Romanticism

The angsty teen of the -isms

Romanticism is a centuries old philosophy that's inspired countless priceless works of art. If you described romanticism to me, I would not guess that. If you described romanticism to me I would smile at you politely, find some way out of the conversation, and then spend the rest of the day wondering if your parents are already paying for therapy, or if I should call someone. Because really? Are the people who believe this 5? I'm probably not being too fair to romanticism. It doesn't know what it's doing. I can't blame it. It's so innocent. Untouched by the knowledge of how pretentious it is.

The picture of innocence.

Their tenants are strange. They believe in endless optimism and possibilities. Everything was possible through experimentation! Science was the future! Plus foreign lands were amazing! There was, like, so much totally awesome stuff going on over there! It was mysterious, gothic, ancient, bizarre! They were in constant search of beauty, for no other reason than it was pretty! Escapism! Life on the frontiers wasn't that great, but life in your head was amazing! Also nature was sexy. They relied heavily on emotions. It all sounds bright and interesting, right?

Then why does everything about Romanticism make me want to cut myself?

This painting landed me 20 years of therapy.

I think the reason that it sucks so bad can be chalked up on the Romantic's dislike of civilization. They hated civilization. They thought that it was corrupt. Ironic, because they are named Romantics after the Roman Empire. One of the world's largest civilizations that fell, due to corruption. The Romantics were obsessed with the cultures of other people. They loved cultural appropriation. They're those people who invite you over to their house, and then have some weird looking thing on their table, and then when you ask what it was they act all shocked and then go into some long winded explanation about their trip to Uganda last year and how it's a fertility vase and how it's a tradition that dates back thousands of years and then suddenly you're looking at their vacation photos and listening to them talk about how they're planning another trip for the fall and how they should totally move there it would be such an adventure and then you desperately try to change the conversation and then you awkwardly end up talking about a friend's weight loss surgery. They loved the aesthetics and the local color. They didn't really care about much else though, just a fancy backdrop for their fantasies to occur in.

It's a charming place if you ignore all the human rights issues.

But exotic for them back in the day was like, Spain. Mostly European countries and colonies. This is exotic in the way Panda Express is exotic. That means it's not. This is why the Romantics loved the Gothic/Victorian architecture and lifestyle, it was exotic, but it was still European. So it was fancy, but not unfamiliar. But have you ever read a novel about Victorian people? Not a lot happens in those people's lives. How did the romantics make this interesting? Well, they used flowery language. Compare:

The walls were painted blue, but the curtains were yellow.

Where there had once been rolling open fields and plains, humanity had erected unnatural walls to constrain and dampen the human spirit. Insultingly reflective of this fact was the color of the walls. A deep azure, darker than the cornflower that grew in the fields, darker than the tears shed by many a man crushed down by the world, bluer than the ocean in which that man drowns himself. Perhaps in mockery of this fact, the curtains, hanging from the window with the sole purpose of separating the prisoners of society from a view of the wonderful natural world, were amber. Looking upon them, one could feel as if an insect crystalized in tree sap since prehistoric times, a visceral creature of nature bound unnaturally in a prison they could never escape.

Did you catch the subtle difference in language?

Romanticism knows what you're up to, charming interior design.

The first description of the room was prosaic. The second was what you'd write if you needed to fill out the word count on an essay you didn't really care about. This was the trademark of romanticism. Many famous writers, such as Mary Shelly, Edgar Allan Poe, and Victor Hugo, were products of romanticism. Let's see, Mary Shelly invented sci-fi with her book about a man made of the parts of other dead men. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story about a guy who gets his rival drunk and then walls him up underground alive. Victor Hugo wrote a book about a deformed man who lives in a bell tower. That sounds like one hell of a dinner party. What happened to optimism? Well, optimism is perhaps the wrong word to use. They were optimistic that anything was possible. This manifests itself in the strangest way: through the supernatural. Supernatural elements are frequent visitors of romantic stories. It goes with the territory, which is dark, exotic locales. Who knows what could be lurking out in the dark?

This is fake, by the way.

What could drive this generation of Americans to such crazy ideas? We can chalk this one up to the world junkiest melting-pot. There were a lot of new immigrants coming to the US at the time, thanks to the growth of industrialization. I don't know if you know this, but the industrial era kind of sucked. Especially for poor factory workers, which was pretty much the only position open to these people. They were sad. They were lonely. They were homesick for foreign lands and dreamed of a better future. It's understandable that these depressed and depressing people would give rise to such a sucky school of thought. But today we don't need romanticism, because we already have enough false positivity and mindless drivel in our lives. Romanticism should have died with the Roman empire. Oh wait, romanticism didn't come about until way after the Roman empire fell? Romanticism should've died when the Roman empire did, because then maybe I wouldn't have had to deal with it.

2 stars, because at least they introduced the term "romantic," which is pretty useful.