Symbolism

Symbolism, or the symbolist movement, developed as a literary style in the nineteenth century. It originated during the 1850s and lasted until around 1900. Its early proponents included French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.

Symbolist writers focused on crafting a work that would generate, in the reader or viewer, a personal experience and interpretation. The person experiencing the work relies on his or her dreams, memories, and spirituality to interpret and understand it.

From the French poets who launched it, the movement expanded across Europe and influenced painting and the theater. Visual artists emphasized the meaning behind the colors and forms. Symbolism also influenced American literature of the early twentieth century.

Background

The dominant movement in literature of the mid-nineteenth century was realism, which adhered to the classical tradition. Writers detailed as closely as possible what was happening, providing many observations about the events and characters. Realism was in many cases fiction in the form of journalism.

Before the symbolists, poets were rigidly constrained in their writing. Poetry was formal and orderly, describing or explaining, but providing little insight into humankind's emotional experiences. In France, a number of poets revolted against this conformity.

Jean Moréas published a manifesto in Le Figaro, a French newspaper, in 1886. This work pushed symbolism into the public eye. Moréas extolled the beauty and significance of expressing ideas through literature—using suggestion, rather than focusing on a realistic view of the world. He believed that literature should allude to ideas that readers could understand on a deeper level.

The manifesto served notice to the establishment that young French writers were rejecting tradition and forging a new path. A number of new literary magazines were established during the 1880s. These publications, which included both established writers and young poets, often were attacked by critics of symbolism. This helped to spread awareness of symbolist writing and the symbolist movement across Europe and in Russia.

Symbolist poets broke free from traditional metrical patterns. In their pursuit of freedom in poetic rhythms, many wrote prose poems and developed free verse, which eventually became associated with contemporary poetry.

Symbolist literature attached significance to commonplace events and objects. Many of the French writers found inspiration in the early nineteenth-century works of American author Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's works are rich in allusion. Many aspired to his ability to call upon all the senses through language.

Authors used a number of techniques in symbolist works. For example, a color may represent a number of ideas and emotions, depending on the context. Red may hint at love and passion, or bloodshed. A chain may represent connection or bondage.

Symbolism in poetry peaked around 1890. Its influence was felt in British and American literature for several decades. Symbolism is evident in the poetry of T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats and the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

Impact

Symbolism bridged the gap between realism and the modernism of the twentieth century. From its origin in French poetry and literature, it quickly influenced authors in Europe and the United States. Symbolism also influenced visual artists such as Edvard Munch, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, James Whistler, Gustave Moreau, and Pablo Picasso. In art, symbolism followed impressionism and was a rejection of realism.

Realism had been almost scientific in its aesthetic. An artist was expected to represent nature, not interpret its connection to the human experience. Symbolists, however, believed in personal expression. An artist was not just painting a scene or person, he or she was interpreting it.

Artists embraced symbolism, producing mythical figures, occult scenes, and dreamy worlds. Many favored ambiguous figures, such as harpies, sphinxes, and other half-human creatures. Even the use of special ambiguity and juxtaposition, as well as hazy effects, obscured and revealed meaning. They explored themes of anguish, death, desire, fear, and love. Women—frequently innocents or femmes fatales—were often the subjects of works, such as Gustave Moreau's biblical painting of Salome moments before she demanded the head of John the Baptist.

Symbolists of Significance

Arthur Rimbaud developed a theory he called voyance. According to this idea, in creating a poem the author examines other realities. For example, his poem Les Effarés is on the surface a look at children peering into a bakery, but in fact, it is a commentary on hunger, poverty, and social class. Even in seemingly conventional poems, Rimbaud took chances with the structure of verse.

Paul Gauguin began his career as both a student and patron of impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. He turned to exotic cultures as an escape from European society. He developed a style, known as synthetic, which seeks to foster emotional responses to abstract forms. In northwestern France, he created Vision after the Sermon (or Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) in 1888 that is acknowledged as a significant symbolist work. The painting includes a number of women and men praying with their eyes closed, while in the distance a biblical figure wrestles an angel on a field of deep red. The composition and color choices, including bright yellow for the angel's wings, create a flat painting. This lack of depth and unusual colors add to the sense of otherworldliness—the scene is clearly abstract and seeks interpretation. The peasants in the foreground are having a religious experience. Many of Gauguin's paintings of this period are of peasants and farmland rather than cultured scenes and people. Gauguin traveled to the South Seas in search of what he described as primitive art. He is often known for his series of paintings of women in Tahiti. He regarded Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–1898) as his greatest masterpiece.

Many of Pablo Picasso's early works—in particular his Blue Period and some works of his Rose Period—were influenced by symbolism. The works of the Blue Period, while predominantly executed in blue and gray, are permeated with sadness. The Rose Period works are brighter and more cheerful.

Norwegian artist Edvard Munch's The Scream is among the most famous images in art history. Munch created several versions between 1893 and 1910. While he is regarded as an expressionist painter, Munch's work is abstract and flat, in keeping with many symbolist works. The central figure of The Scream is a genderless, timeless character in anguish. The artist meant to infuse his work with emotion-sparking images.

Symbolism was a bridge between realism and naturalism of the nineteenth century and the expressionism and modernism that emerged near the start of the twentieth century. It was a transition from classical to modern art and literature.

Bibliography

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