P.L. Møller and Romanticism in Danish Literature

Gossiping and Ageing Princesses in Odoevsky’s Societal Tales

“…Greece is free! 35 Accordingly, the Ottomans are portrayed darkly both in melodrama and in tragedy, as indicated by censor Colman who, in reference to Barrymore's The Suliote; or, The Greek Family, raised the question of 'whether our old allies, the Turks, are to be exhibited … as the oppressors of the Greeks, and as an inhuman & detestable race.' It should be noted that the censors, at least in England, kept their calm and prevented the theatre scene and public feeling from being swept away by a blind, racial crusade against the Turks, even if their motives were tactical in nature.…”

“…In her study of rape culture in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century England, Anna Clark points out that the fashionable libertinism in that time made male violators 'confident of their sexual prowess that they ignored women's resistance, portraying their victims' protests as coy acquiescence'. 35 The assumption that Lorenzo is attempting to rape a reluctant Isabella might appear thin, but Keats's manoeuvre here actually foreshadows Porphyro's sexual advance upon the sleeping Madeline in the later The Eve of St. Agnes. Keats's revision of Stanza 7 silences Isabella, who becomes a passive object of Lorenzo's active 'reading' and generates considerable ambiguity in the nature of this, seemingly romantic, sexual union (the same ambiguity in the erotic interaction between Porphyro and Madeline in The Eve of St. Agnes).…”

“…The fluc- tuation between restraint and fulfilment of erotic love once again triggers pathological symptoms, as Isabella 'Fell sick within the rose's just domain, / Fell thin as a young mother's, who doth seek / By every lull to cool her infant's pain' (ll. [34][35]. The image of a young mother worried about her child seems a bizarre simile for Isabella's sickness, which is caused by her ungratified desire for sexual contact with Lorenzo.…”

“…In our literature, only Gerstenberg's Minona rivals them.] 32 Hence, Schlegel knew the title of Gerstenberg's Ossianic drama 35 Schlegel was thus aware of the labours of the German Circle in Copenhagen. He associated his famous uncle J. E. Schlegel and Gerstenberg with the romantic drama, which had very different genre characteristics as well as a medieval European setting when compared to the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.…”