The Count of Monte Cristo part 1

For my digital civilization class we were assigned mini book clubs. In my 'mini book club' were First Lieutenant Andrew DeWitt and Kurt Witt (very distant relation and an interesting story, ask them about it sometime). Our task was to find a book from the romantic time period. Read it, and present our findings to others using a new media. Neither Andrew nor Kurt had seen the Count of Monte Cristo. I think it is such an exciting story that I wanted them to read the book to enjoy it too. I was actually a little jealous because they were going to experience Edmond Dantes' betrayal for the first time.


First a little background, I had heard about the Romantic period but I wasn't sure what it meant. Did it mean that people were longing for the Roman empire style? Did people just randomly miss huge statues and laurel leaf crowns? Or did it mean something completely different? Did it mean that people were Romantically in love with each other? All the literature of the time was Romance Novels?

I was in for a quick awakening. Like all of history a specific time period makes more sense when it is understood in context. Impressionism, for example was a reaction to the invention of the camera. People no longer needed to commission artists to paint their picture because they could get an exact copy for a fraction of the price. Who cares that it isn't in color? What I lose in color I make up for in realism. What cameras couldn't do was just that, color. So artists focused on what cameras couldn't do, Light and Color. Monet was more concerned about the accurately transmitting the feeling of a scene than the accuracy of the subjects involved.

Romanticism follows the same action / reaction pattern. The industrial revolution was the action and Romanticism was the reaction to it. Everyone was moving to the cities and atrocities were becoming everyday life for people working in cramped dangerous factories and crammed into overpopulated cities with inadequate resources. The Romantics idealized nature and thought a return to nature would solve their problems. They were advocates of the suffering artist/writer that needs to exclude themselves from society to be free. 

The intent of their work was to draw emotion out of the reader/viewer. Or the inverse, to draw the viewer into the situation, so the viewer/reader now becomes a participant with a vested interest in the outcome. Interestingly enough, Romanticism parallels Greek tragedy in my mind. They are not exactly identical because Greek Tragedy is defined by a catastrophe that could have been avoided. Romanticism on the other hand  sets up a happy ending and just before "they live happily ever after" the rug is pulled out from the reader and no one lives happily ever after. As a result, Romantic style anything, to me, is pretty depressing.

We had to first come up with a book. So we created a Google Doc and were supposed to have three suggestions by the next class period. I suggested A very short introduction to Romanticism published by Oxford Press,  The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas. Other suggestions were, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens or Frankenstein by Mary Shelly.

Andrew and Kurt had never heard of the Count of Monte Cristo let alone seen the movie so I said the decision was made and we were reading it. So, on to The Count of Monte Cristo and Edmond Dantes!