Attunement

In European antiquity the harmony of the spheres was a central cosmological notion from the fifth century B.C.E. on. The atmosphere, atmósfaira, was regarded as an intuitive emotional grasp of the synthesis between the microcosmic order of human society and the stable macrocosmic order of the universe, supported by an aesthetic experience of musical harmony. With the changing conceptions of emotion in the emerging secular culture of the eighteenth century, priority was given to interpersonal emotional relations, notably sympathy, which then became the foundation for the establishment of broader human connections and of social order at large. In this process, the holistic dimension of emotions lost its cosmological meaning. Instead, such totalizing moods were internalized as individual states of mind that encompassed entire social situations in which they occurred. In the individualized secular world of nineteenth-century realism, the attunement between a person’s situated moods and the atmosphere of a situation as a whole may evoke personal memories and, hence, attunement is concerned with the fragile and not always successful formation of a comprehensive individual identity rather than with an embracement of a stable cosmic harmony. The Bildungsroman becomes a central genre in this dynamic. Using Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Gustave Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale and Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield as three exemplary cases in point, this case study analyzes the transformation of attunement, or Stimmung, in nineteenth-century realism.