Romanticism and Cultural Relativism

Romanticism (notes taken from Encyclopedia Britannica)

• 18th and 19th century movement, born in Europe, that affected literature, painting and music 
• challenged the value of:
• order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality
• the Enlightenment,18th-century rationalism, and materialism 

• celebrated:
• the individual
• the subjective
• the irrational
• the imaginative as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth
• the personal
• the spontaneous
• the emotional (over the rational)
• the senses (over the intellect)
• the visionary
• the transcendental
• the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general and a focus on his or her passions and inner struggles
• the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures;
• folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era
• the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic
• Not all examples of Romanticism display all of the characteristics listed above.
  
  

"Long before Melville began seriously to think about the question, it was a recurrent theme for writers whom we tend to group under the rubric 'Romantic'--writers who doubted that civilization in the sense of technological advancement and self-suppression was all boon and benefit. From the pioneer physician Benjamin Rush (a contemporary friend of Jefferson's), who speculated that sedentary life lieads to insanity by weakening blood circulation to the brain, to Melville's contemporary Thomas Wentworth Higginson, wh odeclared his 'constitutional affnity for undeveloped races,' and recommended athletic exercise as a means for restoring the zest of savage life, a strong counter-current ran against the Enlightenment idea of civilization as linear progress" (Delbanco).

In the image above, Andrew Delbanco, Professor of American Studies at Columbia
University, reads an old favorite to his grand-daughter Simone, who sits in the lap of her
 mother, Yvonne

"... starting at the end of the eighteenth century, [Romantic writing] had exalted eloquent innocence as the highest achievement of human culture. History was coming to be understood as a story of degeneration rather than of progress. . . . Terms such as 'primitive' and 'illiterate' were losing their pejorative connotaiton and becoming terms of praise--a transformation rooted in the ideas of European Romanticism" (Delbanco).

"As the vaunted superiority of civilization came in to question, intellectuals had also begun to speaknot of one universal form of civilization but of plural civilizations--thereby acknowledging no singular means of organizing life to which humankind ought to aspire" (Delbanco).

"This kind of cultural relativism had been adumbrated centuries before by Montaigne in his famous essay Of Cannibals, which Melville read with delight not long after returning from the Pacific. . ." (Delbanco).

"... although we tend ot think of Melville's America as a nation bursting with jingoistic confidence in itself, countervailing voices were being raised against the presumption of conflating the here and now with the high and good" (Delbanco).

Delbanco, Andrew. Melville: His World and His Work. New York: Knopf, 2005.