Towards the end of the Romantic period, authors like Coleridge and Shelley explored monstrosity as a natural manifestation. They worked under the premise that human beings were good by nature, but corrupted by society as they grew up. Collectiveness was seen as an issue, especially because it represented the union of mankind against religion, which was considered the origin of everything, and the establishment of new gods: Science and technology. As Victorian ideology approached, Romantics lost ground in their struggle to regain people’s faith, so they started changing their writing style. They began both showing nature as a destructive, revengeful force, rather than the careful mother, and warning society that it did not matter how hard they tried to be greater than nature, it was simply not possible. Shelley’s Ozymandias narrates a person’s encounter with a traveller who has just crossed the dessert. The voyager describes the features of a great statue that used to rise above the Egyptian dunes, now reduced to ruins covered by sand. The statue had an inscription: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings (…).” Shelley implies that God, who first pronounced itself king of kings, did not like it very much a human assuming His position, and, through nature, destroyed his mighty monument, probably with a sand storm. This, the reader can infer, is a clear (and yet desperate) message sent by the last romantics to society: Beware of furious God; do not try to equal his power, or you will suffer His revenge. It was not enough.
Towards the end of the Romantic period, authors like Coleridge and Shelley explored monstrosity as a natural manifestation. They worked under the premise that human beings were good by nature, but corrupted by society as they grew up. Collectiveness was seen as an issue, especially because it represented the union of mankind against religion, which was considered the origin of everything, and the establishment of new gods: Science and technology. As Victorian ideology approached, Romantics lost ground in their struggle to regain people’s faith, so they started changing their writing style. They began both showing nature as a destructive, revengeful force, rather than the careful mother, and warning society that it did not matter how hard they tried to be greater than nature, it was simply not possible. Shelley’s Ozymandias narrates a person’s encounter with a traveller who has just crossed the dessert. The voyager describes the features of a great statue that used to rise above the Egyptian dunes, now reduced to ruins covered by sand. The statue had an inscription: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings (…).” Shelley implies that God, who first pronounced itself king of kings, did not like it very much a human assuming His position, and, through nature, destroyed his mighty monument, probably with a sand storm. This, the reader can infer, is a clear (and yet desperate) message sent by the last romantics to society: Beware of furious God; do not try to equal his power, or you will suffer His revenge. It was not enough.
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