Introduction: Towards Romantic Wellbeing

Ben Pladek (Brock University)

There are moments in every life when the importance of wellbeing becomes unavoidable: moments of acute illness or extreme anxiety; moments when we must confront death. As we revise this introduction in 2021, we are collectively experiencing one such moment. In the current global COVID-19 pandemic, our lives have been profoundly affected by issues of contagion, health, mortality, and the deep systemic inequalities that shape embodied experience. Those of us in teaching professions have additionally had to confront the pandemic’s complex effects on the relationship between wellbeing and pedagogy. We may find ourselves struggling to balance our own wellbeing against our institution’s, advocating for our students’ wellbeing, and thinking in new ways about the relationship between labor (our own and our students’) and mental and physical health.

As we’re reminded of our vulnerability, we also may feel more acutely the value of the humanities and the arts. We look to writing, film, and music for meaning and solace. We may look to the past for insight into the present: how did we get here, and how do we move forward? As scholars of Romantic literature and culture, we know that the years between 1750 and 1850 were pivotal for shaping contemporary ideas about wellbeing, health, illness, and disability. In this introductory essay, we hope to show that the Romantic era can also offer resources for thinking about the particular intersection between wellbeing and pedagogy. Romantic thinkers mapped out territory we would do well to revisit, scouting out the pitfalls they dug for us and using their insights to help us identify and avoid new ones.

To say that the Romantics believed wellbeing informed pedagogy is in some ways to state the obvious. In the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802),” Wordsworth explains that poets can enlighten a reader’s understanding, provided the reader “is in a healthful state of association,” and in “The Tables Turned,” Wordsworth posits that “spontaneous wisdom” is “breathed by health”—as if health were wisdom’s prerequisite.

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Wordsworth, William. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, pp. 126. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797-1820, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), lines 19-20.

  Contrarily, in Keats’s well-known “Vale of Soul-Making” letter, he suggests that good poetry, like life itself, is a pedagogical “hornbook” that depends on a person’s suffering through a “World of Pains and troubles.”

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John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp. 280-2.

Consider, too, texts like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” which posit a complex, generative relationship between pain, experience, and knowledge.

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Coleridge insisted on Nature as a salutary influence and prized health even as his writing (both published and unpublished) demonstrates the importance of injury, illness, and disability to his literary and philosophical output.

Though they might have disagreed on the precise relationship between learning and wellbeing, Romantic writers took it for granted that there was one, and that it mattered.

The period’s scholars have recently started to follow suit, asking how wellbeing and education might be related.

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See Josie Billington, Is Literature Healthy? The Literary Agenda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) and Brittany Pladek, The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary Therapy, 1790-1850 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019).

In doing so, they have moved beyond questions about art’s therapeutic and pedagogical power that have interested Romanticists since New Criticism.

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Faith in Romantic poetry as therapeutic was still so widespread by 1983 that it formed one of Jerome McGann’s main targets in The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

In the past two decades, critics have expanded their approach to wellbeing, often by exploring embodiment, a topic previously deemed “unromantic.”

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Sharon Ruston, Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science, and Medicine of the 1790s (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 2.

For example, interdisciplinary fields like disability studies, literature and medicine, and narrative medicine have used new lenses to focus our attention on the disabled, ill, and injured bodyminds that were there all along in Romantic writing.

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Throughout this essay, we often use the term “bodymind.” Following Margaret Price, many disability studies scholars have adopted the term in recognition of, in Sami Schalk’s words, the inextricable “enmeshment” of body and mind (Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham: Duke U P, 2018, p 5.). As a concept, bodymind resists ableist presumptions that conceive of the mind and the body as separate entities, the latter of which (the body) is and should be under the control of the former (the mind). See Margaret Price, “The Bodymind Problem an…

Scholars have also reassessed the ways in which concepts like the imagination and the sublime may be understood as embodied for Romantic-era authors.

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See for example Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), George C. Grinnell, The Age of Hypochondria: Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness (New York: Palgrave, 2010), Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), and Emily B. Stanback, The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability (2017).

Further, Bigger 6 and the V21 Collective have called us to remember that the question of whose bodymind always matters. The canon as it emerged in the Victorian era occluded the voices of marginalized people that we must foreground to understand the stakes of Romanticism’s conceptual preoccupations. In focusing on British Romanticism, this volume considers the decades during which a rising medical profession helped consolidate bodily norms as well as what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls the “normate”: “the corporeal incarnation of culture's collective, unmarked, normative characteristics.”

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For the “normate,” see Rosemary Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” NWSA Journal 14.3 (2002), pp. 1-32.

While oppressive structures of race, disability, and gender predate the nineteenth century, the rise of professional medicine during the Romantic era gave them a destructive scientific legitimacy. During the era, physicians worked to justify the ideas that disabled bodies should be cured and that non-white and non-male bodies were designed to be, in different ways, subjugated.

Yet in the decades leading to the consolidation of these violent norms, authors also explored a variety of approaches to wellbeing that we can now recognize as distinct alternatives—from Thomas Beddoes’s conception of “health” as a functional and aesthetic category, to Charles Lamb’s embrace of non-normative embodiment, to Dorothy Wordsworth’s negotiation of chronic illness.

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For Beddoes and Lamb, see Emily B. Stanback, The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). For Dorothy Wordsworth, see Polly Atkin’s Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth. Salford: Saraband, 2021.

These authors wrote alongside systems that sought to construct and reinforce norms of embodiment. Recovering their voices shows us how the structures that shape our lives were not inevitable. They help us to understand how the past informs the present, and to imagine different futures.

How do these lines of research help us better understand wellbeing in the classroom? Addressing that question is the main task of this volume. By drawing links between wellbeing and pedagogy, we pick up on the lively, robust, and generous conversations about this topic that already exist on social media and have begun to take place at our conferences.

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For example, the fall 2018 “Resistance in the Spirit of Romanticism” conference held at the University of Colorado, Boulder, hosted a pedagogy workshop to which considerations of wellbeing were central. Meanwhile, the 18th- and 19th-century twitter community has regular conversations about pedagogy, accessibility, and instructor and student wellbeing.

By engaging some of those conversations, we invite our field to take them further. As we will show, Romantic thinkers saw wellbeing as relative, embodied, and inextricable from social and political circumstances. Teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic has urgently clarified how dependent good pedagogy is upon such multidimensional wellbeing—our students’ and our own.

Notes

1. Wordsworth, William. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, pp. 126. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797-1820, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), lines 19-20. [back]
2. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp. 280-2. [back]
3. Coleridge insisted on Nature as a salutary influence and prized health even as his writing (both published and unpublished) demonstrates the importance of injury, illness, and disability to his literary and philosophical output. [back]
4. See Josie Billington, Is Literature Healthy? The Literary Agenda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) and Brittany Pladek, The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary Therapy, 1790-1850 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). [back]
5. Faith in Romantic poetry as therapeutic was still so widespread by 1983 that it formed one of Jerome McGann’s main targets in The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). [back]
6. Sharon Ruston, Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science, and Medicine of the 1790s (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 2. [back]
7. Throughout this essay, we often use the term “bodymind.” Following Margaret Price, many disability studies scholars have adopted the term in recognition of, in Sami Schalk’s words, the inextricable “enmeshment” of body and mind (Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham: Duke U P, 2018, p 5.). As a concept, bodymind resists ableist presumptions that conceive of the mind and the body as separate entities, the latter of which (the body) is and should be under the control of the former (the mind). See Margaret Price, “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” Hypatia, Vol 30, No. 1 (2015), pp. 268 – 84. [back]
8. See for example Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), George C. Grinnell, The Age of Hypochondria: Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness (New York: Palgrave, 2010), Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), and Emily B. Stanback, The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability (2017). [back]
9. For the “normate,” see Rosemary Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” NWSA Journal 14.3 (2002), pp. 1-32. [back]
10. For Beddoes and Lamb, see Emily B. Stanback, The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). For Dorothy Wordsworth, see Polly Atkin’s Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth. Salford: Saraband, 2021. [back]
11. For example, the fall 2018 “Resistance in the Spirit of Romanticism” conference held at the University of Colorado, Boulder, hosted a pedagogy workshop to which considerations of wellbeing were central. Meanwhile, the 18th- and 19th-century twitter community has regular conversations about pedagogy, accessibility, and instructor and student wellbeing. [back]
12. For work that uses “wellness” in the same way we use “wellbeing,” see Katherine Cumings Mansfield, Anjalé D. Welton, and Pei-Ling Lee, Identity Intersectionalities, Mentoring, and Work-Life (Im)Balance: Educators (Re)negotiate the Personal, Professional and Political (Charlotte, NC: IAP Information Age Publishing, 2016). [back]
13. wellness, n.”. OED Online. December 2019. Oxford University Press. https://oed.com/view/Entry/227459?redirectedFrom=wellness (accessed February 07, 2020). [back]
14. See Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). [back]
15. See Jia Tolentino, “Athleisure, Barre, and Kale: The Tyranny of the Ideal Woman,” The Guardian, Friday, August 2, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/aug/02/athleisure-barre-kale-tyranny-ideal-woman-labour. [back]
16. The oppressive nature of wellness expectations came out vividly in the debate around the 2019 Peloton commercial in which an already slender woman, after being gifted a $2500 stationary bike by her partner, used her phone to document a year of her daily exercise routine, which she edited into a video to share with her partner. Critics castigated the commercial’s dangerously sexist assumption that women should undertake grueling—and possibly unchosen—exercise regimens in order uphold an ideal of femininity. To our minds, the commercial’s celebration of documenting exercise illustrates how some strains of wellness culture privilege the performance of specific visions of “health,” even possibly over health itself. [back]
17. “well-being, n.”. OED Online. December 2019. Oxford University Press. https://oed.com/view/Entry/227050?redirectedFrom=wellbeing (accessed February 07, 2020). [back]
18. Christopher Lawrence writes, “Rational medicine in the eighteenth century had a language for constituting a person in terms of his life history and experiences. It could describe a person’s own natural state and (sometimes) restore him to it if he fell sick. Nineteenth-century medical men were developing a language (which we still use) for situating all people in relation to each other, for measuring their deviation from the normal, and, increasingly, for managing their deviations from that norm.” Christopher Lawrence, Medicine in the Making of Modern Britain, 1700-1900 (New York: Routledge, 1994), 45. [back]
19. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge , vol. 2, 1801–1806, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 1115 (Letter #591 to Sarah Coleridge, April 1, 1804). See also Letter #600 to Sara Coleridge, June 5, 1804 in the same volume, p. 1140. A valuable study might be written on Coleridge’s various definitions of wellbeing. In response to his chronic illnesses he is at different times vulnerable and stoic: “The effect of years cannot be done away with in a few weeks—I am tranquil & resigned—and even if I should not bring back Health, I shall at least bring back experience, & suffer with patience & in silence,” he writes to Sara (Letters, 2: p. 1140). Years later, in a May 25, 1820 letter to J. H. Green, he would postulate that his body had been so greatly changed by illness that were any one organ to be magically repaired to its original healthy state, the rest of his “Organismus” would reject it, “as if, for instance, a worn lock with an equally worn key—might no longer fit the lock. The repaired organs might from intimate in-correspondence be the causes of torture and madness” (Letters, 5: p. 46). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 5, 1820–1825, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 46. [back]
20. William Babington and James Curry, Outlines of a Course of Lectures on the Practice of Medicine: As Delivered in the Medical School of Guy’s Hospital (London: J. M’Creery, 1811), 1. [back]
21. Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee, and Peter J. Kitson, Literature, Science, and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 7. [back]
22. For example, David S. Anderson’s Wellness Issues for Higher Education (2015) files “nutrition” under “Physical Wellness” and stress management, mental health, and technology under “Emotional Wellness.” It also has a chapter on exercise called “Exercise: Hey, Millennial, It’s Time to Get Physical!” (Anderson, ed., v-vi)—an odd address, given that most traditional-age undergraduates are no longer millennials, though many of their professors are. [back]
23. Anne Digby, Making a Medical Living: Doctors and Patients in the English Market for Medicine, 1720-1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 203. [back]
24. For example, William Cullen’s Synopsis Nosologiae Methodicae (1769–85), as translated by Thomas Beddoes, defines “Insanity” as “consist[ing] in such false conceptions of the relations of things, as lead to irrational emotions or actions. Melancholy is partial insanity without indigestion—Mania is universal insanity” (Beddoes, Hygëia: Essays Moral And Medical, on the Causes Affecting the Personal State of Our Middling and Affluent Classes, “Essay X,” p. 27). [back]
25. Mary Wollstonecraft critiques the gendered assumption that their bodies corrupt women’s minds in several places, arguing that women are brought up to see themselves in harmfully dualist terms: “Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body,” and as such “genteel women are, literally speaking, slaves to their bodies” (47-8). Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Deidre Shauna Lynch (New York: Norton, 2009). For more on Lawrence, see Peter J. Kitson, Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter (New York: Palgrave 2007), 74. [back]
26. Percy Shelley’s vegetarian essays source crime and other social ailments in physical disease, which Shelley then sources in “our unnatural habits.” Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Vindication of Natural Diet,” in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley , vol. 6, Prose, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter Edwin Peck (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), 10. Meanwhile, Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man prescribes beauty for a world that has been made literally ill by the pressures of modernity. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. And trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. Al Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 189. [back]
27. Victor wishes to “banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death.” Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus , ed. M.K. Joseph (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 42. [back]
28. In the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth aligned the conditions of “Low and rustic life” with the “healthy” taste of readers, the “healthful state of association” in which he aimed to write. [back]
29. Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave , ed. Sara Salih. London: Penguin, 2004, p. 38. Similarly, in William Earle’s Obi; or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack (Broadview, 2005), Amri, Jack’s mother, tells her son of “Good medical assistance” she received for a burn, and asks, “If he [Mornton, their enslaver] heals our wounds, for whose sake is it? Is it for ours, or his own benefit?” (100 – 1). For work on the frequency of “brands, deformities, impairments, disfigurements, amputations, and marks of punishment” in descriptions of enslaved people in Barbadian and Jamaican runaway advertisements (214), see Stephanie Hunt-Kennedy’s ‘Had his nose cropt for being formerly runaway’: disability and the bodies of fugitive slaves in the British Caribbean.” Slavery & Abolition, Vol. 41, No. 2 (2020), pp 212 – 233. [back]