Combining queer theory with theories of affect, psychoanalysis, and
Foucauldian genealogy, Romanticism, Gender, and Violence: Blake to
George Sodini theorizes performative melancholia, a condition
where, regardless of sexual orientation, overinvestment in gender
norms causes subjects who are unable to embody those norms to
experience socially expected ('normal') gender as something
unattainable or lost. This perceived loss causes an ambivalence
within the subject that can lead to self-inflicted violence
(masochism, suicide) or violence toward others (sadism, murder).
Reading a range of Romantic poetry and novels between 1790-1820,
but ultimately moving beyond the period to show its contemporary
cultural relevance through readings of Eliot's The Mill on the
Floss, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Andrew Holleran's Dancer
from the Dance, and George Sodini's 2009 murder-suicide case, this
study argues that we need to move beyond focusing on bullying,
teens, and LGBT students and look at our cultural investment in
gender normativity itself. Doing so allows us to recognize that the
relationship between non-normative gender performance and violence
is not simply a gay problem; it is a human problem that can affect
people of any sex, sexuality, age, race, or ethnicity and one that
we can trace back to the Romantic period. Bringing late
18th-century novels into conversation with both canonical and
lesser-known Romantic poetry, allows us to see that, as people
whose performance of gender occasionally exceeds the normal, we too
often internalize these norms and punish ourselves or others for
our inability to adhere to them. Contrasting paired chapters by
male and female authors and including sections on failed romantic
coupling, melancholic femininities, melancholic masculinities,
failed gender performance and madness, and ending with a section
titled After Romanticism, this study works on multiple levels to
complicate previous understandings of gender and violence in
Romanticism while also offering a model for contemporary issues
relating to gender and violence among people who 'fail' to perform
gender according to social norms.
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