II - The sleep of reason: Monstrosity and disavowal

Summary

The German, the French, and the monster

Romanticism and expressionism dream of the unseating of a reason they identify with quantification, mechanization, and the tyrannous control of the father. When the reason of the Enlightenment sleeps, it dreams Romanticism; when it wakes, it deems monstrous the events that transpired during its abeyance. The valorization of the ugly and monstrous in Romanticism and expressionism embodies a split consciousness that partially identifies with the instrumental reason against which it is in revolt: These movements may bring into the light the repressed and oppressed of society, their features twisted by furious knowledge of their own marginalization, but inasmuch as the Romantics and expressionists depict such figures as deformed, they identify with the power they oppose, which also apprehends them thus. The classic instance is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, split between revolt – the calls of sentiment link one, through pity, even to that which seems most monstrous – and conservatism – the oppressed return as a criminal class whose anonymous disaffection drives the revenge of the monster. Kracauer has discerned the same division within The Student of Prague (1913), where it leads naturally to the theme of doubling:

By separating Baldwin [sic] from his reflection and making both face each other, Wegener's film symbolizes a specific kind of split personality. Instead of being unaware of his own duality, the panic-stricken Baldwin realizes that he is in the grip of an antagonist who is nobody but himself. This was an old motif surrounded by a halo of meanings, but was it not also a dreamlike transcription of what the German middle class actually experienced in its relation to the feudal caste running Germany? […]