Kari Lokke. Tracing Women’s Romanticism: Gender, History and Transcendence. London. Routledge, 2004. ISBN 0-415-33953-7. Price: US$125 (£70).

In Tracing Women’s Romanticism: Gender, History and Transcendence, Kari E. Lokke successfully defends her thesis that the feminine visions of Germaine de Staël in Corinne, Mary Shelley in Valperga, Bettine von Arnim in Die Günderode, and George Sand in Consuelo and its sequel, The Countess of Rudolstadt, progressively constitute a critique of Romanticism from within, negating masculine aesthetics and masculine historical paradigms—entropic melancholy and the will to power, or Byronic Prometheanism. The four “heretical” views of history in these four Romantic novels move from the glorification of the Romantic iconoclast and toward the democratization of history. Lokke reads Staël’s famous Künstlerroman, Corinne, as historical dialectic. The syllogistic thesis of the novel is the melancholia of Corinne’s English lover, Oswald, whose obsessive brooding is patriarchal, guilt-centered, and rationalist. Corinne’s Italian enthusiasm serves as antithesis in its feminism, liberation, and spontaneity. Enthusiasm is Corrine’s aesthetics and her religion, the basis of morality, subjectivity, and identity. But Corinne is eventually seduced by Oswald’s suicidal world view, accepting his defeatist and Romantic melancholy as “cultural elitism” and “moral authority.” (Melancholy is not merely Oswald’s personal remorse and grief, but also a socio-political response to the sorry end of the French Revolution.) Lokke posits that in the novel’s final pages, the dying heroine discovers a natural synthesis in Juliette, the young daughter of Oswald and Corinne’s half-sister, Lucile. A homo-social bonding among Corinne (the Sibyl), Lucile (the Madonna) and Juliette (the hope for future womanhood) excludes Oswald’s monomania of melancholy and offers transcendence through the socio-political voice of enlightened womanhood. Lokke’s chief problem, however, is Staël herself. Elsewhere Staël excludes women from the political sphere and advocates a feminine aesthetics of selflessness, but Lokke argues that Staël knew there would be no political opportunities for women and therefore adopted a stance that this very deprivation of power “has enabled [women] to develop spiritual faculties that should in fact be emulated by all humankind ...” (34). As in Corinne, so also in Shelley’s Valperga: or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, no happy ending is possible because post-Revolutionary struggle is ongoing. (Shelley’s novel is set in Italy at the time of Guelph-Ghibelline strife, but Lokke notes that the action is, like that of Staël’s novel, an analogue for the Napoleonic era.) Therefore Shelley’s heroine, Euthanasia, like Corinne, dies at the end—although, unlike Corinne, she has never succumbed to the ideology of the novel’s male protagonist. Prince Castruccio demonstrates the Napoleonic/Byronic will to power; for him, transcendence is the glory of the individual ego and power—a world view countered in Euthanasia’s (and Shelley’s) civic humanism. In Shelley’s novel, as in Staël’s, a trio of women serves as antithesis to the masculine world view. Shelley’s maiden, mother, and crone characters (Beatrice, Euthanasia, and Mandragola) share Corrine-like characteristics of eloquence and enthusiasm and jointly prove Napoleonic imperial arrogance to be self-destructive, although they are also destroyed in the process. Lokke interprets Euthanasia’s “civic humanist values” as an alternative historical model to that of Burkean or Machiavellian conquest by the sword—the “sado-masochistic death at the core of [the] Byronic will to power” (69). A champion of liberty, Euthanasia joins a doomed plot against the man she has loved from childhood, but she is trying to save Castruccio from himself, even as she attempts to save his people from his tyranny. Lokke concludes that Euthanasia’s “political aristocracy” is to be interpreted as a dedication to liberty, more than a personal passion for transcendence. Therefore it serves as antithesis to Castruccio’s masculine and imperialist world view. Bettine von Arnim’s Die …