The French language originates from the Latin and is one of five romance languages (the others being Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian). They have more than 700 million native speakers worldwide. The language of French could make anyone sound romantic even if they are just ordering a sandwich.
The romanticism movement was supposedly helped along by the French revolution of 1789. This was caused by the people of France being unhappy with the government and Roman Catholic Church helped along by a huge rise in unemployment, national debt and famine.
Another aspect of romance is passion. Without passion romance wouldn’t exist. Passion has many forms and many meanings. It ranges from the dictionary meaning to uses in Christianity, films and CD titles. Passion links to romance, it is a need for someone, a want to be with someone so badly it hurts. It is the strongest emotion, the strongest form of lust. Passion can be mental, physical or sexual. Whatever form Passion comes in it is often viewed as an obsession. If a person is passionate it means they care so much about a person or a topic it’s all the think about, they live for said person or topic of interest.
This ties us into Love. Love is the most acclaimed emotion and covers a range of feelings. It can range from love for a classmate, to paternal and maternal love. It can be said of a piece of clothing, a song a film. It is most commonly used between spouses. Often Love is used in a faux-term. It is often used in a shallow, breezy way for example ‘I absolutely love it’ this is mere puppy love, or liking someone or something so much it seems like love. This makes the term “love” incredibly hard to define. Love has wide meanings and has been split into sub-meanings e.g. puppy love, passionate love, romantic love and committed love. These types of love can often be generalized into a level of sexual attraction. In common use, love has two primary meanings, the first being an indication of adoration for another person or thing, and the second being a relational status. Thomas Jay Oord has defined love in various scholarly publications as acting intentionally, in sympathetic response to others (including God), to promote overall well being. This definition of love is used in research for ethics, politics, religion and science. What’s certain is that the over use of “love” often makes it meaningless, false and often mixed up with Lust.
These three interlinked concepts of love, passion and romance all come together within the literary movement called Romanticism. Mary Shelley was one of the few women writers to be associated with this movement.
Mary Shelley was a real life Cinderella. A mother and father famed for being a feminist and a radical, her mother dead and her stepmother jealous of Shelley’s relationship with her father. Shelley was forced to take on household jobs as a slave to the family. However despite the efforts of her step mother Mary Shelley received an excellent education encouraged to write and learn. Her father sent her to boarding school with an acquaintance William Baxter where she grew her Romanticism roots saying:
"I lived principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland. I made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts; but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee. Blank and dreary on retrospection I call them; they were not so to me then. They were the eyry of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy. I wrote then – but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered. I did not make myself the heroine of my tales. Life appeared to me too commonplace an affair as regarded myself. I could not figure to myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever be my lot; but I was not confined to my own identity, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age, than my own sensations."
This quote tells us that this time was when she started believing the principles of romanticism. In 1892 Mary met Percy Bysshe Shelley a political radical and freethinker like her father. They eloped and got married where they embraced the Romantic lifestyle believing in emotions, nature and life.
