Mythopoeic Constructions:
Symbolic Efficacy and the Evolution of Utopia, Paradise and the Heroic in Romantic to Postmodern Age Literature
by
Sharron L. Fleming
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Abstract
The efficacy of the myth symbols of paradise, utopia, and heroism in the mythopoeic fantasies and poetry of Romantic to Postmodern Age literature illustrate an evolution of sociopolitical and philosophical perspectives that are both revealing of their times and relevant in an analysis of contemporary Western culture. An examination of the mythopoeic writings of William Blake, William Morris, W.B. Yeats, J.R.R. Tolkien, and two contemporary authors, Stephen R. Donaldson and Stephanie Meyer, is used to illustrate the evolution and purpose of these myth symbols through the Postmodern Age. This information is contrasted with the breakdown of symbolic efficacy in modern heroic fantasy. The study reveals the importance of mythopoeia as a repository of cultural beliefs, traditions, and moral values, as well as the negative impact on society of symbolic inefficiency when the archetypes of these symbols are redirected by socioeconomic powers such as industrialization and post-industrial capitalism.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank those in my life who over the past few years have mentored, encouraged, and inspired me in my studies at Vermont College of Union Institute & University: Susan Sawyer, Sarah Mitchell, Ph.D., Richard Fantina, Ph.D., and Woden Teachout, Ph.D. These have been the most challenging, important years of my educational life, made more so by the professional and academic integrity of these fine scholars.
I would also like to acknowledge the support and encouragement of my husband and children who listened to my ideas and waited patiently for the day when I could once again build Lego castles, make silly crafts, and cook dinner.
And finally – of all the Williams I’ve known or studied in my life, the greatest by far is my dad, whose bedtime stories had as much layered meaning as William Blake’s mythopoeias, as much epic fantasy as William Morris’s heroic poetry, and as much magic as William Butler Yeats’s Celtic Twilight. Thank you, Dad, for teaching me the value of Story.
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Table of Contents
Chapter One | Mythopoeia
Chapter Two | William Blake: Romantic Mythmaker
Chapter Three | Quest for Paradise: Victorian Medievalism and Utopia In the Works of William Morris
Chapter Four | William Butler Yeats: Heroic Nationalism
Chapter Five | Modern Myth and Society: Symbolic Efficacy of the Heroic in the fiction of Stephen R. Donaldson and Stephanie Meyer
Bibliography
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List of Illustrations
1. Engraving | “The Laocoön” | William Blake’s last illuminated work, c. 1826-1827.
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Chapter 1
Mythopoeia
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“Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.” – Plato, The Republic
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“One man with an idea in his head is in danger of being considered a madman; two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act, a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and the cause has victories tangible and real; and why only a hundred thousand? Why not a hundred million and peace upon the earth? You and I who agree together, it is we who have to answer that question.” – William Morris, “Art Under Plutocracy”
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The creation of a mythology in narrative literature or film is called mythopoeia. Like Classical and Northern myths, mythopoeias contain a range of archetypal material called myth symbols. These symbols carry meanings older than recorded history because they emerge directly from the oral storytelling traditions of ancient cultures. The myth symbols of paradise, utopia, and heroism in the mythopoeic fiction and poetry of the Romantic to Postmodern literary periods illustrate an evolution of sociopolitical, literary, artistic, and philosophical ideologies that are both revealing of their historical time and relevant in an analysis of contemporary Western cultures.
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Mythopoeic fiction, folklore, and other storytelling traditions of ancient to contemporary times have the power to illuminate and shape their respective cultures. As a body of fantastical fiction and poetry, mythopoeias represent a repository of cultural beliefs, traditions, and hopes – ideas that continue to perpetuate and evolve through interaction with successive generations in every culture. Postmodern mythmaking followed a long tradition of symbolic efficacy that preserved the archetypes of paradise, utopia, and the heroic even when the purpose of the symbols was redirected to meet the needs of communities in different ages of history.
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Paradise is an image that has ruled the world from the beginning of time. Mankind has always sought a cure for mortality – and Paradise represents eternity for the physical self, the mind, or both in most religions and cultures in which it has flourished as a symbol of human hope. The Paradise that concerns this paper is the Earthly Paradise rather than Heaven, or the Seat of God in the Christian faith. The word Paradise probably originates in the Persian language and originally meant a peaceful or restful garden of unsurpassed beauty.
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Images of the Earthly Paradise in Medieval Europe proceed from the idea that the Garden of Eden never vanished from the earth. In fact, medieval cartographers produced an enormous body of charts depicting the exact location, they believed, of the Earthly Paradise. Indeed, Christopher Columbus was only one of many explorers who believed in the physical existence of Paradise on Earth and sought it out in numerous explorations of uncharted parts of the world. In a passage from the log of his third voyage in 1498, Columbus wrote,
I believe that, if I pass below the Equator, on reaching these higher regions I shall find a much cooler climate and a greater difference in the stars and waters. Not that I believe it possible to sail to the extreme summit or that it is covered by water, or that it is even possible to go there. For I believe that the earthly Paradise lies here, which no one can enter except by God’s leave…(Delumeau, 54).
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The idea of an Earthly Paradise has been represented since ancient times as the seat of innocence and life restored. This paper deals with Paradise as a state of mind, flowing naturally thereafter into a state of being as described by Romantic Age poets like William Blake and John Keats. The Romanticists motivation to reacquire an Earthly Paradise is tied directly to their passionate objection of the dehumanizing consequences of the Age of Reason that followed the Middle Ages. In fact, poets like Blake sought a revival of what they believed to be the paradisiacal lifestyle of medieval peoples. Romanticists linked innocence, beauty, and misery in a Hegelian marriage of contrasts to produce their fundamental philosophy that truth is a product of both mind and heart. For the Romanticist, the restoration of an Earthly Paradise of mind meant salvation from institutionalized religion and the encroaching ugliness of industrialization.
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While Columbus and others like him in preceding centuries sought answers and healing in a physical Paradise on Earth, Romanticists believed humankind could revive an Earthly Paradise by returning to the state of innocence and oneness with nature they attributed to their predecessors who lived during the Middle Ages. In his book Medieval Lives, Terry Jones quotes author Brian Stock,
The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to define itself; the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the Romantics revived them in order to escape from themselves. In their widest ramifications ‘the Middle Ages’ thus constitute one of the most prevalent cultural myths of the modern world (12).
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What is so interesting about this statement is that the evolution of the symbols of paradise, utopia, and the heroic in the works of William Blake, William Morris, W.B. Yeats, and J.R.R. Tolkien, while different in use, all stem from each author’s sense of medieval revivalism as the point of origin for social reform. In every form they take over the centuries between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age, these symbols refer back to a time of simplicity, innocence, and beauty. The accuracy of the comparison between the historical reality of the Middle Ages and the idyllic image of them is of less consequence to these authors than the meanings of the images and the values they translated regarding honor, craftsmanship, pastoral lifestyle, and spiritual oneness with the natural world.
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In contrast to the Romantic Paradise of the mind, Utopia represents a physical place or state that defies exact definition. Many scholars of Utopian literature have resigned themselves to the idea that most Utopian literature describes societies with few similarities other than a general lack of conflict between individual inhabitants and the inhabitants and their community structure. British historian J.C. Davis writes in Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516 – 1700, that the best definitions have come from scholars who “broadened the defining criteria” (16).
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Two such Utopian scholars, Glenn Nagley and J. Max Patrick, lay out three characteristics by which Utopian literature may be recognized: “it is fictional, it describes a particular state or community, and its theme is the political structure of that fictional state or community (Davis, 16). Nagely and Patrick’s structure is certainly true of all Utopian literature, yet still so broad that it neglects the impetus and fundamental feature of all Utopias: an ideal society in which mankind lives without social, political, or economic contention.
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In contrast, another Utopian scholar, Irving D. Blum, asserted the following defining characteristics of the ideal society:
(1) Utopia’s were ‘permeated with the feeling that society was capable of improvement’. (2) A Utopia was ‘composed, at least in part, of plans for improving society, and (3) formed of proposals that are impractical at the time of writing (Davis, 13).
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The problem with Blum’s definition is that it demands further investigation of what constitutes a “better” society, who establishes the rules by which to judge the condition of society, and “how is impracticality to be defined?” (Davis, 13). Such questions are difficult to resolve, lending very little authority to Blum’s definition of Utopia.
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For the purpose of this paper, to clarify the idea of Utopia as it was written in Victorian Age literature by authors such as William Morris, the impetus behind the writing will be considered of greatest import: Industrialization and Utilitarianism. The fiction of Charles Dickens, as well as the social commentary of Friederich Engels, will be used to describe the world of Victorian England in which William Morris argued passionately for a socialist revolution and the revival of a Medieval Utopia. Ancient examples of heroism and utopianism come from the Greek Classical age. Plato’s Republic is probably the earliest example we have of a Eutopian[1] society.
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The Republic is an object lesson within the context of Plato’s fictional Socratic dialogue. Socrates used an illustration of the perfect society to answer the philosophical question, “is a just man happier than an unjust man?” To discuss this question, Socrates suggests placing the players in question within a society ruled by Philosopher-Kings. Plato chose a government of philosophers because they were considered men of perfect wisdom. After a lengthy discussion that followed a logical string of questions on the definition of justice, the purpose of philosophers, and immortality and the soul, the conclusion of Socrates’ fictional dialogue was that the just man is happier than the unjust man.
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Utopianism was also considered in the Middle Ages. Sir Thomas More, a highly educated lawyer and author of the 15th Century, coined the term “utopia” to describe an idyllic, imaginary society and its system of government. Utopia means both “nowhere” and “good place.” The Philosophical discussion of government structure that forms the basis of More’s Utopia is similar to the fictional Socratic dialogue in Plato’s Republic. Both authors expressed recognition of the need for order and some form of absolute leadership. The concept of government is an idea later utopian authors like William Morris abandoned in favor of socialism.
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Romantic through Postmodern Age writers have dealt with the myth symbols of paradise, utopia, and heroism in many ways; each reiterates the underlying struggle of humanity to find and acquire a state of personal freedom. There have been times in history when humanity has closely approximated the paradisiacal dream, such as the medieval city of Byzantium. For centuries prior to and following the seven hundred years of peace in this empire, the people who filled its streets and marketplaces were at war with each other. Muslims governed Byzantium during its golden age – but Greeks, Italians, Egyptians, Spaniards, Phoenicians, Jews, and Christians lived there in a harmony unparalleled by any other culture in history.
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In 1261, a Muslim merchant named Abdullah described his fascination with the prosperous utopia:
It is a great city on the seashore, comparable to Alexandria, and it takes one morning to cross it from end to end. There is a place as large as two-thirds of Damascus, surrounded by walls with a gate, which is reserved exclusively for the occupation of the Muslims. There is equally a similar place for the Jews…There are one hundred thousand churches, less one…He [the emperor] completed the number by building the Great Church…it is one of the most considerable and marvelous buildings that can be seen” (Herrin, 250).
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The Byzantine image of lushness, unity, and a thriving arts industry resurfaces in the utopian vision of Victorian Age author William Morris. In News From Nowhere, Morris writes that some worship the sun, some worship the moon – in fact, there is complete freedom of religion in his utopia. In addition, Morris’s famous assertion, the work of humankind should also be its joy, is a revivalism of the life of the Byzantine artists and craftsmen. Others who shared Morris’s dream of recapturing the simple, organic life of the Middle Ages, such as John Ruskin, W.B. Yeats, and J.R.R. Tolkien, also looked to the example of Byzantium as a medieval utopia. The Industrial Revolution that began in the Romantic Age and lasted through the Victorian Age, as well as Post-Industrial Capitalistic politics, spurred many authors of the past two centuries to write paradisiacal or utopian literature that carried sociopolitical messages intended to reverse, or at least end, the “evil” work of industrialization and the capitalist money machine.
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The transference of power from nineteenth century Industrial Capitalism to modern Commodity Exchange reveals more than mere evolution in politics and economics: it is a distinctly philosophical paradigm shift in cultural and social values that informs an investigation into symbolic efficiency and the prevailing myth constructions of contemporary Western thought. Historically, our culture placed supreme importance on the manufacture and quality of workmanship in goods produced, a focus that served as an economic catalyst for the continuation of industry. Contemporary values, however, are strikingly different than those of older generations.
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Consumerism today is heavily influenced by the representation of myth and imagery associated with goods sold (Csapo, 286). Power, beauty, glamour, sex appeal, and athleticism – these are motifs around which modern myths are constructed, and which serve as today’s vehicles of exchange. We buy the “image” we seek, trading our assets for mythic ideals – advertising, marketing, and packaging that have seduced us away from an examination of the actual merit or utility of the commodities we purchase.
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Some critics, Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Lacan in particular, call the creation of these myths in postindustrial capitalism “a waning of symbolic efficiency” leading to paranoid narcissism (Haydock, 26). What this means in terms of mythopoeia is that we are experiencing a postmodern culture collapse that is closely linked to the increasing intrusion of the Imaginary into the Real, especially from the bombardment of visual fantasies in film and advertising and the inefficacies of historical and cultural symbols.
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As societies move farther and farther away from the order and meaning derived from historically defined symbols in language and art, a kind of chaos takes over in which the symbols have a fluidity of meaning that shifts and changes with every occurrence. Terms such as “gender,” “family,” and “sexuality,” mean many things based on the context of their use, and these meanings are subject to incessant scholarly and philosophical debate. Symbolic meaning, as it proceeds from traditional myth and folklore, has little contemporary reliability or efficacy – it is, in fact, chimeric.
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Where it once carried a solemn weight of certainty, symbols today are inherently volatile – they can be propagated in modern myth constructions that cover a broad spectrum of uses, from positive to negative, healthy to unhealthy, intellectually stimulating to manipulative exploitation. Let us examine, for example, beer commercials. The myth propagated in these visual advertisements is simply this: Drink so-and-so’s beer product to experience not only a sexual and popularity metamorphosis, but also the probability of eternal youth and vitality. Beer, then, becomes the mythical “fountain of youth.”
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In contrast, the very same symbols of health, vigor, community, and youth used in beer commercials are also used in advertising for gym memberships, health insurance, bottled water, pork (the “other” white meat), SUV’s, Utah and Nevada tourism, and some online degree programs. The common denominators in these generally unrelated consumer products are myth symbols, or motifs.
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In his chapter “Ideology,” from Theories of Mythology, Eric Csapo writes, “There is little to distinguish the marketing of “democratic” government from hair gel” (Csapo, 289). Indeed, as he points out later in the chapter, the boundaries of significance, meaning, and relevance are blurred to the point that all meaning is a product of intent:
Consumer capitalism swallows and incorporates its own critics. Feminism has been used to sell cigarettes, and Che Guevara’s image is a copyrighted logo for a soda company. The cultural values of pluralism and diversity, once the theoretical icons of liberation movements on the Left, are now a marketing tool for an unprecedented trade in new values, identities, and lifestyles (289).
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Commodity exchange consumerism has opened wide the door to this cultural chaos. This phenomenon invites the creation of mythopoeias that film critic Siegfried Kracauer believed were responsible for dulling and manipulating the ideologies of the masses. It is a critical failing of social structure that disconnects modern generations from meaningful interactions with the founding principles of their nations as well as informed analyses of current trends in our culture. Even while we revolt against every political or economic attempt to deny us our human (or constitutional) rights, as consumers we dully hand them over to the same political and economic elite who grow increasingly skilled in the art of manipulative mythmaking.
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Film and literature are the avenues of choice for the capitalist elites who drive the “trade in new values” described by Csapo. The waning of symbolic efficiency in contemporary culture has had a negative affect on the study of the Classical Era. In his text, Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema, Martin M. Winkler, an antiquities and film scholar, writes,
Awareness of the importance of popular culture, both ancient and modern, for all of culture, society, and the arts helps us bridge the gap between antiquity and today. If we approach our common cultural history in this way, we may throw light on both the past and the present (4).
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Why is this important? What need does contemporary society have for a connection to the distant past in which myth held sway over the shape and mind of ancient societies? German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argued,
All interpretations of past literature arise from a dialogue between past and present…[hermeneutics] views understanding as a fusion of the past and present: we cannot make our journey into the past without taking the present with us (italics mine) (Winkler, 10).
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How then can we arrive at reasonable conclusions in our anthropological and historical studies of an ordered past if our chaotic present views of meaning and symbols must go with us? Contemporary reinterpretations and reassignment of meanings to ancient and historical symbols undermine a meaningful connection to our past, the implications of which can be disastrous.
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Siegfried Kracauer, an early nineteenth century journalist, film critic, and sociologist, theorized that Symbolic inefficacy in pre-WWII film was at the heart of the cultural collapse of German nationalism. With the introduction of the white-collar worker to German economy in the early 1920’s, as well as its associated workingman culture and mentalities, Kracauer noted a surge of interest in the newly created German cinema houses. In their essay, “Phenomenology of Film: On Siegfried Kracauer’s Writings of the 1920’s,” Heide Schlupmann and Thomas Levin point out Kracauer’s devotion to the cinema was “his attempt to work out an aesthetic theory of film [that grew] out of a vigilant concern with social conditions” (Phenomenology, 100).
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Already heavily involved in other areas of social commentary and criticism, Kracauer’s research and observations led to an increasing disenchantment with the capitalist regime in Germany and an outspoken and bold gravitation toward a Marxist quality of socialist nationalism. Kracauer’s new outlook lit a messianic fire in his pursuit of what he believed constituted “public good” in the cinema. His views exposed the awakening consciousness of German nationalism in the early decades of the twentieth century.
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He posited that film as art is a bad thing, exposing the masses to superficial, damaging images of life that dulled their senses to any need for social change. Film, he asserted, must express reality – the mundane, the things humans try to overlook or ignore about everyday life – regardless of how horrible or shocking. He determined that the white-collar, salaried masses, who worked long hours at jobs that did not provide personal fulfillment, flocked to the cinemas to watch the details that escaped them in their normal schedules. Kracauer believed that these details were the impetus of change, the spark that would set off a revolution of German nationalism to replace the apocalyptic momentum of modernity in society with a resurgence of national pride and historicism.
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Theoretically, these “lost” details remind viewing audiences of the true conditions in their lives and society by establishing an authentic connection between the film and the subconscious of viewers. The “artful” film, on the other hand, was an illegitimate attempt to “distract [the masses] from the actual problems of society” (100). Schlupmann and Levin describe Kracauer’s thesis in this way:
It is a question of whether the cinema will be established as a tool of social domination or whether an aesthetic opposition from below will be able to assert itself. […] It is in distraction that Kracauer systematically traces the constructive forces that contradict the norms of bourgeois aesthetics. Instead of conveying humane ideas, distraction sharpens the senses for an antagonistic reality. (102)
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In other words, escapism and other artistic imitations of life manipulate the masses into an ideological submission in which they are unable to see connections between filmic reality and their own lives. However, films that portray such details (or “distractions,” as termed by Kracauer) as train depots, gritty bars, working class predicaments, and any otherwise unnoticed or deliberately ignored elements of daily life, establish connections with the viewers that challenge them to evaluate the circumstances of their own lives.
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This returns us to the original assertion that symbol inefficacy has resulted in a tenuous grasp of reality by the masses, a situation that renders them subject to the political and economic manipulations of those who control the various forms of media in today’s Western cultures. Worse, numbed as they are to the agendas of the power-mongers, the masses fail to notice a more insidious threat from authors, filmmakers, and artists whose motivations are more subtle, less visible in their work.
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The crumbling of traditional archetypes is occurring on levels that are moral, ethical, and spiritual in modern mythopoeias – symbols like the hero-type have become anti-heroes whose anarchist behaviors are championed by unsuspecting readers. One has to look no further than Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight trilogy to find misogynistic, sexist themes buried in the compelling sensuality of this epic vampire series for teenagers.
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How has the rich compendium of myth and folklore that once informed generations and ages of the cultural moralities and values of their traditions become so fragile, so susceptible to the destructive new chaos of this age? What does this crisis reveal about the ideological and social condition of contemporary Western culture? Through an examination of the evolution of the paradise, utopia, and hero symbols from the Romantic Age to the present, it is possible to follow the struggle of Western culture as it has attempted to find its perfect existence and name its epic heroes – as well as observe the desperate nature of the social crises that have caused paradigm shifts in not only the purpose of these symbols, but their very definitions.
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Chapter 2
William Blake: Romantic Mythmaker
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an Hour.
“Auguries of Innocence” (Blake SP, 42)
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“I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise.”
– Catherine Blake (Bentley, XXIV)
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Among the Romantic Age poets, William Blake epitomizes the idea that the potential for Paradise resides in the human imagination – that central to the problem of any social revolution to regain paradise is the influence of the creative mind to provide a point of origin from which change can be visualized and investigated, a place for revolution to begin. Social protest through creative endeavors, one of the hallmarks of Romanticism, arose not only in answer to Rational and Empiricist philosophies of earlier decades, but from the polluted bleakness of encroaching Industrialization and Manufacturing.[2] In an age when the traditional, pastoral landscapes of agricultural England were abandoned in favor of crowded cities, writers and artists like William Blake chose instead to reclaim nature and self, to create sweeping mythopoeias in the hope that these stories and poems would stir their world into redemptive action. Blake’s work spoke, in particular, to the abandonment of paradise – the loss of innocence and soul – left in the aftermath of the Enlightenment quest for pure reason. His mythopoeia paved the way for further explorations of a return to innocence in the form of a New Jerusalem, or in the Victorian Age that followed, a perfect social Utopia.
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The spiritual and emotional spontaneity of the Romantic writers was a cry against the preceding Age of Enlightenment in which reason and scientific knowledge were hailed as the lenses through which human circumstance and the material world should be studied. Blake, part of the first wave of Romanticism, perceived pure reason as an evil that robbed life of its energy and joy. In his poem, “Mock on Mock on Voltaire Rousseau,” he writes:
Mock on Mock on! Tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind
And the wind blows it back again […]
The Atoms of Democritus
And Newtons Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red sea shore
Where Isreals [sic] tents do shine so bright (Blake SP, 29).
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Blake’s text Songs of Innocence describes childhood as a time of perfect innocence and lack of spiritual self-awareness – a paradisiacal state of being that inevitably falls victim to the greed and avarice of politics, power-mongering, and the papal abuses of organized religion. Perhaps his sternest judgment against the rush for empirical knowledge in the previous age is found in “The Human Abstract”:
The gods of earth and sea
Sought through nature to find this tree,
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the human brain (Blake SP, 43).
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The “tree,” of course, refers to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil from the Garden of Eden. He refers to its presence in the human brain as a symbol of both death and deadly obsession, a discovery made too late by Eve and Adam in the Garden.[3] Blake’s intense passion for Biblical understanding is evident in all of his work, artistic and literary, although his radical divergence from traditional interpretations of biblical doctrines earned angry or dismissive commentary from the religious community of Romantic Age Britain.
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For instance, Blake did not subscribe to either the doctrine of Original Sin or the Godhood of Christ. In “The Human Abstract” humanity is innocent until subverted by Knowledge. The aspect of cold, pure reason is like the snake in the Garden, luring mankind into an unnatural state from which it can perpetrate true evil upon its fellows – hence the forgotten poor, the voiceless women, the blameless children who all appear in many of his poems and paintings. For Blake, then, the real sin of mankind issued from its willingness to sacrifice parts of itself to gain knowledge. Those with power indulged their own vices at the expense of the innocents, and in this way paradise, or innocence, was lost.
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University of Georgia scholar, Deborah Noel, writes, “that ‘The Human Abstract’ represents Blake’s final realization that the “real disease” is not a “social, economic, religious, [or] political” force, but rather “the cancerous tree of mystery…man’s own thinking process” (Noel). Yet Blake himself writes in the “Laocoön[4] Aphorisms,”[5] “SCIENCE is the Tree of DEATH” and “ART is the Tree of Life” (Rose, 580).
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Illustration 1 – Engraving: “The Laocoön,” William Blake’s last illuminated work, c. 1826-1827. Framed by Blake’s personal commentary on Art, Religion, and Materialism. Blake’s text on the engraving is referred to as the “Laocoön Aphorisms.”
An incomplete list of these sayings includes:
1. If Morality was Christianity, Socrates was the Savior.
2. The Unproductive Man is not a Christian, much less the Destroyer.
3. For every Pleasure Money is useless.
4. The Old & New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.
5. The Whole Business of Man is The Arts, & All Things Common. No Secrecy in Art.
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In “The Human Abstract” Blake refers to the “gods of earth and sea” who search through “nature” using only the faculties of Reason and science to discern truth. To interpret Blake’s representation of these “gods,” the reader should not lose sight of Blake’s fundamental position that the innocent are those who are led by their imaginations, while the thieves of innocence are the religious, political, and philosophical leaders of the Enlightenment. In the poem, the tree, the object of their desire, eludes these thieves because it resides in the mind of humankind – the seat of innocence lost and knowledge gained.
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Blake’s imagery illuminates his position that Reason, like the Trojan Horse, is a deceitful mistress who misleads humankind when given free rule. He believed that the mind and heart must work together – knowledge and passion in balance – in order for any true understanding of the human condition to be realized. His “gods of earth and sea” were those for whom Reason had obliterated the passion and soul of imagination.
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The idea of heart and mind merging is a trademark philosophy of Romanticism. Romantic writers and artists believed that one of the greatest powers of the human imagination was the ability to reconcile opposing concepts and differences in the real world – a principle fundamental to the work of another Romantic writer, German philosopher G.W. Freidrich Hegel.[6] In Romanticism, the concepts of nature (or the physical world) and the human mind (or everything spiritual) do not oppose one another. The Hegelian dialectic asserts that an object has an existence independent of the thought of itself, yet dependent on that same thought in that neither can exist alone. Hegel writes, “The theoretical is essentially contained within the practical” (Hegel HR, 329). He developed a philosophical concept of nature and spirit that synthesized the contradictions of the two without eliminating, or subjecting one to the other, either of these opposites.
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In his text, The Philosophy of Art, Hegel described the reconciliation of the subject of Art (Nature) with the Absolute of Art (or spiritual, phenomenal experience) as a process that begins at a point of interaction with the “sensible […] formal representation of the Beautiful” and resolves in a “direct spiritual apprehension and realization of the Absolute” (95). He wrote, “Art as its highest, in all its spheres […] culminates on the higher standpoint of religion” (95). Indeed, the rich, imaginative life that proceeds from the spirit of the individual is the heart of Blake’s Romanticist assertions on paradise, innocence, and experience. It is in Hegel’s dialectic that we see take form the shape of Romanticism: the subject of physicality (thesis) and the absolute of spiritual existence (antithesis) consummating in a synthesis of true knowledge – or the union of heart and mind.
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The most critical assumption of the Hegelian dialectic is the existence of a higher authority, being, or power. This assertion informs readings of Romantic writers, like Blake and John Keats, who used mythopoeias and mythological metaphors generously in their poetry – as well as others in later ages, such as John Morris and W.B. Yeats who delved deeply and passionately into the myth religions as an alternative to Christianity. All of these poets and writers, regardless of their personal belief systems, acknowledged the existence of phenomenal experiences in humankind, and conveyed a deep spirituality in their works that reveals a Hegelian attempt to resolve the problems and oppositions between the spirit and nature, or thought and subject, of their existence.
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One of the problems of the conflict between nature and mind is that without synthesis between the two, the concept of paradise becomes a moot issue. Empirical proof of the existence of paradise has not been found. In fact, the central substance of most religions – the deity, or higher power – is unproven; therefore, the seat of the power, or paradise, cannot be stated empirically. The evidence for nature is physical, immutable – but the certainty of spiritual existence requires a different kind of sentience, the argument for which has been waged from the Romantic age into our present time.
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Estonian Astrophysicist and Astronomer Undo Uus has written several books and journal articles expressing his belief that modern science falls short of true understanding when it attempts to negate the vast world of phenomenal experience. In “Science and Folk Sentiment,” he concentrates on areas of traditional and commonsense knowledge known as folk belief. As a scientist, Uus does not seek to undermine his own discipline, but to show that the whole body of the truth of human existence must include the growing corpus of knowledge from common folk, and that this knowledge and its morphology lead to the probability that humanity, contrary to modern scientific worldviews, is something more than merely material without a soul. Phenomenal experience is inherently human, and a necessary component of human intellectual life (Vihalemm, 179). Folk knowledge originates in the intellectual and emotional activities that proceed from human interactions in community and with nature.
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The deeply primal energy that gave Romanticism its sweeping momentum was a cry against the inhumanity of pure reason, the scientific denouncement of human spirit. For Romantic writers such as Blake, the existence, loss, and pursuit of paradise was as real as every other phenomenal or noumenal[7] experience, such as love, misery, emotional pain, and the understanding of beauty. Human experience entertains a vast scope of qualitative data, which Uus calls “qualia.” Feelings such as emotional pain or a sense of freedom involve levels of qualia that do not fit well on the scales of scientific fact. Where science rests on provable relationships between cause and effect, folk psychology offers a more realist explanation of sensations. Uus writes, “We have the least possible reason to doubt having experiences: they are empirical data we are directly aware of […] We can say that one of the advantages of folk thinking over scientific reasoning is its lesser regard for theoretical speculations and greater respect for that which is empirically given” (Uus GMS, 11).
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Like Blake and other Romanticists, Uus’ argument centers around the idea that it is an arrogant assumption to believe we can relate the complexities of our physical world to a microcosmic understanding founded solely on the laws that describe the physical processes of the universe. Uus’ modern conclusion to this conflict is elegant: “If conscious beings have free will and immaterial souls, then the world is not thoroughly natural” (Uus SFS, 16). No less elegant is the Hegelian dialectic that promotes a synthesis of thesis and antithesis, a consummation of opposite and independent ideas that results in a profoundly balanced relationship.
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It is certainly not surprising that the Romantic age can be described as the antithesis of the Enlightenment; where reason described a mechanical universe, the Romantic writers and artists celebrated its organic image. Romanticism was sensual and sought out an intuitive understanding of the relationships in nature, particularly a revival of the medieval and baroque traditions considered superstitious by Enlightenment thinkers. For Romanticists nature was emblematic: linguistic or artistic portrayals of nature were descriptively accurate and detailed. It was an age, according to Wordsworth, when the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” became the chosen path to truth. The age was marked by a deep, introspective interest in understanding the journeys of self. The resultant individualism gave birth to a new literary persona: the artist, or writer, as a hero archetype – one whose work spoke for the voiceless oppressed, either directly as in Blake’s “London,” or indirectly as in Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes.”
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As with the works of other Romantic Age poets and artists, it is important to understand that Blake’s mythopoeia and social protest expressed his belief that commerce and industrialization were the thieves of innocence, that innocence represented paradise, and that paradise could be regained through emanations of the creative voice of human imagination. Although his doctrinal beliefs informed his work, it is Blake’s position on the concept of paradise as a state of innocence rather than an element of, or place in, religion, that sits at the heart of his Romantic Age writings concerning the actual place, state, or lack of paradise.
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For Blake, Romantic Age London was the antithesis of paradise – it was a Babylon, a harlot prostituting herself to “the Abomination that maketh desolate. i.e. State Religion which is the source of all Cruelty” (Thompson, 544). Blake’s answer to the lost innocence of England, specifically London, was that it should be remade into a New Jerusalem, a paradisiacal millennial city in which the imaginative life would overthrow the dictatorial oppression of moral and self-righteous law. He believed the Church of England was responsible for compromising true spirituality by asserting over the people an authority not commissioned by God. More important to an analysis of his poetry, Blake believed the Church of England was the Beast: a mass institutional machine of magistrates and councils whose proscribed methods of religious behavior were not only a means of holding power over the people, but also usurped the genuosity of innocent worship.
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In Songs of Experience, Blake moves from poems that describe the world through the eyes of a child to the mature expressions of adults. The reader encounters a stark sense of the betrayal and depravity that accompanies a loss of innocence. For example, there is a powerful anti-institutional movement in his poem “London.” He brings us so close to the Beast[8] that we can almost see the number of its name. E.P. Thompson points out in his essay “Witness against the Beast,” “The tone of [Blake’s] compassion falls upon those who are in Hell, the sufferers; but the tone of indignation falls upon the institutions of repression” (Thompson, 543). Thompson further describes Blake’s “London” as an image of the “fallen,”[9] who languish “within an empire of poverty, self-interest, and State Religion” – a state without grace, brought into being by the Tree of Mystery, or Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that regenerates man’s fall continually as he grapples with wringing truth from a mechanical universe (Thompson, 544).
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Many Romantic writers experienced a similar internal conflict between their individual spirituality and the authority of the Church. As a result, one of the main thrusts of Romanticism was the idea that absolute systems, such as religion or philosophy, must be abandoned in favor of individual systems, or standards, by which to live. In Milton: A Poem, Blake describes the regenerative process of casting off reason in favor of imagination:
To Bathe in the Waters of Life; to wash off the Not Human
I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration
To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Savior
To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration
To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering
To take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination
(Blake MIL, 207).
The acts of “bathing” and “casting off” support the idea that Blake considered innocence the original state of humankind. If innocence came first, contrary to biblical teaching, then reason was an addition of choice that could likewise be cast off in order to regain the original state, the paradise lost.
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Less didactic than Blake and more expressive of Wordsworth’s overflowing emotion, Romantic poet John Keats wrote in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
(Keats, 462).
He speaks of paradisiacal state of innocence in which beauty is the only necessary truth worth knowing. Keats’ words seem almost naïve compared to Blake’s stark accusations against the institutions of reason and knowledge. However, while Blake enumerates the many sources of depravity in his age, Keats oversimplifies the Romantic philosophy by narrowing its paradisiacal vision to the understanding and praise of “beauty.” His words seem to indicate that Beauty is the only thing humanity can truly understand; yet we know from Blake’s writings that this knowledge and much more is lost when Reason alone rules.
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In “Prometheus Unbound” another Romantic Age writer, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote,
The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness!
The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
The vaporous exultation not to be confined!
Ha! Ha! The animation of delight
Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light,
And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind.
(Potkay, 180).
Shelley’s exultation reflects the freedom of self-awareness and introspection that accompanied the Romantic Movement, as well as the voice of the author as the hero archetype of his own poem. This rush of emotions, this uninhibited pleasure taken from a spiritual closeness with nature, was exactly what Wordsworth meant when he described the quality of authorship in the Romantic age.[10] Shelley, like other Romanticists of the age, expressed an intense enthusiasm for the innocent perfection of nature because it offered a paradise for the imagination – a place for living by the heart rather than the mind.
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However, while the poetry of Shelley and Keats flowed with stirring emotion and sensual intuition, Blake’s work directed a more blunt, less flowery injunction against institutional intellectualism – as well as a simple, childlike wonder of organic nature. Although many Romantic authors such as Keats and Shelley wrote of the beauties of nature, Blake’s focus was a sharply honed outcry against the organized religion and institutionalization of society that destroyed or infected that beauty.
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A balance of both perspectives is found in “The GARDEN of LOVE” from Songs of Experience. In this poem Blake voices a childlike innocence betrayed by his arch nemesis: State religion. He associates love with the protected freedom he knew while playing in a virgin garden – but upon revisiting this garden he discovers that it is overrun by the rules and regulations of power mongers – its verdant green diseased by the decay of innocence. It has become a paradise lost:
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;
So I turn’d to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore;
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires.
(Blake WB, 40).
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In stark contrast to the awakening of knowledge, or from Blake’s perspective the loss of innocence, in the above poem, we find his celebration of paradisiacal innocence in a poem from Songs of Innocence called “The Ecchoing [sic] Green.”[11] It describes a youthful world, lit by a merry sun, in which children play without fear under the benevolent gazes of their elders. In every way the poem creates a sense of safety for the innocent, a paradise in which live adults and children much wiser and nobler than those who have fallen under the folly of reason. In the final two stanzas of the poem Blake writes:
Old John, with white hair,
Does laugh away care,
Sitting under the oak,
Among the old folk.
They laugh at our play,
And soon they all say:
“Such, such were the joys
When we all, girls & boys,
In our youth time were seen
On the Ecchoing Green.”
Till the little ones, weary,
No more can be merry
The sun does descend,
And our sports have an end.
Round the laps of their mothers
Many sisters and brothers,
Like birds in their nest,
Are ready for rest,
And sport no more seen
On the darkening Green.
(Blake WB, 12).
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The poem is utterly lacking the ominous tones found in his poetry from Songs of Experience; the reader cannot read even the phrase “darkening Green” in fearful anticipation because it represents only a peaceful end to a joyful day. The idea of children being tucked safely into their beds to dream sweetly until the sun rises again in the morning is inherent in “The Ecchoing Green.”
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Yet, after the Songs of Innocence, we read of “the mind-forg’d manacles” in Blake’s “London,” the prison in which humanity struggles against its own fallen nature in the many poems of his Songs of Experience anthology. Throughout this collection, Blake reiterates over and over the self-destructive nature of man’s fertile mind when it ceases to celebrate the soul and spirit of natural, organic humanity – even while offering a compassionate image of the nobility of human suffering. Blake writes of humankind from the perspective of the individual – the abused child forced into dangerous labor, the prostitutes, widows and underpaid workforce – labeling the collective institutions of intellect, such as State Religion and social apparatus, as the Beast that oppresses them.
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What becomes clear about the aspect of paradise in the Romantic Age is that it was seen no longer as a physical place associated with organized religion, such as the Church of England, but as a symbol of innocence or the perfect state of mind. Romantic writers, whether Christians, atheists, spiritualists, or mythologists, shunned the institutions of authority that had been erected over human freedoms to practice personal belief systems and moral codes as each individual saw fit. In this atmosphere of spiritual, emotional and philosophical rebellion against Enlightenment Age thinking, Heaven as an eternal home and a symbol of Christian purpose was supplanted by the Romantic belief that the divine existed in the mind and imagination of humanity, and so, therefore, did the ability to create paradise on earth.
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The inherent assumption in this perspective was the innocence of humankind from birth – or in Blake’s system, the absence of a Doctrine of Fallen Man. If humanity is born innocent, then it must be able to save itself by rising to meet the highest standards of its existence; and it must do this on an individual basis. Whether right or wrong in its philosophy, Romanticism was the creative, energetic voice of a revolution that spanned a century of some of the greatest social, political, and economical upheavals in European history. It became the first wave of a new social consciousness protest that gained huge momentum and force in the works of writers like Dickens, Morris, Marx, and Engels who wrote in the Victorian Age that followed.
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On the crest of this Romantic wave rode the aspect of Utopian society, a system as absolute in its institutions and authorities as any other ideology that had come before it and failed to satisfy the needs of humanity. Ready to oppose it at every stage of its development followed the passionless specter of Utilitarianism and the hellacious darkness of Industrialization that began to blister the skies of Victorian England.
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Chapter 3
Quest for Paradise:
Victorian Medievalism and Utopia in the
Works of William Morris
“A map of the world that does not include utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.” – Oscar Wilde (The Soul of Man, 247)
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“Morris [is] the one perfectly happy and fortunate poet of modern times. [His is] a dream of natural happiness, and all the people of all his poems and stories…are full of the heavy sweetness of this dream.” – W.B. Yeats (HP, 53)
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The Romantic concept of paradise had little more than an ideological purchase in the Utopian visions of the Victorian Age. Romanticists looked for a paradise of “mind,” convinced that social change was a process of self-realization that would bring humankind into a state of unified, paradisiacal awareness. Most Utopians, however, dismissed the spiritual activism of the Romanticists in favor of the more tangible results that could be gained through political activism. While Romanticism was the antithesis of Reason, Utopianism became the antithesis of Industrialization and Utilitarianism.
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Following the Middle Ages, increasing social inequities in European nations fueled political tensions that gave birth to the roiling hive of ideologies that swarmed the nineteenth century: Idealism, the short-lived Romanticism, Anarchism, Socialism, Communism, Hegelianism, Social Darwinism, Marxism, Conservatism, Liberalism, and more. It was the plight of humankind in its social capacity as a workforce that spurred the utopian writings of the Victorian age, as well as the powerful surges in Socialism and Communism.
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Writers like Jules Verne, the father of science fiction, introduced practical utopian ideologies in novels like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The prolific Charles Dickens wrote an impassioned injunction against utilitarianism and industrialization in Hard Times. William Morris, the father of the Arts & Crafts movement, wrote many novels and epic poems in which the Romantic mind and a practical Utopia merged in what was nothing less than an attempt to promote a medieval renaissance of Byzantine proportions. If these Victorian Age authors had a common cause, surely Karl Marx captured the spirit of it when he wrote in the eleventh of his Theses on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Marx, 145).
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Although Marx denounced what he considered the superficial solutions of the Utopian Socialists, and the idea of Utopia in general, his assertions on the intrinsic value of human labor in relation to the individual worker inspired Morris. First a Socialist, Morris eventually embraced Communism and spent many of his later years writing essays on Socialism and its place in the lesser arts of society. His writing is an interesting and unique blend of Romantic self-discovery and heroism with Utopian moralisms and a Marxist sense of revolutionary praxix.[12]
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Morris’s passionate socio-political attitude on the nature of the relationship between art and the common laborer motivated all of his Utopian writings. He was heavily influenced by the Romantic poet John Keats, often borrowing imagery from Keats’s writings on beauty, heroism, mythology, and melancholy.[13] Both men shared a concern for beauty and the brevity of life. In her essay on Morris and Keats, Clarise Short writes that “life was a brief day to them and poignant because it was brief” (520). She further alludes to Morris’s The Earthly Paradise as a kind of extension on Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy.”
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However, while Morris’s The Earthly Paradise best expresses the idea of transcendent beauty and misery in his work, it is News From Nowhere that informs his socialist concerns for the lesser arts in society. In this Utopian story, Morris presented his idea of a healthy society in which the Utilitarian philosophy of education has been discarded in favor of an informal, yet natural education. Children learn using the art of unconscious intelligence, or intrinsic ability, such common skills as carpentry, cooking, and shopkeeping (Denham, 327). This kind of practical education is foundational to Morris’s political views: the ideal society is one in which humans love their work and function both creatively and usefully in their communities.
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Morris’s book Hopes and Fears for Art contains a chapter entitled, “The Beauty of Life,” in which he described the connections between passions, art, life, and society. He painted a stark contrast between these and the Utilitarian surge toward rational knowledge that was prevalent in his day. Morris expressed his fear that the industrialized world was rushing headlong to gain an unnatural mastery over nature, and that this was evidenced in the predominant Victorian social bent toward material gratification. He further asserted that this single-minded pursuit of wealth and self-gratification would emerge as the death of humanity on both the sensory and rational levels of awareness by depriving humankind of the beauty found in nature (Bowyer, 648-660).
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What is Morris’s ideal of the beauty of life? His writing asserts that a man or woman should enjoy the work of his or her hands, thereby producing what is worthy to be called “art”:
So to us who have a Cause at heart, our highest ambition and our simplest duty are one and the same thing; for the most part we shall be too busy doing the work that lies ready to our hands, to let impatience for visibly great progress vex us much; but surely, since we are servants of a Cause, hope must ever be with us, and sometimes perhaps it will so quicken our vision that it will outrun the slow lapse of time, and show us the victorious day when millions of those who now sit in darkness will be enlightened by an Art made by the people and for the people, a joy to the maker and the user (Bowyer, 660).
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Morris’s sensitivities to the working class took shape against a backdrop of spiritual and visual blight that plagued both man and land during the Industrial Age. Some of the most descriptive and horrific visions of this age can be read in Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times and Friederich Engels’s description of industrial Manchester in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.
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In Dickens’s novel, Stephen Blackpool represents the oppressed laborer who only wants respectable work that will result in enough wages to create some kind of life of worth for himself. Like the other inhabitants of Coketown who toil daily in the factories, Blackpool’s life is portrayed as expendable to society, without intrinsic value – only the product of his work has value and it is owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the factory owner. Blackpool is an iconic fictional character who represented the realities of Industrialization and Utilitarianism for the working class in Victorian Age England. Much of Morris’s fiction, as well as his socialist writings, was directed against the political and economic circumstances that perpetuated working conditions such as those experienced by Stephen Blackpool. He dreamed of a new society, utopian in nature, in which every man, woman, and child could be happy in both work and play.
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In her critical essay on the structure of Industrialism in Dickens’s novel, Patricia Johnson described the characters of Stephen Blackpool and Louisa Bounderby as two lives that are “metonymically presented by Dickens as the ‘coke,’ the fuel and eventually the waste products, of the factory system” (132). The tragedy of these two fictional lives became Dickens’s commentary on the real evils of class alienation and the loss of individuality and compassion that signified the industrial towns of his day. The Utopia in Morris’s News From Nowhere eliminates issues of class and identity.
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Dickens’s imagery in Hard Times evokes a horror that mirrors what many Utopians, Socialists, and Communists felt about industrialization during the Victorian age. Morris responded to the crisis with heroic epics and imagery of Utopian perfection. Engels wrote non-fiction essays about the conditions of the working class, and Marx asserted the critical ideology of class conflicts that result in the inevitable triumph of the worker to own the value of his/her goods produced.
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Although the Utopians, Communists, and Socialists shared a common goal to emancipate laborers from their oppressors, there were profound differences in the way they perceived and defined these poor masses. From Dickens’s descriptions of Coketown, we can imagine that children were thrown into the hell of factory life at a young age and denied their childhood and intellectual development. We can see that the factories were immensely dangerous, and that lives were lost in a most gruesome fashion due to a lack of concern for safety standards. Even though safety inspections might have improved working conditions, we know that they were not regularly conducted nor encouraged by the mill owners. In fact, the capitalist money machine was portrayed as vastly superior in the industrial mind to the lives of those whose toil made the machine “go.” In spite of these conditions, however, we see in Dickens’s description of Blackpool’s tiny domicile that there were a few items of character, such as books – but specifically, that the home was neat and orderly. Dickens expressed the attitude that however demoralizing the oppression, the nobler spirit of humankind can still be found alive in the heart of a social crisis.
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In contrast, Engels’s factual description of Manchester in 1844 evokes an even greater sense of horror than Dickens’s fiction. From the window of a passing train he observed an incomprehensible level of dehumanization. His portrayal of the living quarters of the poor argued that the dehumanizing affect of industrialization was the creation of a working class that had given up altogether in any effort to live by a standard fit for humans. Engels’s perception of the common laborer was less compassionate than Dickens’s. His assumption that the poor factory workers were intrinsically, naturally “dirty” is revealed in his statement, “Here one is in an almost undisguised working-men’s quarter, for even the shops and beer houses hardly take the trouble to exhibit a trifling degree of cleanliness” (Engels). Indeed, Engels’s imagery is predominantly related to filth of an excremental nature, foul odors emanating from the processing of dead animals, and the pollution-raped waterways that coursed through the town. Death in one form or another became the ultimate end to all things that he described.
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For the Victorian laborer, the Romanticist paradise of the mind lacked a necessary component of praxis to generate effective change. Karl Marx answered this need in language that a Utilitarian system, although unreceptive to the ideology, could understand: the wage and labor value of the working class. Marx defined the value of the laborer as his/her time vs. cost of product sold, and the resulting value vs. the value of goods the laborer needed to support his/her life, such as food and lodging. He put forth an objective argument against the imbalance between the laborer and his/her wage with respect to the laborer’s personal investment in the production of goods sold. It was this individual investment, never tangibly repaid to the worker, that Marx believed entitled the worker to some ownership of the profits.
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Marx’s point was reiterated on this score by other authors of the Victorian Age like Ruskin and Morris. In his essay, “The Stones of Venice: The Nature of the Gothic, Servile, and Free Men,” Ruskin wrote, “This is what we have to do with all our laborers; to look for the ‘thoughtful’ part of them, and get that out of them, whatever we lose for it, whatever faults or errors we are obliged to take with it” (Bowyer, 558). Ruskin is referring to work that creates “men” of laborers, as opposed to work that creates the “animated tools” that support the capitalist money machine. He called the work of automation a kind of demon that would “unhumanize” mankind to the point that “soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last – a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in the world is concerned” (Bowyer, 559). In the worlds of Manchester and Coketown, human individuality and uniqueness could not, indeed was not permitted to, flourish.
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Where Marx wrote of the fixed, economic value of the individual laborer, men like Ruskin wrote of the laborer as an individual with innate, immeasurable value:
If you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause; but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him. And whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind and within them (Bowyer, 559).
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William Morris was deeply influenced by Ruskin’s proactive expressions of concern for the value of humankind, particularly those who produced the many forms of art that Ruskin believed were necessary to civilization. As a writer and socialist Morris brought fine-tuned balance to the enmity between the Utilitarian fixation on the kind of rational knowledge that supported the capitalist money machine and the Romantic attachment to phenomenal and noumenal knowledge. He was the father of the Arts & Crafts movement, actively working to reinstate the pride and station of the Craftsman’s Guilds as they existed in the Middle Ages. He held deep convictions about a Utopian society in which humankind would give equal attention to an artistic life as to a rational life – all within the context of a socialist political system.
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Marx believed the oppression of the working class was the product of wage and labor disparities. Dickens broadened this lens by adding the image of an overbearing educational system built on the Utilitarian principle that each man and woman should profit from every exchange he or she makes. When Engels wrote about the conditions of the working class in England, he brought accountability and conscience into play with emotion against the ravages of industrialization.
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Morris’s contributions were both literary and visual. His fiction and non-fiction writings alike expressed the depth of influence Morris felt from the ideologies and philosophies his contemporaries, Marx and Ruskin. In contrast to Marx, however, and more pronounced than Ruskin, Morris placed great value on the uniqueness and happiness of the individual laborer. Where Marx subordinated the individual to the wage and labor value of the working class, and Ruskin was most concerned with the identity of the individual as a laborer, Morris synthesized the conflicting ideas of work, identity, and worth into a concept in which humanity is both happy and happiest when working.
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The glue that binds together what in industrial England were the opposing ideas of work and happiness is the distinctly human potential for creativity and art. Morris did what Marx did not: he defined work as a creative act (Denham, 328). In News From Nowhere, Morris constructed a Utopian society in which work was the “energy by which an intelligent being expresses his intelligence” (Denham, 329). His fictional society is devoid of a leisure class, or exploited workers, because the working class became the leisure class. The infinite, uninterrupted happiness of the inhabitants of his Utopian society emerged from the joy produced when they created works of art with their own hands.
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Across the Atlantic, some American authors had begun to voice their own assertions about work and happiness. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” wrote in 1899 that work is “the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite” (Gilman). Perkins short story and postscript were a response to her husband and her doctor, both of whom prescribed that she never pick up a pencil to write again as long as she lived. For Perkins, the process of writing was both her art and her work – without which she would to lose her purpose and her mind.
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A decade earlier, New England journalist Edward Bellamy wrote what has since been deemed the most influential Utopian fiction ever written in America: Looking Backward: 2000 – 1887. Bellamy’s novel reflects classical Marxist socialism: equal distribution of work across the workforce will result in less individual work required and greater production, particularly in conjunction with industrial and machine technology progress. In chapter 26 of the book, the main character, Jeremy, has awakened in the year 2000 and hears the telephone preacher, Mr. Barton, deliver the following judgment on the capitalistic nineteenth century from which Jeremy originates,
My friends, if you would see men again the beasts of prey they seemed in the nineteenth century, all you have to do is to restore the old social and industrial system, which taught them to view their natural prey in their fellow men, and to find their gain in the loss of others (Bellamy, Chapter 26).
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The main concepts Bellamy outlined in the novel dealt with some of the specific dangers he sensed in the real-life capitalist society in which he lived: credit, the stock market, the inequity of the labor-wage ratio, and incompetent production standards that affected both laborers and production rates. His proposed fictional society addressed these issues with concepts like individual retirement with full benefits at the age of 45, nationally owned production capacities, an industrial army to manage production flow, and equal distribution of all goods to all members of the society. The primary function of Bellamy’s Utopia was to promote a life that balanced the necessary evil of “work” with a perfect life of leisure and a lack of class struggle.
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William Morris was highly offended by Bellamy’s interpretation of socialism. His own Utopian novel, News From Nowhere, is a rebuttal of the idea that socialism creates a predominantly labor-oriented society. In addition, Bellamy’s championing of the Industrial Revolution, machine power, and salvation through an all-knowing government state was in direct conflict with Morris’s ideas of a medieval renaissance in which perfect socialism destroyed the need for government and all but the most necessary machines. In his review of Bellamy’s novel, Morris wrote,
In short a machine life is the best which Mr. Bellamy can imagine for us on all sides; it is not to be wondered at then that this, his only idea for making labor tolerable is to decrease the amount of it by means of fresh and ever fresh developments of machinery… I believe that this will always be so, and the multiplication of machinery will just multiply machinery; I believe that the ideal of the future does not point to the lessening of men’s energy by the reduction of labor to a minimum, but rather the reduction of pain in labor to a minimum, so small that it will cease to be pain; a dream to humanity which can only be dreamed of till men are even more completely equal than Mr. Bellamy’s utopia would allow them to be, but which will most assuredly come about when men are really equal in condition (Morris, CW).
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Morris’s News From Nowhere has been described as a medieval narrative[14] in which the capitalist, industrial landscape of England is transformed by eternal sunshine, salmon-filled rivers, and thatched cottages reminiscent of those that graced the more pastoral landscapes of the Middle Ages (Wegner, 75). The fact that the medieval feudal system was harsh, often deadly, for peasants is ignored in most of Morris’s literature. His plans for a medieval renaissance were based on idealistic images of the more organic, rustic life lived by medieval craftsmen – in fact, even the lives of the craftsmen are idealized in Morris’s work.
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In many ways, Morris rewrote the historical life of the medieval craftsman by raising him or her up to the same status held by painters and other contemporaneous artists. Rather than treat them as workers in the “lesser arts” – unskilled, common laborers – Morris advanced that these craftsmen were the perfect model of utopian workers: happily, creatively producing with their hands those products necessary for their communities. Morris also adopted the mantle of a craftsman, educating himself in the methods and skills of various crafts and textile arts throughout the course of his life. He produced tapestries, paintings, frescos, stained glass, wallpaper designs, architectural plans, and many other handmade, self-designed works in his lifetime.
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News From Nowhere reflects not only Morris’s nostalgic visions of the pastoral medieval landscape, it expresses his deep desire for a social revolution that would eradicate the need for governments, the nuclear family, formal education, private land holding and inheritance rights – in fact, anything that brings a level of class distinction or social inequality. Morris’s vision of utopian equality was so mundane that many of his contemporaneous critics argued News From Nowhere was little more than a pretty picture of life so meaningless that it was hardly worth living. One contemporary, Alfred Noyes, said of Morris’s utopian creation, “There could be no hell like it – this world where hardly anything matters anymore, except superficial sense pleasure” (Helmer, 7).
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Some Twentieth Century critics have taken a more holistic stance on Morris’s utopian visions. Lesley Lawton writes in “Lineaments of Ungratified Desire: William Morris’s News From Nowhere as Utopian Romance,” “Morris makes of his utopia essentially a hybrid form, uniting the real with the imaginary in an attempt to persuade and seduce the reader into action in the real world by means of fiction” (Maloney, 52). In his own century, critics accused Morris of creating an idyllic setting in which he “was merely abolishing everything he disliked in the nineteenth century and replacing it by everything he nostalgically longed for” (Helmer, 7).
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Misread by most of his contemporaries except fellow socialists and utopians, Morris has gained a closer analysis in more recent literary circles. His attempt to reconcile Romantic idealism with Marxist realism in utopian settings has a Hegelian flavor that cannot be ignored. In spite of the blandness of life in Nowhere, Morris is neither apolitical nor ahistorical in his ideology: his Utopia is the perfect picture of a socialist society in which thrives a community of idealistic craftsmen.
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Morris’s understanding of the relationship between creativity and society pervades all of his work – a vast compendium of poetry, fiction, translations, and political writings – and is key to understanding the Romantic Idealism that distinguishes his socialism from Marx’s materialism. Even though Morris didn’t adhere to the Romantic elitism of the “creative genius,” he nevertheless transcended the Utilitarian philosophy of the Victorian Age in his search for the universal Absolute[15] that would synthesize the creative spirit of humankind with the object of its work. It was Morris’s belief in the possibility of happiness that made him, in W.B. Yeats’s words, “the happiest of poets” (Birch, 5).
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Morris’s writings were replete with mythic language and metaphor. According to Dinah Birch in her essay, “Morris and Myth: A Romantic Heritage,” Morris was charmed by the power of myth to tell stories with multi-layered meanings. The anonymity, ahistoricism, and focus on the sacred that are hallmarks of the mythic tradition also served the Romantic and political concerns of Utopian authors like Morris, Ruskin, and Verne during the Victorian Age.
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The late mythologist and scholar Northrup Frye wrote of the idealism of the Romantic Movement in literature and art: “The arts, whatever their limitations, have an essential role to play in the liberating of the human mind” (Denham, 182). Although he expresses little regard for Hegelian philosophy elsewhere in his essays, Frye merely reiterates in this quote Hegel’s assertion in Philosophy of Art that freedom is the ultimate goal of the human consciousness. As the Romantic Age waned, its vision of perfect freedom in the spiritual paradise of the mind failed to inspire the kind of social change its writers and artists had imagined. While Marx and Engels dismissed what they considered the nonsense of Romantic notions of beauty and misery, men like Ruskin and Morris revised Marx’s socialism in the construction of their Utopian societies: labor became the joy of humankind rather than the foundation of civilization.
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This new synthesis of ideas held enough promise to inspire a number of Utopian social experiments during the Victorian Age, none of which convinced the world that it should abandon the technological strides of the industrial revolution or abolish all but the simplest forms of democratic government. In spite of nearly two centuries of literature that exposed both the human cost of industrialization and the deep need for social reform, the light of hope began to dim on the Victorian Age before a road to paradise could be illuminated.
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Morris’s recognition of the link between creativity and freedom is the cornerstone of his utopian writings, but his medieval narrative style and nostalgic yearning for Byzantine unity is what captured the mind and heart of Modern Age poet W.B. Yeats. Yeats’s mythopoeias reflect his nationalistic fervor and longing for unification in the Gaelic Ireland he loved so well. Like other authors of this period, he reintroduced the traditional folklore of his culture. Yeats wanted to renew an idea of the kind of heroism that would result in acts of personal sacrifice – acts that would rally the country to unite in a strong nationalistic bid for the restoration of the traditional Irish past. It would be Yeats, and others like him, who rekindled the flame of hope in the Modern Age, and their literary images of heroes and national heroism that would carry the torch to light the way to a new kind of paradise.
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Chapter 4
William Butler Yeats: Heroic Nationalism
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“Folk art is, indeed, the oldest of the aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses what is passing and trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where all great art is rooted.” – W.B. Yeats (CT, 116)
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“Whether the approach is openly religious or not, mankind still longs for a paradise on earth.” – David Ulin, Los Angeles Times, 1 September 2006
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As the Victorian Age came to an end, literary images of the Romantic paradise of the mind and utopian existence evolved to serve a deeper need, the Modern Age paradise. The new age required transformation and selfless acts of heroism before paradise could be regained. The early Twentieth Century witnessed war and disease on an unprecedented scale: Major European military powers – Germany, Britain, Russia, France, Austria, Serbia – began to declare war on each other in 1914. As their allies joined the war it grew into the global proportions of World War I. Between 1918 and 1919 (the year before the War ended) the Spanish Influenza killed over 50 million people worldwide. The old ideas of paradise and utopia made little practical sense in a new era of global crisis.
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Born in 1865, Irish poet William Butler Yeats inherited the idealism of the Romantics and the social activism of the Victorian Utopians; yet it was in neither of these ideologies that his literary genius finally flourished. Early Yeats writings demonstrate his regard for the Romantic work of John Keats, but the more influential mentor to Yeats’s middle years writings was William Morris and his images of Utopian Byzantine unity. Morris’s Byzantium may be little more than his ideal of a medieval reconstruction and Gothic design, but it is certain that Yeats and Morris discussed the sociopolitical aspects of Byzantium on a much deeper level that resonates in Yeats’s nationalistic compositions.
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Byzantium represents the ultimate synthesis and resolution of many ethnic, religious, and ideological cultural groups in one unified state of an Eastern Roman Empire of the Middle Ages. For Morris, this tolerant society of diverse peoples was expressed best in its anti-academic, anti-classical architecture. In “The Idea of Byzantium in William Morris and W.B. Yeats,” T. McAlindon writes that the rise of Byzantium, unlike the “so-called renaissance of the fifteenth to sixteenth century period, [was] a true Renaissance, a leap from death to new birth” (312). In fact, Morris’s preoccupation with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood stemmed from his perception that the work of the Brotherhood was a “resurrection of Byzantium” in its pursuit of a Gothic revival of the Middle Ages (312).
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For Yeats, Byzantium represented the perfect unification of a culture that echoed the imagery and historicism of the ancient Irish sagas. His native folklore flowed from a culture that traditionally shared the wisdom of its ancients equally with the learned and unlearned alike. The primitive Irish both respected and reflected the values and ideals set forth in their folklore – the folklore itself was a unifying aspect of the culture, bringing together the finest minds with those of “beggars and fools” (McAlindon, 310). In defining the Byzantine craftsman and his or her superiors, Morris wrote:
The difference between them was arbitrary rather than real; there was no such gulf in language, manners, and ideas as divides a cultivated middle-class person of to-day, a “gentleman,” from even a respectable lower-class man; the mental qualities necessary to an artist, intelligence, fancy, imagination, had not then to go through the mill of the competitive market, nor had the rich…made good their claim to be the sole possessors of mental refinement (McAlindon, 310).
It is clear that Morris’s Byzantium effectively captured and charmed the emerging nationalist spirit of a young W.B. Yeats, who with great fervor introduced it into his own poetry as an archetype of the unified Gaelic Ireland he hoped to reclaim.
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The Post Office Uprising of 1916 marks a turning point in Yeats’s vision, for this tragedy turned him away from the Romantic heroism that figured so strongly in his poetry up to that event. It prompted him to write the poem “Easter 1916,” in which he details a spiritual rebirth that wrought in him a “terrible beauty.”
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Yeats begins the poem with a direct, honest discussion of his trite relationships, characterizing them as “meaningless words.” Perhaps he is referring to his earlier muse who inspired the Romanticist poems in which he idealized the medieval Irish peasant and, like Morris, ignored the poverty and brevity that was the reality of their lives. In the poem, Yeats reveals his passions toward four individuals who are not only known to him, but are also involved in the uprising – three of whom are summarily executed when the ordeal comes to its bloody end.
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As the poem continues, he describes the kind of transformation that occurs in these people in whom a “terrible beauty is born.” These are Irish nationals with whom he shares some level of relationship in everyday life: a beautiful woman with a sweet voice; the teacher who rides a winged horse and is probably also a poet; the teacher’s friend who is showing promise in the direction of either art or poetry; and a “louse” of a man who has wronged someone that Yeats holds dear.
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Moving on, Yeats describes the hardening of hearts and lives sacrificed so completely to a purpose that those lives are lost while they are yet still living. Yeats’s poem activates a nationalistic unity in the aftermath of the uprising in which over 700 people were killed – the poem strives toward higher meaning, urging others to take on the “terrible beauty” that marks the personal sacrifice of the heroic. Yeats asserted through his poetry and mythopoeias that such heroism was the right road to the restoration of Gaelic unity. In Yeats’s mind, as with other nationalist authors of the Modern age in Europe, such unity described a return to the Edenic paradise of ancient times in which the heart of the nation beat vividly through its folklore and traditional wisdom.
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The emerging prominence of the hero in Modern Age literature signaled a shift in ideological paradigms from the Romantic and Victorian Age prescriptions for social reform. Hope was no longer placed in discovering the Earthly Paradise, recapturing the innocence of a Paradise lost, or leading a revolution toward Utopia – modern hope shifted toward the new Hero who could lead the way to a revival of nationalistic unity from which a paradise of more ancient times could be restored. In a broad sense, the idea of idyllic existence, free from pain and oppression, seemed a faraway goal; the hero, however, was the embodiment of everything possible – anyone could choose to live a heroic life.
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This new ideology is nowhere better illustrated than in the postmodern writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. In his Lord of the Rings trilogy the most unlikely character, a Hobbit, becomes the greatest hero of all. Like Yeats heroes, however, Tolkien’s Hobbits pay dearly for their “right” and heroic choices in the novels – they are transformed by a “terrible beauty” that represents the necessary, Hegelian synthesis of misery and beauty that describes the character of heroism in the Twentieth Century.
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The medievalist mind of Tolkien is famous. His pastoral imagery and celebration of craftsmanship and an organic lifestyle has an elegance that far exceeds the heroic and utopian fiction of his greatest Victorian influence, William Morris. Tolkien’s work, however, is not utopian. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is multidimensional on many issues that were as relevant in Tolkien’s day as they are today: war, oppression, industrial pollution, ecological rapine, and genocide.
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In fact, a close analysis of the purpose of heroism in the mythopoeias of Yeats and Tolkien points toward another sociological paradigm shift: is an idyllic paradise still the prize, or do we seek to regain lost values that once kept our societies strong? For Yeats a heroic sense of nationalism was required to regain the unified Gaelic Ireland of the distant past; but for Tolkien, the past was not so distant.
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A pastoral medievalism had reigned in Middle Earth for 3000 years at the beginning of his tale. The threat to the land arose within the context of the story, infecting Middle Earth with its evil from one end of the land to the other. The primary goal of Sauron, the antagonist, was more to destroy the cultural and spiritual morality of the peoples of Middle Earth than to rule over them – his greatest satisfaction came from breaking the hearts and minds of the free peoples who lived outside of the borders of his home, Mordor. The heroic struggle in Tolkien’s story expressed his concern not with a quest to attain something that had never existed in the historical community records of any civilization on earth, but with the real possibility of recapturing values and ethics that were lost in the Industrial Revolution of the Victorian Era and the wars of the Twentieth Century.
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The recapturing of values from a paradisiacal past motivated Yeats to revive the ancient mythologies and religions of his native Ireland. In his essay “By the Roadside,” he describes coming upon a group of singers at a wide place in the Kiltartan road. Someone began to sing Eiblin a Ruin, a song of meeting sung by a man to his sweetheart. Of the experience Yeats writes,
The voices melted into the twilight, and were mixed into the trees, and when I thought of the words they too melted away, and were mixed with the generations of men. Now it was a phrase, now it was an attitude of mind, an emotional form that had carried my memory to older verses, or even to forgotten mythologies. I was carried so far that it was as thought I came to one of the four rivers, and followed it under the wall of Paradise to the roots of the trees of knowledge and of life (CT, 116).
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Yeats passionately, eloquently describes the connection between his nationalist roots and a sense of returning to Paradise as he listens to words that had been sung since the dawn of Irish unity. His intuitive understanding of the power of Irish historicism fueled mythological works such as The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore, Mythologies, and literary attempts to revive the pagan cults of ancient Irish heroes like Cuchulain.
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Encouraged by his friend and patron, Lady Gregory, Yeats participated in the founding of the Irish National Theater, in which were staged plays written by both Yeats and Gregory in celebration of Irish heroism, history, and nationalism. In his book, The Life of W.B. Yeats: A Critical Biography, Terence Brown writes of one of these plays, Cathleen ni Houlihan,
The emotional force of the play was rooted in more complex feelings than simple anglophobia or chauvinist enthusiasm for a rebel spirit. Yeats and Lady Gregory has mixed a dangerous cocktail indeed. For in combining as it did Lady Gregory’s fascination as a nationalist for tales of martyrdom in the cause, with Yeats’s longing for and belief in magical transformations of reality, Cathleen ni Houlihan made of the idea of sacrifice a religious imperative. To give one’s life for Ireland was a redemptive act, Christ-like in its transformative potentiality, an act far superior to anything the merely mundane could offer (135).
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The self-sacrificing hero of Irish nationalism inspired another kind of hero in the Modern Age that followed. Yeats’s heroes acted against a backdrop of nationalistic revivalism, a return to everything Irish and the ousting of the Anglo (or British) usurpers. Yeats and other Irish writers of his day looked to a hero that would restore Paradise through personal sacrifice for the nation. The Modern Age hero, like Tolkien’s Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, attempted through self-sacrifice to restore a paradisiacal set of values that would guarantee a return of idyllic, paradisiacal conditions to a conflicted world.
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Chapter 5
Modern Myth and Society:
Symbolic Efficacy of the Heroic in the Contemporary Fiction
of Stephen R. Donaldson and Stephanie Meyer
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“Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Tolkien’s fiction has deeply influenced the writing of fantasy epics since the 1960’s. He redefined the purpose of the hero, as well as made heroism attainable to all who so chose it. Many Postmodern and recent authors have used Tolkien’s model of heroism in their own fantasy series, but none have come as close to the critical complexity and multidimensionality of Tolkien’s fiction as contemporary author Stephen R. Donaldson. Donaldson’s character Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever is a conduit through which the “modern, ironic world view of today [is juxtaposed] with the epic, heroic world view of the [fictional] Land’s inhabitants to illustrate…solutions [for] our modern problems” (Barkely, 1).
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College English professor Christine Barkley writes of Donaldson’s achievement:
Despite the fact that our age has wallowed in its ugly wasteland of literature that has forgotten the heroic in man, Donaldson makes of common man – no, not common man but a most uncommon man, a leper – a hero for our age. In doing so he releases us from the stranglehold of our ironic world view […] Through Covenant, Donaldson shows how even a modern ironic man can recapture his epic vision through his acceptance of responsibility, by his personal choices, and by his engagement with the crises of the world to create the personal, redemptive meaning of his life (1,3).
The character of Thomas Covenant is unique on more levels than the heroic. Covenant is one of the first major anti-heroes of Postmodern Age epic fantasy fiction. His life in the “real world” is golden: he is a successful author, married to a woman he loves, and the father of a young child. His life is idyllic until he learns that he has leprosy. By the time he enters what he believes is the dream world of the Land, all that remains of his former life in the real world is his leprosy and his white gold wedding ring.
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Covenant is bitter, hurt, and unprepared to discover that the Land has healed his leprosy. He believes he is experiencing a dream as the result of an accident in the real world that has left him unconscious. His response to the intensely healthy beauty of the Land is to treat it as a threat to his life – if he ever forgets he is a leper, he will surely die.
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The result of his first encounter with the Land and its healing properties is that he loses control and rapes a young woman who has come to help him. Because Covenant believes he is dreaming, he refuses to accept responsibility for his actions. Throughout the first trilogy of this nine-volume epic fantasy, Covenant repeatedly lashes out at the inhabitants of the Land, causing pain and sorrow everywhere he goes.
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The paradox of Covenant’s struggle is that the inhabitants of the Land try to convince him he was called there from his own world for a reason, that his white gold wedding ring has the power to save the Land from its mortal enemy. Covenant refuses the call to heroism, as he refuses to believe that there can be any healing associated with the ring that reminds him daily of what he has lost in the real world. Covenant earns the title of “The Unbeliever,” a name that brings both hope and despair to the people of the Land. He is adjured to “Be True, Unbeliever” by the Council of Elders who hold the Staffs of Law and rule the Land.
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Eventually, Covenant is told by the High Lord Mhoram, “You are the Wild Magic” (Barkley, 43). Covenant’s world both expands and narrows as he realizes the magnitude of his power and responsibility to make choices: the anti-hero must voluntarily choose heroism, even though it will come at a terrible price to Covenant. What becomes clear as the nature of the Twentieth Century hero unfolds is that heroism is both public and private. Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the World War II Nazi concentration camps and author of the 1959 book, Man’s Search for Meaning, said, “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked” (Barkley, 174). Donaldson, Barkley, and Frankl have introduced the idea of a transcendent hero, or one who “shifts the emphasis from personal desires or needs to responsibilities that affect the whole world” (174).
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In our contemporary world crisis, the transcendent hero is, as Frankl wrote,
Not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment (Barkley, 173).
Recognizing freedom of choice, even in situations of unavoidable suffering like that of Thomas Covenant, is the way contemporary Western culture can overcome the ironic world view that says we are powerless to rise above our conditions. Donaldson’s self-proclaimed purpose in writing the Thomas Covenant series was “to bring the epic back into contact with the real world…to reclaim the epic vision as part of our sense of who we are, as part of what it means to be human” (Barkley, 174). Thomas Covenant is an anti-hero who transcends his own sense of powerlessness and becomes a truly heroic model of the choices that exist for modern man.
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Myth symbols that reflect humankind’s long search for a resolution to mortality and suffering – paradise, Utopia, heroism – have, until recent decades, maintained a high level of efficacy. Only the purpose of these symbols in mythopoeias of the Romantic to Postmodern ages has shifted to serve the particular needs of the age. Post-Industrial capitalism in the Twentieth Century, however, has had the ill effect of absorbing myth symbols into the marketing system, undermining the integrity of mythmaking and confusing generations of Western cultures. One of the side-effects of this socio-economic intrusion into the traditional folkways, through which as Tolkien asserted in his poem “Mythopoeia,” facts and deeper truths are conveyed, is a breakdown in the truth value of certain archetypes in contemporary fiction.
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To illustrate this point we need look no further than the contemporary anti-hero. In every age the hero has been the voice of a culture’s values, hopes, and dreams. Today’s anti-hero, far removed from Donaldson’s Unbeliever of the 1970’s, is putty in the hands of his creator – there are few rules, if any, and standards reflect the fluid environment of our current cultural morality. In fact, there aren’t any assurances that the new anti-hero is actual heroic material.
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Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, a young-adult vampire epic aimed primarily at prepubescent and early teen girls, is a contemporary example of the tragic undermining of the heroic principle. In her story the hero myth is overtaken by a modern value set that exchanges the traditional attributes of self-sacrifice, nobility, and honor for popular attitudes that reflect self-indulgence, self-absorption, and sexual obsession. Meyer’s fourth book allows the physical consummation of the relationship between the human protagonist and her anti-hero vampire boyfriend in what reads very much like a brutal rape.
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The rape aspect of the imagery is hard to accept, as are the attitudes of the two individuals involved in the scene; but the greatest difficulty proceeds from the subtle redesign of the traditional hero archetype. Not only is the vampire lover absolved of responsibility in the act, but the female protagonist is aggressive in her attempts to shift blame to herself and seduce her lover in further acts that will result in the same or greater degree of bodily harm to the female. The myth symbol of the heroic has been turned upside down, and the innocence of the virgin female is replaced with a self-imposed, masochistic victimization. If the story is accepted at face value by its readership, it has the power to rewrite cultural morality regarding heroism, rape, and sexism.
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Although ideologies and critical thought continue to evolve as they have throughout history, the process should not allow so much deconstructive chaos to the point that important myth symbols can retain their cultural significance even when reconstructed as damaging archetypes that undermine the moral and physical stability of a society. Otherwise, we should be required to study these new forms and develop meaningful criticism regarding, for example, the heroic rapist-protagonist whose sexual magnetism has the power to subvert the healthy maturation processes of a generation of young girls.
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Meyer’s fictional characters are only one example of what contemporary symbolic inefficacy looks like in the media. It is important to consider how this phenomenon is affecting the rest of our society in political and economic arenas, as well as in how it is weakening the fabric of the nuclear family in our culture.
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In the Romantic Age, Writers like William Blake, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley constructed images of a Paradise lost to the numbness of a mechanical universe in which Reason was both a god and the destroyer of the human soul. The revival of Paradise as the structure of a renewed mind was the message they delivered in their poetry and art. As Industrialization began to overpower the end of the Romantic Age and set the standard for the Victorian Age, the Romantic idea of a Paradise of the mind lost its power to effect genuine change in England, and writers like William Morris, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and Friederich Engels offered either socialist visions of a Utopian life or commentary that might fuel radical socialist reforms and revolution.
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However, their ideas to create an idyllic existence on earth bore little understanding of the realities of human character. Neither Utopia nor socialism could seduce the capitalistic minority into giving up their gains for the betterment of society. The world entered into war – philosophies and pretty pictures of perfect communities found no purchase in the catastrophic upheavals of the war years. Only the heroic self-sacrifice of real men and women could restore any sense of peace or paradise. Images of the heroic are vivid in the nationalistic works of Yeats and the fictional work of Tolkien.
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When the World War ceased, a sense of cynicism and irony fueled the creation of a new kind of hero: the anti-hero. Although this new kind of savior was designed to remind readers of certain values and ethics that had been lost over the previous decades of war, a break in the efficacy of myth symbols began to undermine the effectiveness of the anti-hero – until the archetype was lost in the mire of Contemporary mythopoeias that often confuse and deconstruct the truth value of the original symbol.
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The picture of a society in which mythic constructions and archetypes are rewritten by authors, filmmakers, marketing professionals, and government agencies to manipulate public opinion is an alarming and chaotic image indeed – and one that deserves close scrutiny and analysis to determine what it is saying about our present sociopolitical direction. The quest for hope has taken a disturbing turn toward a new kind of Paradise – a dystopian world in which generations of humankind struggle to find stability amidst the shifting values of a chimeric world order.
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[1] The term Eutopia refers to a positive utopia – a perfect, non-fictional society – whereas Utopia refers to a fictional society that exists as a philosophical idea rather than a plan of logical action. An example of a Eutopia is Plato’s Republic because it is a logical, possible city that does not require elements of fantasy to exist. William Morris’s News From Nowhere is a Utopia because the physical parameters of the society break the laws of nature and relationships – it is not a logical creation. Dystopia is a negative utopia in which governments are totalitarian and repressive, such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
[2] The literary Romantic Age coincides with the American and French Revolutions, as well as major upheavals in social and political circumstances across Europe, especially those in England and Germany. Romanticism was motivated by revolutionary thinkers who argued against the supremacy of Reason – who insisted, rather, that the creative powers of the human imagination are akin to deity, or at least to the creative powers of Nature.
[3] In the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve were warned by God that they might eat any fruit in the Garden except that which grew on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. To do so would bring sure death; but the Serpent, or Satan, also told Eve that it would bring knowledge that would make her the equal of God himself. He seduced her with the idea that knowledge would give her God’s immortality as well – if she became like God, how could she die? Blake equated the Age of Enlightenment with the seduction of Eve, describing the folly of human pride as a consuming power that brings only the death of innocence, or paradise – for with the acquisition of knowledge, Adam and Eve were also evicted from the paradise of the Garden. In like manner, Blake asserted that the innocents of England, her children and widows, and all others without political or religious voice, were sacrificed to an obsession for knowledge through pure reason.
[4] Laocoön, the subject of several classical authors and playwrights including Virgil and Sophocles, was killed by the gods when he tried to expose the deadly deception of the Trojan Horse by hurling a spear at it. Blake identifies the truth (represented by Laocoön) with Art when he inscribes his engraving with many aphorisms on the depravity of science and reason (represented by the Greeks whose goddess, Minerva, sent the snakes to strangle Laocoön and his two sons).
[5] In 1818, Blake was commissioned to create an engraving of the Laocoön statue. The resulting work is annotated in a swirling style that closely frames the image with aphorisms, some considered cynical, regarding his feelings about the commodification of Art during the Romantic Age. See Illustration 1.
[6] In its simplest form, Hegel’s proposal is a three-stage process of dialectical, or logical, argument consisting of a distinct thesis and antithesis that come together in a natural, nonexclusive synthesis.
[7] Noumenal: Referring to an experience that may be felt but not proved.
[8] In the poem “London,” the “mark in every face” can be interpreted to correspond to the Biblical Mark of the Beast. This mark is received upon the forehead or wrist of every man, woman, and child who chooses to follow the Antichrist. In his poem, Blake writes compassionately of those who have the mark, treating them as victims of Reason, or the Antichrist, who had no choice but to submit to the spiritual death of Reason or truly die. This is another example of Blake’s controversial interpretations of Biblical doctrine. In the Bible, humankind always has a choice and the consequences are based on either his/her commitment to a spiritual eternity or a finite earthly existence.
[9] The “fallen” refers to humankind’s Biblical state of sin after consumption of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
[10] Wordsworth characterized the soul of the age as a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”
[11] The original spelling and grammar of all quotes in this paper have been preserved to reflect the originality of the authors.
[12] Practice.
[13] It is clear that Morris borrowed heavily from such of Keats’s poems as “Endymion,” “Eve of St. Agnes,” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Morris’s retellings of Greek myths such as “Jason” make many references to the ideas and imagery of Keats. Morris’s contemporary, renowned art critic, and patron of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, John Ruskin, draws a distinct connection between Keats and Morris in his thesis “Queen of the Air”: while Keats’s poetry is strikingly beautiful and passionate, Morris’s myth writing is powerful and reflects the mind of a genius – however, the mythopoeias of both men assert the idea that humankind can achieve a paradisiacal condition on earth.
[14] Darko Suvin compared Morris’s Utopia to an “idealized feudal England before the rise of the modern urban centers and the explosive growth of a complex industrial society” (Wegner, 76).
[15] This refers to the Hegelian Dialectic, another ideology that informs a close study of Morris’s, and other Romantic and Victorian author’s, writings.