A Mused (Part Two)

The principle subject of La Belle Dame sans Merci by Barbara Fass is an examination of the titular figure, who must be, like the Femme Fatale, both seductive and dangerous, but, even more, to be unambiguously supernatural and to reside in a supernatural place. As I got into the book I realized how it unexpectedly dovetailed with another book I’ve written about, Graham Hancock’s Supernatural, whose middle section is about the same fairy lore that inspired the Romantic writers Fass treats. Obviously Keats’s poem La Belle Dame sans Merci is a touchstone reference, but so is the Tannhauser legend so beloved of the German Romantics.

With the defeat of paganism at the hands of Christianity, the old gods were driven out and demonized, exiled to another realm, one that reflects the Hellenistic ideals of sybaritism and epicureanism, a place where the strict commandments and judgements of the Judeo/Christian world have no sway. In the Tannhauser myth Venus is the mistress of this dimension, a voluptuary who lives only for sensual pleasure, and who presents such an image of supernatural loveliness that no mere mortal can resist her. (Interestingly, the Barbara Aho net screed I referred to in part one of this essay is haunted by the same scenario which she typically interprets as seduction by Satan).

But there’s a flaw in this sphere – even unrelieved pleasure and beauty can lose their meaning without the bracing contrast of pain and ugliness. Inevitably the smitten hero longs for the contradictory, ended joy of our own world, but the problem is that once he returns to it he finds that neither he nor the world is the same. As we know from the story of Rip Van Winkle, time is experienced differently in Venusberg, and what seems to be an instant there can prove to be decades here. Even though the hero does not feel at home in the unearthly real, once he’s been there he can never feel entirely at home in the earthly realm either.

Thus the knight of Keats’s poem describes his seduction by the belle dame:

Then his own subsequent alienation from the world:

Fass sees the Romantic fascination with the belle dame as reflecting their own contradictory feelings about their artistic vocation, their muse. On one hand, the Romantic nature is drawn to beauty, but it is also drawn to freedom, and poets like Shelley, Keats, and even the later Swinburne felt the pull of the neo-classical idea that literature should be for the moral improvement of mankind, and feared their muse was drawing them into airy, inconsequential realms and away from the crucial political and social conflicts that rocked that age of revolution and democratic awakening.

Although the Romantics were sympathetic to the rising masses, the corresponding decline of royal and aristocratic patronage endangered their livelihood, and the very egalitarianism that they supported seemed to threaten their place in society. As Fass Points out, the imaginative journey to Venusberg was both a pilgrimage to beauty and a flight from an increasingly banal, utilitarian world.

As she says: What artists felt was not so much a longing for the social realm as a rejection by it.