
For history and historiography were used extensively during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to complement and parallel these uses of myth and mythography [GOOCH 1952; PEARDON 1933; REARICK 1974]. In some cases, historiography was even merged with myth, to take on characteristics of myth-making and the Romantic ideology of writing as mythopoeisis. In this way some historiography was brought into a new relationship with literature [GOSSMAN 1990]. Again, however, history as a discourse was developed for general and particular political aims of those who produced and used it, as some examples, mainly from Britain, can show. Throughout the period, too, writers of literature who increasingly used historians for various purposes could signal their own politics according to which historians they cited.
Certain political uses of historiography were well established by Enlightenment «philosophical historians» from Voltaire to Edward Gibbon, who used history to critique court monarchies and their ecclesiastical and popular supports, especially by showing that such regimes were historical human constructions and thus not divinely ordained or natural. These uses continued into and beyond the Romantic period, and were widely appropriated in literature. By the late eighteenth century, however, other historians were using their subjects to attack reform movements and revolution. William Mitford’s History of Greece (1784-1818), for example, was designed to discredit Greek culture, including its mythology and supposedly democratic institutions, which had been promoted by classical republicans since the Renaissance. Mitford’s history also explicitly attacked the American and then the French Revolution and their British sympathizers, who invoked the classical republican tradition.
Political motives also influenced the subjects that historians took up. Because of their political aims, Enlightenment philosophical historians turned with new interest to the supposed foundations of eighteenth-century aristocratic hegemony and court monarchy in the Middle Ages. This interest would develop and expand rapidly in the Revolution debate and its Romantic aftermath, and would provide the basis for Romantic literary medievalism, and for what Mark Girouard has described as the Victorian «return to Camelot». Enlightenment historians of the period from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century aimed to demystify and critique the historic chivalric culture and feudal social, economic and political order of what was still the dominant social class and the hegemonic order in many countries. Historians such as David Hume and William Russell depicted this order as an obstacle to modernization. Historians such as George, Lord Lyttelton, Gilbert Stuart, and Richard Hurd aimed to retrieve, appropriate, or subsume certain elements of chivalric culture in an emergent upper middle-class identity and culture, in which the status of «gentleman» and «lady» was based not on merely social culture and inherited or ascribed rank but rather on subjective attributes and personal merit.
Enlightenment historiography furthered modernization by showing how court governments and politics had hindered it and, by implication, continued to do so. Historiography of past and «surviving» popular culture and society extended this project, and included antiquarian histories, statistical and topographical surveys, local histories of the kind spoofed in Pushkin’s “History of the Village of Goryukhino”, and even local natural histories such as the Rev. Gilbert White’s enormously influential The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1788, dated 1789). Such historiography critiqued plebeian culture as «irrational» and «superstitious» and thus both undermined popular participation in the hegemonic order and implicitly or explicitly promoted re-education of the common people according to middle-class values and practices. Such historiography also served modernization by discrediting plebeian knowledges and promoting their eradication. Later on, such historiography also explained the mentality motivating plebeian political protest, including revolutionary mobilization, and thus it addressed middle-and upper-class anxiety about a plebeian cultural space where alternative political agendas, such as those of the revolutionary «mobs», could be constructed.
The Revolution debate in particular produced an intense interest in history and historiography, as polemicists and observers ransacked history for analogies to, explanations for, and causes of what many considered to be an unprecedented historical event. History was also used in attempts to predict the course and outcome of the Revolution, and to address the contemporary crisis directly and polemically [PEARDON 1933, ch. 7]. For example, the nature and effects of supposedly feudal institutions became a central topic in the Revolution debate, since the French Revolution claimed to abolish feudalism. The counter-revolutionary view of feudalism was advanced in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Though not an avowed work of history, it was designed, like much historiography of this time, to intervene in what was perceived as a historic crisis, and thus to use history to make history. Reflections had a profound and immediate effect on the Revolution debate, and a long-lasting influence on historiography, political philosophy, and literature. Writers such as William Belsham, sympathetic to reform in Britain and to the early phase of the French Revolution, continued the Enlightenment practice of using historiography to critique the monarchic order and its ecclesiastical supports. Historians with counter-revolutionary motives, such as John Adolphus (in 1802) and Robert Bisset (in 1796 and 1803), produced chauvinist, francophobic, and often religiously pious histories of England and its institutions and culture. In 1792 Thomas Somerville published a history promoting Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 against the French Revolution of a century later, and then in 1798 a patriotic history of Queen Anne’s reign celebrating an earlier period of British military victory over the French. T. H. B. Oldfield promoted the caused of reform in histories (1792, 1797, and 1816) of political representation that celebrated ancient Britons’ and Anglo-Saxons’ democratic institutions.
An area of growing interest to historiography during the Revolution debate and after, moreover, was cultural and social history, and this provided a wealth of material for historical novelists, dramatists, and narrative poets. It, too, had political implications, however. This kind of historiography continued a strong interest of the Enlightenment historians, as they considered cultural and social differences and their relation to political institutions in various times and places. Writers of such historiography aimed to relativize the cultural and social values and political structures of their own time and place, exposing them as humanly constructed and not divinely ordained, and thus opening them to change. Such arguments acquired new force in a Revolution debate that had much to say on the applicability of the French Revolution to other countries, cultures, and societies. The issue was given impetus by Burke’s argument in Reflections for the uniqueness of English (or British) political institutions and culture, celebrated as tradition, against the foreignness of French Revolutionary ideas. In fact, the Revolution and its aftermath can be seen as the founding moment of the modern practice of inventing traditions of all kinds [HOBSBAWM 1992], a practice for which literature was even more suitable.
Social and cultural history could also serve local and regional interests, even when not dealing directly with the authors’ or readers’ own time and place. William Roscoe, a leading Liverpool reformer, published biographies of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1795) and Pope Leo X (1805) that were in effect social and cultural histories of the Italian Renaissance. The political purpose of these histories was to celebrate the convergence of commercial interests, intellectuals and artists, and political power to produce a high state of civilization, peace, and prosperity in Renaissance Italy. This was precisely the kind of coalition that Roscoe wished to forge in Liverpool, and other reformist groups wished to forge in provincial centres such as Norwich, Bristol, Birmingham, and Manchester, against the political, social, economic, and cultural dominance of London, capital of the state and of the hegemonic order. As the Revolution debate turned into a great patriotic war against Napoleonic France, this use of social and cultural history was extended to call for national unity, even if unity in diversity, by reconstructing a historic national identity, culture, and destiny. One aim of such historiography could be to suggest the continuing need for reform if national unity were to be achieved by moving beyond the confrontations of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. Another aim could be to retrieve (or invent) a historic national character and culture of «the people», supposedly different from and superior to those of other nations. Such historiography could be conservative or retrospective, promoting a defensive national identity associated with a historic monarchic government and state religion. For example, Nikolai Karamzin’s History of the Russian State (begun 1804, published 1819-26) promoted identification of Russianness with the tsarist state and opposed reforms based on ideas of the French Enlightenment and Revolution. In Britain, works as different as Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799-1805), Joseph Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), and William Godwin’s Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1803) took the characteristically post-Revolutionary line by showing how social divisions had been and thus could again be overcome through a distinctive (though now implicitly middle-class) national identity and culture. Such history was widely fictionalized in plays, novels, and narrative poems, which were often supplied with notes identifying relevant historiography and primary documents.
In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, with the restoration of court monarchies in many parts of Europe and the continuing instability of many of these regimes, history was again invoked to legitimize conflicting political institutions and programs. The emergence of liberalism in particular stimulated a closer relationship between history and literature, seen in the influence of Jean de Sismondi, a member of Germaine de Staël’s circle. His history of the Littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813) was quarried by numerous Romantic writers interested in promoting the role of literature in national identity and culture and the progress of civilization, in contrast to the futile exercise of military and political force still in progress and comprehensively represented in Sismondi’s Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge (1818). This work was useful to emergent nationalist liberalism in showing the futility of struggles between the medieval Italian city-states, their internal factions, and their various foreign backers, and thereby offering a parallel to the liberals’ view of the situation in post-Napoleonic Italy and elsewhere in Europe and the New World.
In Britain, historians similarly aimed to move beyond the political confrontations of the previous quarter century while sustaining particular political programs. As in the Revolution debate, the period of the Stuarts and of the English Civil War and Commonwealth were recurring topics offering analogies to the post-Napoleonic situation of the nation. George Brodie attacked Hurne’s representation of the Stuarts, and William Godwin attempted to insert the ideas of the Commonwealth period into the reform debate of the 1820s. Women historians in particular, such as Lucy Aikin and Elizabeth Benger, represented the periods they wrote about much as Sismondi had presented the history of the medieval Italian republics – a record of conflict, bloodshed, and destruction that was futile in the long view of history. Women historians also represented women as victims of this kind of masculine history, thereby implying that, if the future were not to repeat the past, the public and political spheres must accommodate women and the domains of value they commanded. More important, since such domains had been left out of history and historiography, and were largely undocumented, literature could seem better suited to representing them.
In general, the view of history as a record of the futility of force and conflict was especially useful to emergent liberal ideology, which was being constructed in reaction to totalizing and coercive regimes, including absolutist monarchies both prior to the Revolution and after the fall of Napoleon, the Revolutionary Terror, and the Napoleonic imperium. Nineteenth-century liberalism aimed to found the state on the individual as sovereign subject, with a subjectivity that is authentic and inviolable by the state, nurtured in spheres of private life, private property, and civil society that are almost as inviolable. Unlike absolute monarchy, revolutionary regimes, or centralized empires, the modern liberal state was supposed to be sustained less by state power to direct or coerce its subjects than by the fact that the state is internalized in the subjectivity of each citizen, and in a sense constitutes his identity – modern liberal states were slow to include women in this double subjecthood. Furthermore, the nation-state, which was invented in the Romantic period as a particular form of the modern (though not always liberal) state, ascribes individual identity less to participation in a comprehensive public sphere that has the right to direct personal and private life and civil society and more to membership in a nation with some kind of (usually invented) essential character, culture, history, and destiny [THOM 1995]. This nationhood was supposedly found in both myth and history, broadly understood and as described earlier. Myth and history could not, however, provide the reading public – in liberal ideology equivalent to the political nation – with representations of the modern liberal subject, since that subject was invented in or just before the Romantic period itself. Increasingly, literature represented that subject, combined with particular uses of the myth and history that supposedly guaranteed the national identity. Literature could project this representation of the subject back into the past, and thus legitimize it and imply that it also had a future. Furthermore, this representation of the subject as national and historical was in fact class specific yet implicitly over-rode or transcended actual social differences and conflicts within the nation-state.
It is not surprising, then, that the Romantic period saw extensive use of myth and history in literature. Since classical antiquity, myth and history had been used in literature for several purposes: to validate new works by reference to established and prestigious knowledges, to assimilate new subjects to the supposedly common knowledge of an educated and elite readership, to critique contemporary issues indirectly, and to suggest analogies between contemporary issues and supposedly universal, transcendent, or actual historical examples. In the Romantic period, myth and history continued to be used in literature for these ends, but they were also used in various new ways to reconstruct literature in the image and interests of those who wrote and read it, as a brief and partial taxonomy can suggest. Often the same writer drew from myth or from history, as well as earlier literary uses of both. Often, too, the same writer used both history and myth (especially as popular legend or folklore) in the same work. The commonest uses of myth included rewriting of particular myths from a wide range of cultures, pastiche and imitation of mythology and folklore (or fakelore), use of myth for setting and decoration, outright forgeries, and the creation of new myth. History and historiography were similarly rewritten, imitated, faked, forged, and fictionalized, but especially appropriated for fictional representation of what the historical record did not or could not represent – the subjective and private lives of historic individuals or of fictitious common individuals placed in significant historical events or eras.
Such a taxonomy, even if made exhaustive, however, cannot indicate the subtlety and variety of literary uses of myth and history, or show how an understanding of the political uses of myth and history may bring out new aspects of even familiar texts, as a very few examples may suggest. It is well known, for example, that Percy Shelley’s dramas Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci use classical myth and Renaissance history, respectively. Yet understanding of the political uses of myth and history during their time indicate how these plays may be read and read together as critiques of the regime of post-Napoleonic restored court monarchies and implicitly, through the mythological and historical examples, of such regimes in all and any times and places, in human experience from mythic pre-history through to Shelley’s own day. Walter Scott’s use of history is also well known and was spectacularly influential in world literature long past his own time. He is thought of as a Tory, «anti-Jacobin», anti-Revolutionary loyalist, yet awareness of the engaged nature of historiography, including antiquarianism and study of popular mythology, in his time can suggest that his formulation of the historical novel through use of these discourses offered readers a powerful representation of the future liberal nation-state.
William Blake’s very diverse use and invention of myth and history are well known, too. Set in the context of the wide political use of these discourses in his time, however, his use of them seems designed to challenge historic class-based cultural boundaries, with revolutionary implications. Blake’s appropriations of myth and history, together with the physical form given these appropriations, implicitly claim access for his own fraction of the working class, the artisans, to the broad public political sphere as well as to a democratic yet high art. His fusion of verbal and visual mythic representation indicates the right and ability of the «mere» artisan to appropriate and originate visionary or mythic high art. His works also unite the historically artisanal production of engraved illustrations with the historically intellectual and professional production of literature. Blake’s unique and highly wrought visual-verbal books manifestly aestheticize and transcendentalize the historic reading matter of people of his class – the chapbooks of street literature, which were decorated (rather than illustrated) with pictures and which had circulated plebeian culture, including remains of popular «myth», over centuries. In his prophetic books Blake appropriates and extends the Ossianic mythic mode into the era of the North Atlantic revolutions, suggesting continuity between the heroic and mythic but dying world of Ossian and the heroic new world struggling into existence against forms of decadent and despotic modern patriarchy. He also blends Biblical mythic archetypes and apocalyptic discourse with Ossianic language and form to evoke another long tradition of myth used for revolutionary purpose in English culture, especially popular and populist political protest, since Milton’s epoch of the English Civil War – an epoch with which the French Revolution was often compared.
As with Blake, it is well established that John Keats appropriated both classical myth and popular myth in complex, various, and subtle ways, and the political implications of these uses is being established. The language, style, and verse forms in which Keats embodies these appropriations, however, were associated at the time with the politically, culturally, erotically, and formally transgressive work of the Della Cruscans and their followers, who wrote on the threshold of the French Revolution and who were made figures for the dangerous intertwining of literary-cultural and social-political insubordination. Keats’s appropriation of myth in literary language and forms having such associations implies that myth may be used to create a high literature that is alternative or opposed to an official, established, or dominant literary art serving an established social and political order. That alternative is, as was recognized at the time in infamous reviews, to create a high literary art in the service of a culture and politics that are «Cockney», or plebeian and lower middle-class – precisely the kind of social coalition feared by supporters of the established order. Even Keats’s poetic interest in the so-called «Elgin marbles», or Parthenon sculptures brought to England by Lord Elgin and acquired by parliament for the nation, and the representations in them of a mythic Hellenic world, has particular political significance. For the sculptures, the world they were seen to represent, and the manner of their acquisition by Britain were widely discussed within a complex of related cultural-political issues. These included Britain’s position as the post-Napoleonic world power, like Athens in the Mediterranean world, the nature and relevance to Britain and the post-Napoleonic world of ancient Greek «democracy», and liberal sympathy for Greek independence.
One example will have to suffice to show how understanding of the political uses of history and myth in Romantic literature can open up important meanings especially in little known texts. Felicia Hemans is an almost forgotten writer now, but she was the most widely read woman poet in the English-speaking world through the nineteenth century. She came from Liverpool, centre of a major example of the provincial urban Enlightenments that were designed to legitimize and heroize middle-class culture through a wide range of references to historic and semi-mythic cultures. As a young woman she followed the Napoleonic wars with intense interest and, like Blake, Shelley, and many others, was strongly impressed by the apocalyptic discourse circulating at the time. Like most women writers, she turned more to history than to myth to construct her literary interventions in public culture and politics, aware that claiming mythopoetic power, already invoked by male writers to legitimize and valorize their work, could risk defeminization in the eyes of critics and the reading public and thus disable her public voice and her power to make history (as well as a career and a living) through literature. Accordingly, she developed a variety of techniques that enabled her to continue as a public poet responding to political issues into the 1830s.
In her longer poems of the Napoleonic period, she addressed the national and international crisis as women poets had since the period of the American Revolution – by emphasizing the conventionally acceptable «feminine» themes of the effect of conflict on women and the domestic sphere and the desirability of peace and prosperity. In her first major post-Napoleonic poems, “The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy” (1816) and “Modern Greece” (1817), and she addressed the situation of Britain and its empire in terms of a semi-mythic historical cycle of the rise and fall of civilizations, and from the acceptably feminine viewpoint of concern for art and culture. The poems, like all of her later major ones, are heavily annotated with references to works of historiography, with a leaning to those that could serve an emergent liberal ideology. In her first major collection, Tales and Historic Scenes (1819), she fictionalizes a wide variety of turning points in the history of races, nations, states, and regimes, from the viewpoint of female or feminized male victims of «masculine» history, especially political conflict within and between states, races, nations, and empires. Furthermore, the effect of this collection as a whole is to invoke a mythic, transhistorical vision of history as the cycle of civilizations in human time.
In her historical verse dramas The Siege of Valencia and The Vespers of Palermo (both 1823), published after the trial of Queen Caroline had brought Britain to the brink of revolution, Hemans examines the relation between gender roles, internal factional conflict and conspiracy, and the need to defend the state against external powers. In her next major work, a historical narrative poem entitled “The Forest Sanctuary” (1825), Hemans engaged with another semi-mythic cycle of history, that of the Spanish empire, from the conquest of the New World to, implicitly, the liberal Spanish revolt of the early 1820s, with its echoes in other parts of Europe and the Americas. This time, the mythic cycle of history is clearly set under a providential design which is implicitly to culminate in the emergence of the modern liberal state. Though Hemans’s work fell out of favour early in the twentieth century, and has been regarded as merely popular and sentimental, reading her work through Romantic literature’s use of myth and history discloses not only a broad political vision but also reasons for her enormous popularity through the nineteenth century – the century of founding modern liberal states. Perhaps, more than any other Romantic poet in English, Hemans gave the readers of her own day and after, who were liberal subjects in the making, the sense of their own mythic and historical inevitability.
Recently, with the end of the Cold War and of the potentially cataclysmic confontation of superpowers in our time, that sense has been turned into another myth – of the end of history [FUKUYAMA 1992], or the termination of historical process in the global triumph of the modern liberal state. Pushkin’s “The History of the Village of Goryukhino”, with its burlesque of such grandiose mytho-historico-literary visions in his own time, can warn us against such visions in ours. Significantly, Pushkin’s text breaks off; did he lose interest in his burlesque, or was he wary of having to take up what was the politically sensitive topic of the peasant rebellion? Perhaps the text doesn’t break off after all, but only seems to do so, in order to remind us that lived history cannot in the end be subdued to the closures of historiography, myth, or even literature.
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