There is no mystery as to why the first field of science is astrology—the study of stars and planets, millions and millions of miles away—and the latest is psychology: understanding the individual human seems simple on the surface, but, once taken seriously, the practice is incredibly difficult. Nevertheless, people have attempted to understand themselves long before the introduction of the science through a variety of methods. For the America of the romantic period, the method was literature. American romanticism, a period lasting from 1830 to 1865, was a time in which American literature became its own. Writers began seeking not only America’s identity and voice but their own as individuals in a landscape that saw rapid social reform, the Industrial Revolution, and the introduction of Transcendentalist ideology. But even after America was introduced to the study of psychology in 1875, literature was still used as a device to understand the self in the modern era.
Emmanuel Leutze’s “Self-Portrait” (1865) and Marian Szczyrbuła’s “Self-portrait” (1921) showcase the different styles of romantic and modern art along with their understandings of themselves.
Modernism, a period in American literature lasting from 1914 to 1945, was a time that was very similar to romanticism. Modernists writers recognized the world had changed dramatically after the First World War: city life had become popular, and the famous work of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had a major effect on the understanding of human individuality. Thus, much of modern literature was focused on capturing the America of the early-twentieth century, along with attempts at trying to understand what it was like to be a human in a world so much different than the one that preceded it.
Despite their similarities, romanticism and modernism came to massively different conclusions in their investigations of human individuality, whether the argument was over the value of the self, each human’s place in the world, or what the mind comprised of. By comparing and contrasting the two eras, one can gain insight on how changes in the world caused understandings of the self to shift, and, possibly, how the world affects the understanding of human individuality today.