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Chapter 9
Heartbreak:
Fetches and Lyrical Songs
Romanticism has mostly been considered the "artificial" product of an aesthetic
bourgeois fashion thriving within the confined universe of social privilege and idle fantasy.
Aries, on the contrary, understands the phenomenon as a "rcal" fact of daily life rooted in a
profound transformation of man's conception of himself within society. While traditional
societies were governed by rules of social interaction and solidarity binding one and all, the
eighteenth century introduces a "revolution du sentiment" which focalizes affectivity on the
family circle. l This greater affective investment on "loved ones" henceforward makes them
inseparable and irreplacable.
9.1. "I just saw him come up and with his oilclolhes on"
Revenants do not escape this dramatization of family relationships. The anonymous
warning spirits of medieval and Post-Refonnation times become recognized as close
relatives. While the "ghosts" of the age mostly belong to the family rather than the social
sphere, their number, contrary to logical expectation, does not dwindle. If it is not far
from the ancient familiarity of ghosts to their identification as family members, Aries has
another explanation: the recognition of the autonomous existence of the soul, first
introduced by thc doctrine of purgatory, would be responsible for the almost banal
phcnomenon of "disembodied souls" pouring into the age. He writes:
... il n'y a guere de famille, au debut du XXeme siecle, qui ne possede
dans leur folklore quelque histoire sembI able: un revc terriblc a unc
I Aries develops this thesis in En/anI, and traces this "triumph of affectivity" to the
transfornw.tion of wills in the middle of the eighteenth century. Greater intimacy and
trust in family relations would explain their evolution from an elaborate literary genre 10
a mere legal document. For three centuries, wills had included religious and moral
considerations (requests for burial, alms, prayers, and personal recommendations)
besides material dispositions. The gradual suppression of all but such considcrations, he
contends, resulted from the confidencc that personal wishes entrustcd privatcly would be
respected: lIomme 2: 178-80.