Emotional Objectification: Implications of the Consumer Object in Romantic Poetry

British Romanticism is commonly conceived as a turn to the interior and to nature in the midst of the major economic and social changes associated with the Industrial Revolution. Yet, the British Romantics also aimed to connect with one another and the reality of their age. As part of their grappling with industrial and consumer culture, the Romantics attempted to adopt the object as a mechanism of emotional expression in their poetry in order to create a new mode of communication which would allow them to best express themselves in an era which was fundamentally defined by the industrial object. In this thesis, I analyze how Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, as representatives of the British Romantic poets, utilized the object as a form of personal expression. The object’s function as a figurative device was to act as a semiotic representation of the sentiments of the poet as the poet would displace their emotions onto it. Furthermore, the shared experience created by this emotional displacement served as a basis for a perceived connection between the poet and the object. The Romantics ultimately expanded the practice of emotional displacement beyond inanimate objects to marginalized bodies. However, the use of an object-oriented framework to use marginalized peoples to characterize Romantics’ experience served only to further marginalize them as it emotionally objectified them