Romantic Masculinities: News From Nowhere Vol.2 9781474471664

Citation preview

Romantic M asculinities

Romantic Masculinities Edited by Tony Pinkney, Keith Hanley and Fred Dotting

News from Nowhere, 2 THEORY AND POLITICS OF ROMANTICISM

KEELEUNIVERSITYPRESS

First published in 1997 by Keele University Press Keele, Staffordshire © Respective contributors

Transferred to Digital Print 2011 Typeset by Carnegie Publishing Ltd 18 Maynard St, Preston

ISBN 1 85331 176 6 ISSN 1362 380X

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Preface 1

2

3

4

5

6 7

7

Gendering the Canons of Romanticism: Past and Present Greg Kucich

11

Re/Writing Home: Women Romantic Writers and the Politics of Location Amanda Gilroy

30

Dialect, Gender and the Politics of the Local: The W riting of Ann Wheeler Michael Baron

41

The Father’s Seduction in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda Steven Vine

57

Reading ‘Tintern Abbey’: Towards a Politics of Cultural Production Robert Brinkley and Aled Ganobcsik-Williams

75

The Pen and Sword: Felicia Hemans’s Records of Man E.Douka Kabitoglou

101

Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, and the New Woman Johanna M. Smith

121

News from Nowhere: Theory and Politics o f Romanticism Editors: Tony Pinkney, Keith Hanley, Fred Botting The Wordsworth Centre, Department of English Lancaster University, Lancaster LAI 4YT, UK

News from Nowhere is the Romantic Studies yearbook of The Words­ worth Centre, Lancaster University. It is published by Keele University Press. Contributions and correspondence should be addressed to the editors, at the address above. Orders and distribution enquiries should be addressed to Keele University Press, Keele University, Staffordshire, STS 5BG, UK.

Call for papers The Wordsworth Centre at Lancaster University hosted a symposium on ‘Wordsworth in the Twenty-first Century’ in November 1995. The editors have received some pieces for the 1997 issue based on contri­ butions to that gathering, and would be happy to receive further work for consideration. The next issue, entitled ‘Romanticism in the Twentyfirst Century’, will be edited by Tony Pinkney, who can be contacted in the English Department, Lancaster University.

Preface Crossing dress and gender can become dizzying. Are both ends really in-betweens? Or is indeterminacy simply a masquerade, a designer range that is meant, either outrageously or complicidy, to exhibit precisely what the kilt or slacks conceal? Antony Easthope, for example, once wrote that Wordsworth was like Mick Jagger: ‘when Mick Jagger wore a frock at the Hyde Park concert on 5 June 1969 it affirmed a masculinity so strong it could even contain femininity’.1 Just as feminizations can be very much about men, so masculinities reveal themselves as positions equally open to possession not only of, but also by women, as Anne Mellor and many others have by now convincingly demonstrated.2 So, after inviting pieces on the subject of Romantic Masculinities for this second issue of News from Nowhere, the editors have included a majority of pieces that revolve around women writers. In a similar way, Keats seems to get talked about as much as any individual woman writer in discussions and studies of Romanticism and the Feminine.3 But it is not quite the same: the kind of responses we have had to this topic are probably symptomatic of our greater contemporary interest in seeing things that way round: there is simply more re-dressing to be done in relation to women in all their relations. Masculine Romanticism has been seen most simply as the canon and its defining ideology, but in this volume Greg Kucich’s framing essay explores the regendering of Romantic canons in recent anthologies, in relation to the recuperation of Romanticism’s contemporaneous accom­ modations of women writers, to help ‘resolve the potential limitations, distortions, and misrepresentations informing our current procedures for writing women back into Romanticism’. The danger is ideological reduplication, and the agenda is escape, if possible; certainly, some of our contributors believe this to be the case. A standard argument has been that the institution of literature became, or was in danger of becoming, feminized in this historical period.4 That led to an attempt to remasculinize it, and Herbert Sussman has recently shown how ‘the problematic of a masculine poetic’ centred around the conflictual desire by male writers later in the century to affirm a bourgeois construction of masculinity despite their literary

7

8

Romantic Masculinities

roles.5 On the other hand, Marion Ross has followed the rise of the female poet herself from the feminine poetics which is the other of romantic ideology.6 Amanda Gilroy’s essay in this collection suggests that women’s private domestic world, together with ‘the modalities of feminine spatiality’, formed the basis either for the separation of spheres, or for the construction of the nation in the male-operated public sphere. But Anna Jameson’s Diary o f an Ennuyee exports her domesticity to Italy to create instead a ‘hybrid space’ between inner and outer, private and public, which adds up to an idea of ‘local resistance’ to ‘hegemonic discourses’. A shared preoccupation of the present essays is the consideration of the writer’s role as itself a chief instance of what M ary Poovey influ­ entially described as ‘border cases’, which problematize the binary logic of male/female.7 For Gilroy, Felicia Hemans is ‘a countervoice’, which imports the outer domain into ‘the confines of the home’. Another of our contributors, however, E. Douka Kabitoglou, surprisingly finds ‘an uneasy fusion of domestic and military values’ in Hemans’s assumption of ‘the poetical character’, pre-eminently a bardic figure, which enables her to pretend to cultural power without threatening patriarchal pre­ suppositions. It is, as ever, the question of who is having whom. Stephen Vine’s treatment of M ary Shelley’s Mathilda ironizes the simplicities of this familiar tussle by seeing in it the presence of a ‘conflictual father’. It is, he argues, a transgressive text that presents the author’s father, Godwin, ‘with patriarchy’s incestuous repressed’, and reveals the father as ‘a seducer rather than a lawgiver’. More optimistically liberating is Michael Baron’s dual plotting of a woman writer’s marginality, in terms of class and gender, when he relishes the exuberant transgressions of the literary and ‘educated’ in the dialogues that make up Ann W heeler’s Westmorland Dialect. The dialogical reading which Robert Brinkley and Aled GanobcsikWilliams give to the ‘textual silences’ of that paradigm of male mentoring, ‘Tintern Abbey’, dramatizes the poem’s demand for readerly activity in the co-production of meaning, empowering what would otherwise be a secondary position. They argue that, though its formal openness is problematized by the poet’s insistence on self-reflection in his sister’s reader responses, in effect it triggers the possibility of ‘collaborative transformations’ which depend as much on difference as sameness, for which, one may add, the (repressed) metaphor may be the marriage of minds, or heterosexuality. But this volume ends with another, unholy alliance, mapped by Johanna Smith’s essay, which takes us forward to later nineteenth-century gender constructions. Here, the carceral scenario re-emerges. Smith reveals the disciplinary contain­ ments of male aggressivity and sadism in the reportage of the Ripper murders and Holmesian rationality as they emerge in the management

Preface

9

of ‘moral panic’. Her argument is extended to encompass the re­ enactment of that transformation to conventionalize the ‘threatening figure of the New Woman’, exemplified by Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade series. K.H.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7

Wordsworth Now and Then: Romanticism and Contemporary Culture (Buck­ ingham and Philadelphia: 1993), p. 92. See the section, ‘Ideological Cross-Dressing: John Keats/Emily Bronte’, in her Romanticism and Gender (New York and London: 1993). See, for example, the issue of Studies in Romanticism on that topic, 32: 12 (Summer 1993). See Gary Kelly, ‘Revolution and Romantic Feminism: Women, W riting and Cultural Revolution’, in Keith Hanley and Raman Selden (eds), Revolution and English Romanticism: Politics and Rhetoric (Hemel Hempstead: 1990), pp. 114 -17 . See his Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and A rt (Cambridge: 1995), pp. 7 3-110 . See his The Contours o fMasculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women V Poetry (New York: 1989), chapters 5-8. See her Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian England (London: 1989), pp. 12-15.

Gendering the Canons of Romanticism: Past and Present Greg Kucich University of Notre Dame Working at ‘the limits of Romanticism’, stretching its traditional canonical boundaries, has rarely offered such exhilarating critical pros­ pects as in the last few years, thanks largely to the explosion of recent work on the period’s dozens of hitherto marginalized women writ­ ers.1 Much as the ongoing recovery of those writers has invigorated us all - motivating major new critical studies, new editions, new biogra­ phies, new anthologies, special journal issues, special conferences, all devoted to the revisionary mapping of women writers back into the old terrain of canonical Romanticism - it has also provoked a new set of problems for those seeking to reconfigure the period’s gender dyna­ mics. The first step toward comprehending a vast, largely unexamined body of writing by women, for instance, entailed the construction of critical categories and classifications that now seem somewhat over­ generalized and reductive. Anne Mellor, in demarcating ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ forms of Romanticism based on contrasting social and aesthetic priorities, has produced an invaluable diagram of the contact points where Romantic women writers anticipate, resist, and intersect with the literary productions of their male contemporaries. However, reviewers of her groundbreaking study, Romanticism and Gender, have expressed some discomfort with the rather programmatic, binary nature of her gendered definitions of Romantic writing (Labbe, p. 263). Mellor herself acknowledges these limitations in a pioneering study like her own, and declares that it will take many following works, ‘decades of research’ (Romanticism and Gender, p. 2), to explore the complex range of similarities, differences, and contradictions among the diversified writings by women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As those studies inevitably move forward, moreover, they will continue to confront the even more basic problem of locating the very ground on which a canon of women’s writing can be constructed. Which texts constitute this new canon, and what are our criteria for selecting them? At present, those compelling questions, and the larger debate about

11

12

Romantic Masculinities

Romanticism’s ever-expanding borders, have provoked an incredible outpouring of new, revisionary anthologies of Romantic writing: Jerome McGann’s New Oxford Book o f Romantic Period Verse; Duncan W u’s Romanticism: An Anthology; David Perkins’s significantly revised edition of English Romantic Writers; Jennifer Breen’s Women Romantic Poets: 1785-1832; Andrew Ashfield’s Women Romantic Poets: 1770-1838; Paula Feldman’s forthcoming British Romantic Poetry by Women: 1779-1840; Anne Mellor and Richard Matlack’s forthcoming British Literature 1790-1840; and Susan Wolfson and Peter Manning’s collection of Romantic-era writing - The Romantics and their Contemporaries - for a forthcoming HarperCollins major anthology of British literature. Such a staggering array of new anthologies, all marked by differing historical boundaries and period characterizations, reveals the charged, often contentious state of current debate about the ever-shifting contours of Romanticism. As we assess the strengths and limitations of these pro­ jects, we can find them highlighting the particular challenges facing all those now working at the gender boundaries of Romanticism. The new spate of anthologies offers an intriguing range of innova­ tive editorial principles and organizational structures, revolutionary inclusions and exclusions, which are indicative of the wide range of Romanticisms now emerging. Such divergent efforts to reconstruct Romanticism are united, however, by a fundamental commitment to situate women writers at the centre of their revisionary projects. Perkins announces that his new edition extends the traditional canon of Romanticism by including ‘other figures, especially women, who have been less emphasized in the past’ (Perkins, p. v). W u seeks to push back ‘the boundaries of the accepted canon’ in order to reveal the ‘hitherto undiscovered Romanticisms’ produced by women writers (Wu, p. xxvii). And McGann wishes to correct a general critical obliviousness to the ‘many women writers’ of the Romantic era by including ‘a good selec­ tion of the women poets of the period, partly as an inducement to further and deeper reading’ (McGann, p. xxii). That inducement has been acted on with concentrated vigour by the editors of the new collections of women Romantic poets, which offer entire canons of female-authored texts for our ‘further and deeper reading’. W e might conclude that the collective emergence of these various compilations of ‘new’ Romanticisms, which highlight the significance of women writers while presenting a wide variety of featured authors and selection principles, offers an invaluable basis of recovered texts from which we may confidently build more nuanced scholarly and classroom models of Romantic women’s writing. Yet criticism of their limitations is emerging almost as fast as, and sometimes even before, they can roll off the presses. At two recent North American scholarly gatherings on Romanticism (the 1994

Gendering the Canons o f Romanticism

13

NASSR conference at Duke University and the 1995 Conference on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers at the University of Notre Dame), special panels on the development of new Romantic canons warned about the continuing subordination of women writers in the new anthologies. McGann, for instance, tends to present women writers as a distinct minority within a Romantic canon made up of a much larger body of male authors. His anthology includes 62 men and only 21 women. Perkins and W u move somewhat closer to parity: 45 men to 29 women in Wu, and 21 men to 11 women in Perkins. Yet all three anthologies more problematically reinforce gender hierarchies by generally representing women poets with short lyrics and brief excerpts from longer works, while featuring substantial sec­ tions of canonical male-authored poems like The Prelude, Prometheus Unbound and Don Juan. This specific problem of representation also informs Breen’s anthology of women writers, which provides only two short poems by that prolific writer of major narratives as well as songs and sonnets, Felicia Hemans. Moreover, the basic concept of separate anthologies for women writers raises the problem of marginalizing them within an alternative canon, which is other to, and inferior to, the standard canon of male Romanticism. Harriet Kramer Linkin thus cautions in a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts focusing on gender and Romanticism: ... segregation threatens to maintain marginalization by establishing a subset of women’s poetry within the larger sphere of Romantic verse that finally functions as supplemental rather than essential material. Instead of naming specific daughters to the Romantics’ family tree to assume their rightful places beside the six legitimate sons, one generic substitute sister can function for all daughters as the seventh child, separate and not equal. (Linkin, p. 10) In raising these concerns about misrepresentation, no one would nec­ essarily claim that our understanding of Romanticism ever did or ever will completely depend on anthologies. The scholarly project of canon expansion proceeds in the major research archive, with much broader access to a more diversified range of texts. However, the formation of anthologies, edited by major scholars and published by leading presses, does produce the appearance of a widely sanctioned, authoritative canon of Romanticism, whose official status will continue to exert considerable influence over the way Romanticism is critically discussed and, more particularly, talked about in the classroom. This is why the wave of innovative anthologies is provoking so much intense discussion about the challenges, opportunities and limitations involved in their modes of representing the gender dynamics of the new Romanticisms.

14

Romantic Masculinities

I would like to extend that debate, and raise new questions about the material and critical problematics of our canon reformations, by tracing our current project to its origins in Romanticism’s own revolu­ tionary effort to situate women writers within its self-defined literary canon. W e often tend to conceptualize women’s experience in liter­ ary history up through the later nineteenth century as a continuous record of systematic omission and marginalization. In fact, the situation of women within Britain’s national canon of literature underwent a number of conflicting gains, losses, upsurges and declines throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The period stretching from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries actually witnessed multiple attempts to promote and anthologize women writers as impor­ tant members of the national literary tradition. Yet much as we may applaud such early movements toward a gender inclusive canon, we should also recognize how they remained troubled by various economic, ideological and cultural forces which perpetuated a critical subordina­ tion of women writers. Alexander Dyce may have been aware of these limitations when he prefaced his 1825 collection of women writers, Specimens o f British Poetesses; Selected and Chronologically Arranged , with the prophecy that his anthology would form the basis for later, more improved models: ‘In the course of future centuries’, he announces, ‘new Anthologies will be formed, more interesting and more exquisite than our own’ (Dyce, p. iv). Whether those ‘new Anthologies’ coming out today are necessarily ‘more interesting’, ‘more exquisite’, or more comprehensively representative of women’s writing remains to be seen. For we may find them replicating, not always openly and rarely self­ consciously, the ideological limitations and subordinations of Dyce and his contemporary anthologists. Thanks to the work ofJerome McGann, we have learned to recognize how many of our recent theoretical formulations of Romantic-era writing remain uncritically invested in Romanticism’s own self­ representations and the ideologies that inform them. Critics of women’s literary history like Marlon Ross and Margaret Ezell have also demon­ strated how many twentieth-century efforts to recover a female tradition of writing, beginning with Virginia W oolf’s project in A Room o f One’s Own, unwittingly repeat the distortive gender presuppositions and inequalities of earlier periods - such as in W oolf’s misleading Judith Shakespeare thesis about the total absence of significant women’s writ­ ing in the early modern period. It can be useful to apply a similar corrective warning to our current engendering of new Romantic canons. For our recognition of the ways in which those supposedly ‘new’ constructions remain implicated in the troubled gender dynamics of Romanticism’s own canon formations can better prepare us to address and resolve the potential limitations, distortions and misrepresentations

Gendering the Canons o f Romanticism

15

informing our current procedures for writing women back into Romanticism. The history of Romanticism’s construction of a female literary tradi­ tion actually begins in the mid-eighteenth century, with the first substantial efforts in Britain to create a national poetic tradition manifested in the production of such works as Thomas Percy’s Reliques o f Ancient English Poetry , Thomas Warton’s History o f English Poetry , Samuel Johnson’s Lives o f the English Poets, various miscellanies of British poetry, and the first comprehensive collections of British poetry in large, multi-volume editions. Various causes have been suggested for the emergence of this canon-making enterprise, some of which signifi­ cantly affected the situation of women writers within Britain’s developing idea of its own literary tradition: changes in copyright laws, rapid expansions in the print trade and its technology, a growing middle-class market of readers in need of critical direction, the new application of classical scholarship to native writers, and an inter­ connected rise of British nationalism and historiography. W hat is particularly striking about the procedures of canon formation that emerged from these developments - and perhaps surprising for those of us conditioned to think of early women writers as the victims of systematic exclusion from mainstream canons - is the relatively wide­ spread, though not untroubled, inclusion of women within the earliest phases of Britain’s construction of a national literary tradition. By the mid-eighteenth century substantial collections of women’s writings began to appear, usually prefaced with strong refutations of traditional biases about women’s supposed intellectual inferiority. In 1752, for instance, George Ballard introduced his influential collection of bio­ graphical essays on British women writers, Memoirs o f Several Ladies o f Great Britain: who have been celebrated fo r their writings or skill in the learned languages, arts, and sciences, with the stated intention to ‘remove ... [t]hat vulgar prejudice of the supposed incapacity of the female sex’ (Ballard, p. 321). Several years later, in 1755, George Colman and Bonnell Thornton produced the first anthology of British female writers, Poems by Eminent Ladies (later expanded and retitled Poems by the Most Eminent Ladies o f Great Britain and Ireland), declaring in their preface that ‘great abilities are not confined to the men, and that genius often glows with equal warmth, and perhaps with more delicacy, in the breast of a female’ (Colman and Thornton, p. i). These works played a major role in establishing a ground tradition of British women writers, which became the foundation for later editors and critics to build upon and expand throughout the eighteenth and nine­ teenth centuries. Yet an even more significant vehicle for the inclusion of women in Britain’s literary traditions emerged with the popular miscellany.

16

Romantic Masculinities

Miscellanies of British poetry had appeared in earlier periods, but the eighteenth century’s vastly expanding print trade, coupled with a new eagerness to assemble canonical bodies of literature, gave miscellanies an unprecedented popularity and motivated a soaring frequency in their rate of publication. Fairly easy to compile and produce because of their slack organizational structure of rather randomly selected ‘beau­ ties’ of poetry, they began emerging in great numbers around the middle of the eighteenth century and provided the earliest significant form of a national poetic canon, however loosely it was defined. That developing tradition, as presented in miscellany literature, regularly included women and frequently proclaimed the rights of women to participate in literary culture. Robert Dodsley’s 1766 Collection o f Poems in Six Volumes, the most prestigious miscellany, features a substantial poem, for instance, on ‘The Female Right to Literature’. That right was recognized by the editors of miscellanies like The Beauties o f Poetry Displayed (1757), The Poetical Calendar (1763), The M use’s Pocket Com­ panion (1780), John Nichol’s A Select Collection o f Poems (1780), all of which situate women poets alongside their male counterparts. These collections nevertheless limit women writers to a minority presence and remain fraught with subordinating biases toward women’s lit­ erature, which I will eventually discuss. Yet by including women with male writers instead of constructing separate anthologies of their works, they also fostered the nascent impression of a national literary canon encompassing both genders. That gender-inclusive model was rein­ forced by later, more elaborate miscellanies - such as John Bell’s 1796 Classical Arrangement o f Fugitive Poetry , whose seventeen volumes feature numerous works by Grace Butler, Elizabeth Carter, Lady W ordy Mon­ tagu, Charlotte Smith and other women alongside the poems of male authors. Joseph Ritson’s 1793 English Anthology made one of the strong­ est cases for the place of women writers in the national canon. Including works by Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Lady M ary Chudleigh, Anne Killigrew, M ary Leapor, Anne Finch, M ary Masters and M ary Jones among others, Ritson ranks these productions among the most ‘excel­ lent poems’ in the language (Ritson, p. ii). One of the most forceful demonstrations of such a significant female contribution to the national literature emerged in The Lady’s Poetical Magazine , a multi-volume periodical miscellany subtitled ‘The Beauties of Poetry’ which appeared in the 1780s. Although this collection of poetic ‘beauties’ was clearly targeted for a female readership, as the magazine’s iconography of women’s friendship and literary coteries suggests, its editors did not seek to present a separate female canon. Instead, they went to considerable lengths to integrate male and female writers, while also featuring women’s poems that are remarkable for their intellectual substance and political acuity. The editorial

Gendering the Canons o f Romanticism

17

‘Introductory Address’ to volume one emphasizes such a representation of female intelligence as the magazine’s first priority, thus beginning: Too long has Man, engrossing ev’ry art, Dar’d to reject the Female’s rightful part; As if to him, alone, has been confin’d Heav’n’s greatest gift, a scientifick mind. ... in those arts which humanize the mind, [Women] boast an equal pow’r with all mankind. (LPM, 1: 11. 1-16) As proof of that ‘equal power’, the editors of The Lady's Poetical Magazine included substantial philosophical poems like Elizabeth Toilet’s ‘The Microcosm’, a cosmic meditation on providential design, theoretical poems on aesthetic practice such as Mrs Madan’s ‘The Progress of Poetry’, and political poems on class and gender inequalities like Mrs Hampden Pye’s ‘Earl W alter’, a dramatic narrative about an aristo­ crat’s seduction and betrayal of a lower-class woman. Interspersing these and dozens of other female-authored poems with the works of leading eighteenth-century male poets like Pope, Young, Shenstone, and Thomson, The Lady's Poetical Magazine concluded with John Duncombe’s sustained praise in ‘The Feminead’ of women’s prominent role in the development of Britain’s cultural history. Celebrating an illustrious tradition of women authors dating back to the seventeenth century, Duncombe associated this special lineage with the general rise of Britain’s cultural ascendancy: E’en now fond Fancy, in our polish’d land, Assembled shews a blooming, studious band: W ith various arts our reverence they engage, Some turn the tuneful, some the moral page; These, led by Contemplation, soar on high, And range the heavens with philosophick eye ... (LPM, 4: p. 465) Affirmations of this sort were not always reinforced by the actual modes of representing women writers in miscellany literature. Yet they were widely supported by the notable presence of women poets throughout the eighteenth century’s earliest phase of canon formation, which would seem to confirm an important degree of gender inclusiveness in the ground formulation of Britain’s literary tradition. Yet by 1825, Alexander Dyce felt that women had virtually disap­ peared from the national literary landscape. Colman and Thornton’s 1755 anthology was the only significant precedent that Dyce could find

18

Romantic Masculinities

for his project, and it seemed to have slipped into obscurity, despite its revision and reprinting in several popular editions throughout the later decades of the eighteenth century. ‘Of the Selections which have been made from the chaos of our past poetry’, Dyce laments in his preface, ‘the majority has been confined almost entirely to the writings of men ... The small quantity of female effusions, and their concealment in obscure publications, have perhaps contributed to this neglect’ (Dyce, p. iii). Dyce envisioned his anthology, in fact, as a much-needed, even revolutionary correction of what he saw as a long-standing exclusion of women writers from the literary marketplace. Now we know that by 1825 writers like Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, and Felicia Hemans, among others, had attained considerable popularity. And we have just seen how women could figure rather prominently in the earlier phases of British canon formation. Why, then, did Dyce see mostly empty space when he looked back for a tradition of women writers? The answers can tell us a great deal about the permutations, the shifting rises and falls of women’s literary history, as well as the gendered practices of exclusion that link Romantic canon formation to our own literary historicism. Various theories have been ventured, in fact, to explain Romanti­ cism’s apparent omission of significant women writers from the developing literary canon. Mellor finds the development of industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth century validating a masculine ideol­ ogy of self as power that subordinates women and their social communities (Romanticism and Gender, p. 8). Linkin, drawing on Gaye Tuchman’s ‘empty field’ theory of the gendering of Victorian fiction, argues that male Romantic authors colonized the poetry of women writing in the last decades of the eighteenth century and reinscribed their values of inferiority and feeling as part of a masculine poetics that marginalized women (Linkin, p. 7). Marlon Ross finds a more troubled form of rivalry motivating these exclusions and subordi­ nations, as male Romantic writers felt increasingly threatened by the growing popularity of women authors whom they sought to edge out of the literary marketplace. Surely some deep uneasiness about such competition informs Richard Polwhele’s notorious vilification of women intellectuals as an Amazonian ‘band despising nature’ s law’ (Polwhele, p. 7), or Byron’s repeated caricatures of Felicia Hemans as ‘Heman’ and ‘Mrs. He- woman’, or Hazlitt’s glib dismissal of Han­ nah More in his account of contemporary women writers: ‘Mrs. Hannah More is another celebrated modern poetess, and I believe still living. She has written a great deal which I have never read’ (Hazlitt, p. 147). This is an astonishing confession by someone lecturing ‘On the Living Poets’, and Hazlitt’s insouciant neglect of a major literary pres­ ence like More strategically removes her from the context of living -

Gendering the Canons o f Romanticism

19

i.e., male - poets, situates her entirely, in fact, outside the ‘living’ or accepted canon. Certainly these kinds of exclusionary tactics contributed to the marginalization of women writers throughout the Romantic period. Yet there is still evidence - for instance in Ritson’s 1793 English Anthology, Bell’s 1796 Classical Awangement o f Fugitive Poetry , the re­ publishing of Colman and Thornton’s Poems by Eminent Ladies, as well as Ballard’s Memoirs o f Several Ladies o f Great Britain , or ‘Femineads’ in The Lady’s Poetical Magazine - that testifies to the continuing presence of women, however troubled or problematic, in the canon-building enterprise around the turn of the nineteenth century. And not only did the works of writers like Smith, Baillie, and Hemans go through multiple single-author editions in the early decades of the nineteenth century, their works were also, at times, favourably compared with the productions of their male counterparts. Thus in 1824, the year before Dyce complained of the long absence of women from the literary scene, a periodical writer for Blackwood’s Magazine proclaimed Joanna Baillie ‘in point of genius ... inferior to no individual on the rolls of modem celebrity’ (quoted in Curran, p. 185). These contradictory assessments of women’s entry into and elimination from Britain’s literary centres can be particularly revealing if we trace them to divisions within the very procedures for locating women within the national canon, conflicts that from the outset of the canon-formation enterprise both reinforced and subverted the canonical positioning of women writers. W e may detect in those earliest constructions of a female tradition, like Ballard’s 1752 Memoirs o f Several Ladies o f Great Britain, a pattern of contradictory inscription and subordination of women writers that recurs throughout eighteenth-century and Romantic formulations of literary tradition. Margaret Ezell has recently argued that Ballard, faced with a public audience relatively unenthusiastic about the literary accomplishments of women, felt compelled to represent his subjects according to the most acceptable standards of female decorum (Ezell, p. 84). Commercially successful, scandal-ridden women writers like Aphra Behn were omitted from his collection, and the proper virtues of domesticity and self-sacrifice were prioritized in the figures he chose to include - such as Katherine Philips, praised for her ‘modesty’ and ‘humility’; Katherine Parr, honoured for her ‘great modesty ... tender­ ness and humility’; and Jane, Countess of Westmorland, commended for her ‘most obliging behavior towards her husband, observing all the connubial duties with ... a peculiar sweetness of temper’ (Ballard, pp. 289, 93, 158). Women writers who failed to conform to this model of ‘connubial sweetness’ were, like Behn, left out of the collection and condemned for their ‘violent’, Amazonian ‘independence]’, which Ballard deprecates in Katherine Chidley, or warned against taking the

20

Romantic Masculinities

‘privileges of [their] sex too far’ by abandoning, as Ballard admonishes M ary Astell, ‘a meek and quiet spirit’ (Ballard, pp. 281, 449). Ballard thus constructed what Ezell calls ‘a narrative of female experience’ which honours female intelligence while circumscribing it to the sphere of domestic propriety (Ezell, p. 84). Colman and Thornton produced a similar narrative in the successive editions of their Poems by Eminent Ladies. W hile they insist that ‘genius’ is gender neutral, that ‘fancy and judgment’ are not ‘wholly confined’ to the masculine ‘half of our species’ (Colman and Thornton, 1: p. iii), they also concede that women’s literary accomplishments tend to be uneven, due largely to inadequate education, with memorable flashes of creative brilliance frequently buried amid long sequences of turgid, aesthetically inept writing. In order to compensate for this inferior mode of literary production, Colman and Thornton stress the necessity of representing women poets in short excerpts - ‘little pieces’ (Colman and Thornton, 1: p. 1) - which best embody their creative potential. This implication of women’s incapacity to produce works of sustained excellence led to an increasing emphasis on fragmentary examples of aesthetic beauty in the four editions of Colman and Thornton’s antho­ logy that appeared between 1755 and 1780. Their sequence of editions progressively increased the number of women included, while reducing the length and narrowing the topical range of their works. Aphra Behn went from 49 poems in 1755, for instance, to 4 by 1780, and her longer, more imaginative and explicitly erotic works - such as A Voyage to the Isle o f Love - were dropped, while several sentimental pastoral songs were retained. This mode of representation established an important critical precedent for relegating women’s literary productions to the level of fragmentary displays of beauty and sentiment, which became an increasingly standardized editorial practice throughout the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such an emphasis on songs and lyrics also reinforced the non-intellectual, domestic ideology of female experience that Ballard was promoting. Hence Colman and Thornton recurrently stress the ‘tenderness’ and ‘affecting’ qualities of the writers they include (Colman and Thornton, 2: pp. 136, 186). Echoing Ballard, they commend Katherine Philips’s ‘humility’, ‘good nature’, and ‘excellence] ’ as a wife (Colman and Thornton, 2: p. 146). Behn’s effort to enter the public sphere as a political emissary in Flanders, on the other hand, appears as a regrettable diversion from the circumscribed, feminine activities of a proper authoress (Colman and Thornton, 2: p. 54). Editorial emphases of this sort, much as they contributed to a new appreciation of the size and the achievements of Britain’s female literary tradition, also narrowed the range of its pre­ occupations to what Ezell demarcates as a ‘feminine literary sphere, characterized by decorous delicacy’ (Ezell, p. 117). The price of

Gendering the Canons o f Romanticism

21

canonical inclusion in these early collections of women writers could thus be creative subordination, a relegation strongly reinforced, of course, by the separatist strategy of constructing alternative - i.e., inferior - traditions of ‘decorously delicate’ women writers. A similar kind of contradiction informed the representation of women writers in miscellany literature. Although these collections certainly featured intellectually substantial works by women, like Toilet’s ‘The Microcosm’, they also promoted the domestic ideology encouraged by Ballard, Colman and Thornton. George Ellis’s Specimens o f the Early English Poets, for instance, limits Aphra Behn, following Colman and Thornton, to a single song. Most of the selections of women poets in Dodsley’s collections are similarly limited to brief, sentimental lyrics. This model of female delicacy became even more pronounced in the miscellanies published during the early decades of the nineteenth cen­ tury. Robert Southey’s 1807 Specimens o f the Later English Poets, for instance, typically honours women poets like Toilet for exemplifying in their works the ‘softness of [their] sex’ (Southey, p. 119). The sub­ ordination implied by such characterizations is manifest in Thomas Campbell’s 1819 Specimens o f the British Poets, which stresses Katherine Philips’s absence of ‘genius’, while praising her ‘placid enthusiasm of heart, and a cultivated taste, that form a beautiful specimen of female character’ (Campbell, p. 411). If women could soar through cosmic realms of metaphysical speculation in miscellany literature, they tended more often to grace the drawing room with ‘placid’ rehearsals of the pathos of love and the virtues of propriety. W hat contributed perhaps most significantly to this increasing domestication and subordination of women in miscellany literature was the emergence in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of the first multi-volume collections of British poetry purporting to offer complete historical coverage of the nation’s greatest works. These massive collections, starting with the rival editions of John Bell and Samuel Johnson in the 1770s, and continuing over the next forty years in various editions by Thomas Park, Alexander Chalmers, John Ander­ son and others, differed fundamentally from the miscellanies in their length - frequently running beyond one hundred volumes - and their open ambition of providing, in Bell’s words, a ‘complete uniform edition of the British Poets’ (quoted in Bonnell, p. 130). Such an extensive programme of comprehensive coverage, however troubled theoretically and contested by nearly everyone involved, made these collections the foundation of Britain’s poetic tradition. And while debate raged for decades about the shape of the tradition they offered, who should be in and who out, there was virtually universal consensus about one group that had no legitimate claim to inclusion - women poets. It was at this point in the national project of canon formation that women

22

Romantic Masculinities

poets completely disappeared from what now emerged as the ‘official’ tradition of British poetry, one that had no room among the thousands of volumes edited by Johnson, Bell, Chalmers and the rest for a single woman writer. The motivations behind this glaring exclusion are too complexly variegated for any single explanation, but it is possible to trace some of the leading socio-economic forces at work here and their continuing impact on the gendering of Britain’s poetic tradition. Market pressures were largely responsible for both the initial conceptualization of ‘com­ plete’ editions of British poetry and the selection processes that determined their shape as well as their exclusions. John Bell activated those pressures when he began planning, as a young and upstart pub­ lisher in the mid-1770s, the first comprehensive edition of the British poets to enter the London market. That move came as a direct challenge to the markets of London’s established booksellers, who until then had focused their poetic departments on single-author publications or mis­ cellanies. In response, they banded together in a powerful coalition of thirty-six members who were determined to thwart Bell’s sales and produce their own countering edition of poetic classics. They denied Bell credit, prevented him from advertising in most journals, and blocked his points of distribution. They also enlisted Johnson to write prefaces to their rival edition in order to capitalize on the commercial value of his name. Bell protested at their collusion, yet he managed to keep prices down and his venture afloat through a series of resourceful economic, promotional and technological strategies. W ith a trade war on their hands, the established booksellers reduced by half the planned number of their volumes and began preparing a less costly edition to compete with Bell’s. The ensuing public relations battle was intense, acrimonious and at times ingeniously creative, with Bell at one point distributing a handbill mythologizing his triumph over the snake of established publishing. Amid such commercial struggles, economic pressures inevitably drove the editorial strategies of both projects. And the likely outcome was a decision by both parties to print the authors deemed most marketable. Alexander Chalmers, trying to exonerate Johnson from any culpability for the dubious talents arrayed in his Works o f the English Poets, argued in 1810 that the collection was formed by Johnson’s ‘employers, who thought themselves, what they unques­ tionably were, the best judges of vendible poetry, and who included very few, if any, works in their series for which there was not, at the time it was formed, a considerable degree of demand’ (Chalmers, p. vi). In the 1770s, the poets in greatest demand were relatively recent ones who had matured in the first half of the eighteenth century; and they were all male - such as Pope, Prior, Shenstone, Gray, W est and Collins. Women’s poetry did not become attractively ‘vendible’ until the very

Gendering the Canons o f Romanticism

23

end of the eighteenth century, by which time the official ‘canon’ of British poetry - largely an eighteenth-century male club - had been, at least for a time, established.2 W hat made it even more difficult for women to break into that enclave was a gendered form of nationalism that both conditioned the shape of the comprehensive poetic collections and intensified their masculine priorities. Britain’s canon-making enterprise had been mobil­ ized from the outset, as Gerald Newman argues, by a rising group of middle-class, professional men of letters, like Johnson, seeking to gain economic and political independence from aristocratic privilege and its associations with French cultural hegemony. The nativist, antiaristocratic impulse behind their promotion of British cultural traditions became particularly strong in their efforts to build a comprehensive national canon of poetry that would surpass French cultural influence in a form readily available to a wide, basically middle-class readership. Hence, the new collections of poetry were given nationalistic titles, such as The Poets o f Great Britain or The Works o f the English Poets, and they were deliberately promoted as comprehensive collections of ‘british classics ’. Johnson self-consciously introduced his Works o f the English Poets by distinguishing it from French miscellanies. Bell even made a special point of his egalitarian, anti-aristocratic orientation by advertising his collection as a cheap edition designed for middle-class readers. The gender implications of these nationalistic approaches to canon formation should be apparent if we consider the period’s wide­ spread middle-class caricatures of aristocratic and French culture as effeminate and simpering. The nativist traditions promoted by Bell, Johnson and Chalmers were designed, in pointed contrast, as teutonic, often martial, and always masculine. It should thus come as no surprise that Chalmers represents Britain’s mighty poets as the ‘sons of imagin­ ation’ (Chalmers, p. x; my emphasis), or that the editor of the 1822 Chiswick edition of The British Poets envisions the ‘Works of the British Poets’ as a ‘monument in honour of men who have instructed, delighted and adorned the land of their birth’ (The British Poets, p. v; my emphasis). Such a monument, along with its particular set of economic and ideo­ logical foundations, offered no room for female inscription. The validity of such a monolithic masculine tradition of British cultural history was certainly challenged by many critics, male and female, throughout the Romantic period - Elizabeth Inchbald and Anna Barbauld, notably, constructed alternative, gender-inclusive traditions of British drama and fiction; and numerous literary magazines featuring women writers, modelled on the pattern of The Lady's Poetical Magazine, appeared throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century. Yet the recurrent promulgation of an exclusively masculine official history, outlined and reaffirmed throughout the span of thousands of volumes

24

Romantic Masculinities

of British classics, exerted a profound influence on the gendering of Romantic canon formation. Its regular presentation of long swaths of major works by male authors - such as Young’s Night Thoughts, Thomson’s The Seasons, Pope’s Essay on Man - reinforced a growing impression of miscellanies, and their female-authored ‘poetical beauties’, as fragmentary and insubstantial. That distinction, moreover, encouraged a heightened emphasis on the ‘decorously delicate’, as opposed to the intellectually or politically substantial, portions of female writing represented in miscellany literature. Thus an entrenched bifurcation developed around the turn of the nineteenth century between an authoritative, though constantly shifting, poetic tradition of male authors and a subordinate, domesticated tradition of women writers largely to be found excerpted in the pages of miscellanies. The effect of that division on the Romantics’ revisionary efforts to recuperate a female literary tradition can be measured in the critical assumptions and editorial procedures controlling Dyce’s Specimens o f British Poetesses. Before establishing himself as a major editor of male Renaissance writers, Dyce turned to women writers in 1825 with what he represented as a revolutionary effort to salvage their long-forgotten works. As laudable as his project may seem now, it remained deeply immersed in the divisive gender hierarchies that had been controlling the British canon-making enterprise for the preceding several decades. Dyce was unable to find any women writers in Britain’s major traditions of poetry, just one year after the Blackwood's declaration of Joanna Baillie’s unrivalled genius, precisely because they never appeared in the authori­ tative, masculinist canons of British poetry - still the standard of achievement for Dyce and most of his contemporary editors and antho­ logists. Indeed, he focuses his complaint about the absence of women writers on the specific exclusion of them from what he calls ‘the great Collections of the English Poets’ (Dyce, p. iii). Dyce is pointedly critical of those ‘great Collections’, which he finds containing many ‘worthless compositions’ (Dyce, p. iii); yet their gender hierarchies remain his standard for evaluating women writers. Instead of seeking to include women as members of the great tradition, he builds upon the models of a separate, domestic female sphere that had been developing through­ out the last several decades. Thus, he claims in his preface: the grander inspirations of the Muse have not been often breathed into the softer frame [of women]. The magic tones which have added a new existence to the heart - the tremendous thoughts which have impressed a successive stamp on the fluctuation of ages, and which have almost changed the character of nations, - these have not proceeded from woman. (Dyce, pp. iii-iv)

Gendering the Canons o f Romanticism

25

The achievements one can trace in women’s writing, Dyce continues, entail the expression of ‘sensibility’, ‘tenderness’, and ‘grace’ (Dyce, p. iv). Locating those qualities in the poetry of women writers becomes the structuring principle of Specimens o f British Poetesses, which conse­ quently marks out a separate, inferior tradition of women writers confined to the space limitations of an anthology design. The result is a general tendency to follow Colman and Thornton’s practice of excluding longer, intellectually or imaginatively substantial poems while featuring shorter lyrics and excerpts that affirm the virtues of domesticity, sensibility, and female propriety. When introducing Charlotte Smith, for instance, Dyce ignores her sustained critiques of an oppressive legal system that is particularly hostile to women and focuses attention, instead, on the ‘melancholy ... tenderness, grace, and beauty’ of her poems (Dyce, p.254). He offers selections from her sonnets and an excerpted song from Beachy Head, providing no sense of the narrative continuity of that longer work, while completely omit­ ting Smith’s most politically powerful poem, The Emigrants. Similarly, Dyce associates M ary Tighe’s poetry with ‘purified passion’, making no reference to her moral allegories or her sustained narrative of female questing in Psyche. Instead, he offers as a brief excerpt from Tighe’s six-canto work an ornamental description of Cupid’s Palace of Love. Joanna Baillie, arguably the leading dramatist of the Romantic era, is represented merely by several songs, as is Felicia Hemans, none of whose longer narratives finds any room in these ‘Specimens’ of female art. When Dyce confronts a writer who does not easily fit his model of female propriety, like Aphra Behn, he deprecates her ‘grossness’ (Dyce, p. I l l ) and domesticates her poetry by offering, like Colman and Thornton, only a few songs on the sorrows of love. Much as Dyce contributes to a revisionary recuperation of women Romantic writers, he thus also constructs a female canon of ‘decorous delicacy’, which ensures its subordination to the masculine tradition of, as he puts it, ‘grander inspirations’. Dyce’s anthology became the standard model of female Romanticism throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, going through a second edition in 1827 and providing the basis for Leigh Hunt’s similarly titled Specimens o f British Poetesses, published in 1847. Like Dyce, Hunt represents himself as a champion of forgotten female achievement in the arts. But he too follows Dyce’s subordinating prin­ ciples of selection and exclusion, while also elaborating on Dyce’s theoretical formulation of gender divisions between an authoritative masculine canon of substantial works and a separate female tradition of ‘Specimens’ which can be adequately represented in the form of short lyrics. Like Dyce, Hunt deplores the omission of women from British poetic history and calls for a recovery of their accomplishments.

26

Romantic Masculinities

Poets like Charlotte Smith and Anna Barbauld strike him as far superior to many of those male writers included in the great collections of British poets. Yet Hunt also repeats Dyce’s qualification about the essential inferiority of women poets: ‘It is not pretended’, he cautions in his introduction, ‘that women have ever written poetry equal to that of men’ (Hunt, p. 110). In fact, he goes on, women poets at their very best appear like shadowy images of their male models. Thus Elizabeth Barrett seems like ‘an ultra-sensitive sister of Alfred Tennyson’ (Hunt, p. 112). Such ‘sensitive sisters’ make up a separate attenuated tradition in the anthology format that Hunt produces, with Smith, Tighe, and others represented, as in Dyce’s anthology, by short lyrical effusions of tender sensibility. The canon revisionism that Hunt offers thus reinscribes the gender hierarchies of Dyce’s formulations. Prevailing well into the nineteenth century, such gendered ideologies of canon revision more than likely encouraged the total marginalization that beset the period’s women writers throughout most of the twentieth century. They may also anticipate our current modes of canon reform that detract from, while seeming to endorse, the achievement of women writers. I do not mean to suggest that those editors currently recuperating a female Romanticism are directly modelling their anthologies on Dyce and Hunt, or that they are naively locked into the theoretical assump­ tions or the essentialist dogma of their predecessors. Yet there may very well be subtler economic and ideological continuations of Roman­ tic practice that continue to trouble our own approaches to canon revision. It seems oddly coincidental, for instance, that the Romantic habit of truncating and simplifying poetry by women is repeated in most of our new, revisionary anthologies - that Perkins and W u also represent Smith with just several sonnets; that McGann only provides one short poem by Baillie and a few lyrics by Hemans; that W u omits Barbauld’s major political poem, ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’; that Tighe’s Psyche is offered only in brief excerpts by McGann, W u, and Perkins, just as it appears in Dyce and Hunt; and that all these modern exclusions are accompanied by significant inclusions of long canonical works by male Romantic writers. Some of these patterns of repre­ sentation may be explained by the continuing force of market pressures - anthologies today must sell ‘vendible’ poetry just as they had to in the 1770s, as Susan Wolfson and Peter Manning have recently discovered in preparing the Romantics section of the new HarperCollins anthology of British literature.3 Despite our new enthusiasm for the works of women Romantic writers, one wonders how many classroom teachers would order an anthology that, for reasons of space limitations, omitted all of Wordsworth except a few sonnets in order to represent Tighe with all of Psyche. Providing more substantial selections of poetry

Gendering the Canons o f Romanticism

27

in those collections exclusively devoted to women writers partly corrects these problems, but it also replicates the Romantic scenario of main­ stream and alternative canons, in which the alternative line is often associated with inferiority. And if we seriously consider the subtle depths of our possible impli­ cation in the ideologies of Romantic canon revisionism, we may even need to rethink some of our basic modes of conceptualizing a feminine Romantic poetics. Stuart Curran, Marlon Ross and Anne Mellor have all stressed the affirmation of domestic community as a principal char­ acteristic of feminine Romanticism, one that frequently offers major critiques of the solipsistic forms of visionary questing that many of the period’s male writers practice. W e can certainly trace that privileging of domestic community, what Mellor, citing Carol Gilligan, terms ‘an ethic of care’, throughout the works of Smith, Baillie, Hemans, Barbauld and others. But if we recognize how Romantic canon revisionists over­ emphasized and distorted the role of the domestic in women writers, we should be cautious of propagating similar misrepresentations, espe­ cially in those parts of our new anthologies that reproduce the misleading excerpts and truncations furnished by Dyce and Hunt. Where Mellor has emphasized Hemans’s fundamental commitment to a fragile and problematic ‘domestic ideology’, for instance {Romanticism and Gender, p. 124), Nanora Sweet, perhaps less invested in Romanti­ cism’s own ideology of the domestic, has more recently focused our attention on a Hemans nowhere to be found in the anthologies - past or present - who deplores British imperialism in sustained, politically incisive narratives. Is it possible, we might ask in the end, to construct a more genderinclusive model of Romanticism that is free of the ideological burdens of the period’s own purported canon reformations? Mellor and Matlack, along with Wolfson and Manning, are undertaking that experiment right now, and we will measure their success when their new anthologies come out in the next two years. Wolfson has suggested that a gradual form of canon revision may be the most effective, with publishers becoming increasingly willing to expand the female canon as it grows more and more established with each new edition of Romantic antholo­ gies. Such a model of gradual revolution would, in fact, be quite in keeping with the politics of evolutionary, non-catastrophic reform advocated by most Romantic women writers.4 The answer, though, may lie outside the book format entirely, as we learn to take advantage of electronic databases and the much broader availability of textual material they provide. But as we move into that new generation of electronic anthologizing, and die new challenges to canon formation that it presents, we should continue to apprehend and work through the limitations of our critical procedures by recognizing their persisting

28

Romantic Masculinities

derivations from the Romantics’ own struggles to define and gender themselves.

Notes 1

2

3

4

I take the term ‘limits o f Romanticism’, of course, from the tide o f the excellent collection o f cultural, feminist, and materialist essays on Rom­ anticism recendy edited by M ary A. Favret and Nicola J. W atson (see W orks Cited). A version of this article was presented at the 1995 W ords­ worth Summer Conference at Grasmere. As is the case with many works from that conference, this paper will also be published in The Wordsworth Circle. I wish to extend special thanks to Jonathan W ordsworth and Marilyn Gaull, the motivating spirits behind the W ordsworth Summer Conference and The Wordsworth Circle, for their ongoing support and their gracious permission to reproduce this article in its current format. The editorial perpetuation o f an inflexible male canon o f ‘official’ poetic classics was also reinforced by the economically expedient practice in the publishing trade o f selling the printing plates intact from one collection o f poets for use in another, thus ensuring the reduplication o f the exact same canon in subsequent editions produced by various presses. The need to ensure sales amid a highly competitive market for teaching anthologies has moved HarperCollins to adopt a policy o f maintaining at least a 75 per cent ratio o f canonical authors in their new anthology o f British literature. This insight derives from Julie Costello’s current work on an excellent dissertation, ‘Romanticism and Maternity: Mothers on Trial in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century British Literature’.

W orks Cited Ballard, George, Memoirs of Several Ladies o f Great Britain: who have been celebrated fo r their writings or skill in the learned languages, arts, and sciences (Oxford: 1752). Bonnell, Thomas F., ‘John Bell’s Poets o f Great Britain: The “Litde Trifling Edition” Revisited’, Philological Quarterly 85 (1987), pp. 128-52. The British Poets, 100 vols (Chiswick: 1822), vol. 1. Campbell, Thomas (ed.), Specimens of the British Poets, 7 vols (London: 1819), vol. 3. Chalmers, Alexander (ed.), The Works o f the English Poets, 21 vols (London: 1810), vol. 1. Colman, George, and Bonnell Thornton (eds), Poems by the Most Eminent Ladies o f Great Britain and Ireland, 1755, 2 vols (London: 1773). Curran, Stuart, ‘Romantic Poetry: The I Altered’, in Mellor, Romanticism and Feminism, pp. 185-207. Dyce, Alexander (ed.), Specimens o f British Poetesses; Selected and Chronologically Arranged (London: 1827).

Gendering the Canons o f Romanticism

29

Ezell, Margaret, W riting Women's Literary History (Baltimore: 1993). Hazlitt, William, Lectures on the English Poets: The Spirit of the Age, ed. Catherine MacDonald Maclean, 1910 (London: 1967). Labbe, Jacqueline M., ‘Romanticism and Gender’, The Wordsworth Circle 25 (1994), pp. 261-3.

The Lady's Poetical Magazine, 4 vols (London: 17 8 1-2); referred to in text as LPM. Linkin, Harriet Kramer, ‘Taking Stock of the British Romantics Marketplace: Teaching New Canons through New Editors?’ Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19 (1995), forthcoming. McGann, Jerome J. (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (Oxford: 1993). Mellor, Anne K. (ed.), Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington: 1988). --------- Romanticism and Gender (New Jersey: 1993). Newman, Gerald, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History (New York: 1987). Perkins, David (ed.), English Romantic W riters (New York: 1995). Polwhele, Richard, The Unsex'd Females (New York: 1800). Ritson, Joseph (ed.), The English Anthology, 3 vols (London: 1793), vol. 1. Ross, Marlon, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry (Oxford: 1993). Southey, Robert (ed.), Specimens o f the Later English Poets, 3 vols (London: 1807), vol. 1. Sweet, Nanora, ‘History, Imperialism, and the Aesthetics o f the Beautiful: Hemans and the Post-Napoleonic Moment’, in M ary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson (eds), A t the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural Feminist, and M aterialist Criticism (Bloomington: 1994). W u, Duncan (ed.), Romanticism: An Anthology (Oxford: 1994).

Re/Writing Home: Women Romantic W riters and the Politics of Location Amanda Gilroy University of Groningen

Our home! - what images are brought before us by that one word!1 In the divided socio-political arena of the years following the revol­ utionary decade, domesticity was increasingly figured in terms of a refuge, a haven of private space away from public turmoil. From within this private space the domestic woman disseminated national cultural values. The moral discourse which grounded and justified the ideologi­ cal hegemony codified the home as the nursery of virtue. Though woman’s influence was far-flung, this paradoxically involved a discursive focus on the smaller scale of the domestic, to which it was argued that women were naturally best suited, seeing the world, as Hannah More influentially put it, ‘from a little elevation from her own garden, whence she makes an exact survey of home scenes’.2 The rhetoric of home, then, is tied to configurations of gender and nationality, and to the demarcation of spaces, crucially the gendered definition of public and private space. In this essay I want to examine how the discourse of home, and the spatial position occupied by subjects in relation to this discursive place, functions in some women’s writing of the early decades of the nineteenth century. Despite increased access to travel, during both the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic years (one thinks of well-known women travellers such as M ary Wollstonecraft, Mariana Starke, Lady Morgan) women’s dis­ cursive positioning was increasingly one of confinement, the limited view promoted by Hannah More. The rhetoric of home became an internalized ideology, so that women carried their home with them, their writing producing and reproducing tropes of self-enclosure. Using examples from the work of Felicia Hemans and Joanna Baillie, I will analyse women’s writing of the home, and their reproduction of hege­ monic cultural values which is the basis of their critical success. I will 30

Re/Writing Home: Women Romantic Writers

31

suggest that th e public discourse of reviews guarantees th e private sphere of femininity through the discursive placing of the woman writer within the home (which then acts as a constraint on the production of women’s texts). After this mapping of the cultural hegemony, I will turn to modalities of resistance, and specifically to Anna Jameson’s re-writing of the English home. I will ask whether it is possible to locate the site of what Ellen Moers, discussing the attraction of Italy for women writers, calls a ‘feminine somewhere-else’,3and, more importantly, what this other space might signify. Perhaps the best example of the hymning of the domestic affections is the work of Felicia Hemans. In her poem ‘The Domestic Affections’ (1812) the home is the domain of domestic bliss, an ‘unruffled’ refuge from war and destruction, a ‘bow’r of rest’, a ‘Bower of repose’; the home is idealized and internalized, it is a phantasmic space: ‘Thus, when oppress’d with rude tumultuous cares, /To thee, sweet home, the fainting mind repairs’.4 ‘[H]ome’ is the ‘Empire’ of ‘domestic bliss’, a figuration that underwrites the naturalizing of commercial imperialism, whereby, as in Hemans’s poem ‘England and Spain’, imperial spoils ‘waft’ effortlessly to Britain’s shores, continuing the tradition of Pope’s ‘Windsor Forest’: ‘ ... fearless Commerce, pillar of thy throne, /Makes all the wealth of foreign climes thy own’.5 This is to make explicit Ann Martin Taylor’s claim that ‘to promote domestic virtue, and to preserve the domestic happiness of the fireside is an effectual as well as simple means of increasing national prosperity’.6 As Hemans’s work makes clear, the rhetoric of home inflects the discourses of gender and nationality: in the context of war, English homes and English women provide both a refuge and an anchor, a point of stability in an unstable discursive arena. Reviews of Hemans’s work use the rhetoric of separate spheres - or separate spaces - to applaud her exemplary femininity. Maria Jane Jewsbury writes of Hemans’s ‘matronly delicacy of thought ... her hallowed ideas of happiness as connected with home’; ‘Mrs. Hemans’, she sums up, ‘throws herself into her poetry, and the said self is an English gentlewoman’.7 A Blackwood's reviewer finds her ‘attachment to the privacy of life ... complete^] her qualifications as a fitting representative of her fair countrywomen’; Hemans’s virtues ‘all speak of the cultivated woman bred under English skies, and in English homes’.8 George Gilfillan asserts a natural continuity between the woman poet’s life and work. Of Hemans he writes that: you see a graceful and gifted woman, passing from the cares of her family, and the enjoyments of society, to inscribe on her tablets some fine thought or feeling, which had throughout the day existed as a still sunshine upon her countenance, or perhaps as a quiet unshed

32

Romantic Masculinities

tear in her eye. In this case, the transition is so natural and graceful, from the duties or delights of the day to the employments of the desk, that there is as little pedantry in writing a poem as in writing a letter.9 W hat is at stake here is the difference between sexuality and textuality. Reviews conflate the domestic woman in her home and the woman writer ‘at home’ in the domain of discursive domesticity. Hemans’s poetry reproduces the private sphere, for in the reviewer’s generic reclassification, Hemans writes in the epistolary tradition, less valued than the poetic, which records the ‘effusions’ of woman’s private life.10 The Quarterly Review (1821) observes that ‘if our fancies are not always transported, our hearts at least will never be corrupted’.11 Carlyle praises Joanna Baillie in very similar terms: in a review of M etrical Legends (1821) he argues that Baillie’s poetry does not work by ‘inflam­ ing our hearts or expanding our imaginations’ - it does not, in other words, transport us anywhere - but it ‘brighten[s] ... our common existence’.12 In legislating the terms on which women’s writing will be valued, the reviewers annotate the geopolitical realities of women’s lives: the good woman, the woman writer, and her text, are denied a passport to the wider sphere of life and literature. The woman writer is circumscribed within the parameters of the home, the space of domesticity and femininity, though, crucially, this circumscription is the key to public success (as well as grounding the wider agendas of national identity). Carlyle and other reviewers of M etrical Legends single out ‘The Legend of Griseld Baillie’ as the most pleasing poem in the volume (they have a range of objections to Baillie’s forays into ‘male’ history, her accounts of W illiam Wallace and Christopher Columbus).13 The legend is part of Baillie’s own family history, and it constructs a politics of the family, centred on the notion that helpful daughters make happy homes. Griseld is a ‘damsel sweet’, and her journey through life an ‘unwearied course of gentle deeds’.14 Temporarily exiled from Scotland to Holland, the family are ‘oudaws’ in ‘[a] stranger’s land’, but Griseld sets about making ‘a humble home’ out of their ‘alter’d lot’ (st. XXXI). She ‘clings’ to her family (st. XLIV), and finally marries the son of a family friend, while remaining subject to paternal law. This abridged tour of the landmarks of the legend demonstrates Griseld’s place in the gender ideology of Baillie’s time. Even when she goes abroad, our heroine takes with her so much cultural baggage that travelling is just like staying at home. W hat her experiences confirm is the ‘homely merit’ of a ‘helpful Maid’ (concluding stanzas). Though Griseld makes brief forays into a Gothic landscape (she

Re/Writing Home: Women Romantic Writers

33

visits her father, for example, who is in hiding in a burial vault), her role is to bring ‘sweet’ tales of home into alien spaces. There is no real sense in the text of home as a site of disturbance; where the gothic genre expresses cultural anxieties about the security of the home and exposes die dark secrets of patriarchal law, the mainstream celebrations of domesticity that we have been considering avert their gaze from such threats to the social fabric. Though it is not a line of argument I will pursue here, one could, of course, theorize about the signifying absence of such anxieties and the suppression of the unheimlich. As we have noted earlier, reviewers again make a characteristic elision between the woman writer’s life and her text, confirming that both Baillie and her heroine are models of domestic virtue. Thus, ‘[i]n the pleasing task of recording congenial virtues, Miss Baillie seems quite at home, and peculiarly inspired by her subject’.15 She is poetically at home because she ‘was herself a pattern of filial duty, exalted, tender, and devoted, like that of her heroine’ (Scots Magazine, p. 264); the highest praise the reviewer can bestow is that, ‘in the quietest seclusion’, Baillie ‘practised in their full extent all those homebred and homefelt virtues she knows so well to describe’ (p. 264). The rhetorical emphasis on ‘home’ picks up on the earlier comment that ‘Miss Baillie seems quite at home’ with her subject, so that home becomes both the place where virtue is engendered (and where (female) gender is contingent on virtue) and the locus of the poetic text: the text of the poem is home. The life of the poetess, as purveyed to us by the reviewer who peeks into ‘the sacred recesses of domestic privacy’, is a ‘lesson’ (p. 264) to other women, just as the textualized life of her heroine is a ‘pattern’ to be followed: at the end of the poem, Baillie’s speaker addresses the ‘polish’d fair of modern times’ - the woman reader is clearly meant to identify herself, in terms of nationality and gender, with the ‘British fair’ who show ‘kindred sympathy’ with the ‘modest worth’ of the heroine (Baillie, ‘Legend’, concluding stanzas). W e might have expected a different national agenda here, given Baillie’s nationality, the subject of the poem and the context of the review; what is notable, however, is that apart from a passing comment in the review that ‘Of this [virtuous] character our Scottish maids and matrons have been allowed to partake in no common degree’ (Scots Magazine, pp. 263-4), the relativity of national difference is subsumed into the larger context of British identity. Both the poem and the cultural discourses it engenders affirm the centrality of the domestic affections to national unity, and these have a transcendent authenticity in the face of the contingencies of time and history, as the frequent elision of Baillie and her heroine makes clear. Moreover, what all these texts demonstrate is that women’s spatial existence is positioned by the co-ordinates of hegemonic power structures; the modalities of feminine

34

Romantic Masculinities

spatiality involve inhibition, enclosure and confinement. In writings of the period there is often a slippage between geography and gender, so that a metaphorical congruence is asserted between domesticity and femininity; in Hannah More’s words: ‘That kind of knowledge which is rather fitted for home consumption than foreign exportation, is peculiarly adapted to women.’ 16 Thus, it is important to emphasize the imbrication of the spatial and the social; as Doreen Massey puts it, we need to think of ‘the spatial [as] social relations “stretched out’”;17 one implication of this notion of space is that we cannot homogenize women’s relation to space. I would like now to turn to Anna Jameson’s Diary o f an Ennuyee, first published in 1826. This is a hybrid work which eludes generic fixity, being a guidebook, a diary and a novel rolled into one. This generic ambiguity is in itself significant, for it constitutes a crossing of boundaries, an impulse towards deterritorialization which is played out in the text in spatial terms. The pretext of the (fictionalized) trip and the diary is an unhappy love-affair, the memory of which fosters the frequently melancholic tone of the work. It is based on the Grand Tour that Jameson made in her capacity as governess to the Rowles family of Bradboume Park, but this social context is suppressed in favour of an independent heroine (husbandless and parentless) who tours the sites of Italy. The trope of the journey and of femininity as a space underwrites a utopian desire to push against the boundaries of patri­ archy, to imagine spaces which are not structured through masculine ideologies. The diary form aids Jameson’s evasion of those masculinist claims to exhaustiveness which Gillian Rose locates in her work on geographical discourses.18 Jameson’s textual tour is a pilgrimage in which place and personal feeling interact. She inscribes female identity within an alternative politics of place and position, which is neither the disembodied panoramic perspective associated with masculinist land­ scape viewing, nor the confined view from Hannah More’s garden (though she rearticulates this latter view of space). I will suggest that the inscription of feminine identity and a gendered geography involves a refusal to separate emotion from the interpretation of place (which has implications for the stability of the Cartesian mind/body duality) and the representation of public space in terms of domestic inte­ riors.19 A Blackwood's article on ‘Modem Tourism’ (1848) gives covert support to the cartography of gender that I discern in Jameson’s text, for the writer laments that the plethora of post-Napoleonic travel accounts (especially of tours of Italy) ‘spoils all rational travel ... it repels ... th e manly investigator’.20 The mingling of mind and matter is the keynote of Jameson’s travel diary, a fusion which may generate negativity - ‘my mind seemed no longer in my own power’ - but which also pushes against the

Re/Writing Home: Women Romantic Writers

35

demarcation of physical and psychic landscapes, and thus destabilizes epistemological certainty and diffuses any sense of fixed, monolithic identity.21 Of the journey to Milan, Jameson describes how ‘the dark blue sky was above our heads, and the transparent lake shone another heaven at our feet’; the dissolution of the boundaries between real and metaphorical space is extended by the Visions of poetic fancy’ which hovered around the scene and by the ‘remembrances of the far-off absent’ which ‘mingled with the whole, and shed an imaginary splendour or a tender interest’ over the scene (Diary, 3: pp. 223-4). Ultimately, this is a narrative in which there is no gap between vision and emotion: ‘O what a country is this! all that I see, I fe e l - all that I feel, sinks so deep into my heart and my memory! the deeper because I suffer’ (Diary, 3: pp. 280-1).22 The chiastic structure of this last sentence enacts the fluid interaction of psychic and physical space that characterizes Jameson’s narrative. This fluidity is the crucially shifting ground of the elision of spatial oppositions in Jameson’s representation of Italy. She displaces the spatial metaphors that translated and ordered the heterogeneity of class and gender differences into the oppositions interior/exterior, inside/ outside. Jameson recognizes the salutary effect of ‘the witchery of these deep blue skies’ on her ‘sick heart’, even while she reminds her reader of her identification with ‘England - dear England!’ (Diary, 4: p. 157). National and gender identity would seem to be grounded in a nostalgic vision of home: ‘I love, like an Englishwoman, its [England’s] fire-side enjoyments, and home-felt delights: an English drawing-room with all its luxurious comforts - carpets and hearth-rugs, curtains let down, sofas wheeled round, and a group of family faces round a blazing fire, is a delightful picture’ (Diary, 4: p. 157).23 But this patriotic roman­ ticizing of home is already a ‘picture’, a representation of an idyll that is discursive rather than actual. This is a myth, a romance of domestic space, that must be ever more rigorously policed if the realm of bourgeois domesticity is to remain a safe haven for men of the world. Jameson contrasts the parameters of public and private in Italy and England: ‘all those minute details of domestic life, which, in England, are confined within the sacred precincts of home, are here [in Italy] displayed to public view. Here people buy and sell, and work, wash, wring, brew, bake, fry, dress, eat, drink, sleep, &c. See. all in the open streets’ (Diary, 4: p. 183). The indiscriminateness of this ‘vast Bartholemew fair’ (Diary, 4: p. 182), the fact that the private is public in Italy, makes a new experience of space available to women: this mapping of inner onto exterior space imag(in)es a space that is accessible to the female subject - public space is seen in terms of private space, precisely the domestic realm presided over by women. The best example of this is Jameson’s description of the gardens of the Villa Pamfili outside

36

Romantic Masculinities

Rome. Though these gardens, if they were in England, would ‘horrify’ the narrator as ‘unnatural’, in Italy the boundaries between nature and art, as between public and private, are fluid (‘sportive art revels and runs wild amid the luxuriance of nature’ (Diary, 4: p. 197)). The marble terraces and leafy arcades, the profusion of gods, nymphs, grottoes and fountains, ‘are comfortable and consistent as a well-carpeted drawing­ room and a warm chimney-corner would be in England’ (Diary, 4: p. 197). This is a hybrid space, both inside and outside, real and imagined, foreign, exotic, Italian, yet comfortable as an English home. Jameson transplants the language of English domestic space, the famili­ arity of the world she knows, into her descriptions of Italian public space - in which she perceives the displacement of the boundaries of public and private - so that she can feel at home in a foreign public space. She legitimizes her place in Italy by reference to the British domestic sphere. It is worth returning here briefly to Felicia Hemans as a countervoice, one which points up by contrast the subversive possibilities of Jameson’s double displacement. In her popular poem, ‘The Homes of England’ (1827), Hemans celebrates the happy families which nurture national identity and religious belief; from stately homes to cottages, ‘household love’ holds sway. The happy home motif is explicated in a notebook entry: ‘Our home! - what images are brought before us by that one word! The meeting of cordial smiles, and the gathering round the evening hearth, and the interchange of thoughts and kindly words, and the glance of eyes to which our hearts lie open as the day; there is the true “City of Refuge”.’ 24 Hemans imports the image of the outside, the public, into the domestic, private sphere: around the hearth our hearts are metaphorically open as the day, and the home is a city of refuge. She reverses the direction of Jameson’s spatial displacement, transplanting the outer onto the inner, so that both nature and the urban are available within the confines of the home. This is a rhetoric of confinement, keeping women in their place through the illusion of boundlessness.25Jameson, on the other hand, to recapitulate, uses dom­ estic imagery to explore the public domain, an exploration which is only possible because the cultural arena in which the opposition of public/private operates is displaced from England to Italy. The myths of national identity and gender identity are rewritten together. Both levels of transgression are perceived by The Monthly Review, which criticizes the author’s making public of private feelings - ‘There is an indelicacy in the exposure, even anonymously, to careless and indifferent eyes, of personal grief which was meant to be secret, and ought ... to have been sacred’ - and her ‘license of observation ... which we would not willingly see substituted for the retiring sweetness of their [our fair country-women’s] insular manners’.26 The insular is

Re/Writing Home: Women Romantic Writers

37

valued over the exotic, the private should not be displayed, or prosti­ tuted, in the public realm. Moreover, doubts about the authenticity of the text disorient the reviewer; it is impossible to make the conservative elision between author and character that we have noted in other reviews because it is unclear exactly who is speaking. Moreover, if the author’s melancholy feelings are real, they should not have been re­ vealed; if they are not real they should not be masquerading as such. Either way the text upsets the ideological and epistemological co­ ordinates of the status quo.27 It is, as we are well aware, not possible to operate outside the power of hegemonic discourses, and there are many examples in the text of the inhibition and immanence of feminine spatial existence which is positioned by a system of co-ordinates outside women’s control. Jameson represents experiences of confinement in space that are tradi­ tionally associated with female subjectivity (see, for example, Diary, 4: pp. 65, 74, 278); there is an emphasis on disempowering modes of displacement - the narrator is ‘a nameless sort of person, a mere bird of passage’ (Diary, 4: p.223); she is drawn to graves and funerals, signifiers of absence, and to a rhetoric of exile; the boundlessness and immensity of some landscapes oppress and fatigue her (see Diary, 3: pp. 199 and 214), and she is unable to transcend these experiences in the manner of her male Romantic counterparts, that process of sublime self-aggrandisement that Patricia Yaeger has termed ‘self-centred imperialism’.28 W hat it is possible to argue is that there are gaps in hegemonic discourses. Ellen Moers’s ‘feminine somewhere-else’ as the site of resistance to hegemonic discourses must then be located in the here and now, or it is nowhere, which would leave women politically stranded beyond history and beyond language. Teresa de Lauretis provides a useful spatial model for feminist resistance to masculinist discourses, a resistance that she says ‘is the elsewhere of discourse here and now, the blind spots, or the space-off, of its representations. I think of it as spaces in the margins of hegemonic discourses, social spaces carved in the interstices of institutions and in the chinks and cracks of the power-knowledge apparati.’ 29 De Lauretis maps out the paradoxical spatiality of the feminine subject (and of feminism itself as a subject) who is involved in a type of oscillation between the hegemonic and the subversive, the repre­ sented and the unrepresentable, between the centre and the margins, between home and ‘elsewhere’. What a feminist analysis that attends to the inscriptions of public and private, personal and political, can demonstrate, is the deeply imbricated nature of national and gender identities, but also their constructedness, and thus the possibilities for change. Jameson’s contribution to feminist history is to explore the potential gap between sexual and national codes, a difference that

Romantic Masculinities

38

the rhetoric of ‘home’ normatively elides in the early nineteenth cen­ tury. In other words, to adapt Audre Lorde’s famous phrase, she uses the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house (or home). One cultural legacy to be inherited from women romantic writers such as Jameson is the insight that the future of difference - and the possibilites of a different future - may lie in what we might call ‘local resistance’.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18

Memoir o f the Life and Writings o fMrs. Hemans. By her Sister (Philadelphia: 1839), p. 131, quoted in Anne Mack, J .J. Rome and Georg Mannejc, ‘Literary History, Romanticism, and Felicia Hemans’, Modem Language Quarterly 54 (1993), pp. 2 15-35; p.228. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modem System of Female Education, in The Works o f Hannah More, 5 vols (London: 1834), 3: p. 202. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (London: 1977), p. 204. Felicia Hemans, Poems (London: n.d.), p. 113. Felicia Hemans, Songs o f the Affectmis and Other Poems (Halifax: 1852), p. 238. Quoted in Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 17 8 0 -18 5 0 (London: 1992), p. 173. Maria Jane Jewsbury, ‘Literary Sketches, No. 1’, The Athenaeum 172 (Feb­ ruary 1831), pp. 104-5; p. 104. ‘Mrs. Hemans’, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 64 (1848), pp. 6 41-58; p. 641. George Gilfillan, ‘Female Authors, No. 1 - Mrs. Hemans’, Tait's Edinburgh Review (1847), pp. 3 59 -63 ; p. 361. Ibid. ‘Mrs. Hemans’s Poems’, The Quarterly Review 24 (1821), pp. 13 0 -9 ; p. 131. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Article V: Miss Baillie’s M etrical Legends', New Edinburgh Review 2 (1821), pp. 3 9 3 -4 14 ; pp. 4 12 -13 . See, in addition to Carlyle, The Monthly Review 96 NS (1821), pp. 7 2 -8 1. Joanna Baillie, The Dramatical and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie (2nd edn; London: 1853); the first quote occurs in the second stanza, and the latter in the last stanza o f the poem, which forms part o f a concluding address to British women. All further references will be to this edition, with stanza numbers included in brackets in the text. ‘Remarks on Miss Baillie’s Metrical Legends’, Scots Magazine 8 NS (1821), pp. 260-5; p. 264. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. More, Strictures, p. 188. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: 1994), p. 2. See Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography (Cambridge: 1993), p. 138. James Buzard points out that ‘Jameson’s Diary mocks the conventional woman’s travel diary as “Verbiage, emptiness, and affectation!”, distin­ guishing itself from all those other volumes o f which it deliberately

Re/Writing Home: Women Romantic Writers

19

20 21

22 23

24 25

26 27

39

reminds us by semi-fictionalizing itself.’ Buzard discusses Jameson in terms o f the emergent anti-touristic tradition of travel writing; the implications o f his argument are that Jameson is ultimately more o f a tourist, consuming settings which are “‘saturated” in historical and emotional significance’, than a romantic traveller; in other words, her confrontation with the foreign is from a safe distance which suppresses more destabilizing forms of otherness. Buzard’s reading o f the Diary is convincing within the framework of the touristic/anti-touristic paradigm that structures his argument, but he elides questions of gender which give a different inflec­ tion to Jameson’s views; for example, his notion that as ‘picturesque sightseer’ Jameson is indifferent to what she sees could be re-evaluated as a stance o f feminine non-appropriativeness. See James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 18 0 0 19 18 (Oxford: 1993), pp. 161, 185, 190. It is important to note alternatives to this mapping o f geography and identity: emotional investment is not, o f course, the only modality of female travel writing, while many male authors similarly wish to resist ideologies o f exhaustiveness. M y parameters are derived in part from recent works on landscape and visual ideology which point to ‘the illusion o f an unmarked, unitary, distanced, masculine spectator’ whose view is characterized by generality and abstractness, and more relational, ‘femi­ nine’ modes o f viewing, characterized by attention to detail and the rearticulation of traditional space (see Rose, Feminism, pp. 8 6 -112 ; p. 112). Quoted in Buzard, Beaten Track, p. 159 (my italics). Anna Jameson, Diary of an Ennuyee, in Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad, 4 vols (London: 1834), 3: p. 254. All further references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume number. All italics in original, unless otherwise stated. The constraints o f national identity are clearly ideological in the Althusserian sense, that is, that ideology represents ‘the imaginary relation o f ... individuals to the real relations in which they live’; see Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investi­ gation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy (New York: 1971), p. 165. Thus, Jameson’s simile marks precisely the gap within ideology, for she is Irish-born (though raised in England; her father was an Irish artist, Denis Murphy). Quoted in Mack et al., ‘Literary History’, p. 228. Angela Leighton provides an alternative reading o f the ideals o f hearth and home in Hemans’s work; she argues that, writing out of financial necessity in the absence of her husband, ‘public anxiety’ and ‘personal plight’ combined to make these ideals ‘all the more furtively desirable’. Further, she demonstrates that ‘Hemans’ many displaced wives and daugh­ ters, by being exiled from their allotted “sole spot”, offer a socially critical commentary on the metaphysics o f place which underpins Romantic idealism. Their nostalgia or their deaths conflict with ... the men’s im­ perialist energy.’ See Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: W riting Against the Heart (Hemel Hempstead: 1992), pp. 14, 23. The Monthly Review 1 (1826), pp. 4 14-26; pp. 417, 420. In the 1834 edition o f the text, Jameson laments that ‘If I have cheated

40

Romantic Masculinities

some gentle readers out of much superfluous sympathy - as it has been averred - it was certainly without design’; despite the fact that her narrator dies, while she, of course, does not, Jameson asserts that the Diary's merit is ‘its truth as a picture of mind’ {Visits and Sketches, 1: pp. x, xii). 28 Patricia Yaeger, ‘Toward a Female Sublime’, in Linda Kauffman (ed.), Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism (Oxford: 1989), pp. 191— 212; p. 192. 29 Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies o f Gender (Basingstoke: 1987), p. 25.

Dialect, Gender and the Politics of the Local: The Writing of Ann Wheeler Michael Baron Birkbeck College University of London

,

Ann Wheeler (1735/6-1804) is one of a number of women writers of dialect texts who were well known locally in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and who are now generally forgotten. Her Westmorland Dialect, first published in 1790, was reprinted for fifty years, first locally for the entertainment of her Westmorland compa­ triots, then nationally as a piece of philological data.1 The changing fortunes of this text, its early success and later neglect (if we measure these by publishing history), are sufficiently clear to be discussed, and they seem to me to say much about the construction of ‘dialect’ in the decades before dialectology was known as a science, and also about the politics of local publication and reputation. The broader purpose of this article is to show that the questions faced by dialect writers in the Romantic period (and especially female dialect writers) involve some familiar and central Romantic opposites: literariness/pre-literariness; the cult of the author/the valuing of unauthored texts; the national/the local or regional - oppositions that point to the control of the category of the aesthetic and the ‘ownership’ of language, and embody particular crossings of gender and class. When we speak of English dialect writing in this period, we have to forget Bums and, indeed, the Scottish language, which is not a dialect of English, but had its own literary tradition and establishment. Bums was responsible for an enormous amount of dialect poetry in England (let alone Scotland) from the 1790s onwards, and has become more or less synonymous with ‘dialect’ literature of the period. This is unfair not only to Scottish literature, but also to regional literature in England which had nothing to do with Bums. W e have to forget, too, the mythic regional definition of the ‘Border’ used by Scott in Minstrelsy o f the Scottish Border in 18032 and canonized by F.J. Child eighty years later in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Though 41

42

Romantic Masculinities

Child did not use ‘border’ as a defining regional term in quite the way Scott did, his selection nevertheless privileges feudal ballads of the kind that Scott associated with the ‘border’ region, and perpetuates an extraordinarily persistent idea of a geographical space embodying certain values - as mythical, perhaps, as Hardy’s ‘Wessex’.3Both these dominant images of dialect literature obscure the many actualities of dialect writing. The tradition I am addressing in this article is one of prose dialect writing - in which women played a large part, a part that has been obscured by ‘collectors’ of dialect (philologists, dialectologists) in the mid- and late nineteenth century - as well as the dialect ballad fashion that was inspired by Bums. These monuments throw all other dialect texts into an undeserved shade. Why, beyond the familiar frameworks that I have mentioned above, should dialect writing be important to the Romantic period? An oblique but important answer is that it gave a particular focus to the question of orthography - how to represent spoken language with marks on paper - in an age when phonetics did not exist as a science, and when spelling conventions were fiercely and politically contested. In the 1780s and 1790s there was an efflorescence of books on proper and improper speech and spelling, and in the works of Thomas Spence and John Horne Tooke the standard of correctness of language became a political issue, an issue involving orthography as well as diction and syntax. The radical Thomas Spence was convinced that the greatest barrier to the spread of knowledge (and therefore power) among working people was the use of English spelling conventions, which made it difficult for people to leam to read: spelling was not phonetic. He gradually invented modified alphabets and used them in his own books. He also tried different means of communicating with the unlettered, distributing to passers-by iconic medallions about political equality and common land ownership.4 These experiments in communication can be related to the problems faced by contemporary writers of dialect, even when the ostensible purpose of dialect texts may be different, for in each case what is addressed and indeed constructed is a specific point of entry into print culture. Early writers of dialect texts, like Ann Wheeler, John Collier and M ary Palmer, had to invent orthographical conventions and were often criticized by reviewers for doing so. The representation of oral language, that is, is a point of entry into the debate about standards in language use, which are closely related to standards of taste. So, dialect texts enter a political context that was nationally important in Britain in the 1790s and later. In this political framework, Wheeler is in the background, not the foreground, but there is overwhelming evidence that these issues, or local versions of them, are embedded in her work and its reception. (A pause to note a historical irony: since the cultivation of the local

The Writing o f Ann Wheeler

43

was itself aesthetically sensitized and therefore politicized in, for example, Reynolds’s Discourses, where ‘Nature’, the true subject of the artist, is defined as general or typical, as against the idiosyncratic, which is not a fit subject, it is worth noting that one of the earliest and best-known dialect texts of the eighteenth century, A Devonshire Dial­ ogue, was written by Mary Palmer (1716-94), Reynolds’s sister-in-law. Palmer’s dialogue remained unpublished as a whole until 1837, though parts of it had circulated fairly widely much earlier.) Wheeler has survived as a writer solely because of her text Westmor­ land Dialect, and it is this text that I want to focus on principally. Its title and the circumstances in which it was reprinted perhaps suggest a very limited range of interest: merely a philological specimen. But this is misleading. Westmorland Dialect is a series of dialogues (three in the 1790 edition; four in later editions) which are amusing, witty in places, and implicitly address the idea of otherness. The content of the dialogues is demotic, scurrilous, and specifically about sexual and gender relations. Pointedly, in a ‘Prefatory Discourse’ Wheeler tells an anec­ dote about two Cambridge-educated London men who wager that they will understand any language they encounter in Cumbria, but fail to understand their coachdriver’s (dialect) comment on a fist-fight between two women. Clearly caught up in the situation, the driver exclaims ‘en udder blae el daet’ (‘another blow will do it’) and wins the wager: It wur net ith time of Oliver Crumel, ner king Stune, but some udder king, twea men com a girt way off, ameast be Lunnon, en they wanted toth gan owar sand, but when they com an leakd what a fearful way it wur owar, en nae hedges nae tompike to be seen, they wur flayed, en steud gloarin abaut net knaain what toth dea, when belive a man com ridin up tew em en esht whaar they wur bawn, they sed owar sans, but it wur sic a parlish way they didnt like tae gang, for feard ea been drownt. This mon sed cum gang wie me, I’ll tak ye’th seaf owar I’ll uphod ye’th, wie that they set off; an thor men hed been at a college, coad Cambridge, en they thout to hev sum gam wie their guide, so as the raaid alang, yan on em sed he wod giv a supper in a crawn haul of punch, if they cud cap him wie ony six words; they try’d monna tiem, but cud nat deat. At last they gat seas owar sand, en ridin up Shilla, twea wimmen were feighten, hed pood yan en udders caps off, en neckclaiths; they steud and leakd et em a lile bit, when th guide coad out ‘en uder blae el deat,' upon hearing this awr travellers sed yee hev won the wager, for that wur a language unknawn tae onny University.5 Gender transgression is embodied in linguistic otherness. This epis­ ode also comments implicitly on the voyeurism of picturesque travellers

44

Romantic Masculinities

as educated men fix their eyes on women brawling (Donna Landry in The Muses o f Resistance wrote compellingly of the voyeuristic comment of (male) tourists on the bare feet of young women working on the land in Scotland6), and the comment is, crucially, about language difference. The men - graduates of a university, men of the world think they have linguistic power over the natives; but it proves not to be so. Dialect is a site of resistance, where the imagined audience assumed it was a sign of inferiority easily comprehended and explained. It is also a site of gendered indecorum, as the Cambridge men would see it, and, interestingly, of the blurring of history and geography. Crom­ well and King Stephen (‘Stune’) are the only historical co-ordinates the discourse offers, and place is vague (‘ameast be Lunnon’ and ‘a college, coad Cambridge’). The ‘Discourse’ seems explicitly to displace national points of self-definition, temporal and spatial, and replace them with local particularities.7 If it seems that these oppositions are only casual and lack particular focus, I would argue that W heeler’s ironic use of the phatic conventions of writing and publishing draw attention to an opposition between written and spoken communication that ironizes the content as well, since it, too, is about communication. To present a ‘Prefatory Dis­ course’ in an unfamiliar dialect is in any case a subversive gesture, similar, perhaps, to Blake’s use of a mythological poem (‘Rintrah roars’) as ‘The Argument’ to The M arriage o f Heaven and Hell. In each case readers might expect an explanatory page, but they get a puzzling one. In the four dialogues themselves, the speakers are women, and this allows us to gain a further perspective on the text. So far as Wheeler had a model for her work, it was the enormously popular narrative of Tummus and M eary , written in Lancashire dialect by ‘Tim Bobbin’, a pseudonym for John Collier.8A review of W heeler’s book in the Monthly Review for August 1791 compared it with Collier’s, thus attesting to the enduring popularity of the earlier work.9 In Collier’s dialogues, it is in fact ‘Tummus’ who does nearly all the talking, bragging to ‘Meary’ about his adventures and cleverness. But in the first of W heeler’s dialogues the subject of discussion between ‘Ann’ and ‘M ary’ is the management of husbands, verbally and physically. Like Xantippe, Mary is not above emptying a chamber pot on her husband’s head.10 And although Wheeler cannot be regarded as a social revolutionary - Ann advises Mary not to leave her husband, because marriage, for all its faults, is still the only available form of financial security - nevertheless these narratives of matching cunning with cunning are surely an explicitly gendered answer to Tim Bobbin/John Collier. Westmorland Dialect also has local literary and political relations. When Wheeler died in 1804, she was buried in the chancel of Beetham church, south of Kendal, having lived in the parish during

The Writing o f Ann Wheeler

45

her widowhood as companion to her brother W illiam Coward at Amside Tower.11 A note in the 1821 edition describes her as ‘an affectionate, charitable woman’, and tells us that she left a guinea with the vicar ‘to preach her funeral sermon from Psalm 94, verse 19’ (which reads, ‘In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight my soul’). This vicar, whom Wheeler must have known and who may just possibly have written the note describing her (though I think it unlikely), was the Reverend W illiam Hutton, a local historian and antiquarian and himself the author of a dialect text, A B ran New W ark, published in Kendal in 1785, five years before Wheeler’s book, under the pseudonym of W illiam de Worfat (i.e. W illiam of Overthwaite). The text, so enigmatically titled, is in fact a series of three short exhortations to parishioners to live their lives in a Christian way. So it is quite different in subject-matter from Wheeler’s dialogues, and in fact very different in language too. The first paragraph of the ‘Prologue’ is typical: ‘God be with ye! I regard with the tenderest affection every muther’s barn o’ ye, fra the heeghest to the lawest; I equally respect the gentleman that treads in black snod pumps, and the clown that rattles oor the peavement in cakert cloggs; because each hes a race to run, a saaul to save, and may he prosper!’ 12 A cursory, non-specialist comparison of this with any passage in Wheeler’s dialogues shows that Hutton’s language, in spite of the occasional use of local diction, is syntactically structured as standard written English in a polite hortatory mode, whereas Wheeler’s syntax is much closer to spoken language (spoken reportage), and for that reason less widely comprehensible. Hutton’s dialect, that is, is standard written English with an accent; W heeler’s represents the language of those who did not write. To be fair to Hutton, he also kept a miscellaneous written record of his incumbency and thoughts, known as The Beetham Repository, a folio volume kept in the church porch, and this included as one of its last entries a two-page ‘Dialogue in the Vulgar Language of Storth and Amside, with a Design to make to our Posterity, the Pronuntiation of A.D. 1760’.13 The genre of dialogue allowed him to use a more orally structured language than in A B?an New W ark. But it is a trivial piece compared with Wheeler’s, narrating briefly a tall story about ‘Robbin’ (from Arnside) who found a stranded porpoise, cut it up and sold it for fourpence a pound. This provokes the slightly incredulous admir­ ation of ‘Tammy’ (from Storth). As the title indicates, the ‘Dialogue’ was written in an antiquarian spirit. It remained unpublished until 1906. The differences between ‘realistic’, popular dialogues and the works of vicars are reflected in the difficulties and embarrassments of Victorian editors of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century dialect texts. There is a very distinct colonialist attitude: editors assert that these things have a scientific (anthropological) value, but lack literary (aesthetic)

46

Romantic Masculinities

worth, and this leads them to construct ideas about what is acceptable and what is not. In 1879 W . W . Skeat (a cleric as well as a great philologist) edited Hutton’s A Bran New Wark for the English Dialect Society, and though he noted that ‘strictly speaking, the language is not dialectal, but literary English’, he nevertheless valued it because it ‘breathes the language of genuine Christian love’.14 More important, he contrasted it with the ‘many specimens of (so-called) provincial talk’, which he described as ‘a quantity of trash’ put together ‘in order to raise a laugh and catch a penny’.15 Note the dismissive way in which he used the word ‘talk’; spoken language is conceived of as less impor­ tant than written language, and the unexpressed implication seems to be that it is excluded from any aesthetic categories and pleasures. It is not clear that Skeat had Wheeler specifically in mind, but he certainly might have. Skeat’s comments point to the central difference between Hutton’s and W heeler’s works. Hutton’s purpose in A Bran New Wark was to sermonize in the local language, to translate the gospel message into a vernacular. This can be seen as inventive and even radical, and Hutton noticed in the first part of the text, the preface, that there was a long tradition of northern writers who had translated or helped disseminate holy writings. It can also be related to the regionalization of sacred texts effected by the medieval cycle plays. I assume this is the sort of moral purpose Skeat had in mind when defending his re-edition of Hutton’s work. But, on the other hand, Hutton’s work can be seen as essentially colonialist, adapting ‘native’ (oral) language to doctrinal purposes: the regions are the home colonies. I do not ascribe to Hutton a consciously dirigiste attitude, but the uses to which his work was put (the very reason it survives) make this opposition unavoidably relevant. Hutton’s A Bran New Wark prefigures pretty well exactly the frame of mind evident in Victorian philological studies of dialect, because its subject-matter and syntax could so easily be approved by Victorian editors. Skeat’s edition, massively annotated and informed by his enor­ mous etymological knowledge, is a triumph of scholarship which subordinates the text to the purposes of the edition, but it has to be said that Hutton’s own aims are perhaps not radically misrepresented by Skeat’s scholarly attentions. In contrast, W heeler’s Westmorland Dialect was more widely known and respected earlier in the century (up to the 1840s), but it had no aim to improve its readers and was later neglected. Skeat’s comments on A Bran New Wark vividly betray the problem for the reverend philologist. He must aim at a scientifically accurate representation of language, but other criteria, moral or aes­ thetic, can get in the way. In view of all this, when Wheeler writes of her dialect volume that it might be thought of as ‘wark ets fit for nin but Parson et dea’ (as

The Writing o f Ann Wheeler

47

opposed to writing recipes),16 she is surely acknowledging the fact (and the convention) that clergymen are the repositories of local knowledge, whether of facts or of language, and challenging it. It seems to me clear from what we can find out about her life that the challenge was a conscious one. There may be further evidence of this in the fact that the second (1802)17 and subsequent editions of W estm orland D ialect give a full range of textual preliminaries: an address ‘To the Public’, another ‘To the Reader’, the ‘Prefatory Discourse’ excerpted above, and a glossary. Wheeler’s comments in these preliminaries often look tonguein-check, especially when she says that she published her work to illustrate ‘the progress towards improvement which is daily making in the dialect of every district’.18 I read this as an amused and tolerant (if not consciously politically radical) reflection on the fashion for linguistic self-improvement of the 1770s and 1780s.19 There was a broad opposition between women dialect writers and male editors, and this is not a matter of simple gender divisions, but involves social standing in local communities: in other words, it involves class, but in very particularized terms. In dialect literature the terms can seem so particularized that class and gender parameters are hard to determine, but specific cases seem to attract these distinctions in different but related ways. There is an interesting example in another 1879 edition of an early dialect text, also published for the English Dialect Society. It is a lively piece called A n Exmoor Scolding, a flyting, or verbal contest in abuse, between two women.20 Along with a com­ panion piece, A n Exmoor Counship , this was published in 174621 and reprinted many times in the following forty years. The 1771 edition is particularly interesting, because the editors (presumably the publishers) supply a glossary and go out of their way to emphasize the value and authenticity of the text, and also its practical usefulness. The former claim is evident in the title (An Exmoor Scolding: in the Propriety and Decency o f Exmoor Language, between two sisters, W ilm ot M orem an and Thomasin M orem an, A s they were Spinning),22 and the latter in the Preface,

where it is recommended to ‘such Lawyers as go the Western Circuit, by whom the evidence of the Country-man is sometimes mistaken, for want of a proper Interpretation of his Language’.23 One hundred years later Elworthy dismissed both these claims, apparently because of an overriding concern with moral gallantry: ‘here I most strongly protest against the libel contained in the title-page of the “Scolding”. To imply that the subject matter dwelt upon in this dialogue is a fair sample of the propriety or decency of the young women of the district in the last century, is simply scandalous.’ 24 Elworthy goes on to say, in a wonderful piece of self-condemnation, that he is republishing this work only for the benefit of scholars, relying on the obscurity of a volume published by a learned society to deter people who might have other (lesser) kinds

48

Romantic Masculinities

of interest in the work - people, perhaps, who might enjoy it: ‘Nothing but the confidence that the form is not such as to attract the ordinary reader, and that students alone will wade through it, would have induced me to touch such pitch/ In this frame of mind, he condemns the ‘mind’ of the anonymous author, ‘who was evidently ashamed to own his work, though not ashamed to reap the profits of at least nine editions, by pandaring to the taste of the class which delights to feed on garbage’.25 An Exmoor Scolding is linguistically very inventive, and its interest to decades of editors and readers seems hardly likely to have been merely prurient: more likely, people were simply pleased to see their language in print. But Elworthy thinks of this inventiveness only in philological terms, and he would clearly rather leave the text alone. As to its authorship, the evidence that Elworthy gives suggests that it was written by a man, and this is not contradicted by earlier specu­ lation. The 1771 editors claim it was the work of a ‘blind Fidler (one Peter Lock of North-Moulton or its Neighbourhood,) who was man of some Humour’, and that a local clergyman helped him put the book together.26 Elworthy, interestingly, quotes a different local tradition, which suggested that the clergyman, William Hole, was himself the author.27 As far as I know, there is no scholarly argument that the author was a woman. But it is interesting that the Victorian editor should be convinced (without substantial evidence) that it could only have been written by a cleric: rejecting the idea of a blind and presumably illiterate fiddler, he is obliged to imagine a debauched vicar. The history of An Exmoor Scolding has nothing direcdy to say about women authors, but it has a lot to say about notions of female behaviour and literary decorum; and these matters, as we have seen, are often the subject matter of dialect texts. The opposition between vicars and women in nineteenth-century philology should be seen in the broader perspective of the ways in which scholarly editors compartmentalized, and thus selectively valued, the diverse energies of Romantic writing, especially at its interface with the oral and the demotic - that is, with dialect texts. Prose dialogues in dialect can easily be regarded as nothing more than pure mimesis, and they are sometimes presented as such: aesthetically naive produc­ tions; slices of life; specimens of language and customs, as if the two were identical. But though the association of dialect and dialogue is both etymological and generically ancient (at least as old as Theocritus), this view is itself naive, since language can never be regarded as trans­ parent. Philological questions of the etymology and the ‘authenticity’ of dialectal forms, valuable in their own sphere, simply encourage this philosophically naive view, and obscure the politics of authorship and anonymity that I find pervasive in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury dialect texts, whether poems or prose. Instead of dismissing

The Writing o f Ann Wheeler

49

prose dialogues as irretrievably minor or unliterary, I suggest we might revalue them as a specific pastoral genre, with all the political significance that that implies. The interest and the power of this kind of writing is that it is dubiously peripheral to the Romantic canon; a kind o f‘linguis­ tic remainder’, to use Lecercle’s term, because it is unmanageable. For this reason we have to be wary of using fam iliar writers of non-standard English as aesthetic and political touchstones, especially Bums. As a writer in the Scottish language, Bums was both a liberating and an imprisoning example to local poets in the English regions. In the Lake District the outstanding example is Robert Anderson, bom in Carlisle in the same year as Wordsworth (and author of a poem called ‘Lucy Gray’, incidentally), who dated his poetic vocation from the moment in 1794 when he heard at Vauxhall Gardens a number of songs sung ‘in the mock pastoral Scottish style’. He was ‘disgusted’ with the popularity and artificiality of the songs and decided to do better. So his first collection of poems (published in 1798) included poems in a loosely Scottish language.28 His real success, however, came a few years later with poems in Cumberland dialect, collected as Cum­ berland Ballads (1805). But though he became known shordy afterwards as ‘The Cumberland Bard’, he still often reverted to the token ‘dialect’ language generated by Burns’s example.29 Ann Wheeler is perhaps more fittingly contrasted with another Carlisle Burnsian poet, Susanna Blamire. Blamire’s poems were not collected for publication until 1842, but many were widely circulated before and after her early death in 1795, and she became known as ‘the Cumberland Muse’. It is interesting that a male poet could be called a bard, a female poet a muse: these are the gendered ways in which poets were identified with places. It is even more interesting in view of the fact that Anderson actually appropriated a few of Blamire’s poems and printed them as his own.30 In the 1842 volume, which contains some sixty poems in all, over twenty are in a mildly Scottish language and only seven are in her version of Cumberland dialect (a version that is distinctly Cumbrian in diction and often in syntax, but less obviously modelled on oral language than W heeler’s Westmorland dialect). Blamire was well connected and sang her own songs in drawing-rooms. Her best-known poem in Cumbrian is ‘Wey, Ned, Man’, a dialogue defending the rights of property owners against ‘The Reets o’ Man’, evidently Thomas Paine’s book. In it, Joe asks Ned what troubles him, and Ned asks where is the justice in tithes and the custom that allows ‘girt fowk’ to ‘ride down my hedges’. Joe argues that these matters are best left to wiser heads: Tou couldn’t mend laws an’ tou wad, man; ’Tis for other-guess noddles than thine;

50

Romantic Masculinities Lord help te! sud beggars yence rule us, They’d tek of baith thy cwoat an’ mine. W hat is’t then but law that stands by us, While we stand by country and king? And as to being parfet and parfet, I tell thee, there is nae sec thing.31

Another of Blamire’s popular poems, ‘The Chelsea Pensioners’, cele­ brates the glory of ‘Butcher’ Cumberland, the victor at Culloden. Her politics express her milieu. I don’t criticize this, but it is interesting that she was a dialect writer o f a particular kind, operating largely within the confines of a polite genre (the drawing-room ballad, fashionably in so-called Scottish language), and that there is another dialect tradition in which, as it happens, women have grasped the issues of gender relations and seen that they have to deal with the politics of publishing. There is a certain logic and consistency in the fact that Blamire did not concern herself with publishing her songs at all: the pressures and problems of publishing simply do not arise in her case. There is a generic distinction to be observed in comparing Wheeler and Blamire. Like Anderson, Blamire wrote songs and had a reputation as a performer (amateur, of course), and it is not difficult to imagine that song as a genre of dialect writing was the acceptable interface of local and ‘polite’ literature.32 W heeler wrote generally in prose and for publication, often with discemibly local purposes. But before looking at her other prose work, I want to mention her one known poem, because, though it was published as ‘A Song’ in the 1802 and subsequent editions of Westmorland Dialect, it is in fact far from being a song, being a piece of versified reportage. It begins: Gud Morrow, gossip Nan, Haw dus awe at heaam dea? Haw dus iw ery yan, Lile Dick en awe dea? Tom is gaylie weel, Sends his sarvis teaa; Sail hes hort her heel, Er wod hea cum et seea and, after four more stanzas of miscellaneous news, ends with the narrator reflecting on her own situation and state of mind: I hae gitten a swoap a gin, Rare hummin liquor, Troth I’m on the merry pin,

The Writing o f Ann Wheeler

51

Cum gud lass be quicker; Heres tae awe awr varra gud healths, En may we hae plenty on it, I hate tae drink by stealth, Sfish! I hardly ken my bonnit. I cannit miss this spot, But mun coo et seea, I’d rader gang rawnth knot, Than nit say haw dea. Fare yee weel, dear Ann, As I am sinner, Clock hes strucken yan, Fleaks toth fry for dinner.33 Looking at this poem, a reader may feel that De Quincey was right when he wrote in his story, A Stranger's Grave (1823), set in Wetheral, south-east of Carlisle, of ‘the disposition to make much out of little, for which the inhabitants of a Cumbrian village then were and still are distinguished’.34 But we should note that the cultivation of reportage is itself a regional poetic tradition in the Romantic period - Anderson’s ‘Nichol the Newsmonger’ is a sprightly example, and Mark Lonsdale’s ‘The Upshot’ is among the earliest of many reports of events at local fairs and dances.35 W e may also feel that De Quincey’s remark chimes with Wordsworth’s phrase about the poetic mind that ‘builds up greatest things from least suggestions’ (The Prelude, XIII; De Quincey was one of the few people who knew this passage in 1823), and that Words­ worth’s celebrated literalness or matter-of-factness might have its roots in the most unliterary kinds of narration. Ann Wheeler wrote in many genres - dialogues, satiric portraits, at least one poem and probably a number of short plays,36 though these latter may never have been published and have not yet come to light and such of them as are extant raise questions that also have to do with central Romantic preoccupations. One is self-representation. It appears that she wrote a text called ‘Acco and Ego: a Dialogue’, though, as far as I know, no copy has ever been found. The title presumably refers to the Greek word ‘Akko’, and if Wheeler knew Burton’s Anatomy o f Melancholy (the most likely source of her knowledge of this name), she will have thought of the word as meaning ‘an old woman, seeing by chance her face in a true glasse (for she used false flattering glasses belike at other times, as most Gentlewomen do) animi dolore in insaniam delapsa est ... ran mad’.37 ‘Akko’ is in fact an unusual word, described in Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary (1788) as dialectal: a tantalizing classification. I do not know whether Wheeler read Lempriere, but the

52

Romantic Masculinities

image of self-reflection in Burton generates interesting possibilities, especially since his remark is so conventionally gendered. Wheeler is also said to have written a work called Female Restoration, but though anonymous works of that title were published in the eighteenth century, none can be plausibly attributed to Wheeler. There is another extant work, Strictures on the Inhabitants o f a Market Town ... by a Citizen o f the World (Kendal: 1789), which is her first known published work. It is not in dialect, but is intensely ‘provincial’, a satire on certain local worthies in Kendal. It is an example of a late eighteenth-century genre or fashion for satiric verbal descrip­ tions of public individuals that present themselves fictitiously as descriptions of actual, visual portraits, often stereotypical descriptions of the professions. Strictures is a series of thirty-two short descriptions of imaginary pictures. In each case the ‘artist’ is obliquely identified (as ‘Mr. P - k - r ’ or ‘Capt. C - r - t ’, for example), and the picture is a verbal representation of the named person. In some cases the picture is a simple, typical representation of the person’s profession. Other ‘pic­ tures’ are of classical gods or heroes or allegorical figures or groups. Among others, one local person is represented as Robinson Crusoe, and another as ‘A Drunken Buck, Challenging the Statue of a Black, with a Dial on his Head’. It is difficult to know what satiric force or target these ‘portraits’ have without detailed information about the inhabitants of the ‘Market-Town’. Since Strictures is now very hard to find, and was apparently not known to Victorian bibliographers, it may very well have had a small circulation. It is, as I said, intensely local in its reference and may therefore be regarded as a mere curiosity. But it is, I think, a consciously local version of a satiric mode that had been immensely popular a decade before, and it is not the only one of its kind. The prototype seems to have been the anonymous Sketches from Nature, in High Preservation , by the Most Honourable Masters; amongst which are the Undoubted Originals (Never before exhibited) o f [there follows a list of twenty-two names] and many others. With Explanatory and impartial Strictures on the Merits o f the several Performances (London: 1779). The specific satirical angle of these texts is the implication that the subjects - well-known political figures and members of the nobility - are themselves answerable for having chosen historical, mythological, bib­ lical or fictional models for self-representation. In these fictions the ‘sitter’ is also the painter, the subject also the patron. Burke, for example, is represented by two pictures, ‘Cicero declaiming against civil Com­ motions’ and ‘Longinus - Taken from the Antique’, and criticized for not quite living up to these images (pp. 45-6). It seems strikingly modem: the author is concerned as a satirist with the relation between image and truth, but also with specific (fictitious) acts of self-projection,

The Writing o f Ann Wheeler

53

and this allows him to focus on the way figures in public life mythologize or historicize themselves. W hy was this work important to a writer of dialect dialogues? I suggest that Wheeler’s Strictures was an experiment in ‘scaling down’ a satiric mode from a national to a local scene. Would the same methods (characterizing people as classical gods at the same time as making them recognizable to the presumed readership) work at the local level? Was there a sufficient readership familiar with the allusions and the genre in Kendal in 1789? These questions of readership and locality link the Strictures to the Westmorland Dialect, and they are questions we are now used to asking about Romantic texts. I find it fascinating to come across them in the work of a writer who sees how these issues related to her own gender and social position in Westmor­ land in the 1790s. To end with a contrast, I will connect this discussion of Wheeler as a female writer of dialect with an anecdote told of Robert Tannahill (1774-1810), a Paisley poet and weaver, another of the many influenced by Bums. The anecdote is a deeply gendered story of communication, reported in every biographical sketch of him that I have come across. One version of it goes like this: Many tributes were paid to his genius while he lived, but none pleased him so much, not even the visit of the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, as during a solitary walk, on one occasion, when his musings were disturbed by the voice of a bonnie country lassie in an adjoining field singing by herself one of his own sweet songs - ‘W e’ll meet beside the dusky glen, on yon burnside’.38 The poem (‘Yon Bum-side’) is in the words of a young man inviting his girl (perhaps inevitably called Jean) to a tryst away from the sight of ‘yon unfeelin’ crew’. What charmed Tannahill was to hear his words of invitation in the mouth of a girl who (we can assume) may not have been able to read. It was evidence that his work had achieved the condition of unliterariness - by which I mean he seems to have assumed that the singer learned his song aurally - and it is important in the anecdote that it is a girl who sings. Tannahill is sexually invited by his own invitation, and the focus of excitement is that he has successfully projected his own desire on an unknown woman, a woman, moreover, who could be identified as part of nature, a worker in a field, whereas he, of course, worked in a factory. This is the Romantic muse, literature’s ‘other’. Wordsworth’s Solitary Reaper and, more parti­ cularly, his Highland Girl are other examples.39 Tannahill’s social and poetic ideal - an ideal of communication - is validated here more than in the personal approval of James Hogg, because the girl is

Romantic Masculinities

54

unambiguously unliterary. By all accounts, Tannahill was a modest but oversensitive man, who died early as a result of depression: in other words, the archetypal young male Romantic poet. W hat has this to do with Wheeler? She is the opposite face of this trope, a woman who grasped the gendered interface of the literary and the unliterary and asserted her right to write, and to exploit the literari­ ness surrounding dialect writing, and to laugh at all these, if necessary. Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6 7

8 9 10 11

The major editions are: The Westmorland Dialect, in three fam iliar discourses, in which an attempt is made to illustrate the provincial Idiom. By A. W . (Kendal; printed by James Ashburner: 1790); The Westmorland Dialect, in four fam iliar dialogues in which an attempt is made to illustrate the provincial idiom. The second edition. To which is added a dialogue never before published. By A. W heeler (London; printed for W . J. and J. Richardson, Royal Exchange, W ilson and Spence, York, H. Walmsley, Lancaster; and other Booksellers by M. Branthwaite, Kendal: 1802); The Westmorland Dialect, with the adjac­ ency o fLancashire and Yorkshire in four fam iliar dialogues. In which an attempt is made to illustrate the provincial idiom. The Third Edition. By A. W heeler (Kendal; printed by M. and R. Branthwaite. Sold by J. Richardson, Royal Exchange, London: 1821); Westmorland and Cumberland Dialects. Dialogues, Poems, Songs and Ballads by Various W riters ... with a Copious Glossary of Words peculiar to those Counties (London, John Russell Smith: 1839). See Morag Shiach, Discourse on Popular Culture (Cambridge: 1989), ch. 4, and Michael Baron, Language and Relationship in Wordsworth’s Poetry (Lon­ don: 1995), ch. 2. Gerald Porter shows in The English Occupational Song (Umea: 1992) that Child’s privileging of feudal ballads generally obscures a powerful tradition o f occupational ballads and preserves the highly ideological notion that ‘traditional ballads’ predate class-consciousness and antagonism. Marcus W ood, Radical Satire and Print Culture (Oxford: 1994), gives the fullest recent analysis o f Spence’s medallions. The development o f his various phonetic systems has apparently not been fully discussed in print. W heeler, Westmorland Dialect (1802), pp.viii-ix. Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance. Labouring-class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 17 3 9 -17 9 6 (Cambridge: 1990), p. 220. Is there some political connection between the reign o f Stephen and the Protectorate which might have had special significance for the working inhabitants of Cumbria? A View o f the Lancashire Dialect (Manchester: 1746); reprinted many times. The passage is reproduced in the 1802 edition o f Westmorland Dialect, p. iv. Ibid., p. 13. Information is from the memoir prefixed to the 1821 edition. It also states that W heeler’s late husband was ‘a Guinea Captain’ (transporting slave

The Writing o f Ann Wheeler

12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30

31 32

55

labour from W est Africa to the W est Indies). It is possible that the implicit radicalism o f Westmorland Dialect reflects this fact (associating racial with sexual and/or class domination). I don’t know of any direct evidence to support the idea, but it seems full o f potential significance. Quoted from a slightly later edition: William de W orfat, A Bran New Wark ... containing a true Calendar of his Thoughts, concerning good Nebberhood (‘London, printed and sold by all the Booksellers in Great-Britain’, n.d. [c. 1800]), p. 5. John Rawlinson Ford (ed.), The Beetham Repository, 1770, by the Reverend William Hutton, vicar o f Beetham 17 6 2 -18 11 (Cumberland and W estm or­ land Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, Kendal: 1906). The ‘Dia­ logue’ is on pp. 16 6 -8 . W . W . Skeat (ed.), W illiam de W orfat, A Bran New Wark (1879), p. 180. Ibid., p. 179. Wheeler, Westmorland Dialect (1802), p. viii. The 1802 edition is the first in which W heeler is named as the author. Wheeler, Westmorland Dialect (1802), pp. v-vi. I have in mind the plethora o f books on speech and spelling in the period, and particularly works on the science of ‘orthoepy’, the forerunner of phonetics. For a recent discussion, see Tony Crowley’s Proper English? Readings in Language, History and Cultural Identity (London: 1991), espe­ cially chs. 4 -6 . F. T. Elworthy (ed.), An Exmoor Scolding and An Exmoor Courtship, in Specimens o f English Dialect (English Dialect Society, 1879). The Exmoor Courtship was first published in The Gentleman's Magazine in June 1746; the Scolding in the same journal in the following month. A ‘W ord List’ for them appeared in August 1746 (details from F. T. Elworthy’s edition). 'An Exmoor Scolding; in the Propriety and Decency o f Eocmoor Language, between two sisters, Wilmot Moreman and Thomasin Moreman, As they were Spinning. Also., an Exmoor Courtship. The Seventh Edition ... (Exon, A. Brice & B. Thorn, opposite the Guildhald [frc]. M DCCLXXI. Price nine-pence).’ An Exmoor Scolding (1771), p. i. Elworthy (ed.), An Exmoor Scolding, p. 13. Ibid. An Exmoor Scolding (1771), p. ii. Elworthy (ed.), An Exmoor Scolding, p. 10. Robert Anderson, Poems on Various Subjects (Carlisle: 1798). His comments are quoted from the Preface to Poems (1820). This is evident from the most extensive collections of Anderson’s poems, starting with Anderson V Cumberland Ballads (Wigton, William Robertson: n.d. [c. 1840]). The claim was made by Patrick Maxwell in a memoir of Susanna Blamire in The Poetical Works of Miss Susanna Blamire, 'The Muse o f Cumberland\ now fo r the first time collected (Edinburgh: 1842), p. xi. Blamire, Poetical Works, p. 210. Anderson’s progress and decline as an urban (and sometimes vagrant)

Romantic Masculinities

56

33 34 35

36

‘bard’ has a quite different trajectory from Blamire’s, but it is important in the life narratives of both that they were poets, not writers of prose. Westmorland Dialect (1802), pp. 117-19. Edmund Baxter (ed.), Thomas De Quincey, A Stranger's Grave (1823; London: 1988), p. 18. ‘Nichol the Newsmonger’ was first published in Anderson’s Cumbrian Ballads (Carlisle: 1805); Lonsdale’s poem (which some editors accuse Anderson of plagiarizing) was written by about 1794 and first published in Sketches o f Cumberland Manners and Customs (Carlisle: 1811). For a brief discussion of Anderson’s poem, see Baron, Language and Relationship, pp. 18-20. This statement is based on a remark in the Preface (apparently written by a friend or member of the family) to the 1821 edition of Westmorland Dialect.

37 Thomas C. Faulkner et al. (eds), Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, vols 1, 2, 4, 7 (Oxford: 1989), 1: p. 369. 38 I quote from a representative anthology, James Grant Wilson (ed.), Poets and Poetry o f Scotland (London: c. 1870), I: p. 502. 39 See my discussion of sexuality in these poems, Baron, Language and Relationship, pp. 30-4.

The Father’s Seduction in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda Steven Vine University of Wales Swansea

,

At the beginning of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda - an astonishing tale of incestuous father-daughter love written in 1819, but not published until 19591 - the text’s blighted narrator, Mathilda, muses on the trans­ gressive power of her history: Perhaps a history such as mine had better die with me, but a feeling that I cannot define leads me on and I am too weak both in body and mind to resist the slightest impulse. While life was strong within me I thought indeed that there was a sacred horror in my tale that rendered it unfit for utterance, and now about to die I pollute its mystic terrors. It is as the wood of the Eumenides none but the dying may enter; and Oedipus is about to die. (MSjR, pp. 175-6) The autobiography of the female Oedipus, Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, is a darkly negative rewriting of Oedipal mythography which tells the tale of a guilty father’s desire and a daughter’s guilt-ridden seduction. At the threshold of her blasted narrative, Mathilda figures her text as a dark trajectory to extinction, an odyssey of erasure which, like Oedi­ pus’s quest for truth in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, ends in self-loss rather than in self-knowledge.2 A language spoken almost from the grave, Mathilda’s text is a melancholy preface to her death, an utterance that plunges its speaker into abject silence. As ‘the wood of the Eumenides none but the dying may enter’,3 the text enlists its reader, too, in a kind of death, precipitating him/her into the very register of trans­ gression. Mathilda’s reader, it seems, is to be led by an enigmatic Oedipal daughter onto forbidden ground; onto ground that, as we will see, ungrounds the very notion of an inhabitable place or ground. A text of transgression, Mathilda is itself materially or textually inscribed in a history of transgression and prohibition. Remarkably, M ary Shelley sent her tale of incestuous father-daughter love to her father, W illiam Godwin, in 1820, shortly after she had finished the 57

58

Romantic Masculinities

manuscript, ostensibly with a view to Godwin’s finding a publisher for it. However, as Maria Gisborne reported in her journal, Godwin was scandalized by the tale, finding its subject-matter ‘disgusting and detest­ able’, and commenting, with reference to Mathilda’s apparent freedom from sexual guilt, that ‘one cannot exactly trust to what an author of the modem school may deem guilt’.4 In possession of the daughter’s transgressive tale, Godwin demurred and as a result the text was left unpublished; indeed, he failed to return the manuscript to Shelley in spite of her repeated requests. Katherine C. Hill-M iller interprets Shelley’s act of sending Mathilda to Godwin as a gesture of ‘perfect daughterly ambivalence’,5 for the deed at once defers to Godwin (finances from the text’s publication were to help him pay his debts) and confronts him with a scandalous narrative of transgressive paternal desire. On one level, then, Shelley takes up the position of the dutiful daughter of patriarchy, protecting the position of the father; but, on another, she audaciously presents the father with patriarchy’s incestuous repressed, and refigures the father as seducer rather than as lawgiver. However, if Mathilda - and its transmission to Godwin - flouts the protocols of patriarchal law and representation, at the same time it strangely seeks out its own silencing. As Tilottama Rajan argues in a brilliant reading of the novella, Mathilda can be read as the very text of abjection in Kristeva’s sense of the term.6 Rajan contends that, while Shelley’s sending of the novella to Godwin ‘accuses and thus abjects her father’, her gesture also ‘protects him and rejects her own work by sending him the manuscript and thus deferring its publication’.7 Shelley’s fiction, in this sense, is self-abjecting, casting itself into obliv­ ion at the same time as it raises itself tremulously into utterance. For Rajan, indeed, Shelley’s text ambiguously and precariously bridges the imperatives of symbolization on the one hand (in literary publication), and the engulfrnents of melancholic affect on the other (in the novella’s embrace of its suppression by the father, its self-muting retreat from symbolic structures). If sending the text to Godwin, then, both confronts the father with incest and compliantly calls on him to silence it, this ambivalent gesture enacts on a material level the contradictory meanings of incest in Mathilda itself, and in the general text of Romanticism. As a number of commentators have pointed out, incestuous desire in Romanticism ambiguously straddles the conflicting energies of patriarchal power on the one hand and filial insubordination on the other. For, while sibling incest in Romantic texts tends to suggest a flouting of the law of the father in an act of sexual and social transformation, incest between father and daughter foregrounds the tyranny of paternal power in an anatomy of filial subjection. Thus, while in Percy Shelley’s ‘Laon and Cythna’ (the first version of The Revolt o f Islam (1818)) incestuous love

Mary Shelley's M athilda

59

acts as a metaphor for sibling insurrection and the sublime of political and imaginative idealism,8 in his The Cenci (1819) - completed while M ary was writing Mathilda - the despotic father’s rape of his daughter works as a figure for patriarchal and political tyranny.9 Yet Mary Shelley’s Mathilda puts into question the opposition that identifies filial incest with oppression and sibling incest with rebellion, and compli­ cates - albeit darkly and dividedly, and on the level of desire rather than act - Peter Thorslev’s argument that ‘[p]arent-child incest is universally condemned in Romantic literature’.10 For M ary Shelley’s novella tenaciously and troublingly charges its father-daughter relation­ ship with oppressive and with transgressive significance, aligning it both with sexual-political subversion and with patriarchal domination. As Meena Alexander points out, the father in M ary’s Mathilda is consis­ tently desired, while in Percy’s The Cenci he is reviled;11 moreover, while the father in The Cenci is a figure of despotism, in Mathilda he is depicted as a strangely disempowered figure, whose desire, as we will see, abjectly dismantles him rather than enthrones him in a securely paternal position. The function of the father in Mathilda, indeed, is fraught with ambivalence, for his position is marked by an instability that subversively strips him of patriarchal efficacy. The uncertainty that inhabits his being allows Rajan to link him to Kristeva’s concept of the ‘imaginary father’ - rather than to the more austere Lacanian category of the ‘Symbolic’ father. For the father in Mathilda is primarily an affective rather than a legislative pater. According to Kristeva, the ‘imaginary father’ is a composite psychic and affective figure which names a pre-symbolic, imaginary transference on the part of the child: a trans­ ference in which the child identifies metaphorically with the desire of the mother for the father. Elizabeth Grosz puts it succinctly: the imaginary father is the position that the father occupies in the mother’s desire: ‘He embodies love.’ 12 Kristeva insists that this ‘amatory trans­ ference towards the imaginary father’ by the child occurs ‘chronologically and logically’ prior to the formation of the ‘Oedipal Ego’, and therefore predates the establishment of the ‘Name’, the ‘Symbolic’ and the paternal law as such.13 The imaginary father, then, is not for Kristeva the father of the law, but is instead what she calls ‘an archaic inscription of the father’ (Tales, p. 44). ‘He’, ‘she’ or ‘it’ (Tales, p. 43) is a ‘father-mother conglomerate’, a composite of ‘fatherand-mother, man-and-woman’ (Tales, pp. 40, 46) which precedes sexual differentiation itself, and comes before the distances and prohibitions that characterize the paternal function. Specifically, the Kristevan imaginary father is a ‘coagulation of the mother and her desire’ (Tales, p. 41), a libidinal condensation in which the child identifies with the direction of the mother’s yearning (in Lacanian terms, with her desire

60

Romantic Masculinities

for the phallus). In a radical sense, this amatory transference towards the imaginary father undoes the ‘differentiation, distance, and prohibi­ tion’ ( Tales, p. 29) of the paternal function, subverting the law with longing, the symbolic with the semiotic. The imaginary father, then, is a strange amalgam of maternal and paternal functions, and cannot be identified straightforwardly either with the law or with the abjected maternal space that, in the trajectory of Kristevan subjectivity, enables the law and the symbolic to come into being. Rajan uses the motility and ambiguity of the imaginary father to fine effect in her reading of the contradictory figure of the father in Mathilda . For she shows how the father in Shelley’s text ‘occupies the position held by the mother in the Kristevan dialectic’, and she argues that the incestuous drama of the text consequently operates ‘on the border between the Symbolic and the semiotic’, invoking both symbolic struc­ turation and semiotic subversion.14 The symbolic father, in this sense, is in a certain way dislodged in Mathilda , for he is thrown back into a pre-symbolic affective dynamic which antedates the triangular struc­ turations of Oedipal romance. (For Kristeva, in fact, the imaginary father is a transitional figure who enables the precipitation of the subject from dyadic into triangular relations: see Tales, pp. 34—5.) But the imaginary father in Mathilda is at the same time haunted or tracked by his symbolic or legislative incarnation; that is, by his structural position in a drama of prohibition in which he stands Oedipally in the place of Mathilda’s mother (who dies shortly after her birth), debarring the mother’s presence15 as much as reinvoking it. Oscillating between imaginary and symbolic incarnations, the father in Mathilda is a mobile signifier of the law and of transgression, an avatar of the conflicts and contradictions that structure Mathilda’s daughterly inscription in the drama of Oedipal desire. If Mathilda , then, proffers a conflictual father, this paternal instability emerges in the symbolic displacements and shifting identifications that govern the father’s being in the tale. For instance, in Mathilda’s account of her parents’ courtship and love early in the text, the father and mother seem to trespass on each other’s symbolic territory, displacing and destabilizing conventional gender positions between them. The father is represented as a creature of sensibility whose indulgence in the vagaries of sensual gratification recalls nothing so much as M ary Wollstonecraft’s account of the imprisonment of late eighteenthcentury femininity in an ideology of sense and the body.16 ‘Novels and all the various methods by which youth in civilized life are led to a knowledge of the existence of passions before they really feel them, had produced a strong effect on him who was so peculiarly susceptible of every impression’ (MSR, p. 178), writes Mathilda. But while the father is a sensualized figure whose submission to feeling oddly

Mary Shelley's M athilda

61

feminizes him, Mathilda’s mother, Diana, is an idealized portrait of enlightened Wollstonecraftian rationality. Her ‘understanding was clear and strong’ (MSR, p. 178), says Mathilda; and, during the mother’s and father’s youthful love, Diana’s benign education rationally mothers and symbolically masculinizes the father’s mind: ‘Diana had tom the veil which had before kept him in his boyhood: he was become a man ... an enlightened lover of truth and virtue’ (MSR, p. 179). Literally making the father a ‘man’, Mathilda’s mother rescues him from the feminine and infantile aberrations of sensibility, rigorously schooling him in thought as opposed to affect, and reason as opposed to passion. Math­ ilda’s mother thus stands in a putatively maternal and masculinizing relation to the father; hers is a tutelary influence. The condensations and substitutions of gender and familial identity in Mathilda make the text a symbolic circuitry of desires and displace­ ments, a network of identifications and transgressions within which the subjects of the story are by turns defined and dissolved. The father’s desire for Mathilda transposes her into a replacement for the dead mother, a link whose libidinal logic the father himself outlines in a letter to Mathilda prior to his despairing suicide: And now, Mathilda I must make you my last confession. I have been miserably mistaken in imagining that I could conquer my love for you; I never can. The sight of this house, these fields and woods which my first love inhabited seems to have encreased it: in my mad­ ness I dared say to myself - Diana died to give her birth; her mother’s spirit was transferred into her frame, and she ought to be as Diana to me. She ought to be as Diana to me. (MSR, pp. 209-10) Mathilda, co-opted into a figure of the mother for the father, in one sense recalls or re-presents the lost mother to him. But, in another sense, she obliterates that mother, for Mathilda’s birth coincides wretchedly as did Mary Shelley’s - with her mother’s death.17 Immediately after Mathilda is born, indeed, her father conflates the daughter’s birth with the mother’s death, and reads the one as the sign of the other, being unable to look on Mathilda without dread: ‘He seemed insensible to the presence of anyone else, but if, as a trial to awaken his sensibility, my aunt brought me into the room he would instantly rush out with every symptom of fury and distraction’ (MSR, p. 180). Many years later, after the father’s catastrophic confession of his love for her, Mathilda herself reads her being as a form of matricide. Violently commuted into the mother’s place, Mathilda sees her existence as an unlawful supplanting of her own scene of origin, a monstrous act of usurpation that erases the mother’s position and prerogatives. In the place of the mother, Mathilda is gripped by the waking dream of a vengeful maternal phantom:

62

Romantic Masculinities it was despair I felt; for the first time that phantom seized me; the first and only time for it has never since left me - After the first moments of speechless agony I felt her fangs on my heart: I tore my hair; I raved aloud; at one moment in pity for his sufferings I would have clasped my father in my arms; and then starting back with horror I spumed him with my foot; I felt as if stung by a serpent, as if scourged by a whip of scorpions which drove me - Ah! W hither Whither? (MSR, p. 202)

Symbolically replacing and effacing the mother, Mathilda becomes the disempowered subject of the father’s desire. Having abandoned her in horror at her birth, Mathilda’s father returns sixteen years later to reclaim her; and, at one point during the narrative of this meta­ phorical re-fathering, Mathilda reports: ‘I felt as if I were recreated and had about me the freshness and life of a new being’ (MSR, pp. 188-9). However, Mathilda’s re-creation by her father turns out to be - as in the case of Frankenstein’s monster - a de-creation; for, once her father declares his passion, she is remade not into a new being, but into the transgressive figure of his incestuous desire, a female Oedipus displaced and deranged by the father’s seduction. As Susan Sniader Lanser puts it, Mathilda becomes a ‘parentally created “mon­ strosity” ’.18 Like Victor Frankenstein’s creation, Mathilda is a (re)created being produced in a monstrously patriarchal circumvention of maternal power: a creature remade in the image of the father’s transgression. An object of the father’s incestuous desire and fantasy, Mathilda sees herself towards the end of the text as ‘polluted by the unnatural love I had inspired ... a creature cursed and set apart by nature ... [a] monster with whom none might mingle in converse and love’ (MSR, pp. 238-9). Subjected to paternal desire and made into a monster, she experiences in miserably Gothic mode the tyranny of the father’s longings. When her aunt (who rears her in the absence of her parents) dies, Mathilda is regaled by her father with a vision of his despair at her mother’s death: Even at that time I shuddered at the picture he drew of his passions: he had the imagination of a poet, and when he described the whirl­ wind that then tore his feelings he gave his words the impress of life so vividly that I believed while I trembled ... His feelings seemed better fitted for a spirit whose habitation is the earthquake and the volcano than for one confined to a mortal body and human linea­ ments. But these were merely memories; he was changed since then. He was now all love, all softness: and when I raised my eyes in wonder at him as he spoke the smile on his lips told me that his heart was possessed by the gentlest passions. (MSR, pp. 189-90)

Mary Shelley’s

M athilda

63

Mathilda’s account of her father’s desire aims to modulate its exorbi­ tant sublimities into the social accommodations of the beautiful, turning its excess into measure and its terror into pleasure. However, the father’s sublime of desire returns upon Mathilda later, falling on her like ‘a flash of lightning to destroy me’ (MSR, p. 201). In this sense, Mathilda becomes the disempowered female subject of a patriarchal libidinal tyranny that, as Anne Mellor points out, is a significant trope in the female Gothic novel. Mellor argues that, while in male Romantic writers the sublime works as a figure of ‘masculine empowerment’, in the female Gothic this ‘masculine sublime’ is refigured and politicized as ‘patriarchal tyranny’.19 Undoing the sublime of masculine self­ recognition and aggrandizement, female Gothic relocates the sublime as male power ‘within the home’,20 thus domesticating its idealism and gendering its claims to transcendence. Mellor writes: [These] novels expose the dark underside of the doctrine of the separate spheres, the sexual division of labour, and the domestic ideology of patriarchal capitalism. The father, whether as patriarch or priest, is unmasked as the author of violence against women ... the violator of the very bonds of affection and responsibility that constitute the bourgeois family ... By moving the exercise of sub­ lime power into the household, the female Gothic domesticates the sublime as paternal transgression - represented as fatherdaughter incest - that is everywhere most monstrous and most ordinary.21 In her reading of Mathilda , Mellor argues that under patriarchy the dominative father-daughter relationship becomes the ‘paradigm of all male-female relationships’; for in a society where ‘the father or male is the dominant authority ... the female is taught to love and obey’ and ‘[w]omen are urged to remain daughters (or children) ... to marry “father figures”, men who are older, wiser, stronger, and more eco­ nomically powerful than they’. For Mellor, this means that Mathilda suggests that heterosexuality within patriarchy is itself ‘a kind of incest’, suffused with the narcissism of paternal desire.22 However, although Mellor’s argument significantly critiques the sexual politics of Romantic sublimity, Shelley’s tale does not simply depict the sublime as a patriarchal power which engulfs Mathilda with its tyrannous self-regard. For, in an unseating of patriarchy, Mathilda collapses the empowerment that supposedly attaches to the sublime. The father’s sublime of passion, once it shifts from die mother to the daughter, plunges him, along with Mathilda, into self-loss and asymbolic dissolution, rendering him abject, monstrous, unsustainable. After his confession of unlawful love, he says:

64

Romantic Masculinities Monster as I am ... [w]hat I have become since this last moment I know not; perhaps I am changed in mien as the fallen archangel. I do believe I am for I have surely a new soul within me, and my blood riots through my veins: I am burnt up with fever ... W e have leapt the chasm I told you of, and now, mark me, Mathilda, we are to find flowers, and verdure and delight, or is it hell, and fire, and tortures? Oh! Beloved One, I am borne away; I can no longer sustain myself; surely this is death that is coming. (MSR, pp. 201-2)

Tumbling from his position as the symbolic agency of the law, the father’s being collapses in a riotous semiosis which textually prefigures his later plunge to death in suicide. Precipitated into the anguish of a radically negative sublime, his paternal position is shattered, and he falls into an ungovernable monstrosity that (de)constructs and (de)constitutes him in contradiction. Mathilda laments her father’s fall from metaphorical paternity: ‘my father was as dead to me. Might he not many, many years hence, when age had quenched the burning sensations that he now experienced, might he not then be again a father to me?’ (MSR, pp. 203-4). Her project late in the text, indeed, is to ‘restore’ the father to his lost symbolic position (MSR, p. 241); yet the scandal of the father in this text is that, irresolvably and abjectly, he mingles desire and prohibition, and so atomizes the law with ambiguity. ‘I had no idea that misery could arise from love’, writes Mathilda; and, ‘I must ever lament, [my] few short months of Paradisaical bliss; I disobeyed no command, I ate no apple, and yet I was ruthlessly driven from it. Alas! my companion did, and I was precipitated in his fall’ (MSR, p. 189). Mathilda’s miserable autobiography thus proceeds from the singular ambiguity that, while staying within the law, she is violently abjected from it. Kristeva defines the abject as ‘that which disturbs identity, system, order. W hat does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’;23 and she finds abjection in the hypo­ crisies, schemes and dissimulations that characterize the criminal’s relationship to the law. When transgression undermines the law from within, but does not oppose it from without - in the ‘immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady’ 24 - and when crime inhabits the field covered by the law, but does not announce itself as such, then Kristeva finds the abject: ‘W e may call it a border’, she writes; ‘abjection is above all ambiguity’ 25 - an ambiguity that, in Mathilda, collapses the differ­ ence between the law and its undoing. When Mathilda bemoans ‘[T]he holy name of father was become a curse to me’ (MSR, p.239), her filial derangement seems to dramatize with peculiar force the fall of the boundary between the law and its other, for her abject father is a figure of the law who is also a figure of crime, a paternal metaphor

Mary Shelley's M athilda

65

who pulverizes paternity. In Mathilda , the site of the law is the site of crime. Rajan notes that female ‘figures of incurable trauma’ such as Shelley’s Mathilda, ‘who use melancholy and hysteria to resist interpellation into the Symbolic order, have recently come to preoccupy feminist criti­ cism’;26 for such figures, according to feminists, jam the circulation of the patriarchal symbolic economy with their recalcitrant desires and refractory symptomatologies. However, these figures hesitate troublingly between being victims and insurgents, acting both as subjects and subversives within patriarchy’s order.27 And Shelley’s Mathilda herself is divided in these terms, for, as we will see, her tale both anatomizes patriarchy by exposing its conflictual construction, and founds its own exposure of patriarchy’s contradictions on the abjection and eventual extinction of Mathilda herself. Thus, while a major strategy of the text is to disclose patriarchy’s divided rule - and so to submit it to the instability that underwrites it - the price of that disclosure is Mathilda’s dissolution as a subject. For her subjectivity is atomized by the turbulent discontinuities of the Oedipal narrative into which she is inserted; and, just as Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex becomes himself the riddle that he attempts to solve at Thebes,28 so Shelley’s Mathilda is constituted as an enigma, a puzzle whose internal discontinuities she is unable to resolve. Simultaneously and irreconcilably, Mathilda is daughter, mother, wife and lover in relation to her father; and it is in the radical disjunctions of her being that Shelley dramatizes the politics of her story. For, as a subject in displacement, Mathilda’s tale dramatizes the divided position of the daughter as the self-punishing subject of patriarchy’s desire and interdiction. If the father’s fall in Mathilda dethrones him as a figure of the law, the text’s more radical project is to locate this dethronement within the law itself; and so to shake the rule of the paternal metaphor. For, more than a trope of transgression, the father in Mathilda is a conflictual figure who melds together the law and transgression in an unstable image of patriarchal contradiction. Or, to put it differently, Mathilda critically exposes the law of the father as the desire of the father: a desire that, according to Luce Irigaray (speaking of the prescriptions and proscriptions of Freudian theory), is elided within patriarchy by ‘the enticing delusion’ of the father’s ‘legislative discourse’.29 For Irigaray, the legislative discourse of the father masks the way in which his law is predicated on his desire: that is, the patriarchal father maintains his position as a figure of the law through effacing the seduction that, whether in fantasy or actuality, structures his relation to the daughter. Thus Irigaray speaks of the ‘cloak of the law in which [the father] wraps his desire’:30 for the law of the father occludes and renders unread­ able the incestuous desire that underwrites and undermines that law.

66

Romantic Masculinities

According to Irigaray, the father ‘lays down a law that prohibits him from [recognizing and living out his desire]’;31 and he legislates to defend himself from desire so as to render the daughter exchangeable (or marriageable) within the sexual economy of patriarchy. Irigaray’s argument is based on a reading and critique of Freud’s (in)famous late essay, ‘Femininity’ (1933), and her case bears closely on Freud’s account of the history of his reading of female hysteria. Freud writes: [Y]ou will recall an interesting episode in the history of analytic research which caused me many distressing hours. In the period in which the main interest was directed to discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father. I was driven to recognise in the end that these reports were untrue and so came to understand that hysterical symptoms are derived from phantasies and not from real occur­ rences.32 Irigaray’s interest, however, lies not in whether the hysterics’ accounts of paternal seduction are true or false, but in the politics of a psycho­ analysis that attributes seduction fantasy to the daughter, and the law forbidding seduction or incestuous relation to the father.33 For in this way, Irigaray suggests, Freudian discourse repeats and reinscribes the patriarchal structure that places the daughter or hysteric beneath the law, and enthrones the father as the legislator who positions, pos­ sesses and - as the analytic ‘father’ 34 - psychoanalyses her. Thus it is that Irigaray speaks of ‘the seduction function of law itself’:35 for the law seduces the daughter into compliance with the effacement of pa­ ternal desire, and interpellates her into the patriarchal-Oedipal scene of prescription and prohibition. Furthermore, the daughter’s submission to the law is sustained by the seductive power of interdiction itself. Glossing Irigaray, Jane Gallop remarks that the father ‘gains ... a veiled seduction in the form of the law. The daughter submits to the father’s rule, which prohibits the father’s desire ... out of the desire to seduce the father by doing his bidding.’ 36 ‘[SJeduced to the discourse and law of the father’, the daughter’s desire thus endlessly reconfirms the Oedipal Law that ‘the father has no desire for her’.37 But if patriarchy, as Gallop argues in a pleasing pun, is ‘grounded in the uprightness of the father’, feminist psycho­ analysis has, she suggests, itself seduced the father (of psychoanalysis) ‘out of his impassive self-mastery and into showing his desire’.38 For feminist psychoanalytic theory draws attention to the ways in which psychoanalysis itself is a discourse of desire, an active inscription of the daughter or hysteric into the structures of patriarchal symbolicity.

Mary Shelley's M athilda

67

If theorists such as Irigaray undo the patriarchal incorporation of the daughter by showing that the father’s law is veiled desire, Shelley’s Mathilda similarly disrupts the daughter’s assimilation to the law by scandalously dramatizing the very scene of seduction on whose repres­ sion this law depends. Audaciously narrating a desire that dismantles the law, the ‘monstrous passion’ (MSR, p. 207) unfolded by Mathilda transposes both father and daughter into subjects of transgressive dis­ placement, disclosing in the process the void that underpins the functioning of the paternal metaphor. In Lacanian theory, the paternal metaphor works as the ‘Name’ that positions the subject as a subject of language. Predicated on an Oedipal elision of the desire for the mother, the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ locates the subject as a subject of the signifier; and, through its agency, the subject accedes to signification on the basis of maternal absence, and to desire on the basis of paternal prohibition. Lacan writes: ‘the metaphor of the Name-of-the-Father ... [is] the metaphor that substitutes this Name in the place first symbolized by the operation of the absence of the mother’.39 Founded on the absence of the mother, the metaphorical nature of the ‘Name-of-theFather’ thus encloses an abyss within itself: the paternal metaphor is built on a void, an ‘absent ground’ 40 that ungrounds its symbolic authority and reveals its precarious rhetoricalness. If in Mathilda the father is nameless, being designated only as ‘my father’, it is through this metaphorical naming that the text draws attention to his symbolic rather than personal meaning. He is figured as a function rather than a unique individual. Yet in Mathilda the father’s ‘Name’ is destabilized by transgression and contradiction, as we have seen; and his agency fails to situate Mathilda’s selfhood securely in the order of sexual, psychical and social symbolization. Instead, like Frankenstein’s monster, Mathilda’s being is fractured into discontin­ uous and irresolvable plurality - as daughter, mother, wife, lover - and she becomes an animate subversion of the categories of the paternal symbolic order into which, as an Oedipal daughter, she would normatively be inscribed. The destabilization of the paternal metaphor in Shelley’s text dis­ lodges Mathilda’s selfhood from the identificatory function of metaphor, and launches it into the sliding displacements of metonymy. Expelled from the position of daughter, Mathilda is evicted from any stable position in which her subjectivity might be symbolized. After her father’s revelation of passion, she muses wretchedly on ‘how it became me to act’ {MSR, p. 203), and what shapes she might assume; for Mathilda is wrenched precipitously into unnamed modes of being. Late in the narrative, indeed, she believes herself to be properly fig­ ured only as ‘a murky cloud loaded with blight’ that others would ‘perceive ... by the cold chill I should cast upon them’ (MSR, p.239).

68

Romantic Masculinities

Like Frankenstein’s monster again, she is a phantom of non-identity, a roving deconstruction of knowable selfhood, the daughter of a restless displacement. Dislodged from her position as familial and social subject, her very existence becomes a simulacrum, the occasion of a phantasmal self-reinvention. After her father’s suicide, she plunges into a kind of death, burying herself in obscurity; she feigns her own demise and abjects herself from sociality. Adopting a ‘fanciful nun-like dress’ and retiring to a secluded cottage on a desolate heath, her life becomes ‘a secret known only to myself’ (MSR, pp. 219, 223): she is unreadable and, at a certain level, unsymbolizable. Her love affair with ‘nothingness’ (MSR, p. 221) means that her story becomes a melancholic inversion of the narcissism of self-representation. Mathilda’s ‘fanciful seclusion’ (MSR, p.228) from the world makes her being into a fiction or masquerade. Dressed in a ‘whimsical nun-like habit’ (MSR, p. 228), she bizarrely apes the signs of a piously retired femininity, mimicking and mocking the mark of the spiritual daughter devoted to the service of the transcendental spiritual Father. Separated as she is from stable familial and social identifications, she can only understand herself in the mode of fictionality. As her life fades, she constructs herself as a subject of theatricality; she speaks of her nearing death as ‘the last scene of my tragedy’, and muses concerning the ‘scenes of my short life’ that ‘if the world is a stage and I merely an actor on it my part has been strange, and, alas! tragical’ (MSR, pp. 242, 245). Paternally abjected from the symbolic and self-abjected from the social, Mathilda’s melancholic theatricality mournfully eludes the identifi­ cations of the world whose protocols her desire has transgressed. Seeing herself as ‘struck off from humanity; bearing no affinity to man or woman; a wretch on whom Nature had set her ban’, she regards herself as ‘the source of guilt that wants a name’ (MSR, pp. 229, 239) - and, by the same token, as wanting a name herself. Plunged into alterity, Mathilda is unnameable in terms of the categories of the world she flees. A ‘marked creature, a pariah, only fit for death’ (MSR, p.239), she consigns herself to fancy, whimsy, seclusion, theatricality, and finally to death: to the place(s) of radical otherness. In the last movement of the narrative, she is befriended by the idealized Shelleyan poet, Woodville, who seeks to draw her back into sociality and sympathy - and, indeed, into sanctioned and con­ ventional femininity. Woodville finds it ‘strange ... to see a female in extreme youth ... evidently belonging to the first classes of society and possessing every accomplishment an excellent education could bestow, living alone on a desolate heath’ (MSR, p. 228). Musing on Woodville’s influence upon her, Mathilda wonders whether his words will ‘drive the fiend from my soul and make me more human’, but then she continues:

Mary Shelley's M athilda

69

I am, I thought, a tragedy; a character that he comes to see act: now and then he gives me my cue that I may make a speech more to his purpose: perhaps he is already planning a poem in which I am to figure. I am a farce and play to him, but to me this is all dreary reality: he takes all the profit and I bear all the burthen. (MSR, p. 233) Here, Mathilda repudiates Woodville’s attempts to convert her into rhetorical capital, to make a ‘figure’ out of her for his symbolic profits. She also resists his attempts to reincorporate her into the social. In a radical sense, she remains - and insists on her own status as - a dis­ figuration of Woodville’s (and all) conventionalizing metaphors. If to Woodville Mathilda is a source of symbolic profit, a literary spectacle at a safe and usable distance, to herself she represents the fictions that fleetingly identify and displace her in the unstable semiosis of her being. She lives the melancholy and alterity that Woodville converts into literary representation, and she is carried by the semiotic instability that he attempts to master. She is a displaced and unreadable wraith emerging from what the text calls ‘the Kingdom of Shadows’ (MSR, P-245). Yet if Mathilda lacks a place for her being, the situation that she finally desires for herself is a fusion with her father in what she calls an ‘eternal mental union’ beyond death. Scandalously, however, she imagines herself in this situation as the bride of her father: ‘In truth I am in love with death; no maiden ever took more pleasure in the contemplation of her bridal attire than I in fancying my limbs already enwrapt in their shroud: is it not my marriage dress? Alone it will unite me to my father when in an eternal mental union we shall never part’ (MSR, p. 244). Despite the fact that the body is expunged from this fantasy of spiritual union, Mathilda’s desire for her father continues to be tracked by its earlier transgressive mode, as incest returns in the figure of father-daughter marriage to stain the spirit with matter. In one sense, this relation to the spiritual father rebuilds the father’s law, and reconstitutes Mathilda as a filial subject of the patriarchal symbolic; for the fleshly transgressive father of the earth is replaced by the idealized, disembodied father of the spirit. But, in another sense, Mathilda’s bridal longing dissolves her own daughterly idealization of the father, incestuously co-opting daughter into wife. Fusion with the father is thus ambivalently a reconstruction of the law and a repetition of crime. The symbolic father is only precariously restored. The ambi­ valence surrounding the father’s spiritual and bodily representation in Mathilda is instructive; for, as Meena Alexander argues, Mary Shelley’s characteristic version of the sublime resides not in the transcendences of the spirit, but in the engulfments of the flesh; not in the glories of the mind, but in the claims and resistances of the body. In this sense,

70

Romantic Masculinities

the father’s idealization or spiritualization in Mathilda stands in ironic tension with the dark energies of the Shelleyan sublime. Alexander, for instance, reads Frankenstein’s monster as the bodily rebuttal of ‘pure spirit’, as ‘irreducible flesh and blood ... never to be swallowed back into sheer consciousness’;41 and, in The Last Man (1826), she sees the plague as a sublime that is negatively based on ‘the body of nature’. This ‘negative’ Shelleyan sublime represents a darkly annihilating embrace which, at the limit of Romantic idealism, returns the divinity of mind to the entanglements of matter, and compromises the godlike sublimities of mental power. But what of Mathilda’s spiritual father, the bizarre groom in the text’s promised mental marriage? Although the ambiguities of Math­ ilda’s desire, as we have seen, continue to haunt the father’s idealization with incestuous transgression, he is nevertheless restored rhetorically to his symbolic function: a mental rather than a seductively material pater. But what does his spiritualization leave behind? What is repressed in this symbolic restitution? To broach this question we need to turn to Mathilda’s version of the sublime. As she contemplates her approach­ ing death and reunion with the father, she utters a farewell to the earth: For it will be the same with thee, who art called our Universal Mother, when I am gone. I have loved thee; and in my days both of happiness and sorrow I have peopled your solitudes with wild fancies of my own creation. The woods, and lakes, and mountains which I have loved, have for me a thousand associations; and thou, oh, Sim! hast smiled upon, and borne your part in many imaginations that sprung to life in my soul alone, and which will die with me. Your solitudes, sweet land, your trees and waters will still exist, moved by your winds, or still beneath the eye of noon, though what I have felt about ye, and all my dreams which have often strangely deformed thee, will die with me. You will exist to reflect other images in other minds, and ever will remain the same, although your reflected semb­ lance vary in a thousand ways, changeable as the hearts of those who view thee. One of these fragile mirrors, that ever doted on thine image, is about to be broken, crumbled to dust. But ever teeming Nature will create another and another, and thou wilt lose nought by my destruction. (MSR, pp. 243-4) This valediction to the earth is silently structured throughout by a gendered opposition between maternal Nature on the one hand and paternal spirit on the other. It is governed rhetorically, that is, by the metaphysical dualism of matter and spirit: by the split between the body of the ‘Universal Mother’ and the spirit of the disembodied father. Furthermore, the passage figurally abandons (or abjects) the material

Mary Shelley's M athilda

71

mother in the name of the symbolic father; its valediction to the one is uttered in the name of its embrace of the other. Prior to this passage, Mathilda writes (again to the earth): ‘I am about to leave thee; soon this living spirit which is ever busy among strange shapes and ideas, which belong not to thee, soon it will have flown to other regions and this emaciated body will rest insensate on thy bosom’ (MSR, p. 243). The mother (the earth) gets the emaciated body, the father (the spirit) gets the transfigured soul. But at the same time this dualism of maternal matter and paternal spirit is deconstructed by the text’s interrogation of its own figural mode. For the opposition between material mother and spiritual father is replicated and revised in the passage’s opposition between ‘Nature’s’ material solitudes on the one hand and the mind’s images on the other; and it is, moreover, the operation of the passage to undo these images of the mind, displaying their fragility, deformation and dissolution in the face of the destructive processes of maternal Nature. In this way, the category by which Mathilda identifies proleptically with the father - the spirit, mind and imagination - is dismantled by the activities of the immense material body figured here as the ‘Universal Mother’. If the maternal is aligned with the (material) ground figured by the mind, and the paternal with the (spiritual) mind that figures that ground or body, this passage works to unground the mind’s figures by displacing the paternal symbolic power into serial displacements and deformations. Paternal metaphoricity, in this sense, dissolves into maternal metonymy, and identification surrenders to displacement. For it seems that the mental images or figures that represent Nature here have no purchase on the maternal body that they represent. The ‘Universal Mother’ of nature stays both unimpeachably the ‘same’ and for ever changing, as she restlessly underwrites and undermines the figures that figure her.42 Feminized as process rather than as origin, ‘Nature’ here produces the ungrounding moment of a negative sublime, a maternal sublime whose operations suspend the paternal Symbolic function43 - even as they reconstitute that function elsewhere in the form of Mathilda’s waiting spiritual father. Straddling ambiguity, then, Shelley’s text simul­ taneously affirms and abjects its maternal sublime, loving and leaving the mother as it celebrates and circumvents ‘everteeming Nature’: the ungovernable power that, in Mathilda’s description here, sustains and dissolves the self’s imaginings. Notes 1

Mathilda was first published by Elizabeth Nitchie as an extra number of Studies in Philology (Chapel Hill: 1959). It has recently been published along with M ary Wollstonecraft’s M ary and M aria in an edition by Janet

72

2

3

4

5 6 7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15

Romantic Masculinities Todd in hardback (London: 1991) and in paperback (Harmondsworth: 1992). The text used here is from Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robin­ son (eds), The M ary Shelley Reader (Oxford: 1990). All further references, cited as MSR in brackets in the text, will be to this edition. In the first version o f Mathilda, The Fields o f Fancy, Shelley prefaced the text with a scene set in the ‘Elysian fields’ (Nitchie, Studies, p. 91). In this instructional tableau, Mathilda is told by the prophetess Diotima that the ‘end o f ... being’ is ‘knowledge o f itself’ (ibid., p. 98); but Mathilda insists that her history on earth was commanded by self-destructive passion rather than self-knowledge (ibid., pp. 99-100), and her narrative is a reply to Diotima in these terms. For other parallels between Mathilda and Oedipus, see Katherine C. H ill-M iller,6My Hideous Progeny ’; M ary Shelley, William Godwin, and the Father-Daughter Relationship (Newark: 1995), pp. 114 -16 . In Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, the aged Oedipus arrives at the grove o f the Eumenides (‘the Kindly Ones’) and resolves to die there, despite the fact that the place is reserved for immortals. See Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, tr. Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth: 1982). Cited by Elizabeth Nitchie, ‘M ary Shelley’s Mathilda: an unpublished story and its biographical significance’, Studies in Philology XL (1943), p. 450. Hill-Miller, ‘My Hideous Progeny’, p. 126. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: 1982), especially ch. 1, pp. 1-32. Tilottama Rajan, ‘M ary Shelley’s Mathilda: melancholy and the political economy o f romanticism’, Studies in the Novel XXVI (1994), p. 49. Susan Sniader Lanser makes a similar point when she observes that ‘it is fitting that Shelley sent Mathilda to Godwin rather than directly to a publisher, for this gesture repeats Mathilda’s own self-destructively tenacious sub­ ordination to a man who cannot allow his daughter her individuality’; and she adds, ‘[it is] likely that Godwin’s censorship would have been re­ enacted by a publisher’, Fictions o fAuthority: Women W riters and Narrative Voice (Ithaca and London: 1992), pp. 171, 172. See J. Hillis Miller, ‘The critic as host’, in Harold Bloom et al., Decon­ struction and Criticism (London: 1979), pp. 2 35 -6. See Anne K. Mellor, M ary Shelley (London: 1988), p. 197. For an extended treatment o f the incest motif in Romantic texts, see Peter Thorslev, ‘Incest as Romantic symbol’, Comparative Literature Studies II (1965), pp. 4 1-58 . T h orslev,‘Incest’, p. 47. Meena Alexander, Women in Romanticism (London: 1989), p. 161. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Julia Kristeva’, in Elizabeth W right (ed.), Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary (Oxford: 1992), p. 199. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: 1987), pp. 41, 22; further references to be cited parenthetically in text. Rajan, ‘M ary Shelley’s M athilda’, pp. 59, 50. This is very much Terence Harpold’s argument in ‘ “Did you get Mathilda from Papa?”: seduction fantasy and the circulation o f M ary Shelley’s Mathilda’, Studies in Romanticism 28 (1989), pp. 4 9 -6 7 . Harpold contends

Mary Shelley's M athilda

16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

73

that as a fantasy of origin Mathilda foregrounds the ‘oedipalization of the primal scene that is the effect o f the father’s intervention in the m otherdaughter relationship’ (p. 56). See Miriam Brody (ed.), M ary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Harmondsworth: 1985). For an analysis of Wollstonecraft’s account o f female bodiliness and sensuality and its relation to subsequent feminist debates, see Cora Kaplan, ‘W ild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/ Feminism’, in Sea Changes: Essays in Culture and Feminism (London: 1986), pp. 31-56. For readings of M ary Shelley’s Frankenstein that relate Frankenstein’s creation o f the monster to a loss of the mother, see Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's W riting (Chicago and London: 1986); Marc Rubenstein, 4“M y accursed origin”: the search for the mother in Frankenstein', Studies in Romanticism 15 (1976), pp. 165 -9 4 ; Barbara Johnson, ‘M y monster/my self’, Diacritics 12 (1982), pp. 2-10. Lanser, Fictions of Authority, p. 165. Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (London: 1993), pp. 85, 91. Ibid, p. 93. Ibid, p. 91. Mellor, M ary Shelley, p. 198. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. Ibid. Ibid, p. 9. Rajan, ‘M ary Shelley’s Mathilda', p. 64. For a fascinating enactment of this debate concerning the sexual-political meanings o f female hysteria, see Catherine Clement and Helene Cixous, The Newly Bom Woman, tr. Betsy W ing (Manchester: 1986), pp. 136 -6 0 . For a fine reading o f Oedipal sexuality and textuality and the ‘riddle’ of dreams, see Cynthia Chase, ‘Oedipal textuality: reading Freud’s reading o f Oedipus’, Diacritics 9 (1979), pp. 54—68. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, tr. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: 1985), p. 39. Ibid, p. 38. Ibid. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, The Standard Edition, XXII, tr. James Strachey (London: 1964), p. 120. For a searching critique o f Freud’s attribution(s) o f guilt in the family drama o f hysteria, see Catherine Clement, ‘Seduction and guilt’, in Clem­ ent and Cixous, The Newly Bom Woman, pp. 40-57. Irigaray, Speculum, p. 40. Ibid, p. 38. Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter's Seduction (Lon­ don: 1982), pp. 70-1. Irigaray, Speculum, pp. 38, 39. Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, pp. 75, xv. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, tr. Alan Sheridan (London: 1977), p. 200. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, ‘The sexual masquerade: a Lacanian theory of

74

41 42

43

Romantic Masculinities sexual difference’, in Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher (eds), Lacan and the Subject o f Language (London: 1991), p. 63. Alexander, Women in Romanticism, p. 32. In The Fields of Fancy, Shelley included a footnote to this passage that similarly emphasizes the undecidable sameness and difference o f ‘nature’: Dante in his Purgatorio describes a grifon as remaining unchanged, but his reflection in the eyes o f Beatrice as perpetually varying (Purg. Cant. 31). So nature is ever the same, but seen differently by almost every spectator and even by the same spectator at various times. All minds, as mirrors, receive her forms - ‘yet in each mirror the shapes apparently reflected vary & are perpetually changing’ (cited by Nitchie, Studies, p. 89, n. 84). For a discussion o f the Oedipal dynamics o f the Romantic sublime and the possibility o f a ‘preoedipaP feminist sublime, see Patricia Yaeger, ‘Toward a female sublime’, and Lee Edelman, ‘A t risk in the sublime: the politics o f gender and theory’, in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism (Oxford: 1989), pp. 191-224.

Reading ‘Tintem Abbey’: Towards a Politics of Cultural Production

,

,

Robert Brinkley University of Maine Orono Aled Ganobcsik- Williams, M iami University Ohio

,

Introduction In this essay, we will address two textual features which have been the focus for recent critical readings of ‘Tintern Abbey’. First we will look at the silences in the text. Silences about the poem’s immediate historical situation are frequently interpreted as indices of specific acts of dis­ placement on the part of the poet. For example, to Kenneth Johnston, Jerome McGann, or Marjorie Levinson, the poem’s silences index the poet’s evasion of the grim social realities and human costs of industrial activity on the banks of the River Wye, the actual landscape that is first repressed, then replaced by an ideal (or idealized) one, a process which begins with the blurred and hesitant representational pattern of the first verse paragraph.1 Second, we will consider the presentation of Dorothy Wordsworth. She is often interpreted as marginalized or silenced (or otherwise condescended to) in the poem. She is sometimes seen as representing a feminine moment which the poet has since transcended. To John Barrell, for example, she represents a femininized youthfulness which the poet has transcended (Barrell, p. 166). To David Simpson, in so far as she can be taken as the poet’s interlocutor, she has been seen merely as a ‘proleptic and worshipful companion’, one who can never become a reader of the poem (Simpson, p. 550). In what follows, we would like to complicate previous readings of these two problematic aspects of Wordsworth’s poem. W e will suggest that while the poet’s sister is indeed, at one level, a figure for the reader, looking more closely at her role in the poem can provide a way of reading the poem’s silences which goes beyond a hermeneutics of dis­ placement. To anticipate: our argument is that the textual silences in ‘Tintem Abbey’, which can be interpreted as including everything that is left unresolved in the poem (including Dorothy Wordsworth’s 75

Romantic Masculinities

76

unexpected appearance in the last verse paragraph), position the reader as a co-performer, or collaborator, in the production of textual meaning. Since our essay is about - in the same way we would say that ‘Tintern Abbey’ is ‘about’ - the production of such meaning, it seems important to note that the writing in it is collaborative and dialogic, and that, of necessity as well as by design, it eschews a single, identifiable voice. The essay works towards a particular way of reading ‘Tintern Abbey’, of (re-)reading the poem in a way that the poetry itself can make legible.

A Moment of Danger W hat happened once is happening again; happening again, it is hap­ pening differently. ‘Once again’: the pattern becomes familiar, never the same, but nevertheless recurring - like the complex recurrence of past and present moment in the oceanic sound of ‘waters, rolling’ that occurs in the ‘inland murmur’ of mountain streams. Or, again, like the words ‘For thou art with me.’ If these words are familiar, it is not only because Wordsworth uses them at a now familiar moment, near the beginning of the last verse paragraph of ‘Tintern Abbey’. The words were already familiar when he used them, recalling as they do the words of the 23rd Psalm. In ‘Tintern Abbey’, however, the words no longer refer to the psalmist’s God, but to a friend, who is also Wordsworth’s sister:2 For thou art with me, here, upon the banks Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend, M y dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read M y former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while M ay I behold in thee what I was once, M y dear, dear Sister! And this prayer I make ... (11.115-22) Given the familiarity of ‘Tintern Abbey’, Dorothy Wordsworth’s appearance in the last verse paragraph has long since become expected (for example, we can now imagine her to have been there all along, silently, as an interlocutor whose role is like that of the poem’s reader). It can still seem uncanny, however, despite any familiarity, that she should appear where she does in place of the Judaeo-Christian God. To whom, then, can the poem pray?

Tor thou art with m e ’ - The words repeat a passage from the fourth

Reading ‘Tintem Abbey’

77

verse of the 23 rd Psalm (the W ye Valley at this moment taking the place then of ‘the valley of the shadow of death’?): ‘... though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me’ (Psalms 23:4). For the words of the psalmist (traditionally the words of King David), Milton, who was a regicide, substituted the following lines (in Paradise Lost, the dangers that surrounded him during the early years of the Restoration take the place of ‘the valley of the shadow of death’): Standing on earth, not rapt above the Pole, More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchang’d To hoarse or mute, though fall’n on evil dayes, On evil dayes though fall’n, and evil tongues; In darkness, and with dangers compast round, And solitude, yet not alone, while thou Visit’st my slumbers Nightly, or when Morn Purples the East: still govern thou my Song Urania, and fit audience find, though few. (Paradise Lost VII: 11. 23-31) In part, it is Urania’s presence in these lines that distinguishes Milton’s struggle with change from Satan’s earlier struggles in Hell: ‘one who brings / A mind not to be changed by place or time’ {Paradise Lost I: 11 252-3). In ‘Tintern Abbey’, where Wordsworth ‘dare[s] to hope/ Though changed’, not only will the words of the 23rd Psalm recur, but also Milton’s articulation of danger (specifically the synecdoche of ‘evil tongues’), this articulation recurring within the context of the prayer that Wordsworth addresses - now not to his sister - but to Nature: ... she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress W ith quietness and beauty, and so feed W ith lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e’er prevail against us ... (11.126-33) Coming just after the address to Wordsworth’s sister, the allusion to Paradise Lost - as a kind of indirect quotation - can make legible the psalm that Wordsworth quotes directly and that Milton indicates silently (to Urania, Milton also says that he will fear no evil so long as

78

Romantic Masculinities

she is with him). At the same time, in the interplay between sister and Nature, there is also an allusion - an allusion which is also a displace­ ment - to Milton’s muse. In Paradise Lost, Milton redirects the classical name ‘Urania’ (Milton’s muse was already a displacement), so that it will no longer refer to the classical Muse of Astronomy, but instead to the sister of Eternal Wisdom: Descend from Heav’n Urania, by that name If rightly thou art call’d, whose Voice divine Following, above th’ Olympian Hill I soar, Above the flight of Pegasean wing: The meaning not the Name I call; for thou Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top Of old Olympus dwell’st, but Heav’nlie born, Before the Hills appeerd, or Fountain flow’d, Thou with Eternal wisdom didst converse, Wisdom thy Sister, and with her didst play In the presence of th’ Almightie Father, pleas’d W ith thy Celestial Song. (11. 1- 12) In ‘Tintem Abbey’, Milton’s reference to his muse is redirected again, now to Dorothy Wordsworth, now to Nature: ‘I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.’

But what is it that is recurring in ‘Tintem Abbey ? - At issue, perhaps, is the way in which an engagement with a particular past can produce the specific sense of a particular present. Among other recurrences in the poem, one could include the poet’s impressions of place, of a landscape, which also happen differently, changing even as the poem works to articulate them, so that ‘these hedgerows’ in a moment are ‘hardly hedgerows’, but ‘little lines of sportive wood run wild’ (11.15-17). Or: The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which, at this season with their unripe fruits, Among the woods and copses lose themselves Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb The wild green landscape. (11. 9- 15) Among other recurrences, there is the poet’s sense of self, the impression

Reading ‘Tintern Abbey ’

79

that he too happens again in this place, at this moment, but is now not the same: ... And so I dare to hope Though changed, no doubt, from what I was, when first, I came among these hills (11. 66- 8) Each of these passages involves Wordsworth’s past as it produces his sense of the present. At the same time, each passage also involves the recurrence of Paradise Lost: Wordsworth’s impressions of the landscape recall the book of nature to which Milton was blind (‘Seasons return, but not to me returns /Day’ (Paradise Lost III: 1.41); Wordsworth’s sense of a changing self recalls Milton’s assertion that (like Satan) in changed circumstances his voice has remained unchanged. Among the many allusions to Milton in ‘Tintern Abbey’, perhaps the strongest recurrence involves the experience of danger, of ‘evil days ... and evil tongues’, an experience that pervades Paradise Lost and which provides an incessant undersong in Wordsworth’s poem, countering the asser­ tions of optimism and leading to the moment when, as the last of these assertions, Wordsworth’s sister will appear together with Nature, will join Nature as the recurrence of Milton’s muse.

How does the past recur? - Shortly before his suicide in 1940, Walter Benjamin wrote that: ‘To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” [Benjamin is quoting Ranke]. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger ... to retain the image of the past that unexpectedly appears’ (Benjamin, ‘Theses’, p.255). He continued: [T]he past can be grasped [festzuh alien, taken, arrested] only as image [als Bild ], as the never-to-see-again [das a u f Nimmerwiedersehen, the never-to-meet-again] which flashes up at the instant of recognizability \im Augenblick seiner Erkennbarkeit eben aufblitzt, in the blinking of an eye] ... an unrestored image of the past [das m itjed er Gegenwart zu verschwinden ] that threatens to disappear with each present [die sich nicht als in ihm gem eint erkannte\ that does not recognize this image as its concern. (Benjamin, ‘Theses’, p.255, translation modified) Among these images (often as paradigms for other images) Benjamin includes quotation, both direct and indirect. Among others (as a kind of quotation), one might also include literary allusions - for example, Milton’s words as they recur in ‘Tintem Abbey’. W hat makes these

80

Romantic Masculinities

recurrences images, however - specifically in Benjamin’s sense of das Bild - is the sense of danger that accompanies them in Wordsworth’s poem, the sense that what was once has become ‘the never-to-see-again’ that seems to threaten to disappear irrevocably. It is as an image, perhaps, that the past recurs in a landscape which will never again be the same. Perhaps it is as ‘the never-to-see-again’ that the poet engages his past in his sister’s eyes and voice: ... in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read M y former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes ... ... from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence ... (11. 117-20; 149-50) Here too, however, the poet’s sense of urgency reflects his pervasive feeling of danger - perhaps the danger that Milton’s political stance, which ‘Tintern Abbey’ attempts to recover, may at any moment prove impossible to restore.

One m ight say that ‘Tintern Abbey’ is exemplary o f the difficulties o f historical reading in which a specific past struggles to become legible at a particular moment o f danger - The nature of the peril referred to in ‘Tintern Abbey’ is articulated more fully at the end of Wordsworth’s 1799 Prelude , where Milton’s response to the Restoration recurs as an image in Benjamin’s sense (in a September 1799 letter, Coleridge had asked Wordsworth to write ‘The Recluse’ as ‘a poem in blank verse, addressed to those who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind, and are sinking in to the most epicurean selfishness’ (Coleridge, Collected Letters, p. 527)). In these lines addressed to Coleridge, Wordsworth responds: ... if in these times of fear, This melancholy waste of hopes o’erthrown, If, ’mid indifference and apathy And wicked exultation, when good men On every side fall off we know not how To selfishness, disguised in gentle names Of peace and quiet and domestic love Yet mingled, not unwillingly, with sneers On visionary minds - if, in this time Of dereliction and dismay, I yet

Reading ‘Tintem Abbey ’

81

Despair not of our nature, but retain A more than Roman confidence, a faith That fails not, in all sorrow my support, The blessing of my life, the gift is yours Ye mountains, thine O Nature. {Prelude II: 11.478-92) In addressing these concerns, both in 1798 and in 1799, Wordsworth offers a reading of Milton: the recognition that the threatening atmos­ phere of political apostasy articulated in Paradise Lost is recurring in Wordsworth’s present. But in 1799, in revising Milton, Wordsworth turns to Nature rather than to God; a year earlier, in ‘Tintern Abbey’, he had turned both to Nature and to his sister.

‘[Effeminately vanquished ’ - In ‘Tintern Abbey’ the turn to Dorothy Wordsworth occurs within a context of allusions to Milton’s poetry not only to Paradise Lost, but also to Samson Agonistes, specifically to the moment in Milton’s drama when Samson, ‘Blind among enemies’ (Samson Agonistes, 1.68) - ‘How many evils have enclosed me round’, he says (1.194) - for the moment: ... feel[s] my genial spirits droop, M y hopes all flat, nature within me ... In all her functions weary of herself ... (Samson Agonistes, 11. 594—6) Wordsworth, having reaffirmed that he is still: A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, And what perceive ... (11.103-8) rewrites Samson Agonistes and turns to his sister in place of the psalmist’s God: ... Nor, perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay: For thou art with me, here, upon the banks Of this fair river. (11.112-16)

82

Romantic Masculinities

Milton’s play begins as Samson retires to an ‘unfrequented place’ {Samson Agonistes, 1.17), where ‘restless thoughts ... rush upon me thronging, and present / Times past, what once I was, and what am now’ (11.19-22) - change rashly caused by ‘foul effeminacy’ (1.410) in betraying himself ‘to a woman,/A Canaanite, my faithless enemy’ (11. 379-80), ‘effeminately vanquish’t’ (1. 562). Samson’s calamity repeats Adam’s confused choice in Paradise Lost when he eats the ‘fair enticing fruit’ that ‘she [Eve] gave him ... W ith liberal hand ... Against his better knowledge, not deceived, / But fondly overcome with female charm’ {Paradise Lost IX: 11. 996-9). The way Milton presents Adam’s decision offers some indication as to how one might avoid such effemi­ nacy. The presentation involves a test, not only of Adam, but of Milton’s reader. Adam, not yet fallen, says to Eve, who has already fallen: ... I with thee have fixt my Lot, Certain to undergo like doom, if Death Consort with thee, death is to me as life; So forcible within my heart I feel The Bond of Nature draw me to my own, M y own in thee, for what thou art is mine; Our state cannot be severed, we are one, One Flesh; to lose thee were to loose my self. {Paradise Lost IX: 11. 952-9) Readers may well be tempted to find in Adam’s choice what Eve does: ‘of exceeding Love, / Illustrious evidence’ (11. 961-2). Paradise Lost is not open to this reading, however; the reader who is tempted is also corrected. Adam: ... scrupled not to eat Against his better knowledge, not deceiv’d, But fondly overcome with female charm. Earth trembl’d from her entrails. (11. 997-1000) W e know good only by knowing evil, Milton writes in Areopagitica: ‘W e bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; and that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary’ (Milton, p. 728). In depicting the Fall, as in the poem as a whole, Paradise Lost is structured as a purifying trial - as Stanley Fish has shown and as Areopagitica suggests any book should be.3 Readers ‘scout into regions of sin and falsity’ that they may ‘see and know, and yet abstain’ (Milton, p. 728). W hat readers abstain from are regions that the poem defines as sin, but that it permits us first to entertain as

Reading ‘Tintem Abbey ’

83

attractive possibilities. C. S. Lewis writes that Milton does not so much describe as arouse in readers their interpretation of his subjects; the interpretations that Milton arouses he can then clarify in accordance with the determining hermeneutics that Paradise Lost offers.4To indulge an interpretation that the poem opposes is to fall into sin - as here, into effeminacy. As such, what Milton offers readers are the comforts of a closed poetic form, a sense of limits and of predetermined meanings, and this seems related to the control of the ‘feminine’. When Wordsworth turns to his sister in ‘Tintern Abbey’, when he addresses her in place of God, this might in a moment of danger be an unacceptable revision from a Miltonic point of view, perhaps unaccept­ ably effeminate. On the other hand, as Wordsworth suggests in the Advertisement for Lyrical Ballads, a need for predetermined meanings can, in effect, make his poetry illegible. The Advertisement raises the question of predetermined meanings in connection with aesthetic con­ cerns: [Readers] will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness: they will look for poetry, and will be induced to enquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title. It is desirable that such readers, for their own sakes, should not suffer the solitary word Poetry, a word of very disputed meaning, to stand in the way of their gratifi­ cation ... that they should consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision. (Gill, p. 591) If one were to reframe Wordsworth’s challenge to these codes in terms of Miltonic values, the challenge might be to the closed form of Milton’s poetry, its insistence on its own asserted truth as a defence against the effeminate. On the other hand, in the last verse paragraph of ‘Tintern Abbey’, the writing that concludes Lyrical Ballads, Words­ worth’s address to his sister seems to offer a precise response to Milton’s interpretative stance. According to Paradise Lost, Milton’s muse is a kind of governor and protector; or so he hopes: ‘still govern thou my song,/Urania... But drive farr off the barbarous dissonance/Of Bacchus and his revellers’ {Paradise Lost VII: 11. 30-3), i.e. the Bachaii, women who dismembered another poet, Orpheus, ‘in Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears/To rapture, till the savage clamor drownd/Both Harp and Voice’ (11. 35-7). The passage at once recalls the dangers that actually confronted Milton with the Restoration - a number of his fellow regicides were in fact dismembered, drawn and quartered while attributing the danger to ecstatic women. In ‘Tintern Abbey’, when Wordsworth turns to his sister, the dangers he faces are no longer

84

Romantic Masculinities

identified with the feminine; on the contrary, the turn towards effemi­ nacy may be Wordsworth’s response to the danger.

Impressions o f Another Being W hat is Dorothy Wordsworth’s role in ‘Tintern Abbey’? At times she has been taken to be ‘the reader’s surrogate’ (McGann, p. 88), a ‘rhe­ torical move showing us how to take the poem’ (Levinson, p. 49), but her relation to reading and interpretation may turn out to be consid­ erably more complex. The substitution of Dorothy Wordsworth for Milton’s muse (perhaps for other Miltonic figures as well) can be read, for example, as indicative of Wordsworth’s way of offering his own role, that of poet, as a surrogate for the reader: the poet as reader, the reader as poet - beginning with a particular reading (or re-reading) of Milton’s poetry. As a poem produced explicitly from Wordsworth’s reading of other texts (not only Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, but also Frost at M idnight , Gilpin’s Guide, the book of nature, the texts of past experience), ‘Tintern Abbey’ is not only concerned with what the poet hears and sees and remembers; it is also concerned - perhaps it is primarily concerned - with how he reads and interprets, with how readers can participate in both. The concern is explicit in the poem’s relation to Wordsworth’s sister: ... in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read M y former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. (11.117-20) How does one do that: catch a language from the past in a present voice, read the past in the present? The question involves more than ‘Tintern Abbey’, it involves much of Wordsworth’s poetry, including, of course, The Prelude in all its versions. During the early process of the latter’s composition, Wordsworth wrote in 1799: A tranquilizing spirit presses now On my corporeal frame, so wide appears The vacancy between me and those days Which yet have such self-presence in my heart That sometimes when I think of them I seem Two consciousnesses - conscious of myself And of some other being. {Prelude II: 11. 25-31)

Reading ‘Tintern Abbey ’

85

The passage recalls language in ‘Tintern Abbey’ with regard to ‘the life of things’ - here impressions of the past as they recur at the moment of writing have a comparable illuminating power - but in ‘Tintern Abbey’, the ‘other being’ is both the poet as ‘I was once’ and Dorothy Wordsworth as she now is, the former made legible as a reading by the latter. If the question of Dorothy Wordsworth’s role in ‘Tintern Abbey’ involves the question of reading, a point of departure might be to consider the reading that becomes legible in the poem’s response to ‘some other being’.

W e see into the Life o f Things' - Towards the end of the second verse paragraph of ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth writes of this way of seeing (though perhaps in a poem which is about the way the poet reads - as one might read the ‘book’ of nature - questions of seeing and reading are difficult to separate): ... the breath of this corporeal frame, And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, W e see into the life of things. (11.44-50) In an 1801 notebook entry, Coleridge responded to these lines in a way which connects them to his later speculations in Biographia Literaria about Primary Imagination: - and the deep power of Joy W e see into the Life of Things i.e. - By deep feeling we make our Ideas dim - & this is what we mean by our Life - ourselves. I think of the W all - it is before me, a distinct Image - here. I necessarily think of the Idea Sc the Thinking I as two distinct Sc opposite Things. Now < let me > think of m yself - of the thinking Being - the Idea becomes dim whatever it be - so dim that I know not what it is - but the Feeling is deep & steady and this I call I - identifying the Percipient Sc the Perceived - . (Coleridge, Notebooks, p. 919) In Coleridge’s interpretation, thinking characterizes the subject, ‘the thinking I’, for whom each object (for example, a wall) is the idea thought. If ‘the Thinking I ... m yself ’ becomes the idea (or thing) thought, however, insofar as ‘the Thinking I’ cannot become

86

Romantic Masculinities

what is thought but is ontologically distinct from what is thought, ‘the Idea [i.e. the object of thought] becomes dim’, while the feeling that ‘I call F deepens. It is in terms of this feeling that Coleridge interprets ‘the Life of Things’, an insight that grounds his reading in ontological distinction between Being and beings.5To the extent that ‘the Thinking F as a feeling is ‘the life of things’ in ‘Tintem Abbey’, then this life might also be interpreted as Primary Imagination (‘the living power and prime agent of all human perception ... a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’ (Coleridge, Notebooks, p. 313). W hat may distinguish Wordsworth from Coleridge in this regard, however, is the otherness of ‘the life of things’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’, that this life, far from being ‘the Thinking I’, may instead be referred to as the thinking other, not so much an object of thought, but an address from the other to which the poet-reader responds. Coleridge reads Wordsworth’s way of seeing within familiar paradigms of perception, where ‘the Percipient’ and ‘the Perceived’ can either be opposed or conflated. W hat if Wordsworth’s way of seeing is more like a kind of reading, however, a reading of the other’s words, the way one reads as interlocutor in response to what another has said? What, then, does ‘the life of things’ become?

‘[LJnterminable depth ’ - If Wordsworth’s way of seeing turns out to be a way of reading, both are interwoven, in his writing, with responses to his sister: ‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears’, he wrote in 1802 (‘The Sparrow’s Nest’, 1.17); in the 1805 Prelude it is Dorothy Wordsworth who, ‘speaking in a voice ... like a brook ... Maintained for me a saving intercourse / W ith my true self’ and ‘in the midst of all, preserved me still/A poet’ (Prelude X: 11. 909-19). From her and in a time of danger, he learned that: ... though impaired, and changed Much, as it seemed, I was no further changed Than as a clouded, not a waning moon. (Prelude X: 11. 915-17) Unchanged, though changed - as Milton says in relation to his muse in Paradise Lost. The Prelude's image of the moon may refer to a specific moment in early 1798 (some months before the composition of ‘Tintern Abbey’), when Wordsworth wrote lines later entitled ‘A Night-Piece’ in response to an entry of 25 January in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal (which re-creates a night-walk from Nether Stowey to Alfoxden). A brief consideration of the composition of ‘A Night-Piece’ can offer evidence

Reading ‘Tintem Abbey ’

87

of how in practice Dorothy Wordsworth’s role as ‘muse’ could shape Wordsworth’s approach to reading and poetic composition. Jonathan Wordsworth notes that ‘A Night-Piece’ marks Wordsworth’s return to a ‘poetry of personal response to Nature’ (Wordsworth, J., p.454) after a break of five years (as such it is comparable to the return after five years in ‘Tintem Abbey’), but in the case of ‘A NightPiece’, the response is specifically to his sister’s writing - writing, as Beth Darlington suggests, that she addressed to him (the journal ‘was largely for his sake’ (Darlington, p.426)). Taken together, the journal entry and ‘A Night-Piece’ might be interpreted as a dialogic intercourse between lovers, if the conventional notions of ‘lovers’ did not suggest a far too reductive interpretation for the originality of the writing. Recalling the night-walk from Nether Stowey to Alfoxden, Dorothy Wordsworth describes the sudden appearance of the moon: The sky spread over with one continuous cloud, whitened by the light of the moon, which, though her dim shape was seen, did not throw forth so strong a light as to chequer the earth with shadows. At once the clouds seemed to cleave asunder, and left her in the center of a black-blue vault. She sailed along, followed by multitudes of stars, small, and bright, and sharp. (Wordsworth, D., p. 2) As so often in the journal, Dorothy Wordsworth’s writing is contex­ tualized by its silences, by words left unsaid, a kind of space (or spacing) in the writing in which readers (Wordsworth in particular, but also, elsewhere, Coleridge) can participate in response, where the possibilities in response open to a range of creative choices. The writing in that sense offers what John Cage calls an open form. W ith respect to his own music, Cage describes compositions where ‘nothing takes place but sounds: those that are notated and those that are not’, the sounds ‘that are not notated appearing] in the written music as silence, opening the doors of the music to the sounds that happen to be in the environ­ ment’ (Cage, pp. 7-8). In the same spirit, one can speak of verbal compositions in which the notated and unnotated interplay, where words, phrases and images that are not notated appear in the compo­ sition as silence, as composition space (like the white on the page) that is open to words, phrases and images that a reader offers collaboratively in response. When Wordsworth reads the entry in his sister’s journal, much of the language in the poem repeats language in the journal, but in response to the journal’s silences, he not only adds narrative details that seem to dramatize his response as a reader, he also finds language that sustains the silence and openness of her writing:

88

Romantic Masculinities ... The sky is overspread W ith a close veil of one continuous cloud All whitened by the moon, that just appears, A dim-seen orb, yet chequers not the ground W ith any shadow - plant, or tower, or tree. At last a pleasant instantaneous light Startles the musing man whose eyes are bent To earth. He looks around, the clouds are split Asunder, and above his head he views The clear moon and the glory of the heavens. There in a black-blue vault she sails along Followed by multitudes of stars, that small, And bright, and sharp along the gloomy vault Drive as she drives. (‘A Night-Piece’, 11.1-14)

The third-person narrative, together with the ‘musing man whose eyes are bent/To earth’, might be said to picture ‘the Thinking I’ by ‘identifying the Percipient & the Perceived’, an image for which there is no parallel in the journal entry. One could say, too, that Wordsworth’s first response to his sister’s writing is to find himself mirrored in the space and silence that she provides, to fill the openness with himself. In this way ‘A Night-Piece’ can seem to anticipate the moment in ‘Tintem Abbey’ when Wordsworth finds his past mirrored in his sister’s present: ... in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read M y former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while M ay I behold in thee what I was once, M y dear, dear Sister! (11.117-22) On the other hand, to find only mirroring in either ‘A Night-Piece’ or ‘Tintem Abbey’ is perhaps to read both poems too reductively, to miss the way in which both poems sustain the otherness of reading, reading as the thinking of the other. In ‘A Night-Piece’, the musing man does not simply see what the journal re-creates. He misses what the journal records: the moon emerging as the clouds open (‘cleave asunder’) to leave ‘her in the center’. He sees what the journal does not record: the ‘instantaneous light’ upon the ground that startles him, which causes him to look around and up, so that he sees an openness that has already occurred.

Reading ‘Tintem Abbey ’

89

What a comparison between poem and journal suggest is that, while reading what his sister wrote and while writing the poem, Wordsworth’s imagination lingered on the dark earth she recalled and - rather than turning from it towards the light - envisioned the moment when the darkness brightened. The instantaneous light upon the ground is his response to what he has read, a sign of his participation in the journal­ writing; the musing man looks up like a reader (or writer) from a text.6 Once the moon has appeared, the writing extends the silence and openness of the journal. Rather than fill or appropriate the space the journal offers, the poem seems to sustain - and be sustained by the journal-writing, the energy of the journal’s image of the moon as ‘she sailed along’. Given this energy, the poem finds a writing that is remarkably open to additional, collaborative readings: There in a black-blue vault she sails along Followed by multitudes of stars, that small, And bright, and sharp along the gloomy vault Drive as she drives. How fast they wheel away! Yet vanish not! The wind is in the trees; But they are silent. Still they roll along Immeasurably distant, and the vault Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds, Still deepens its interminable depth. (‘A Night-Piece’, 11.11-19) The formal openness of this writing is in part grammatical: it is stars that ‘wheel away’ but ‘vanish not’, that ‘roll along / Immeasurably dis­ tant’; it is ‘the wind [that] is in the trees’. When Wordsworth writes that ‘they are silent’, however, is it to the trees, to the stars, or to both (perhaps first to the trees and then to the stars) that the pronoun ‘they’ refers? The openness of the reference, which connects sound and silence, the proximate with the ‘immeasurably distant’, deepens the writing with an energy and feeling where (to borrow Coleridge’s gloss of ‘Tintern Abbey’) ‘the Idea becomes dim whatever it be - so dim that I know not what it is - but the Feeling is deep & steady’ (Coleridge, Notebooks, p. 919). Here, however, it is not ‘the Thinking I’, but the otherness of the writing that is perhaps felt, a deictic writing that begins in the journal and which refers to what it does not say.7 Like the ‘rolling’ oceanic sound which the ‘sweet inland murmur’ of ‘mountainssprings’ evoke in ‘Tintern Abbey’ (11. 3-4) - so that, ‘inland’, one still hears ‘the mighty waters rolling’ (‘Intimations Ode’, 11.165, 170) - what is unsaid in ‘A Night-Piece’ is perhaps the writing’s most original production. It offers a productive space in which or with which the poem’s readers can collaborate.

Romantic Masculinities

90

In ‘Tintern Abbey’, written shortly after ‘A Night-Piece’, Words­ worth writes in silences again, in a poetry where what is said is always indicative of what it leaves unsaid - the burden of fears, for example, that so largely go unspoken. In the 1805 Prelude , where Wordsworth rewrites ‘A Night-Piece’ as the illumination on Mount Snowdon ... at my feet the ground appeared to brighten, And with a step or two seemed brighter still; Nor had I time to ask the cause of this, For instantly a light upon the turf Fell like a flash. I look about, and lo, The moon stood naked in the heavens ( Prelude, XIII: 11. 36-41) - the ‘black-blue vault’ of the journal and ‘A Night-Piece’ becomes an image open to ‘an under-presence ... whatsoe’er is dim /Or vast in its own being’ (11. 71-3): ... a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour, A deep and gloomy breathing-place, through which Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice ... ... that breach Through which the homeless voice of waters rose, That dark deep thoroughfare, ... [where] Nature lodged The soul, the imagination of the whole. (11. 56-65) The genesis for the image lies in the open form that Wordsworth produced collaboratively, in connection with his sister’s writing. Per­ haps it is the collaborative nature of such writing to which ‘Tintern Abbey’ turns in its last verse paragraph.

A Politics of Reading In this essay, we read the silences in ‘Tintern Abbey’ as spaces in which readers can participate in the creation of the poem (this relationship of text to reading is one way in which ‘Tintern Abbey’ rewrites Paradise Lost in order to address the dangers of its time).8 As an example of such silences, we have mentioned the unresolved ambiguity between the oceanic sound o f‘rolling waters’ and the poem’s insistence on its ‘inland’ location. The distance between what the poem affirms, and what is

Reading ‘Tintem Abbey ’

91

heard though left unsaid in the poem, produces a space for the reader to respond collaboratively. The silences in the poem are not always read in this way, however. Does the poem, as Marjorie Levinson suggests, offer a representational strategy with far-reaching consequences because it erases the particu­ larity of the landscape (Levinson, p. 15)? According to McGann, ‘Tintern Abbey”s silences are strategies for evading a ‘certain nexus of historical relations’ (McGann, p. 82); they replace a public, material his­ tory with the privatized history of the growth of the poet’s mind. It is possible to support other readings, however. The social significance of the landscape, which we have to assume was apparent to Wordsworth, is not directly addressed in the poem, but the evidence is not completely erased. The presence of the charcoal burning and of the beggars is evoked in the verse: ... These pastoral farms Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up in silence, from among the trees, W ith some uncertain notice, as might seem, Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire The hermit sits alone. (11.17-23) Through an imaginative surmise (which we can learn to read as a political displacement of the homeless beggars), the poet takes the smoke to be an index, albeit an uncertain one, of the presence of the vagrant dwellers or of the ‘hermit’. If we assume that Words­ worth’s readers would also have been familiar with Gilpin’s commentary, perhaps even with the Abbey and the W ye Valley them­ selves, the gaps which occur between what the poetry says and what the reader hears in the allusion to the guide and to the social realities will then remain unresolved. A space will occur between what the poetry affirms and what, while left in silence, is alluded to - a space in which the reader collaborates with the poem in the production of its social context. While ‘Tintern Abbey’ is not a poem about poverty, nor homeless­ ness, nor other social realities produced by industrialization (realities which Wordsworth had engaged in other parts of Lyrical Ballads, for example, ‘The Female Vagrant’), references to these realities are there for readers to make. By engaging readers in the production of these references, ‘Tintern Abbey’ turns out to be a poem whose writing addresses - and where reading involves - the socio-political climate described by Wordsworth in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.

92

Romantic Masculinities

Production and Consumption - Wordsworth writes in the Preface that his poetry will attempt to introduce the reader to new habits of taste, a task to which he attaches a socio-political, as well as a literary, significance: [T]o treat the subject [the task of defending the theory upon which the poems are written] with the clearness and the coherence of which I believe it is susceptible, it would be necessary to give a full account of the present state of the public taste in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved; which again could not be determined, without pointing out in what manner language and the human mind act and react on each other, and without retracing the revolutions not of literature alone, but likewise of society itself. (Gill, pp. 594-5) Wordsworth calls his poems ‘materially different’; they are to be dis­ tinguished by their purpose from ‘triviality and meanness, both of thought and language’ (pp. 596-7), but he almost immediately with­ draws from associations with ‘purpose’ any crude intentionality or design on the reader, an instrumental notion of literature (‘not that I mean to say, that I always began to write with a distinct purpose formally conceived’ (p. 598)). The equivocation about ‘purpose’ in the Preface can be read as an instance of a more general difficulty in thinking through the relationship between an aesthetic work and its social function, between poetry and its social base. Perhaps part of the problem with many politicized readings of ‘Tintern Abbey’ is the failure to permit a sufficent range in understanding what a political poetics can entail - how ‘Tintern Abbey’ can work politically. For a text which explicitly raises the question of how an art work can be politically efficacious and simultaneously lay claim to autonomous aesthetic value, we turn to W alter Benjamin’s ‘The Author as Producer’ (a lecture given at the Paris Institute for the Study of Fascism in 1934). In Benjamin’s terms, we can read Wordsworth’s hesitancy over his ‘pur­ pose’ in the Preface as an assertion that the poetry has a political function not reducible to its value as propaganda. For Benjamin, the most important question for a critic to ask of a work will not involve its expressed attitude toward the relations of production in its time, since the capitalist apparatus of production can assimilate ‘astonishing quantities of revolutionary themes, indeed can propagate them without calling its own existence ... into question’ (p. 229). It can offer these thematic concerns as one more product for consumption. Benjamin offers as examples: photography that has ‘succeeded in transforming even abject poverty ... into an object of enjoyment’; and literary movements that have ‘made the struggle against

Reading ‘Tintem Abbey ’

93

poverty an object of consumption’ (pp. 230, 231-2). W e can certainly adopt this as a criticism for some of Lyrical Ballads, which - when read out of context - seem to objectify poverty for the reader’s enjoyment. But from Benjamin’s perspective, criticism o f‘Tintern Abbey’ as a work that does not depict social realities, which fails as an instance of social realism, could mistake its actual political force. According to Benjamin, what we should question is a work’s position within the literary relations of production (p. 222). The important point for Benjamin - and this is why he makes political efficacy dependent on innovative or revolutionary technique - is that the art work transform the apparatus of literary production and not simply supply new products: ‘the [revolutionary] work will never be merely on products, but always, at the same time, on the means of production’ (p. 233). One way in particular that Benjamin suggests the productive apparatus can be transformed is by overthrowing the material distinctions which con­ struct our notion of art and hold the bourgeois relations of production in place: ‘W hat matters therefore is the exemplary character of pro­ duction, which is able first to induce others to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers - that is, readers or spectators into collaborators’ (p. 233). By breaking down the anti­ thesis of producer and consumer, the work can begin to open barriers imposed by specialization in the process of production. In articulating a strategy that breaks down the antithesis of writer and reader, producer and consumer, Benjamin’s politics can recall Wordsworth’s Preface, the way it defends the poetic production of Lyrical Ballads in terms of the need to remake the reading population. The Preface describes the cultural and spiritual poverty of a society that consumes sensation (‘gross and violent stimulants’, ‘this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’) in a culture where a multitude of causes, unknown to former times’ are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminatory powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to state of almost savage torpor (p. 599). Cultural productions of the day have ‘conformed themselves’ to gratifying this ‘craving for extraordinary incident’ (p. 599), they are productive of a population alienated from the means of producing its own spiritual and cultural sustenance, a society that passively consumes the given cultural products. Although Wordsworth does not say so explicitly, there seems to be a nexus between this cultural impoverish­ ment and a population unable to escape political domination, a population acquiescing to the pressure to conform to political orthodoxy (the apostasy he describes in ‘Tintern Abbey’ and elsewhere). ‘Tintern Abbey’ can be read as an attempt to offer readers a creative space where

94

Romantic Masculinities

they can find increasing power in relation to the means of production, resisting an identity as mere consumers of cultural products and becoming more fitted for the ‘voluntary exertion’ of the faculties. This, we suggest, is the political valence of ‘Tintem Abbey’, a variation and revision on the revolutionary hope, echoed throughout Milton’s writing, that all the Lord’s people can be prophets.9 It is a project that the poem affirms when the poet turns in the last verse paragraph to his sister.

Conclusion: Writing the Other, Writing as Another Benjamin writes of the images that rise up at a moment of danger, that ‘the place one encounters them is language’ (Benjamin ‘N ’, p. 24): ‘It isn’t that the past casts its light on the present or that the present casts its light on the past: rather an image is that in which the past and present moment flash into a constellation’ (p. 7). If, in relation to such images, one imagines a collaborative art in which reading is cultural production, then perhaps what readers are producing is the legibility of the past. This might be less a legibility which allows readers to produce what the past was, than the possibility of discovering how the past recurs in relation to the moment of reading. The collaborative art that Benjamin imagines would be collaborative in engaging this recur­ rence. If we approach ‘Tintern Abbey’ from this perspective, we can find the possibility of such a collaboration articulated in relation to Wordsworth’s sister: ... Nor, perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay: For thou art with me, here, upon the banks Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend, M y dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read M y former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while M ay I behold in thee what I was once, M y dear, dear Sister! (11. 112 - 2 2 ) W e have spoken of ‘Tintem Abbey’ as an open form. It is possible, however, to argue that there is actually very little openness in the poem’s presentation of Wordsworth’s sister. The textual space in which she appears can, instead, seem both appropriating and controlled. In so far

Reading ‘Tintern Abbey ’

95

as the poet sees in his sister ‘what I was once’, perhaps one should say that there is only mirroring here - by her, of him - she carefully controlled by him to reflect the image that he desires. If this relation is itself in turn paradigmatic for readers of ‘Tintern Abbey’ - and not only for ‘Tintern Abbey’, but for the subsequent poetry it has influenced - then perhaps all the poetry offers is a space in which readers find themselves mirrored: like ‘the Thinking I’ that Coleridge found in ‘the life of things’, or ‘the musing man’ mirrored out of Dorothy Wordsworth’s writing in ‘A Night-Piece’. The poetry would offer a traditional version of what Luce Irigaray describes as ‘female sexuality conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters’, ‘woman ... [as] more or less the obliging prop for the enactment of man’s fantasies’, where the ‘female imaginary’ is no more than a speculum for logocentric designs (Irigaray, pp. 23, 25, 28). If this were the case, Wordsworth’s revisions of Milton would be more like a repetition, ‘speaking sameness’ (Irigaray, p. 205), a repetition of a masculine language appropriating a woman’s silence, a recurrence of the same closed forms. If, on the other hand, one were to attach importance to complicating details in Wordsworth’s writing, to notice that the mirroring is not of the present but the past - not of what I am but of what I was - if, in addition, one were to say that what the poetry involves is not so much a mirroring but a transformation - Wordsworth’s past in his sister’s eyes and in her voice - then the image that ‘Tintern Abbey’ offers, the space it offers readers, might no longer be reduced to self-reflection. It might offer a different imaginary, the production of self as other as another - through engagement with an image from the past. W e do not want to occlude the material difference between men and women at a particular historical juncture. It is surely true, for example, as Judith Page argues, that Dorothy Wordsworth’s ‘culture placed limitations on her life’ (Page, p. 46), a reality about which ‘Tintern Abbey’ is also silent. ‘For woman to reach the places where she takes pleasure as a woman’, it is also ‘assuredly necessary’, as Irigaray writes, to take ‘a long detour by way of the analysis of the various systems of oppression brought to bear on her’ (Irigaray, p. 31). On the other hand, to engage the writing of ‘Tintern Abbey’ - to respond to something of the relational intensities that mark the poem’s responses to Wordsworth’s sister, of his writing to hers - we may want to be open to alternatives, to displacements of ‘the various systems of oppression’, which reading poetry can produce. In a series of Lacanian readings, Keith Hanley has argued that Wordsworth’s strong relation to the imaginary always rendered his relation to language problematic; it produced silence in the writing where the poetry is left with nothing it can say.10 Perhaps, one might argue in addition, however, that Wordsworth’s continuing attachment

96

Romantic Masculinities

to the imaginary made its productions particularly problematic - but also particularly available - as well to the intersubjective forces of language. Inasmuch as the imaginary became available in his words even or especially in their silences - it also became open to repeated transformations; it became a story that could be told differently. While the imaginary can be interpreted as a natural given, it can also be interpreted (like most natural givens) as a particular social product, specific in its historical moment as it relates to the means of its production (the relation to a mirror can be a relation of production, a way of making an image with a mirror; it can also be a relation of consumption, a way of consuming the image in the mirror). One might approach Wordsworth’s originality in terms of this production, as a kind of cultural work that produces a different imaginary, by opening its construction to the collaborative transformations that he finds in others’ writing - specifically, in the writing of his sister - and which the reader can find in Wordsworth’s poetry as well. As readers engage in ‘Tintern Abbey’, as reading becomes collabo­ rative cultural work, perhaps it is a different imaginary - one no longer traditionally male - that we are always in the middle of producing. When the poet ‘catch[es] the language of my former heart’ in his sister’s voice, what does any traditional male imaginary become? Whose language is it and whose voice? In so far as this question can be an open one, we might also find that ‘Tintern Abbey’ extends language the possibilities for speaking it - rather than for appropriating the legibilities of an open form. W e will end with a kind of complement to the prayer for Dorothy Wordsworth that ends ‘Tintern Abbey’, with a reply which - for the moment - we will imagine could now be hers: [B]etween our lips, yours and mine, several voices, several ways of speaking round endlessly, back and forth [entre tes/mes levres plusieurs chants, plusieurs dives, toujours se re'pondent]. One is never separable from the other. You/I: we are always several at once [Tu/je: fon t toujours plusieurs a la fois] ... It’s our good fortune that your language isn’t formed of a single thread, a single strand or pattern ... Of course, we might - we were supposed to? - exhibit one ‘truth’ while sensing, withholding, muffling another [certes, nous pouvions - nous devions? - exhiher quelque ‘v e r itf tout en sent ant, retenant , taisant quelque autre]} ... Truth’s other side [son revers] - its complement? its remainder? [son reste ]? ... Others may make fetishes of us to separate us: that’s their business [que d ’autres nous fassent fetiches , pour nous separer , c ’est leur affaire]. Let’s not immobilize ourselves in these borrowed notions [ne nous laissons pas immobiliser], (Irigaray, pp. 209, 210, 217)

Reading ‘Tintcm Abbey’

97

It might be the possibility of such writing that rises up at a moment of danger, the legibilities of collaborative work. The danger - or the anxiety that the poem articulates - may turn out to involve its produc­ tion of legibility: that the poetry - its reading - can always be left open or left closed.

Notes 1

‘Most readers observe that an object does not materialize in the poem before it is effaced or smudged, a thought does not find its full articula­ tion before it is qualified or deconstructed, a point o f view is not estab­ lished before it dissolves into a series o f impressions' (Levinson, p. 15). For a response to Johnston, McGann, and Levinson, see Robert Brinkley, ‘Vagrant and Hermit: Milton and the Politics o f “Tintern Abbey”’, and ‘ “Our chearful faith”: On Wordsworth, Politics, and M ilton’. 2 All line references from Gill are included parenthetically in the text. 3 ‘Milton allows the illusion o f independent action on the human level; and when the reader has (predictably) acquiesced in the illusion, if only by failing to struggle against it, he [Milton] then reminds him [the reader] o f the truth he ought to have remembered ... [W]ithout M ilton’s “snubs” we could not be jolted out o f a perspective that is after all ours ... [T]he method ... is to lead us beyond our perspective by making us feel its inadequacies and the necessity of accepting something which baldly con­ tradicts it. The result is instruction, and instruction is possible only because the reader is asked to observe, analyze, and place his experience, that is, to think about it’ (Fish, pp. 19-21). 4 ‘Milton must seem to describe,’ but ‘while seeming to describe his own imagination he must actually arouse ours’ (Lewis, pp. 48-9). 5 Cf. Martin Heidegger, who offers the ontological distinction as the fun­ damental illumination or enlightenment to which W estern metaphysical thought is open, i.e. that ‘“Being” cannot have the character of a being [“Sein” ist nicht so etwas wie Seiendes]’ (Heidegger, p. 23, translation modified). In a notebook entry for 17 March 1801 (two entries after the ‘Tintern Abbey’ entry, Coleridge once again explores the ontological distinction between thinking and thought, now with reference to his son Hartley: Hartley looking out o f my study window fixed his eyes steadily & for some time on opposite prospect, & then said - W ill yon Mountains always be? - 1 shewed him the whole magnificent Prospect in a Looking Glass, and held it up, so that the whole was like a Canopy or Ceiling over his head, & he struggled to express himself concerning the Differ­ ence between the Thing & the Image almost with convulsive Effort. - 1 never before saw such an Abstract o f Thinking as a pure act & energy, o f Thinking as distinguished from Thoughts. (Coleridge, Notebooks, p. 923) 6

W hen Wordsworth revised the text for publication in 1815, he included

98

Romantic Masculinities an allusion to poems written after ‘A Night-Piece’, and extended the moment o f response: A t length a pleasant instantaneous gleam Startles the pensive traveller while he treads His lonesome path, with unobserving eye Bent earthwards; he looks up - the clouds are split Asunder, - and above his head he sees The clear Moon ... (‘A Night-Piece’, 11. 8-13)

7

The ‘instantaneous gleam' recalls the ‘gleams o f half-extinguished thought’ in ‘Tintem Abbey’ (1. 59), the ‘visionary gleam’ o f the ‘Intimations Ode’ (1. 56), both allusions themselves to the stranger in ‘Frost at Midnight’, Coleridge’s ‘sole unquiet thing’ (1.16) that became the life in the embers that W ordsworth’s ode celebrates (‘in our embers / Is something that doth live’ (11.132-3)). This writing anticipates the deictic gesture o f passages in the 1799 Prelude, passages that are particularly distinctive o f W ordsworth’s originality: I heard among the solitary hills Low breathings coming after me, and sounds O f undistinguishable motion, steps Almost as silent as the turf they trod. (Prelude I: 11. 4 6 -9 ) W ith what strange utterance did the loud dry wind Blow through my ears; the sky seemed not a sky O f earth, and with what motion moved the clouds. (11. 6 4 -6 )

8

Cf. Milton, who in explaining why he chose not to write Paradise Lost in rhymed verse, makes a connection between blank verse and freedom. He writes that rhyme produces ‘hindrance and constraints’ for contemporary poets; neglecting to rhyme is an ‘ancient liberty recovered to the heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage o f riming’. 9 ‘For now the time seems come, wherein Moses, the great prophet, may sit in heaven rejoicing to see the memorable and glorious wish o f his fulfilled, when not only our seventy elders, but all the Lord’s people are become prophets’ (Areopagitica, p. 744). The coming o f this time is dependent, Milton says, on the possibility o f a community where reading is free o f any censorship, a freedom which allows him to ‘see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle muing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unsealing her long-abused sight at the fountain itself o f heavenly radiance’ (p. 745). 10 W hile we cannot discuss the nature o f the Wordsworthian imaginary at any length in this essay, we can briefly sketch the direction such a discussion might take. Hanley argues: ‘W ordsworth’s embarrassment with language... derives from a peculiarly dominant formation o f a rudimentary

Reading ‘Tintem Abbey’

99

sense of self ... [which] resulted in an ongoing interplay between the primary subject position and the subject subsequently inscribed in lan­ guage. The effect dictated not only an illusory oneness with natural objects but a marvelously satisfying self-inscription in imaginary languages (Han­ ley, ‘Crossing Out’, pp. 105-6). A ‘fundamental ambiguity produced a continuing oscillation in the process of composition between the subjective alienation [of the symbolic] ... and the retracting pull o f the imaginary subject’ (p. 110). Wordsworth ‘was therefore predisposed to a literary discourse that represented the inheritance o f the father’s Symbolic domain splendidly undiminished by any sense o f detachment from the Imaginary order’, and while ‘feelings o f shock and disappointment resulted from the disruption o f Imaginary discourse ... when that recognition eventually became inevasible, the program for the poetic imagination ... turned into the self-conscious reconstruction o f a discourse o f Imaginary relationships within the Symbolic order’ (Hanley, ‘ “A Poet’s History’” , p. 37).

Works Cited Barrell, John, ‘The Uses o f Dorothy: “The Language o f the Sense” in “Tintern Abbey’”, Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester: 1988), pp. 137 -6 7 . Benjamin, W alter, ‘The Author as Producer’, in Peter Demetz (ed.), Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: 1978), pp. 220-38. --------- ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illu­ minations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: 1968), pp. 2 53 -64 ; Illuminationen (Frankfurt: 1969). --------- ‘N [Theoretics of Knowledge; Theory o f Progress]’, The Philosophical Forum 15, 1-2 (Fall-W inter 1983-4), pp. 1-4 0 . Brinkley, Robert, ‘Vagrant and Hermit: Milton and the Politics of “Tintern Abbey’” , The Wordsworth Circle 16, 3 (1985), pp. 126-33. --------- “‘Our chearful faith”: On Wordsworth, Politics, and M ilton’, The Wordsworth Circle 18, 2 (1987), pp. 57-60. Cage John, Silence (Middletown, Connecticut: 1973). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (vol. 1, Kathleen Cobum (ed.); New York: 1957). --------- Collected Letters o f Samuel Taylor Coleridge (vol. 1, E. L. Griggs (ed.); Oxford: 1956). Darlington, Beth, ‘Two Early Texts: “A Night-Piece” and “The Discharged Soldier” ’, in Jonathan Wordsworth (ed.), Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies (Ith­ aca: 1970), pp. 4 2 5 -8 . Fish, Stanley, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost’ (Berkeley: 1971). Gill, Stephen (ed.), William Wordsworth (New York: 1984). Hanley, Keith, ‘ “A Poet’s History”: Wordsworth and Revolutionary Discourse’, in Pauline Fletcher and John Murphy (eds), Wordsworth in Context (Lewisburg: 1992). --------- ‘Crossings Out: The Problem of Textual Passage in The Prelude\ in Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (eds), Romantic Revisions (Cambridge: 1992), pp. 103-35.

100

Romantic Masculinities

Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robin­ son (New York and Evanston: 1962); Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: 1963). Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: 1985); Ce sexe qui n ’en est pas un (Paris: 1977). Jackson, H. J. (ed.), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: 1985). Johnston, Kenneth, ‘The Politics o f “Tintern Abbey”’, The Wordsworth Circle 14, 1 (1983), pp. 6 -14. Levinson, Marjorie, ‘Insight and Oversight: Reading “Tintern Abbey’” , in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: 1986), pp. 14—57. Lewis, C. S., A Preface to Paradise Lost’ (London: 1961). McGann, Jerome, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: 1983). Milton, John, Complete Poems and M ajor Prose (Merritt Y. Hughes (ed.); New York: 1957). Page, Judith W ., Wordsworth and the Cultivation o f Women (Berkeley: 1994). Simpson, David, ‘Figuring Class, Sex, and Gender: W hat is the Subject o f W ordsworth “Gypsies’” , South Atlantic Quarterly 88, 3 (1989), pp. 5 4 1-6 7 . Wordsworth, Dorothy, The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (Mary Moorman (ed.); New York: 1971). Wordsworth, Jonathan, Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies (Ithaca: 1970). Wordsworth, William, Wordsworth, Jonathan, Abrams, M. H ., and Gill, Stephen (eds), The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850 (New York: 1979).

The Pen and Sword: Felicia Hemans’s Records of Man E. Douka Kabitoglou Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

She was no amazon in literature, but a tender, a delicate, a sensitive woman. There was nothing masculine either in her mind or in her influence. (M. A. Stodart) She was totally ignorant of housewifery and could as easily have managed the spear of Minerva as her needle. (William Wordsworth) Mrs. Hewoman’s ... your feminine He-man . (Lord Byron) Oh! the bright swords! ... I must not forget to tell you how I sat, like Minna in The Pirate (though she stood or moved, I believe), the very ‘queen of swords.’ I have the strongest love for the flash of glittering steel - and Sir W alter [Scott] brought out I know not how many gallant blades to show me. (Felicia Hemans)

I In the unfinished fragment, ‘Scenes and Passages from the “Tasso” of Goethe’, the first of a series of papers to be entitled ‘German Studies’ undertaking a critical reading of major poets (a project that never materialized), Felicia Hemans attempts her own account o f‘the poetical character’ in the manner so fashionable in the literary milieu to which she belonged, and in accordance with the general context of the Roman­ tic obsession with defining the nature and status of the poet. Identifying the central conflict in the poetic drama as that between ‘the spirit of poetry and the spirit of the world’, which ultimately brings about the destruction of the protagonist, she gives a record of the nature and role of the (male) poet. The essay appeared in the New Monthly Magazine 101

102

Romantic Masculinities

for January 1834 and, as her sister and biographer informs us, it is ‘a paper which well deserves attention, because ‘it embodies so much of her individual feeling with respect to the high and sacred mission of the Poet’ (Hemans, I: p. 272), complying with the Romantic ideologies on the subject. Yet Hemans’s imaginative depiction of the figure of the poet as ‘masculine’ adds a strong colouring of natural and military associations that are not normally found in similar accounts by the contemporary male Romantics: Some master-minds have, indeed, winged their way through the tumults of crowded life, like the sea-bird cleaving the storm from which his pinions come forth unstained; but there needs a celestial panoply, with which few indeed are gifted, to bear the heirs of genius not only unwounded, but unsoiled, through the battle; and too frequently the result of the poet’s lingering afar from his better home has been mental degradation and untimely death. (VI: p. 282) Looking upon Tasso as the prototype of the poet, ‘visionary, enthusi­ astic, keenly alive to the splendour of the gorgeous world’, a being ‘endowed with all these trembling capacities for joy and pain’, Hemans also points out the danger of lacking a ‘sustaining consciousness of his own high mission’, which makes him vulnerable to external powers that can ‘shake his whole soul from its pride of mission’, finally making him a victim of ‘cold triumphant worldiness’. In the specific case under discussion, the ‘high-minded Tasso’ recognized ‘as superior with the sword and the pen to all men , struggling in so ignoble an arena’ is ‘finally overpowered by so unworthy an antagonist’, his opponent Antonio (VI: p.285). That Hemans’s juxtaposition of the ‘creative’ and the ‘martial’ is not a passing fancy, but, as I propose to argue, one of the central thematic and structural tenets in her work, becomes manifest in the sustained interest which embodies the conjunction of ‘pen’ and ‘sword’ in her male prototypes of the poetic figure - the Italian Tasso and the German poet Komer, in the poems entitled, ‘Tasso and his Sister’ (V: p. 256), ‘Komer and his Sister’ (V: p.269), ‘The Death-Day of Komer’ (V: p.272), and ‘Tasso’s Coronation’ (VI: p. 121). In the first two parallel poems, where the creative male is presented in relation to a passive female companion, the two aspects of active masculinity - the poetic and the military - converge. Tasso is portrayed as ‘the bard of gifts divine’ and presented in his dual capacity: ‘He of the sword and the pen!’ Similarly, Hemans’s interest in Komer is located in his identity of ‘Soldier and bard’, and his death is lamented by ‘the deep guns with rolling peal’ announcing ‘[t]hat Lyre and Sword were broken’. Hemans not only constructs male creativity as constituted of self-assertiveness,

Hemans’s Records o f Man

103

energy and violence in its extremity, but in her usual manner contrasts it to female passivity and softness, in a role prescription that follows the traditional codification of masculine/feminine as ‘power’ versus ‘service’. Hemans abides by the conventional gender complementarity of roles, whereby the masculine occupies the sphere of thought and action, and the feminine the sphere of sensitivity and emotion. Tasso and Komer embody the qualities of power, genius and sublimity, whereas the anonymous ‘sisters’ stand for delicacy, domesticity, and commonness - in short, Hemans presents a dialectic of male power and female powerlessness dressed in the garb of masculine passion and feminine emotion. This conflict between assertion and submission, self-affirmation and self-negation, which forms the core of Hemans’s poetry is described by her sister, referring to her lyric ‘The Grave of Komer’, as a subject that fascinated her because it ‘so peculiarly combined the two strains dearest to her nature, the chivalrous and the tender’ (I: p. 56). In her attempt to reconcile the violent with the gentle, the male quester/con­ queror with the redeeming female companion, Hemans would appear to be enhancing the qualities of docility, submissiveness, selflessness and renunciation as the appropriate female domain, giving to her women readers lessons of service, of selflessness, of domesticity. ‘There is no doubt’, we are told, ‘that Hemans privileges the feminine world of powerful affection’ (Ross, p. 274), docility and self-effacement over the masculine one of aggression and self-assertion; it has also been argued by Anne Mellor that ‘Hemans’ poetry pits a masculine public code of heroic chivalry against a feminine private code of domesticity, only to reveal the inadequacy of each’ (Mellor, p. 10). Yet, the way I see it, this apparently convenient compromise between docility and energy points towards an uneasy fusion of domestic and military values which upsets the traditional nineteenth-century aesthetic/social codifi­ cations (often adopted by contemporary critics) of a ‘masculine sublime’ and a ‘feminine beautiful’. Henry F. Chorley, in his Memorials o f Mrs. Hemans, published in 1836 (one year after her death), comments on her obsession with the ‘martial’: ‘W hile she shrunk with more than ordinary feminine timidity from any bodily pain, - refusing even to submit to the trifling suffering of having her ears prepared to admit ear-rings - her mind wrought upon scenes of heroic enterprise and glory’, with an ‘engrossing delight in military glory’, which ‘was very different from the common school­ girl’s love of a red coat’ (and that despite Hemans’s marriage at eighteen to a captain), and having nothing to do with ‘that common-place frivolity of temperament upon which the noise of drums beaten, and the flare of streaming colours, act as a stimulus’; adding that it is ‘beautiful to remark in many of Mrs. Hemans’ poems, the mingling of

104

Romantic Masculinities

all that is true, and gentle, and deep in feeling, with all that is most glowing in imagery’, though her muse ‘wears under all the robes of triumph, the pitying heart of a woman’ (I: pp. 26-7). M y intention in this paper is precisely to reverse this statement and to argue that, indeed, her muse under the pitying heart of a woman wears the robes of triumph, cross-dressed as a male - poet/soldier or bard/warrior, in the dual expression of man’s appropriation of power - quest and conquest. The poetic vocation has socio-historically been defined as distinc­ tively masculine: appeals to the virility of the creative project are constantly made in Romantic (and subsequent) manifestoes. The very term ‘egotistical sublime’ (devised by Keats as a critique of Wordsworth) denotes the confident assumption of priestly and visionary power by the male poet, and ‘transcendence’ - a major value term in Romantic poetry - is definitely associated with masculinity. In claiming a public voice, the female author of the nineteenth century, almost despite herself, had to play into the given perceptions of poetic creativity; because the figure of the poet was masculine, women writers (and I mean poets) had to take part in a self-definition by contraries. Hemans confesses: ‘but I fear that a woman’s mind never can be able, and never was formed to attain that power of sufficiency to itself, which seems to lie somewhere or other amongst the rocks of a man’s’ (I: p. 162). In the patriarchal culture to which Hemans belonged, and particu­ larly the early nineteenth century, for a woman poet to seek the power of self-articulation and public speech was ‘monstrous’ - unless she was a ‘poetess’. A woman poet praised as ‘feminine’ - the exact ‘pose’ taken up by Hemans whose poetry is defined as ‘exquisitely feminine’ - meant that she did not constitute a threat to patriarchy. This attitude fully exposes the duplicity of patriarchal culture - its paternal protection of female mediocrity and its ruthless attack on female boldness. As long as the woman remained the ‘holy’ and ‘sweet’ poet (the elegiac comment on Hemans in Wordsworth’s ‘Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg’, 1835), she was safe for masculine praise because ‘feminine’ poetry was seen as an extension of women’s domestic function. At the time that Hemans was writing (her life-span is from 1793 to 1835), the terrain for poetry was clearly divided into two complementary spheres, masculine and feminine, and even if women employed the same genres and themes as men, they were expected to differ in matters of approach, manner, language and style. Entrapped within male literary and social conventions, a woman had somehow to manage to be a poet without threatening ‘man’. W hat the masculine ideology expected to hear was that women were not trying to compete with men for money and fame; that they were writing out of feminine self-sacrifice with the intention of edifying males, ‘saving men from themselves’, or out of sheer financial need (‘poetess’ being the second best to ‘governess’).

Hemans’s Records o f Man

105

Because the predominant category of masculinity at the time was ‘intellectuality’ (as an aftermath to the age of reason) rather than ‘valour’, the use of wit by a female poet was prohibitive because it meant crossing the line of proper feminine decorum. So the woman becomes a monster - ‘a sort of literary ogress’ (Chorley, I: p. 260), as Hemans says playfully - when she uses her intellect. The age was not prepared to put up with the monstrosity of female wit - and desire. Felicia Hemans, the ‘ravishing golden girl of precocious talent’ (Moers, p. 301), totally confirmed, and conformed to, masculine expec­ tations of femininity. Her very successful dealings with patriarchy turned her into the most famous female poet of all ages in England and one of the most popular of her time, successfully competing with Byron and Scott. The intense awareness of her absolute dependence on men (publishers, reviewers and other mediators) to gain access to publicity made complying with the conventional male frame of refer­ ence an absolute necessity for artistic survival. As Marlon Ross puts it, ideology ‘screams to Hemans that if she is to write poetry and succeed she must not be masculine; she must find ways to be feminine while engaging in an activity that is marked by ideology as masculine’ (Ross, p. 11). Because she acted on that imperative, the ‘awkward truth’ about her ambition and successful publicity was ‘conveniently ignored’ thanks to the values which her poetry upheld (Clarke, p. 33). M y view is that, in order to gratify her desire of entering masculine public life, she consciously employed - not to say exploited - the stereotypical images of femininity; Mrs Hemans’s ‘ethereal womanliness’ is, I believe, less a consciously held belief and more of a ‘pose’, in which she gives herself to the public in the form desired, ‘prostituting’ herself. Under the circumstances, the only way Hemans could write on her cherished military topics (and still be acceptable) was by using them as ‘foils’ for highlighting domestic affections. It has been maintained of Hemans (and Joanna Baillie) that even though they ‘want to explore the “epic” masculine world of combat and conquest, they always domesticate that interest by showing its limitations’ (Ross, p. 287); my view is that she rather hides her political interest behind the veil of domesticity. Hemans’s ‘delight’ in military glory and her ‘ardor’ for martial subjects indicates that her categorial abstraction for ‘masculinity’ encompasses not the current qualities of reason or intellect, but the old epicchivalric virtues of heroism, valour and glory. M y proposition in this paper is that Hemans imaginatively sides with the heroic/public although her moral allegiances seem to uphold the domestic/private; that would situate her within the Burkean category of the sublime/ transcendent and not the beautiful/domestic as Mellor argues (pp. 12443) - domesticity, as I see it, being a thin cover for glaring ambition. The contradictions between being a woman and a poet in the

106

Romantic Masculinities

early nineteenth century, the conflict of self-effacement versus selfexpression, were ‘mortally’ internalized by Hemans. Caught in the deadly collision between the need to represent female experience and woman’s silencing within language, which made public artistic success not only inappropriate but contaminating, Hemans, I propose, found it hard to envisage (at least in the first stage of her career) a sense of female creative power. In the ‘struggle to reconcile a womanly self with unwomanly gifts’ (Clarke, p. 80), to correlate ‘the feared stigma of professional ambition’ with the ‘hidden code, for the power of that ambition’ (Leighton, p. 19), she launched into literary authorship by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal standards (so ingeniously that it would take a modem deconstructive reading to see through her tropes and tactics). Her subordination of (masculine) ‘desire’ to (feminine) ‘duty’ was a strategic compliance, I think, to the code of propriety which demanded indirection and secrecy: (creative) self-assertion had to look like something other than it was. Hemans’s is a case in point of Cora Kaplan’s statement that ‘femininity is masquer­ ade, for behind it lies a scheming active masculine ambition to survive and get ahead’ (Kaplan, p. 119). The empowering act of writing (for the female), the fact that - as articulated by contemporary expressive aesthetics - to write is to assume the initiative of creator, brought the poet’s vocation into violent clash with ideal womanhood for usurping the male instrument of power (the phallic pen or s/word). Hemans, like other women poets of her time, was acutely conscious of the fact that the ‘woman’ and the ‘poet’ were different selves and in conflict with each other, and that this fragmentation of personality induced by the dichotomy of poetry and femininity put an unbearable strain on her. ‘ “M y spirits’” , she wrote of herself, ‘are as variable as the lights and shadows now flitting with the wind over the high grass, and sometimes the tears gush into my eyes when I can scarcely define the cause ... I am a strange being, I think’ (I: p. 108). Hemans’s career was a deliberate and consistent self-promotion (proved by her very success­ ful dealings with the literary establishment) - and that despite her exclamation to Fame: ‘Away! to me - a woman - bring / Sweet waters from affection’s spring’ (VI: p. 181). She liberally indulged in the energy and freedom of the poetic imagination as an escape from the constraints of patriarchal notions of femininity that intervened between herself and herself, that is between what she felt and what the culture suggested she should feel. Because of her (apparently) total conformity to cultural norms, she experienced very intensely the ‘tension between the facts of her existence as a professional woman writer and the fictional ideal of the poetess according to which she was constructed’ (Clarke, pp. 33-4). The angelic renunciation of the female self that she advocated in her poetry was all the time internally undermined by the ‘selfishness’ of

Hemans's Records o f Man

107

the very poetic act she was practising, and her imaginative experience found itself at cross-purposes with social morality. As Gilbert and Gubar put it, ‘to attempt the pen has historically been a subversive act for a woman’ (Gilbert and Gubar, p. xvi); this is more so with the women poets rather than the novelists of the time (writing after all, a ‘genre of their own’), who felt (and they were made to feel) that they violated the stronghold of patriarchy, the ‘high discourse’ of poetic expression - thus laying bare the female desire for power hidden behind the deeply felt experience of powerlessness. Because poetry, and particularly the lyric, entails an ‘autoerotic’ com­ mitment to self and a first-person self-exposure not exacted in the novel or drama, where the ‘I’ is disseminated into a multiplicity of forms and characters, the woman poet is brought into direct confrontation with the ultimate female sin of narcissistic self-love and self-assertion, which, within the cultural constrictions of the period, would turn artistic pride into a wicked vanity. Women poets have resorted to various strategies for dealing with this sense of guilt and the fear of their own ambition (which is, in fact, die ‘anxiety of power’), and Hemans’s particular way of turning vulnerability into empowerment is, I think, to adopt the masculine posture and ‘speak-like-a-man’ until she felt confident enough to ‘speak-as-a-woman’. When in the privacy of her self she penetrated into areas of personality (bold feeling and visionary thought) conventionally associated with the masculine, she nominated them so - and cross-dressed them into the ‘ideal world ... of a hundred knights and squires who declare that their “swords shall leap out of the scabbard” at a single word, in one’s cause’ (Chorley, II: p. 192). Assigning a masculine gender to that in herself which did not fit in with the conventional ideology of womanliness was Hemans’s tactical move, and it exemplifies the strategy of the woman dressing in the hero’s garb, when not yet ready for feminizing the quest. She plays at woman-being-hero until she is ready, later in her career, to stage heroas-woman, in her mature work Records o f Woman, published in 1828. Not wishing or daring to admit publicly, as other women have done for instance Aphra Behn’s ‘my masculine part, the poet in me’, Christina Rossetti’s ‘I wish and I wish I were a man’, or Elizabeth Barrett’s speaking of the man in herself (in the persona of Aurora Leigh) - Hemans, I propose, uses this transvestite emancipation as a major device. If her originality lies ‘in the persistent and ostentatious gendering of her voice’, as Angela Leighton affirms (Leighton, p. 21), I would argue that this gendering works both ways, female-wise and male-wise - and I do not mean what Leighton maintains, that ‘she ventriloquises the work of her most admired contemporaries’ (p. 21). The male mask, in her case, proves to be an equivocal technique of self-expression, a protec­ tion against exposure of the (culturally unacceptable) female subjectivity

1 08

Romantic Masculinities

and female genius. As Kaplan informs us, ‘She was attracted to sub­ jects that were in their essence “coarse”, but was forbidden by her upbringing and instincts, as well as by the prejudices of the day, from treating them fully’ (Kaplan (ed.), p. 94). In my attempt to demolish the myth of Hemans’s fundamental ‘myth of domesticity’, I would argue that her imaginative universe (quite apart from the obvious moral of her stories and tales) tells a ‘different’ story. Hers, I would argue, is an aesthetic of glory, pleasure, self-assertion, sensuality and triumph, disclosing a laughingly sexual, pleasure-loving, rebellious ‘power’. Realizing the connections between desire and power, assertive sexual­ ity and assertive speech, Hemans masquerades the self-assertiveness of the woman writer (in direct contradiction to ideal homely happiness) into a dual male model - the poet-warrior enacting both quest and conquest (the means through which men have appropriated power over women).

II Hemans’s verses, it has been maintained, ‘offer ample evidence of the extent to which the phrase “arms and the woman” evokes activities that may be at once military, maternal, and erotic’ (Lootens, p. 242). Choos­ ing the ‘masculine’ as her formula for inner creative power in which to mask her gender-bound (erotic and aggressive) rituals of war and poetry (the sword and pen) works for Hemans, I believe, as a way of enjoying the ‘taste’ of power as ‘other’, minimizing the accompanying sense of guilt in which the will-to-power is, if we read the dominant imagery of military aggression in her poetry, a sublimation of sexuality. If we accept that repressed eroticism becomes displaced for Hemans into military glory, then we are once again confronted with the pheno­ menon of the transformation of Eros (god of desire) into Ares (god of war) - the etymological kinship is not accidental - indicating that the central issue is always one of power and desire, the energy that drives all human activity. That pen and sword are interchangeable ‘weapons’ that poetic ‘furor’ is (always) already martial, and that both participate in sacrality - is brought to our attention by the historian of religion Mircea Eliade who, speaking of the ‘young warrior’ who ‘must trans­ mute his humanity by a fit of aggressive and terror-striking fury’, emphasizes the linguistic and experiential homology between the Greek homeric menos, German Wut, and Irish fe r g , ‘almost exact equivalents of this same terrifying sacred experience peculiar to heroic combats’, and points out that ‘certain names applied to the Hero in Old Irish refer to “ardor, excitation, turgescence” ’, indicating that ‘ “[t]he Hero is the man in fury, possessed by his own tumultuous and burning

Hemans's Records o f Man

109

energy”’. Eliade illustrates his point by referring to the saga of the initiation of the Irish hero Cuchulainn (Eliade, p. 84). Hemans, her sister informs us, took great delight in fairy tales and fantastic legends: ‘Her own enjoyment of such fanciful creations was fresh and childlike. The “Irish Fairy Legends” were always high in her favour, and the “German popular Stories” were as familiar to her young auditors at the fireside readings, as those of M r Crabbe’ (I: p. 148). Given that she shared the historical interest of Romanticism in the legendary past, that she was herself a product of the age of sensibility with its emphasis on ‘the hypnotically repetitive, oracular, incantatory, dreamlike’ quality of poetry, which found its utmost expression in Ossianic poetry (Frye, p. 14), and that she was a resident of North Wales from a very early age, Hemans’s obsession with the ‘bard’ - the ‘lyre’ and ‘sword’ - should not surprise us; for ‘pen’, of course, is the modernized lyre, indicating the transition from the oral to the written poetic tradition. If, as Frye observes, the poems of Ossian turn ‘what is psychologically primitive, the oracular process of composition, and project it as something historically primitive’ (Frye, pp. 16-17), then Hemans, for whom poetic composition is a ‘spontaneous overflow’ (divine afflatus?) repeatedly represented in her poetry as ‘pouring’ or ‘swelling’, adopts yet another male model for poetic expression, ventriloquizing her narrative voice into bardic ritual. Continuing in the tradition of Thomas Gray (‘The Bard’), for whom ‘writing becomes a metaphor for speech itself’ in its projection backward into the ‘mantic vocality’ (Frye, p. 112), Hemans fully plays, I would argue, into the Romantic metaphor of poet-as-bard which appropriated the vocabulary of theology for the realm of aesthetics. She has no reservations in dressing (or masquerading) her voice in the quasi-priestly role of a holy vocation, often creating the impression that her stories are narrated by a naive minstrel. In adopting the rhetoric of ‘poetry as process’ (Frye, p. 17), she chooses to articulate an oracular or ecstatic state. Reviving the figure of the original bard and appropriating it to her own purposes, Hemans attempts to bypass the inherent difficulties of a masculinist literary tradition that assimilates the modern poet to bard, but refuses poetic Logos to the woman, thus seeking her poetic empowerment back in mythic origins before historical time. Her intention in assuming the literary convention of a vatic identity is, I believe, to capture ‘visionary language’ in its making and to emulate her contemporary Romantics, who ‘put themselves forward as members of the small company of poet-prophets and bards’ (Abrams, p. 29) Wordsworth, Blake, Southey, Coleridge, Shelley, and Holderlin writing ‘in the persona of the visionary poet-prophet, “the Bard”, who pre­ sent, past, and future sees’, in ‘suitably grandiose literary forms’ (Abrams, p. 332).

110

Romantic Masculinities

It is true that Hemans’s long residence in Wales, the land of bards, must have played an important role in her adoption of a male personanarrator, whose voice, in being prophetic and oracular, is public to an extreme degree. Biographical data informs us, for instance, that her ‘peculiar admiration of Mrs Joanna Baillie’s play of Ethwald was always pleasingly associated with the recollection of her having first read it amidst the ruins of Conway Castle’ (I: p. 17). At the same legendary spot, she is reported to have made the acquaintance of a local surviving bard, an ‘extraordinary musical genius’ (Hemans’s own love for and great sensitivity to music must be mentioned here), one of the few surviving bards ‘on whom the Druidical mantle has fallen so worthily’ (I: p. 18). At the age of eighteen (1811), Hemans addressed a poem ‘To M r Edwards, the Harper of Conway’, in which she placed the grand and abstract poetic language in the traditional locus of the sublime: Minstrel! whose gifted hand can bring, Life, rapture, soul, from every string; And wake, like bards of former time, The spirit of the harp sublime. (I: p. 18) Divine inspiration and expressive aesthetics are conjoined in the fourth stanza of the poem in which she assimilates (like her contemporary male poets) poetic discourse to that of religion: For Genius, with divine control, Wakes the bold chord neglected long, And pours Expression’s glowing soul O’er the W ild Harp, renowned in song. And Inspiration, hovering round, Swells the full energies of sound. (I: p. 19) In a letter to a friend in 1822, she uses the ‘expression of our old Welsh bards ... “as to green spots on the floods” ’ (I: p. 64) - which I believe is Hemans’s felicitous space of ‘home’; as her sister comments, another bardic expression, ‘The noble motto for all die proceedings of the Old Welsh bards. - “In the face of the sun, and in the eye of light”, was one completely after her own heart’ (I: p. 65). Hemans herself asserts in another letter that, ‘ “The idea entertained of the bardic character, appears to me particularly elevated and beautiful”’ - the idea being that of the freedom and absolute invulnerability enjoyed by bards, ‘One of the general titles of the order [being], “Those who

Hemans's Records o f Man

I ll

are free throughout the world”’ (I: pp. 65-6). Later in life, she learnt to play the harp herself and was apparently capable of creating a magic aura through her musical improvisations; a friend recollects that Hemans: pour[ed] forth a full tide of music all without notes, and with as much facility of execution as if she had had the instrument daily under her hand for years. Having listened and wondered for about an hour, I said, ‘Really, Felicia, it seems to me that there is something not quite canny in this; so, especially as it is beginning to be twilight, I shall think it prudent to take my departure’. .. [T]he harp, however, required more physical exertion than [Hemans] could well afford, and it soon fell into neglect again. (I: p. 169) The sublimity of bardic rapture in the context of wild landscapes (so often depicted on the front cover of books on Romanticism) is narrated by Hemans (in a letter of 1822), describing her own experience of the valley of Llangollen celebrated by Cambrian Bards: ‘I once passed through that scenery at night, when its sublimity was inexpressibly heightened by the fires which had been lighted to burn the gorse on the mountains. The broad masses of light and shadow which they occasioned gave it a character of almost savage grandeur, which made a powerful impression upon my mind’ (Chorley, I: p. 87). About ten years later, in another visit to the Welsh countryside, she became so captivated by the genius loci of the place that she assumed the role of magician in an animated nature (the occult being another pole of great attraction to her): I thought Anglesey, through which I travelled the next day, without exception, the most dreary, culinary-looking land of prose I ever beheld. I strove in vain to conjure up the ghost of a Druid, or even of a tree, on its wide mountainous plains, which, I really think, Nature must have produced to rest herself after the strong excitement of composing Caernarvonshire hills. But I cannot tell you how much I wanted to express my feelings when at last that bold mountain-chain rose upon me, in all its grandeur, with the crowning Snowdon, (very superior, I assure you, in ‘shape and feature’, to our friend Ben Lomond,) maintaining his ‘pride of place’ above the whole ridge. (Chorley, II: 155) One of Hemans’s last collections, under the title Sonnets, Devotional and Memorial, opens with a poem on ‘The Sacred Harp’ (VII: p. 243), which is about the loss of inspiration, visionary power and prophetic voice under the strain of ‘guilt’; this time the speaking voice is private,

112

Romantic Masculinities

the tone subdued and non-declamatory, the attitude introspective and self-reflexive, the gender unmistakably female: How shall the harp of poesy regain That old victorious tone of prophet-years, A spell divine o’er guilt’s perturbing fears, And all the hovering shadows of the brain? Unveiling herself for what she is - bardic daughter - Hemans laments the forgetfulness of ‘The mighty music’s consecrated reign’, the loss to her (personal and historical) of the high speech of poetic and magical potency, seeking a transformative redefinition of the ‘fallen’ language itself, a reconstruction of the magical power of the word, which has also been a central concern of her contemporary male poets. In her bardic identity Hemans seeks not exactly a lost power, but the Logos that never was for woman, the self-expression and autonomy of the initiating subject. Fully aware of the fact that the masculine poetic tradition derives from the performative Logos of a paternal deity who created with language in the first spell, and having experienced her exclusion from a linguistic chain of masculine prerogative handed down from Father to Son in the genealogy of God-Bard, Hemans, in one of the last poems she wrote before her death (‘The Poetry of the Psalms’, VII: p.275), draws the line of connection between the bard - ‘Nobly thy song, O minstrel! rush’d to m eet/Th’ Eternal on the pathway of the blast’ - to that ‘high strain’ which ‘Jehovah spake, through the imbreathing fire’. W hat is fascinating is that she herself had sought this linkage between the patriarchal Logos and the human poet, which alienates her from power and articulation precisely for being a woman, as ‘Father’s daughter’. She did this by going directly (almost arrogantly) to the powerful male ‘other’ who rules women’s lives - the archetypal Patriarch himself - when she composed her ‘Address to the Deity: W ritten at the Age of Eleven’ (VII: pp. 331-2): The infant muse, Jehovah! would aspire To swell the adoration of the lyre: Source of all good, oh! teach my voice to sing Thee, from whom Nature’s genuine beauties spring. The woman poet’s (girl’s in this case) address to God is also an attempt to relate to her own ego, to her own power exteriorized in masculine form. Asking for the empowerment of autonomous creativity and masculine assertiveness, she places herself as a descendant of the genealogical line of God-Bard-Poet/Warrior, in a regal self-assertion (Hemans’s conceiving of herself as a ‘queen’ in her private life and

Hemans1s Records o f Man

11 3

letters is most revealing) that combats self-abnegation. She loves to metamorphose from a woman (to whom aggressive public speech is forbidden) to images of males (for whom assertive speech is natural). Given such a theatrical consciousness - the desire for female imper­ sonation of masculinity - it is not surprising that she should be attracted to the genre of metrical romance or epic: ‘Like the other women poets of her time’, we are told, ‘her sense of poetry is inextricably bound to her passion for romance narrative’ (Ross, p. 270). Early in her life, we learn from her sister that ‘New sources of inspiration were now opening to her view. Birthday addresses, songs by the seashore, and invocations to fairies, were henceforth to be diversified with warlike themes; and trumpets and banners now floated through the dreams in which birds and flowers had once reigned paramount’ (I: pp. 10-11). W ith two brothers enlisted in the army (one of them engaged in the Spanish war), she felt that ‘the days of chivalry seemed to be restored’ (I: p. 11). Hemans’s engagement with the romance mode, which is ‘one of the prime expressions of the sentimental imagination’ (Rajan, p. 97), falls, of course, within the romance revival and proliferation of epics in England in the period 1790-1825 (Curran, p. 158). For both men and women poets of Romanticism, the attraction of chivalrous romance, an apparently masculine form, generally takes the form of either external or internalized quest (Scott and Southey versus the other major Roman­ tics). As a Victorian critic observes in his book English Poetesses: ‘Romance was in the air. Byron, Southey, and Scott, were its great heralds; and Mrs. Hemans was the first woman of distinction who joined them in the new movement’ (Robertson, p. 184). Hemans, I would argue, first adopts the externalized form of narrative, writing metrical romances (where she moves across gender, cultural and histori­ cal boundaries, exploring a multiplicity of roles and projections), and then reverting to the internal mode at a later stage when the romance heroine awakens and demands a quest of her own, as in her Records o f Woman and elsewhere. Ross maintains that: The nostalgia for romance is affecting the male romantics and the new female writers in some significantly different ways. Whereas the aura of romance allows men to recapture the masculinity of their poetic project just at the point when they fear its loss most, the same form allows women to experiment with poetry as a familiar structure of feminine experience. (Ross, p. 270) He sees the special fascination that the genre exercises on women writers as ‘the immanent conflict between masculine and feminine desire’ (Ross, p. 271) which, in the case of Hemans, takes the form of placing ‘a subterranean current of feminine desire beneath the visible

114

Romantic Masculinities

pattern [of masculine desire]’, creating a tension ‘that occurs when a rare feminine voice speaks simultaneously with a blustering male choir’ (p.274). He adds that ‘Hemans’ recording of feminine desire is [very] obvious in her poetic romances’ which ‘pit the masculine world of external quest and conquest against the feminine world of internal sentiment and affection’ (p.274). This position closely follows the traditional interpretation of Hemans’s poetic romances, a very early sample of which, written by Maria Jane Jewsbury (contemporary poet and Hemans’s friend) is quoted in the Memoir. The men were made to hold high feast on days of victory - to lead the resolute chivalry of freedom - to consecrate banners in ancient churches, solemnized with rich evening light - to scale the walls of cities or defend them - to strike with courage - to endure with fortitude. The women to sing hymns of pensive worship - to sit in antique bowers, with open missals and attendant maids - to receive at castle gates the true-hearted and the brave ... to wait long, long days for the deceiver who will not return. (I: pp. 28-9) To this Hemans might add: “‘Do you remember all we were saying on the obscurity of fem ale suffering on such stormy days of the lance and spear ...? ’” (Chorley, II: p. 17). Ross, as if theorizing on Jewsbury’s description, proposes that ‘Hemans’ rejection of conventional romance plots’ is related to her intention ‘to extend feminine space into the literary terrain’ in that, because ‘she sees her realm as the domestic, she is much more concerned wirh the inexpressible that resides just within our reach’ (Ross, p. 305). M y own reading of her work sees her diversion from traditional romance more in the absence of the arche­ typal woman’s role as object of masculine desire, and also tends to discern an internal conflict within her texts between narrative structure and narrative voice, plot and image, ethics and aesthetics. Hemans is supposed to take a very straightforward stance when it comes to the binary oppositions that codify masculinity, power, history, glory, pride, adventure versus femininity, service, self-sacrifice, seflessness, humility and gentility - in brief, the paradigmatic modes of being as ‘action’ and ‘suffering’. I believe that although she appears (pretends?) to enhance romantic sentiment and the domestic affections over chivalry, her stories tell a ‘different’ story (through techniques of ‘negative’ representation or ‘end’ reversal), where ‘domesticity’ is less a matter of freedom of choice and more of a cultural convention. ‘Desire’ (mascu­ line? feminine?) lures her towards the gorgeous world of chivalric grandeur and ‘glorious pageantry’. The voice of the bard appropriated by Hemans is also present in

Hemans's Records o f Man

115

her verse epics and romances, where she plots not only stories but narrative strategies. Wearing the bardic mask, as we have seen, involves a displacement of female subjectivity, a transvesting of femininity for the purpose of establishing poetic identity. It is interesting that, writing ‘to be heard by a new audience of women’ (Leighton, p. 13), Hemans should be dressing her femaleness in male impersonations, adopting the double mask of historical narrative and a male narrator. Her epic ‘The Last Constantine’ (III: pp. 178-224) is an example. The narrator is cast in the persona of a bard who, as war correspondent, gives an ‘on the spot’ account of the process of events. The disguised narrative persona sees ‘himself’ as a young member of an old order in unbroken continuity, when he decides: ... to call from green Elysium’s bowers The shades of elder bards; a night, to hold Unseen communion with th’ inspiring powers (III: p. 192) An almost unmediated apprehension of presence - ‘I see a wavering gleam/O’er the hush’d waters tremulously fall’; ‘and I hear /What seems like heavy rain-drops’ (pp. 196, 208) - is accompanied by a male/divine panoptic command: ‘- Ay! this is the compass of our gaze, - ’ (p. 211), and: ... But the scene again Bursts on my vision, as the day-beams break Through the red sulphurous mists. In this epic, as in most of her romances, I think, characters (male or female) do not matter - they are sketchy, disposable, non-existent. Constantine is hardly present (let alone a hero), and lines such as, ‘Sleep, weary Constantine!’, the twice repeated, ‘Where art thou, Con­ stantine?’ and ‘Search for him now’ (pp. 208, 212, 213), emphasize the draining of the ‘heroic’ from its traditional embodiment, the male protagonist. For Hemans, the discourse of the heroic and the glorious is located not in personages but in iconic postures (I would almost say ‘posters’) of romance - ‘warfare as music’, ‘wild hurricane, delight!’. It finds expression in open, violent, free, volcanic, licentious chivalric imagery; in her fascination with ‘rhythm and energy’ (Chorley, I: p.289); in the ‘martial assertiveness of her rhythms and rhymes’ (Leighton, p. 12); in ‘laughter’ as the sign of the irresponsible; in pleasure-loving energy; and, above all, in the ‘colour of masculinity’ in which she drenches her stories, the colour purple, the redness of sexual energy.

116

Romantic Masculinities

At this point I would like to focus on a key image in Hemans’s poetic imagination: that of the (red-gold) ‘banner’. Its sweeping presence denotes an obsession that far surpasses any accounts of patriotism or generic conventions. Banners are found everywhere, even in poems that have nothing to do with chivalry or wars. W hat we see in this is the martial ‘emblem’ par excellence that embodies what we might call the (masculine) joy of exhilaration and life (opposed as it is to ‘dirge’ and death), and which, paradoxically, is of feminine gender (‘queen of earth and air’). As Hemans discloses in one of the last poems she wrote before dying, ‘Despondency and Aspiration’ (VII: pp. 276-82) - the only instance to my knowledge that the term ‘banner’ is used metaphori­ cally (a belated recognition?) - the word comes to represent the visionary power of the creative imagination: When silently it seem’d As if a soft mist gleam’d Before my passive sight, and slowly curling, To many a shape and hue Of vision’d beauty grew, Like a wrought banner, fold by fold unfurling. (VI: p. 278) The autobiographical poem ‘An Hour of Romance’ was written in 1825 in Wales. It consists of 44 lines and the first part is devoted to a sensuous, almost hypnotic description of the natural environment (reminiscent in many ways of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’): ‘thick leaves above me and around’; ‘low sweet sighs’; ‘soft showers on water’; ‘pictured glooms’; ‘a hidden rill/M ade music such as haunts us in a dream’; ‘a tender gleam/Of soft green light’ - all of which forms the natural context for the activity (or rather passivity) of reading: ‘And steep’d the magic page wherin I read /Of royal chivalry and old renown.’ Gradually the female speaker falls into a trance, fully inhabit­ ing the fantasy world where the magic of the imagination turns the words on the page into a ‘virtual reality’: ... But ere long, All sense of these things faded, as the spell Breathing from that high gorgeous tale grew strong On my chain’d soul: - ’twas not the leaves I heard; A Syrian wind the lion-banner stirr’d, Through its proud floating folds. She hears a wild shrill trumpet, feels the burning air, sees steeds of Araby flowing on glittering sands, and lance and spear, and graceful

Hemans's Records o f Man

117

palm-trees, and harps; until a human voice, her boy’s, abruptly dissolves the ‘baseless fabric of this vision’ (to recall Shakespeare) and brings her back to self and family, though her return seems to carry none of the regret and isolation that we find in Keats, for instance. Hemans con­ cludes: The bright mask faded. Unto life’s worn track, What call’d me from its flood of glory back? A voice of happy childhood!—and they pass’d, Banner, and harp, and Paynim’s trumpet blast; Yet might I scarce bewail the splendours gone, M y heart so leap’d to that sweet laughter’s tone. W e learn, of course, from other sources, that ‘Many of the imaginations which floated through her brain in this retirement, were lost in the more interrupted and responsible life, which followed’ (Chorley, I: P-131). Similarly, in the poem ‘The Procession’ (VI: pp. 236-8), introduced with a quotation from Coleridge - “‘The peace which passeth all understanding,” disclosed itself in her looks and movements. It lay on her countenance like a steady unshadowed moonlight’ - visionary (masculine) ‘glory’ is counterposed to human (feminine) ‘love’, and the latter is ostensibly preferred: There were banners to the winds unroll’d, W ith haughty words on each blazon’d fold; High battle-names, which had rung of yore, When lances clash’d on the Syrian shore. It is contrasted to ‘a lowlier grave’ and a female ‘gentle form’. The observer, enravished by the ‘ancestral pageantry’, continues to look until: It faded before me, that masque of pride, The haughty swell of the music died; Banner, and armour, and tossing plume, All melted away in the twilight’s gloom. The poem ends with the visionary transcendence of the masculine sublime carrying the day, and the speaker (and reader) overwhelmed by the imaginative power of vision and sound, despite the overt final validation o f‘the speaking prayer’ of the ‘orphan form’. Speaking about the positionality of the subject in power fantasies, Kaplan endorses the view that the primary function of fantasy is to provide a setting for

118

Romantic Masculinities

desire, because ‘in fantasy the subject does not pursue the object or sign: he appears caught up himself in the sequence of images’ (Kaplan, pp. 127-8). In her ‘chain’d soul’ the female speaker of ‘An Hour of Romance’ submits to the internalized masculine principle that allows her to fantasize possibilities of freedom and power and then return to her domestic/maternal self without apparently facing any irreconcilable contradictions between gender and genre, or imagination and reality. To what extent this is true we might explore by taking Gary Kelly’s lead; he proposes that: ‘Hemans transforms chivalry from a social to subjective culture, from history to the transcendent’ (Kelly, p. 189). The poem ‘The Dreaming Child’ (VI: pp. 52-4) might be consid­ ered a companion poem to ‘An Hour of Romance’, as it portrays a similar, though more aggravated, situation, with the mother winning the child back from the ‘mysterious anguish’ of sleep, the ‘visionary strife’: Come from the shadow of those realms unknown, Where now thy thoughts dismay’d and darkling rove; Come to the kindly region all thine own, The home still bright for thee with guardian love. (VI: p. 54) W hat becomes evident here, and throughout Hemans’s poetry, is what Meena Alexander describes as a ‘subtle, sometimes brutal tension between imaginative power and the claims of femininity’ (Alexander, p. 18), that is the ‘home’ of domesticity. Hemans constantly projects through her poems and letters (and the impressions of the people close to her) images of self-representation that depict the female author as a person engulfed (and finally undone) by the creator as genius. The split between a publicly acceptable persona and that part perceived as the essential, creative, powerful (masculine?) self, yet unacceptable and ‘monstrous’, leads, in the case of Hemans, to extreme consequences, among which were recurrent depression and severe loneliness. So, in her maturity and later years, the masculine/feminine conflict gradually turns from external gender difference to internalized self-division, creat­ ing a chasm in the mind. It has been suggested that Hemans ‘had not succeeded in combining womanliness and poetry’ because of her failed marriage (Clarke, p. 37). This is only part of the problem: as I see it, the root of her ‘anxiety’ about female poetic creativity and her sense of ‘guilt’ lay in the incompatibility between womanly fulfilment and passionate art. Hers is the case of a woman who, having sacrificed domestic (or better marital) ‘happiness’ for artistic ‘ecstasy’ (although the decision might have been more of an inner compulsion than free choice), spent her life caught between ‘celebration’ and ‘mourning’.

Hemans's Records o f Man

119

And although Donald Reiman contests that ‘Hemans never evidences the struggle toward self-discovery’ (Reiman, p. xi), I strongly urge that hers is the struggle of the feminine subject to break into new areas of being (her interest in the occult has already been mentioned), excavating the real self beneath the imposed selves in the intense self-reflexiveness that is, after all, the characteristic of the poetry of sensibility. For her, I think, ‘sensibility’ is an existential condition rather than a ‘pose’, experiencing as she does the void at the centre of sensibility, a feeling of dispossession. The ideal of creative but suffering femininity that lies at the heart of the literature of sensibility is, with her, a ‘reality’. At the risk of sounding over-sentimental, I would like to propose that for Hemans the woman writer’s search for her own autonomous sources of creativity (her ‘masculinity’) fatally wears her down to the point of dying - that (to use my central metaphor) the ‘pen’ becomes the ‘sword’ which finally kills her.

Works Cited Abrams, M. H., Natural Supematuralism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: 1971). Alexander, Meena, Women in Romanticism: M ary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and M ary Shelley (London: 1989). Ashfield, Andrew, ‘Introduction’, in Andrew Ashfield (ed.), Romantic Women Poets, 17 7 0 -18 3 8 : An Anthology (Manchester and New York: 1995). Chorley, Henry F., Memorials of Mrs. Hemans, with Illustrations of her Literary Character from her Private Correspondence, 2 vols (London: 1836). Clarke, Norma, Ambitious Heights: W riting, Friendship, Love - The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Welsh Carlyle (London and New York: 1990). Curran, Stuart, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York and Oxford: 1986). Eliade, Mircea, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (New York: 1958). Fry, Paul H., ‘Thomas Gray’s Feather’ed Cincture: The Odes’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Poets of Sensibility and the Sublime (New York: 1986). Frye, Northrop, ‘Towards Defining an Age o f Sensibility’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Poets of Sensibility and the Sublime (New York: 1986). Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar, ‘Introduction: Gender, Creativity, and the Woman Poet’, in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (eds), Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (Bloomington: 1979). Hemans, Felicia Dorothea, The Works of M rs Hemans; with a Memoir o f her Life by her Sister, 7 vols (Edinburgh and London: 1839). Reference to the Works is given in the text by volume number and page number. Kaplan, Cora, Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London: 1986). --------- (ed.), Salt and Bitter and Good: Three Centuries of English and American Women Poets (London and New York: 1975).

120

Romantic Masculinities

Kelly, Gary, Women, W riting, and Revolution, 17 9 0 -18 2 7 (Oxford: 1993). Leighton, Angela, Victorian Women Poets: W riting Against the Heart (New York: 1992). Lootens, Tricia, ‘Hemans and Home: Victorianism, Feminine “Internal Enemies”, and the Domestication of National Identity’, PMLA 109, 2 (1994), pp. 238-53. Mellor, Anne K , Romanticism and Gender (New York and London: 1993). Moers, Ellen, Literary Women (New York: 1977). Rajan, Tilottama, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse o f Romanticism (Ithaca and London: 1980). Reiman, Donald H., ‘Introduction’, in Donald H. Reiman (ed.), Romantic Context: Poetry. Significant M inor Poetry, 17 8 9 -18 3 0 (New York and London: 1978). Robertson, Eric S., English Poetesses: A Series of Critical Biographies, with Illus­ trative Extracts (London, Paris, and New York: 1883). Ross, Marlon B., The Contours o f Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry (New York and Oxford: 1989). Stodart, M. A., Female W riters: Thoughts on their Proper Sphere and on their Powers o f Usefulness (London: 1842). Taylor, Anya, Magic and English Romanticism (Athens: 1979). Wilhelm, Richard, ‘Introduction’, in I Ching, or Book o f Changes (London: 1951). Williams, Jane, The Literary Women of England (London: 1861).

Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, and the New Woman Johanna M. Smith Bowdoin College W hile the figures of my title may seem very different - a historical murderer, a fictional detective, and a concept of femininity - all three are fictions or constructions of the late nineteenth-century press. As Judith Walkowitz and Jane Caputi have demonstrated,1Jack the Ripper was in great part a creation of the popular press; the Sherlock Holmes stories were published in The Strand magazine; New Women were the subject of press commentary throughout the 1880s, and the New Woman I will discuss, Hilda Wade, appeared in a series of stories written by Grant Allen and published in The Strand in 1899. I read all three figures as imbricated in late nineteenth-century popular discourses of criminality, medical science and prescribed masculinity and femi­ ninity. The hook on which I hang my analysis of these three cultural productions is borrowed from sociology and criminology - the concept of the moral panic. I want to argue that moral panics over medical science and the New Woman were variously constructed and addressed by the forms of masculinity and femininity embodied in Sherlock Holmes and the New Woman Hilda Wade.

Jack the Ripper A moral panic is created by one of the media, in five stages;2 1 will use press coverage of the Ripper murders to illustrate this. An initial deviance - for example, the first murder discovered in Whitechapel on 31 August 1888 - is reported in the press. The second stage is inventory, a series of events perceived as similar to the initial deviance - in this case, more murders by evisceration in Whitechapel reported in Sept­ ember and October 1888. The next stage is sensitization, a coverage that increases awareness of the deviance; this is often accomplished by the creation of a folk devil (such as Jack the Ripper). Inventory and sensitization operate together, each heightening the other to create the 121

122

Romantic Masculinities

fourth stage of moral panic, an overestimation of the deviance; at one point, for instance, twenty-two murders in Whitechapel were attributed to a single killer. The final stage is the production of moral entrepren­ eurs, who ‘use the public indignation’ to ‘“sell” their particular form of moral enterprise’.3 The moral entrepreneur might be a crusading newspaperman, like W. T. Stead with his 1880’s ‘Maiden Tribute’ cam­ paign, or a hard-line judge. But it might also be a fictional figure, and I will be arguing that Sherlock Holmes and Hilda Wade functioned as moral entrepreneurs for panics that centred on the criminalizing, pro­ fessionalizing, and gendering of medical science. It should be clear that moral panics are constructed, and that they tend to be ‘self-perpetuating; recreating and amplifying the threat to which they are a response’.41 want to demonstrate this self-perpetuation by examining the Jack the Ripper moral panics that were constructed by the Illustrated London News and Punch . The Illustrated London News was a weekly publication which covered various doings of interest to middleand upper-middle-class London readers; Punch , a weekly illustrated humour periodical, commented on topical issues for a similar audience. Hence, the Ripper coverage in these papers indicates some of the strategies and purposes of a moral panic that was pitched towards middle- and upper-middle-class Londoners. The first point to make about this coverage is that Jack the Ripper does not figure in it. The term most commonly used is ‘the Whitechapel murders’, and, even in the sensitization stage of this moral panic, the ‘folk devil’ is generally characterized as ‘the Whitechapel Fiend’ or ‘the Whitechapel “ripper” ’.5 In this way, the murders are represented as events peculiar to the East End working-class district of Whitechapel. The second and related point to make about the coverage of both publications is that it simultaneously constructs and manages a ‘Whitechapel murders’ moral panic via a discourse of liminality. I use ‘liminality’ in anthropologist Victor Turner’s sense, to denote the physical or temporal ‘betwixt and between’ state6 which well describes Whitechapel’s relation to other London areas. This working-class dis­ trict was just on the borders of London’s financial district, the City; aristocratic bloods slummed in Whitechapel,7 and many wealthy, philanthropic young men and women came to live there after the opening of Toynbee Hall in 1885.8 Some social commentators of the 1880s, such as W alter Besant, sought to manage Whitechapel’s limi­ nality by representing East Enders as different from other Londoners only in their poverty,9 and in September 1888 the Illustrated London News took this tack when it termed the East End a ‘manufacturing’ district inhabited by ‘decent, orderly, and cheerful people’ with an ‘orderly domestic and social life’.10 But press coverage of the murders also endowed Whitechapel with

Jack the Ripper, Holmes,

the New Woman

123

‘the quality which most fascinated late Victorians’:11 the threatening homogeneity of a ‘working-class district unalloyed by middle-class guidance’.12 In this sensitization of Whitechapel, the district’s liminality is converted into a dangerous otherness which is then used to justify not only ‘existing methods of control’, but also ‘better and more extensive means of disciplinary supervision’.13 An example of this func­ tion of sensitization is the mini moral panic over ‘Leather Apron’, a Polish Jew who was arrested on the theory that the Whitechapel murderer was a ritual slaughterman. Whitechapel had a large concen­ tration of Jewish immigrants, who were often blamed for its unemployment and overcrowding, and Jews also formed a ‘high pro­ portion’ of those questioned about the Whitechapel murders.14 The anti-Semitism of the Leather Apron panic enabled commentators to approach the perceived problem of a Jewish Whitechapel with solu­ tions - such as removal of the slaughterhouses - that left its larger economic and political structures intact. Another example of such ‘othering’ of Whitechapel occurs in James Payn’s news column of 27 October 1888, when he drops his usual arch and fldneur-\ikc detachment in order to express an earnest hope that ‘the horror of the Whitechapel murders’ will call ‘public attention to the growing brutality of our roughs’ and to the ‘inadequate’ punishment of that brutality.15 Similar disciplinary managements of Whitechapel’s liminality appear in the Punch and News articles that overestimate the area’s poverty and crime. Of course, this East End had itself been constructed in the moral panic fuelled by such texts as The Bitter Cry o f Outcast London (1883) and How the Poor Live (1883), and by press coverage of the Trafalgar Square ‘riots’ by the unemployed in 1886 and 1887. Thus, the Punch and News overestimation belongs to this socio-medical discourse which aimed at crime- and disease-control of Whitechapel. Both papers hector their middle-class readers for irresponsibly ignoring the district’s poverty. In a September 1888 illustrated poem entitled ‘Nemesis of Neglect’, for instance, Punch blamed ‘murderous Crime’ in Whitechapel on middle- and upper-class indifference to ‘the slum’s foul air’.16 Such a ‘moral panic strategy became a substitute for [the] hard copy’ on the Whitechapel murders that was denied to the press by Scotland Yard;17 indeed, in late 1888 Punch repeatedly used the unsolved murders as a stick with which to beat the Metropolitan Police and detective force. W ith the slum and police angles of its coverage, then, Punch both ratcheted up the Whitechapel moral panic and established its own pretensions to serious coverage of that panic for its readers. The News's angle was to advertise the authenticity of its reports. In October 1888, a News artist accompanied the Vigilance Committee, a group of respectable Whitechapel residents, in its ‘exploration of the dismal haunts of the degraded inhabitants’ of

124

Romantic Masculinities

Whitechapel; together they ventured into ‘the lonely courts and alleys, where [lived] the miserable female victims of the indescribable cruelties that have shocked the public mind’. The artist’s sketches of homeless and other ‘Outcasts at the East-End’ were meant to ‘appeal to humane feelings of regret and earnest desire to check the downward course of so many of our fellow-creatures in the foul places of great and mighty London’.18 As such press overestimation reified a Whitechapel of criminal poverty, ‘the identification and exclusion of this “residuum”’ worked to construct a ‘consensual “we”’ of concerned bourgeois readers. And as this discourse of moral panic created that ‘consensual community’ 19 united in abhorrence of the Whitechapel murders, it also created a readership committed to judicial and philanthropic discipline of the East End. To contextualize the medical science form of the Whitechapel mur­ ders moral panic, I turn now to the antivivisection moral panic produced by the late nineteenth-century professionalization of medicine. By the 1880s British medical professionals were commonly classified as general practitioners or as consultants, and the latter group raised concerns which we will see expressed in the ‘mad doctor’ hypothesis of the Whitechapel murderer’s identity. Consultants were medical scientists who had moved away from the older methods of comparative anatomy and clinical observation to a more ‘activist, interventionist, empiricist’ medicine based on experimentation.20 Anxieties about such experimen­ tation focused on physiologists and peaked with the controversy over vivisection in the 1870s. Prior to this decade, the utility of physiological experiments was seldom questioned, partly because the medical pro­ fession had established physiology as ‘an independent science justified by the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake’,21 and partly because the introduction of anaesthetics in mid-century had seemed to ensure that vivisected animals felt no pain. By the 1870s, however, it had become clear that anaesthetics such as ether sometimes failed, and that others such as curare induced paralysis rather than insensibility in animals. Furthermore, the authoritative Handbook fo r the Physiological Laboratory (1873) made no mention of anaesthesia, and two years later one of its authors, Dr Emanuel Klein, testified before the Royal Commission on vivisection that he used anaesthetics only to keep animals from biting or scratching, and that no scientific investigator should be ‘expected to devote time and thought to inquiring what [the] animal will feel’.22 Due in part to the subsequent furore, Parliament passed the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876. This act, however, regulated vivisection rather than abolishing it; moreover, that regulation was turned over to a medical elite, so in effect the act was a victory for the ‘expert knowledge and professional autonomy’ of medical science.23 But the campaign against vivisection continued, rising in fervour after 1884 and reaching

Jack the Ripper, Holmes,

the New Woman

125

moral-panic intensity with the publication in 1887 of Edward Berdoe’s very popular antivivisection novel, St. Bernard's. A brief consideration of St. Bernard's will indicate how moral entre­ preneurs for panics about vivisection, and about medical science in general, might be gendered. The novel’s villain, Dr Malthus Crowe, is an experimental scientist and vivisector who caps his medical career by poisoning his wife: ‘W hat wonder? He had been a murderer half his life in a licensed and acknowledged sense’.24 Positioned against this deadly scientific masculinity is the novel’s hero, Dr Harrowby Elsworth. A ‘true man’ (p. 8) when he began his medical studies at St Bernard’s hospital, Elsworth loses his ‘lofty ideal’ (p. 232) o f‘service of humanity’, but regains it by ‘berating himself into manhood again’ (p. 234). Deter­ mining to ‘be a man, and live a man’s life’, he brings the blessings of sanitary engineering to the Gitano gypsies of Spain, and he also ‘bearjs] his part manfully in the fight’ against irreligion (p. 298) by telling them Gospel stories ‘with hearty, manly sympathy’ (p. 297). The complement to this lofty masculinity is a heroic femininity modelled on Coventry Patmore’s ‘angel in the house’ (Berdoe often cites Patmore) and John Ruskin’s ‘teaching’ that ‘[w]omen mend what men mar’ (p. 309). Women’s ‘whole-hearted, unselfish courage’ must correct the ‘deepseated, persistent social wrong[s]’ (p. 308) created by ‘the selfishness, the thoughtless cruelty, and the greed of men’. Already ‘hundreds of noble, clever, earnest, indefatigable women’ (p. 8) are ‘leaving work more congenial to their habits and tastes’ and ‘taking up the work men are too limp and selfish to perform’ (pp. 9-10), and Berdoe’s two heroines exemplify such feminine service. W e will see that Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade is the nurse as New Woman; in contrast, Berdoe divides the heroine function between the nurse Sister Agnes and the New Woman Mildred Lee. If nursing is a ‘sacred office’ (p. 274), it is also a ‘noble profession’ (p. 334) for ‘skilled and educated’ women like Sister Agnes. Distressed by ‘needless and dangerous’ experiments (p.275) performed on patients at St Bernard’s, she leaves to become matron at the Nightingale Hospital, established by ‘ladies of wealth and position’ (p. 319) who have settled in the East End to help ‘the poor and ignorant’ by ‘teaching them how to help themselves’. Mildred Lee, a New Woman engaged in ‘philanthropic projects’ as well as ‘intellectual pur­ suits’ (pp. 384-5), gives her fortune to Nightingale Hospital and devotes herself to ‘revolutionizing] the system of our great hospitals’ (p. 421); she also marries Elsworth, because ‘women love heroes’ (p. 412). Unlike her New Woman aunt, then, who considers marriage ‘not the best state’ for women concerned with ‘the wants of the great world outside a nursery’ (pp. 385-6), Mildred is finally a Newish Woman. Perhaps more striking in the context of Berdoe’s critique of vivisection is his representation of Elsworth as the New Man of Science. Where the

1 26

Romantic Masculinities

vivisecting surgeon Wilson believes that ‘ [s]ympathy was for women’, Elsworth’s ideal masculinity includes the unwillingness to cause pain, which is ‘the unvarying qualification of all the noblest men and women’ (p. 156). The medical science element of the Whitechapel murders moral panic should be understood in this context, namely the anxiety detailed in St Bernard’s over-surgical experimentation by medical men. The ‘first major theory’ 25 of the Whitechapel murderer’s identity was the ‘mad doctor’ hypothesis of a medical professional gone wrong. Some contemporaries believed the Whitechapel murderer was an abortion­ ist,26 or a surgeon taking revenge on prostitutes after his son was infected with syphilis. Conan Doyle thought the murderer had ‘a rough knowl­ edge of surgery’ 27 (he also thought the killer dressed as a woman, a notion which cries out for analysis, but which I must regretfully set aside). One particularly panic-inducing theory held the mad doctor to be a vivisecting surgeon who had ‘extended his research from dogs to prostitutes’.28This theory tapped a working-class fear of becoming what Berdoe calls ‘human “material”’ (p. 36), the subject of medical experi­ mentation. Such fears were well founded: most hospital patients were working- or lower-middle-class, medical schools as well as charity wards were often attached to hospitals, and the medical scientists who staffed these hospitals sometimes placed their ‘right to research’ over the care of patients.29 The mad doctor hypothesis also tapped fears that medical science regarded pain with ‘curiosity, inquisitiveness, and absolute indifference’ 30 rather than Elsworthian compassion.31 Leading antivivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe, for instance, believed the Whitechapel murderer was ‘a physiologist delirious with cruelty’.32 And because the mad doctor murdered women, this hypothesis focused New Women’s fears of aggressive masculinity. I will return to this anxiety in the New Woman section below; here, I want to argue that it is this moral panic, evinced in the hypothesis of the Whitechapel murderer as a medical professional, for which another professional, scientific detective, Sherlock Holmes, served as moral entrepreneur.

Sherlock Holmes The audience for this entrepreneurial Holmes consisted of readers of The Strand magazine; The Strand published ‘cheap, healthful literature’ 33 for a ‘largely middle class or improved working class’ readership.34 A typical number might include an ‘urban exploration’ piece on the East End, an interview with a well-known professional figure, and an educa­ tional article on scientific or medical discoveries. Reader interest in criminality was served by articles on the new science of criminology

Jack the Ripper, Holmes,

the New Woman

127

and by fiction focused on the diagnosis and detection of crime - serials such as ‘Martin Hewitt, Investigator’, ‘Romances from a Detective’s Case-Book’, and ‘Adventures of a Man of Science’, as well as the Sherlock Holmes and Hilda Wade stories. By examining how Conan Doyle revised Holmes’s science, I hope to indicate the kind of moral entrepreneur best suited for readers of The Strand who were troubled by moral panics over the profession of medical science. The Holmes of the first, pre-Ripper novella, A Study in Scarlet (1887), might have been custom-made for antivivisectionist propaganda. Although he is not a medical student, he is first seen conducting experiments in a chemistry lab and exulting over his ‘practical medico­ legal discovery’ of a test for blood-stains.35 In addition, he is an ‘enthusiast in some branches of science’ (p.637) with ‘a passion for definite and exact knowledge’; yet he is ‘a little queer in his ideas’, finally ‘a little too scientific’. This latter quality ‘approaches to cold­ bloodedness’, as evidenced by his habit of ‘beating the subjects in the dissecting-room with a stick’. In the Holmes stories written after the Whitechapel murders, that effect of stark scientificity is throttled back; Holmes is never again seen in a lab and seldom does chemical tests. More significantly, his scientific interests and methods alter. By The Sign o f the Four (1890) he is devoted to the ‘exact science’ of detection (p. 713), and by A Scandal in Bohemia (1891) his cold-bloodedness is not experimental but analytical, a ‘cold, perfect ... reasoning and observing’ (p. 1). Three points need to be made about Holmes’s analytical reasoning. The first is that it takes on the cachet of the non-experimental sciences.36 Dr Joseph Bell, Conan Doyle’s teacher and his model for Holmes,37 praised the detective as ‘a successful diagnostician’, and he compared Holmes’s monograph on varieties of tobacco ash to ‘the recognition and differentiation’ of bacteria, which he considered the ‘greatest stride’ in modern ‘preventive and diagnostic medicine’.38 As a ‘consulting detective’ (Sign, p. 714), Holmes might seem linked with the experimental science of medical consultants; as a diagnostician, however, he is distanced from the materialist medicine and experi­ mentation that characterize consultants, surgeons and the Whitechapel murderer. Instead, he works on ‘the model of medical semiotics or symptomatology’ that investigates surfaces rather than innards.39 That symptomatology also informs the sciences of criminology whose development in the 1890s can be charted in the Holmes stories. Cesare Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal was popularized in England by Havelock Ellis’s The Criminal (1890), and Holmes’s science of de­ tection shares with Lombroso’s criminal anthropology a claim to the professional authority ‘to read in the body [a] scientifically predeter­ mined identity’.40 The parallels between Holmesian detective science

1 28

Romantic Masculinities

and French criminology are especially noteworthy. Edmond Locard, one of the originators of French forensic medicine, recommended A Study in Scarlet and The Sign o f the Four to students of his ‘new police science’.41 In ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’ (1893) Hol­ mes expresses his ‘enthusiastic admiration’ for Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometry (p. 305), and by 1903 he is conversant with the Angli­ cized form of anthropometry set out in Francis Gabon’s Finger-Prints (1892). Using all these diagnostic tools, Holmes serves contemporary readers as a moral entrepreneur for the virtues and efficacy of scientific detection. The second point to make about Holmes’s professional authority is its liminality. Holmes figured as a moral entrepreneur for any number of moral panics: Russian Nihilists (‘The Adventure of the Golden Pince-nez’, 1904); Irish Fenians (The Valley o f Fear, 1915); innumerable secret societies such as the Ku Klux Klan (‘The Five Orange Pips’, 1891) and the Mafia (‘The Adventure of the Six Napoleons’, 1904); and the ruling class’s penchant for scandal (‘Adventures of the Beryl Coronet’, 1892; ‘The Priory School’, 1904; and ‘The Illustrious Client’, 1927). Holmes succeeds as a moral entrepreneur across such a spectrum of panics because his authority is liminal, ‘betwixt and between’ old and new models of policing. In one sense he is a throwback to an older judicial structure in which local gentry served as JPs in a relatively informal system, which ‘could be used to maintain their power as a ruling class’.42 ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ (1891), in which Holmes is judge and jury as well as detective, or ‘The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton’ (1904), in which his conduct is ‘morally justifiable, though technically criminal’ (p. 434), are only two examples of Holmes exercising such ruling-class discretionary powers. But as a scientific detective he also has the authority of a newer model of the professional, the expert with specialized knowledge. The stories maintain this form of authority by differentiating it from another new and competing professional model, that of the detective police. In the 1880s the Metropolitan Criminal Investigation Division, although newly profes­ sionalized, remained in bad odour. Neither popular dissatisfaction with the secrecy of detective methods, nor the ‘lingering odium’ from the Turf Fraud corruption scandal of 1877,43 was improved by the galloping incompetence (gleefully recorded by Punch ) manifest in the CID investi­ gation of the Whitechapel murders. The Holmes stories contrast the competence of the upper-middle-class professional detective, whose work is his ‘highest reward’ (Sign, p. 714), with the bumbling and corruption of a largely working-class detective police force. And Holmes is not bound by the rigid ‘institutional rules’ governing the newly bureuacratized force,44 so his ‘selectively idiosyncratic “bohemianism” ’ 45 further distinguishes him from police professionals.

Jack the Ripper, Holmes, and the New Woman

129

The final point, and one which leads into my final section, is the intransigent masculinity of Holmes’s rational science of detection. As Catherine Belsey and Laurie Langbauer have demonstrated, the mys­ terious irrationality of women functions in these stories as ‘ground’ but also ‘quicksand’ for the masculine rationality of Holmes’s science.46 His success as a ‘perfect reasoning and observing machine’ {Scandal, p. 1) is predicated on his ‘abhorren[ce]’ of heterosexual desire; in his view ‘ [a]ll emotions, and that one particularly’, are ‘distracting’ to ‘the trained reasoner’. If there is anything liminal about Holmes’s masculinity, it is his homosocial relation to Watson; unlike St. Bernard's Harrowby Elsworth, however, Holmes lacks the sympathetic emotions charac­ teristic of that New Man of Science. In contrast, creating such sympathy in a young medical student helps mark nurse-detective Hilda Wade as a successful moral entrepreneur for the moral panics of medical science and the New Woman.

The New Woman By the 1880s it was possible to identify a New Woman: young, mid­ dle-class, highly educated, financially independent, single ‘on principle’, and otherwise resistant to conventional decorums of femininity.47 The ensuing moral panic is evident in the verbal and physical abuse experi­ enced by suffragists, in the vicious caricatures of women’s rights advocates as snaggle-toothed hysterics, and in press ridicule of ‘the shrieking sisterhood’. Again, Punch is exemplary; in 1888 it carried a series of cartoons and squibs mocking the current ‘is marriage obsolete?’ debate, and one September 1888 cartoon celebrating marriage appeared just above a piece on the Whitechapel murders. The conjunction is not fortuitous. The New Woman was highly visible because of ‘new heterosocial space [s]’ of urban leisure and employment,48 and many women feared that this visibility made them targets for the Whitechapel murderer. In her ‘Ladies’ Column’ for the Illustrated London News of 29 September 1888, Florence Fenwick-Miller terms the Whitechapel murders only one instance of ‘a terrible out­ burst ... an epidemic of crimes of violence against women’.49 Moreover, ‘the men who sit in judgment on such crimes practically encourage them’; one judge, who sentenced a man to six months for the attempted murder of a woman, was recently knighted. ‘How long’, she concludes, ‘is this cruel and brutal acquiescence of “learned gentlemen” with cruel and brutal crimes against the weaker half of society to go on unchecked?’ Punch printed several cartoons ridiculing such fears, and Robert Ander­ son, head of the CID, pooh-poohed women’s ‘silly hysterics’ by insisting that the Whitechapel murderer was ‘a cause of danger’ only to ‘a small

130

Romantic Masculinities

and definite class’, namely prostitutes.50 As Fenwick-Miller’s column indicates why these containment theories failed to assuage New Women’s fears of a mad doctor, it also suggests that they had good reason to distrust such masculine differentiations between them and prostitutes. The link between feminists and prostitutes in the 1860’s campaign against the Contagious Disease Acts is well known; less well known are two 1880’s associations between New Women and prostitutes. One is the vulnerability of New Women to the policing of West End street prostitutes, which increased in the 1880s despite (or perhaps because of) the failure of a campaign - ‘largely sparked by the medical profes­ sion’ - to extend the CD Acts from military to civilian populations.51 The notorious Cass case of 1887, in which a London constable arrested a New Woman whom he mistook for a prostitute, drew parliamentary attention to the police’s overzealous efforts to suppress prostitution;52 it must also have indicated to New Women their vulnerability to such mistakes. The second link between prostitutes and New Women is the invasion of women’s bodies by medical science. As early as the 1840s disorders that had previously been signalled by symptoms as apparent to patients as to physicians had been ‘thoroughly mystified’ to the realm of ‘gynaecological experts’.53 One result was the medical examination, sanctioned by the CD Acts, of supposed prostitutes by speculum. Another was a ‘new age of gynaecological surgery’; between 1853 and 1883 surgeons perfected clitoridectomy, ovariotomy, hysterectomy and radical mastectomy.54Working-class women were especially at risk from experimental research into such surgical ‘cures’ for masturbation and nymphomania. One doctor informed the British Medical Association that these disorders appeared only in pauper women, and curative clitoridectomies were performed ‘experimentally’ on women paupers as late as 1900.55 But such procedures were also used to cure ‘derange­ ment and aberrant behavior’ in general,56 which in middle- and upper-class women included New Womanism. Hence, it is not sur­ prising that many New Women, heeding antivivisectionists’ pleas to ‘identify themselves with the animals’, feared that they too were ‘poten­ tial victims of sexual assault’ by medical science.57 Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade series works to position the New Woman as a moral entrepreneur for such mad doctor moral panics about masculine medical science. Himself a gendeman amateur scientist inter­ ested in natural history and speculative biology, Allen popularized ‘soft’ Darwinism in such books as Physiological Aesthetics (1877). He is perhaps best known for his novel The Woman Who Did (1895), the defence of free love which became a cause celebre of the mid-1890s New Woman controversy. But Allen also wrote the novel to further his view of women as ‘eugenic police’,58 and his Hilda Wade series performs a

Jack the Ripper, Holmes,

Afcy

Woman

131

similar ideological containment of the New Woman. I will return to this function of the series; here, I want to focus on the first story, which appeared in The Strand in March 1899. I approach this story with the aid of three concepts. The first is liminality, for the very term ‘New Woman’ indicates a ‘betwixt and betweenness’ that is particularly evident in Hilda Wade. The second and related concept is ‘parasexuality’, defined as a liminal or ‘middle ground’ of sexuality,59 an ‘ensemble of sites, practises, and occasions that mediate across the frontiers of the putative public-private divide’ which relegated the ‘old’ woman to the private sphere. As a New Woman nurse-detective working amidst a gaggle of male medical students, Hilda Wade stands in this middle ground between the Madonna-whore binary of mid-Victorian sexual ideology. M y third concept is glamour, the ‘visual code’ of parasexuality,60 the sign of gender commodification under and for capitalism. Parasexuality is created by late capitalism as an ‘open yet licit sexuality’ which is to be ‘deployed but contained’,61 and glamour ensures ‘the proper utilisation of resources’ toward this ‘managed sexuality’ - not a moralized suppression of sexuality, but an economic channelling of parasexuality. The selling of commodities such as The Strand is accomplished in part through the glamour of other, gendered commodities such as Hilda Wade. The first story in the series, ‘The Episode of the Patient who Disappointed her Doctor’, introduces Hilda Wade, her bete noire the aged Dr Sebastian, and young Dr Cumberledge, Sebastian’s assistant and the story’s narrator. Eerily reminiscent of the early ‘cold-blooded’ Sherlock Holmes, Sebastian too displays every flaw emphasized in antivivisectionist propaganda. He is ‘a scientific doctor’, a physiologist and surgeon ‘engrossed by one overpowering pursuit’, the ‘advancement of science’.62 He is particularly obsessed with his discovery lethodyne, an anaesthetic which he hopes will ‘revolutionize surgery’ (p. 329). Even the hierophantic young Cumberledge, who reverences Sebastian as ‘the Master’ (p. 328) and ‘the prince of physiologists’, recognizes that ‘[p]atients recovered, and patients died: but their death or recoveries were as dross to lethodyne’. To perfect his anaesthetic, Sebastian experiments on rabbits, the hospital matron’s pet cats, and his own working-class patients, including women ranging from a washerwoman and a consumptive to ‘mothers of large families’ (p. 333). He displays the vivisector’s indifference to pain in his ‘professional enthusiasm’ over a woman patient whose ‘deadly’ and ‘malignant’ growth requires surgery and thus affords a ‘splendid opportunity’ to test lethodyne. This patient, Isabel Huntley, is the nexus of important differences between the doctor Sebastian and the nurse Hilda Wade. Where Sebastian calls Isabel ‘Number Fourteen’ (p. 333) and refers ‘sarcasti­ cally’ to her working-class origins, Hilda calls Isabel by her name and

132

Romantic Masculinities

recognizes her as ‘a lady in fibre’. After Isabel’s operation, Sebastian congratulates the surgeon on ‘[a] very neat piece of work’ (p. 334); Hilda asks after the patient, and her concern is also contrasted with the ‘callousness’ of the surgeon (whose refusal to be ‘bothered by senti­ mental considerations’ recalls the vivisector Emanuel Klein). Most importantly, Hilda is alone in understanding the relation between Isabel’s health and her sexuality. Unlike Sebastian, she diagnoses that Isabel’s illness has been ‘aggravated’ by fretting over the absence of her fiance Arthur, and after the surgery she makes therapeutic use of that knowledge by coaxing Isabel to eat ‘for Arthur’s sake’ (p. 335). To Sebastian, who ‘thought meanly of women’, such acts are ‘not nursing’; but to Cumberledge, Hilda is an ‘Angel of Mercy’ whose version of nursing is irradiated by such feminine service. Martha Vicinus has documented the difficulties posed for nursing’s new professionalization in the 1890s by its ‘domestic-service ori­ gins’.63 Hilda W ade’s feminine services are made less problematic, for she is not a simple binary to Sebastian’s masculinity, but rather ‘inter­ mediate temperamentally between the two sexes’ (p. 328). While Hilda has ‘the deepest feminine gift - intuition’, Sebastian’s ‘instinct of diag­ nosis’ is ‘the same endowment in its masculine embodiment’; feminine intuition and the masculine diagnostic ‘instinct’, in other words, are represented as two forms of the same faculty. Furthermore, Hilda’s ‘subtle knowledge of temperament’ often produces results close to those of Sebastian’s ‘reasoned scientific analysis’, so that her intuition becomes professional as well as feminine. In these ways the story constructs a gendered yet professional differentiation between sciences: Sebastian is the callous masculine experimenter, Hilda is the feminine care-giver and professional diagnostician. The difference is driven home at the end of the story, which explains how ‘the patient disappointed her doctor’: Isabel survives, and Sebastian ‘quite angrily’ (p. 337) terms her recovery ‘an insult to medical science’. By a feminine professionalism which saves Isabel from her doctor, nurse Hilda functions as a moral entre­ preneur for a panic over medical science’s callous masculinity. As the series continues and Hilda defeats Sebastian’s other nefarious designs, she takes on an authority almost as wide-ranging as Sherlock Holmes’s. In one story Sebastian is described as ‘like the worst of anarchists’ for stirring up a rebellion of the Matabele in Rhodesia;64 the title of another story characterizes him as ‘the European with the Kaffir Heart’, and thus suggests how threatening is a man who flouts the dictum that ‘[i]n a conflict of race we must back our own color’.65 By foiling such threats to the empire in the person of Sebastian, Hilda serves, like Holmes, as moral entrepreneur for a number of moral panics. But Allen’s series also contains the newness of this New Woman in several ways. In one particularly ugly story he uses Hilda to undermine

Jack the Ripper, Holmes,

Afotf

Woman

133

critiques such as Fenwick-Miller’s of masculine violence: Hilda excuses a wife-murderer by using scientific data to prove that women with certain physical characteristics ‘always get assaulted’.66 Furthermore, her life’s mission is not her profession, but salvaging the reputation of her doctor father from a scandal initiated by Sebastian. Although pur­ suing this mission involves Hilda in such New Woman activities as travelling alone to Rhodesia and bicycling away from the Matabele rebellion, after clearing her father’s name she marries Cumberledge. I want to conclude with the contradictory operations in this romance of parasexuality and glamour. In the series’ first story, Hilda’s work in the hospital provides the ‘ensemble of sites, practices, and occasions’ which constitute parasexuality. ‘M y care and your skill’ (p. 334), Hilda tells Cumberledge, join as they treat ‘our patient’ Isabel. As Cumberledge realizes that caring for the patient is ‘just what [nursing] was’ (p. 335), he also learns from Hilda to ‘distrust’ Sebastian (p. 337) and to recognize the ‘cruelty’ that informs his erstwhile mentor’s ‘devotion to science’. From this professional rapport develops their personal relationship and eventually their marriage, the conclusion to the series and thus a model of how parasexuality works. A New Woman whose antipathy to Sebastian might be perceived as anti-man is eventually endowed with a heterosexual desire safely channelled into marriage. Moreover, the marriage saves Cumberledge not only from Sebastian’s form of medical science, but from Sebastian himself; in the wake of the Oscar Wilde scandal, the name ‘Sebastian’ was coded as gay,67 and his belief that ‘[a] doctor, like a priest’,68 should remain unmarried may be another hint of his sexuality. And it is relevant here that the stories’ illustrations present Hilda as demure, but quite a dish; as this sexual glamour manages the potentially threatening figure of the New Woman, it also makes her a commodity which helps to sell the com­ modity in which she appears. If such containments make Hilda Wade a less satisfactory figure for 1990s feminists than for 1890s New Women, the contradictions of that containment can fruitfully suggest how and why Victorian sexualities were constructed and managed, the many and various uses to which popular discourses of masculinity and femininity were put. Notes 1 J. Walkowitz, City o f Dreadful Delight: Narratives o f Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: 1992), pp. 191-228, and J. Caputi, The Age o f Sex Crime (Bowling Green Ohio: 1987), pp. 22-30. 2 R. Sindall, Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century: Media Panic or Real Danger? (Leicester: 1990), pp. 32-6. 3 J. Davis, ‘The London Garotting Panic o f 1862: A Moral Panic and the

134

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17

18 19 20 21

22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

Romantic Masculinities Creation o f a Criminal Class in mid-Victorian England’, in V .A . C. Gatrell et al. (eds), Crime and the Law: The Social History o f Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London: 1980), p. 199. Davis, ‘London Garotting Panic’, p. 199. Quoted in A. McLaren, A Prescription fo r Murder: The Victorian Serial Killings o f Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (Chicago: 1993), pp. 57, 140. V* Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: 1986), p. 25. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 194. P. J. Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (London: 1971), p. 110. Keating, Working Classes, p. 103. ‘Sketches with the police at the East End’, Illustrated London News 22 (September 1888), p. 352. A. S. W ohl, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (London: 1977), p. 313. G. S. Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationships between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: 1971), pp. 322-3. M. -C. Leps, Apprehending the Criminal: The Production o f Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse (Durham NC: 1992), p. 116. S. L. Gilman, “‘W ho kills whores?” “I do”, says Jack: Race, Gender, and Body in Victorian London’, in C. B. Burroughs and J. D. Ehrenreich (eds), Reading the Social Body (Iowa City: 1993), p. 113. J. Payn, ‘Our Note Book’, Illustrated London News 27 (October 1888), p.478. ‘Nemesis o f Neglect’, Punch 29 (September 1888), pp. 149-50. C. Frayling, ‘The House that Jack Built: Some Stereotypes o f the Rapist in the History o f Popular Culture’, in S. Tomaselli and R. Porter (eds), Rape (Oxford: 1986), p. 204. ‘Outcasts at the East-End’, Illustrated London News 13 (October 1888), p.422. Leps, Apprehending the Criminal, p. 130. R. D. French, Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society (Prince­ ton: 1975), p. 32. S. Richards, ‘Vicarious Suffering, Necessary Pain: Physiological Method in Late Nineteenth-century Britain’, in N. A. Rupke (ed.), Vivisection in Historical Perspective (London: 1987), p. 126. Quoted in French, Antivivisection, p. 104. Ibid., p. 219. Aesculapius Scalpel [Edward Berdoe], St. Bernard's; The Romance o f a Medical Student (London: 1887), p. 343. Further references will be included in the text. Caputi, Age o f Sex Crime, p. 123. McLaren, Prescription fo r M urder, p. 82. T. Cullen, When London Walked in Terror (Cambridge MA: 1965), p. 225. C. Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison: 1985), p. 141. Lansbury, Old Brown Dog, p. 58. Quoted in J. Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: 1980), p. 97.

Jack the Ripper, Holmes, 31 32 33 34 35

36

37

38 39

40

41

42

43 44 45 46

47

the New Woman

135

Think of the theory advanced by the mad doctor of H. G. W ells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, that pain is sheer atavism. Quoted in M. A. Elston, ‘W om en and Anti-vivisection in Victorian Eng­ land, 18 7 0-19 0 0 ’, in Rupke (ed.), Vivisection, p. 281. ‘Introduction’, The Strand 1 (January 1891), p. 3. R. Pearsall, Conan Doyle: A Biographical Solution (New York: 1977), p. 57. A. Conan Doyle, ‘A Study in Scarlet’, in The Illustrated Sherlock Holmes (New York: 1984), p. 638. All page references for the Holmes stories are to this edition and will be included in the text. It also substitutes the ‘resolution o f “mystery” ’ for ‘any sense o f crime as a social practice’: D. Longhurst, ‘Sherlock Holmes: Adventures of an English Gentleman 18 8 7-18 9 4 ’, in Longhurst (ed.), Gender, Genre and Narrative Pleasure (London: 1989), p. 53. So far I have slid over the medical science o f Drs Watson and Conan Doyle. In so far as Watson practices medicine in the stories, like Holmes he tends to diagnose (hysteria, for example, in the 1892 ‘Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb’, p. 115). Conan Doyle was a physician rather than a surgeon, and although his teacher Bell was a clinical surgeon, clearly he admired Bell’s diagnostic rather than his surgical skills. J. Bell, ‘Mr. Sherlock Holmes’, in Conan Doyle, Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, p. xviii. C. Ginzburg, ‘Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method’, in U. Eco and T. A. Sebeok (eds), The Sign o f Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (Bloomington: 1983), p. 86. R. Thomas, ‘The Fingerprint o f the Foreigner: Colonizing the Criminal Body in 1890s Detective Fiction and Criminal Anthropology’, ELH 61, 3 (Fall 1994), p. 680. George Hutchison’s illustrations to the 1891 reprint o f A Study in Scarlet seem to me to suggest that the villainous Enoch Drebber exemplifies criminal atavism, another Lombrosian concept: by the final illustration (p. 705), Drebber is thoroughly simian. Quoted in R. Thomas, ‘Minding the Body Politic: The Romance of Science and the Revision o f History in Victorian Detective Fiction’, in J. Maynard and A. Munich (eds), Victorian Literature and Culture 19 (New York: 1991), p.236. D. Philips, ‘ “A New Engine of Power and Authority”: The Institution­ alization o f Law-Enforcement in England 17 8 0-18 3 0 ’, in Gatrell et al., Crime and the Law, p. 158. S.Petrow, ‘The Rise o f the Detective in London, 18 6 9 -19 14 ’, Criminal Justice History 14 (1993), p. 98. M. W iener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England 18 3 0 -19 14 (Cambridge: 1990), p. 222. Longhurst, ‘Sherlock Holmes’, p. 57. L. Langbauer, ‘The City, the Everyday, and Boredom: The Case of Sherlock Holmes’, Differences 5, 3 (Fall 1993), p. 96. See also C. Belsey, Critical Practice (London: 1980), pp. 109-17. V. Gardner, ‘Introduction’, in Gardner and Susan Rutherford (eds), The New Woman and her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 18 5 0 -19 14 (Ann Arbor: 1992), pp. 4 -6 .

136 48 49 50 51

52 53

54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68

Romantic Masculinities Walkowitz, City o f Dreadful Delight, p. 45. F. Fenwick-Miller, ‘Ladies’ Column’, Illustrated London News 29 (Septem­ ber 1888), p. 376. Quoted in McLaren, Prescription fo r M urder, p. 75. R. D. Storch, ‘Police Control o f Street Prostitution in Victorian London: A Study in the Contexts o f Police Action’, in D. H. Bayley (ed.), Police and Society (Beverley Hills: 1977), p. 61. Ibid., p. 55. R. Cooter, ‘Dichotomy and Denial: Mesmerism, Medicine and Harriet Martineau’, in M. Benjamin (ed.), Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Enquiry, 17 8 0 -19 4 5 (Oxford: 1991), p. 158. Caputi, Age o f Sex Crime, p. 130. S. Edwards, Female Sexuality and the Law: A Study o f Constructs o f Female Sexuality as they Inform Statute and Legal Procedure (Oxford: 1981), pp. 8 7 9. Ibid., p. 75. Elston, ‘W om en and Anti-vivisection’, p. 279. P. M orton, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 18 6 0 1900 (London: 1984), p. 137. P. Bailey, ‘Parasexuality and Glamour: The Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype’, Gender and History 2, 2 (Summer 1990), p. 148. Ibid. Ibid., p. 149. G. Allen, ‘The Episode o f the Patient who Disappointed her Doctor’, The Strand 17 (March 1899), p. 327. Further references to the story are included in the text. M. Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community fo r Single Women, 18 5 0 -19 2 0 (Chicago: 1985), p. 120. G. Allen, ‘The Episode of the Stone that Looked about it’, The Strand 18 (September 1899), p. 332. G. Allen, ‘The Episode o f the European with the Kaffir Heart’, The Strand 18 (October 1899), p. 461. G. Allen, ‘The Episode o f the W ife who did her Duty’, The Strand 17 (May 1899), p. 521. Thanks are due to to Tim Morris for this observation. Allen, ‘Patient who Disappointed her Doctor’, p. 335.