Write an essay on the Romantic Novel
with special reference to Jane Austen and Walter Scott.
Answer:
The great novelists of the Romantic period are Jane Austen and Scott,
but before them there appeared some novelists who came under the spell of
medievalism and wrote novels of ‘terror’ or the ‘Gothic novels’. The origin of
this type of fiction can be ascribed to Horace Walpole’s (1717-97) The
Castle of Otranto (1746). Here the story in set in medieval Italy and it
includes a gigantic helmet that can strike dead its victims, tyrants,
supernatural intrusions, mysteries and secrets. There were a number of
imitators of such a type of novel during the eighteenth century as well as in
the Romantic period.
The most popular of the writers of the ‘terror’ or
‘Gothic’ novel during the Romantic age was Mrs. Ann Radciffe (1764-1823), of
whose five novels the best-known are The Mysteries of Udolpho and the Italian.
She initiated the mechanism of the ‘terror’ tale as practiced by Horace
Walpole and his followers, but combined it with sentimental but effective
description of scenery. The Mysteries of Udolpho relates the story of an
innocent and sensitive girl who falls in the hands of a heartless villain named
Montoni. He keeps her in a grim and isolated castle full of mystery and terror.
The novels of Mrs. Radcliffe became very popular, and they influenced some of
the great writers like Byron and Shelley. Later they influenced the Bronte
sisters whose imagination was stimulated by these strange stories.
Though Mrs. Radcliffe was the prominent writer of
‘Gothic’ novels, there were a few other novelists who earned popularity by
writing such novels. They were Mathew Gregory (‘Monk’) Lewis (1775-1818). Who
wrote The Monk, Tales of Terror and Tales of Wonder; and Charles Robert
Maturin whose Melmoth the Wanderer exerted great influence in France.
But the most popular of all ‘terror’ tales was Frankestein (1817)
written by Mrs. Shelley. It is the story of a mechanical monster with human
powers capable of performing terrifying deeds. Of all the ‘Gothic’ novels it is
the only one which is popular even today.
Jane Austen (1775-1817)
Jane
Austen brought good sense and balance to the English novel which during the
Romantic age had become too emotional and undisciplined. Giving a loose rein to
their imagination the novelist of the period carried themselves away from the
world around them into a romantic past or into a romantic future. The novel,
which in the hands of Richardson and Fielding had been a faithful record of
real life and of the working of heart and imagination, became in the closing
years of the eighteenth century the literature of crime, insanity and terror.