Romanticism and Gender

Anne K. Mellor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136040382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Taking twenty women writers of the Romantic period, Romanticism and Gender explores a neglected period of the female literary tradition, and for the first time gives a broad overview of Romantic literature from a feminist perspective.

Part I Masculine Romanticism

There is no need to remap the contours of masculine English Romanticism here; numerous insightful critics and scholars over the last thirty Years have put forth increasingly complex and sophisticated descriptions of the thematic, formal and theoretical pursuits of the canonical Romantic poets. For the purposes of the dialogue which I wish to initiate, it will be sufficient to recall only a few major signposts. We might begin at Meyer Abrams' magisterial summation, in Natural Supernaturalism (1971), of the way Romanticism had been constructed in the previous decade: as a “spirit of the age” (to evoke Hazlitt's term) which responded directly to the major political events of the late eighteenth century, the American and French Revolutions. Identifying Romanticism with the Enlightenment beliefs in democracy and the rights of the common man, Abrams argued that the greatest Romantic poems traced what he called a “circuitous journey” from innocence to experience or a higher innocence, a quest that begins with the child's unconscious conviction of a primal oneness between himself and Mother Nature and his fall away from that communion into an experience of alienated self-consciousness and isolation.¹ But this fall, like Milton's, proves finally fortunate, for it enables the poet to learn the powers inherent in consciousness itself. He can thereby spiral upward to a higher state of consciousness, even a sublime transcendence, in which he comes to understand the ultimate harmony between the workings of nature and his own mind and to consummate a marriage with nature through his “spousal verse.” For Abrams, Romantic poetry finally constitutes a humanistic secularization of the Judaeo-Christian myth of a paradise lost and regained, a rewriting as epic autobiography of the myth that has dominated Western culture for over two thousand years.

Abrams' paradigm of English Romanticism was challenged by numerous scholars and critics during the 1970s and early 1980s, primarily on the grounds that it omitted Byron and the selfironizing practices within Romanticism which Byron's Don Juan so notably represented. Many critics have demonstrated that a recognition of the prison house of language was fundamental to the poetry not only of Byron but also of Wordsworth and the other major Romantic poets.² A deconstructive concern with romantic irony, questioning habits of mind, and the instabilities of poetic forms and figures replaced the apocalyptic certainties of Natural Supernaturalism. The publication in 1983 of Jerome McGann's The Romantic Ideology posed a challenge both to Abrams' paradigm and to deconstructive reading methods, this time from a historical rather than a rhetorical position. Arguing that the critics of English Romantic poems have themselves imbibed the values and ideological commitments of the Romantic poets, McGann insisted that we must recognize the historical and social specificity of English Romanticism, the ways in which these texts promote the cultural and economic interests of a particular class of people in a particular society at a particular time. Only by detaching ourselves from the class interests inherent in Romantic poems can we begin to understand their “false consciousness” or “bad faith.” Many new historical and cultural critics have offered increasingly sophisticated interrogations of the role of ideology and historical discourse in Romantic texts—I think especially of Alan Liu's Wordsworth—The Sense of History (1989).

Whether we have focused on the social and historical, or the psychological, or the rhetorical maneuverings of the English Romantic poets, we have concurred in grounding English Romanticism on a reading of a highly selective group of texts, almost all poetry, almost all written by men. David Perkins has recently tracked the way in which English Romanticism came to be conceptualized as a coherent literary movement only in the early twentieth century, and has further emphasized the historical instability of the academic construction of that very coherence, which shifted between Victorian political identifications of Romanticism and later aesthetic definitions.³ We need to learn still more about how Romanticism came to be defined (by whom, when, and most important, with the privileging of what texts and for what cultural purposes), and the shifting role of gender within that process of historical literary canonization. Preliminary investigations by Gaye Tuchman and Paula Feldman suggest that women novelists dominated the publishing field in England until the middle of the nineteenth century, while female Romantic poets retained their great popularity until the beginning of the twentieth century.⁴ What forces in the period of literary Modernism in England, from 1900 onwards, contributed to the exclusion of women writers from the canon of Romanticism, forces so powerful that the once-canonical woman writer of the Romantic period, Jane Austen, came to be defined as “non-Romantic”?⁵ Such an inquiry would require a thorough examination of both the publishing practices in England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the establishment of the academic curriculum of “English Studies” at Oxford and Cambridge Universities during this period, and is beyond the scope of this book.

Here I will explore the role played by gender in the construction, not of the canon of Romanticism, but of Romantic literary texts themselves. The canonized male-authored texts of what we have been taught to call English literary Romanticism share certain attitudes and ideological investments which differ markedly from those displayed by the female-authored texts of the period. In emphasizing these large differences, I am fully aware that many individual exceptions exist, in the writings of both men and women, exceptions which I shall try to acknowledge. Nonetheless, there are important differences between the body of canonical masculine Romantic literature and the body of writing by women now excluded from this canon, and it is these differences (rather than similarities and local exceptions) which we must first recognize if we are to comprehend the full range and complexity of English Romanticism.

1 Gender in Masculine Romanticism

DOI: 10.4324/9780203060865-2

How does gender function in the canonical texts of masculine Romanticism? What shared definitions of the nature and function of the female do we find in the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, in their treatments of the nature of the imagination, of the creative process, of erotic love, of the development of the self, of the value and rights of the common man, of the epistemological relation of the “philosophic mind” to the natural world?

In attempting a brief and necessarily preliminary answer to this large question, I wish to maintain the linguistic distinction between sex and gender. I will confine the term sex to the difference between male and female reproductive organs, and use gender to refer to the socially constructed roles and functions allotted to an individual on the basis of perceived sexual difference. I am aware that binary sexuality (or biology) is itself a social construction, as has been shown by Foucault and recent studies both in the history of sexuality and in the cultural variations of sex differences (some cultures recognize only one sex, others construct a third sex or “berdache”).¹ For the purposes of clarity, however, in this book I will reserve the terms male and female for the binary sex differences established by Western culture and use the terms man/woman, boy/girl, masculine/feminine to refer to the products of the social definition and organization of gender.

When Wordsworth, in the climactic passage of The Prelude, triumphantly climbs, “in opposition set/Against an enemy” and “foremost of the Band,” to the top of Mount Snowdon, where “lo!/The Moon stood naked in the Heavens” and a fractured sea of mist is spread beneath his feet, he explicitly represents himself—as Marlon Ross has argued²—as the weary but nonetheless heroic conqueror of a Nature whose Soul, “the Imagination of the whole,” is not his own. Defining the landscape as “the perfect image of a mighty Mind,” Wordsworth acknowledges the power of Nature to exert a “domination…upon the outward face of things,” to so mould, endure, abstract, combine or “by abrupt and unhabitual influence” to “make one object so impress itself/Upon all others,” that even the “grossest” human minds “must see and hear/And cannot chuse but feel” this power. As Wordsworth celebrates the power of Nature, he genders Nature as feminine—“that domination which she oftentimes/Exerts” (my emphasis). It is a woman's power to arouse, create and control that he has encountered, a power that first appeared as explicitly sexual (“the Moon stood naked”). Meyer Abrams has described this encounter as an “apocalyptic marriage” of mind and nature consummated in Wordsworth's “spousal verse.” But a more subtle gender politics is at work here. While Wordsworth acknowledges the power which a female Nature “thus/Thrusts forth upon the senses,” both physical and mental, he also immediately appropriates that power, insisting that it is a “genuine Counterpart” of the “glorious faculty” which the “higher minds” of poets “bear with them as their own.” Not only does Wordsworth insist that the poetic imagination “can send abroad/Like transformations” and “create/A like existence”—equalling the creative power of Nature—but he also insists that this power is “truly from the Deity” and that the poets who possess it are endowed with sovereignty, emotions entirely trustworthy, cheerfulness, moral truth, and unfailing delight. Most readers who have noted the gender roles implicit in this passage have argued that Wordsworth has equated the capacities of his masculine imagination with those of feminine Nature, his mighty mind working in harmony with her mighty mind.³ However, a closer reading of this passage suggests that Wordsworth has actually usurped Nature's power, leaving her silenced, even absent. For the “domination” or power which a female Nature exerted at line 81 becomes by line 89 the “Brother” of the poet's imagination, “a genuine Counterpart/And Brother of the glorious faculty/Which higher minds bear with them as their own.” Since a female faculty can only be a “sister,” Wordsworth has here subtly regendered nature's power as masculine and thus attempted to eliminate her otherness, her difference, her separate being.

Wordsworth's rhetorical strategy, the precariousness of which I shall explore in chapter seven, illustrates a common tendency in masculine Romanticism. These six poets' descriptions of the growth of the individual mind frequently posit a split between the subject and the object. So long as the object—nature—is gendered female, that split cannot be resolved into the unity in multeity of which Coleridge dreamed. Therefore these poets often subtly regender both the subject and the object as male and in the process erase the female from discourse: she does not speak; she therefore has no existence. As Margaret Homans has persuasively argued, by identifying Nature as female and the female as Nature (or not-human), Wordsworth effectively denied to women the ability to enter what Lacan called the symbolic order.⁴ Rarely allowed to speak for themselves, the female figures in Wordsworth's early poems exist only as embodiments of an undifferentiated life cycle that moves inexorably from birth to death. They do not exist as independent, self-conscious human beings with minds as capable as the poet's. In this sense, almost all of Wordsworth's women are dead, either literally (as in the cases of Lucy, Margaret and Martha Ray) or figuratively (they are mad, or allowed to live only vicariously through the words and experiences of male narrators). Dorothy remains a silenced auditor in Tintern Abbey, a less conscious being whose function is to mirror and thus to guarantee the truth of the poet's development and perceptions, even as the poem itself acknowledges the existence of an unbridgeable gap between the poet's forever-lost past subjectivity and his present self, a gap also troped in the division between his sister's “wild eyes” and his own “eye made quiet by the power/Of harmony.”

Even more troubling, the masculine mind can receive pleasure from the silencing of the female. Margaret's inability to survive without her husband and her gradual mental and physical decay, represented in the decay of both her home and her garden, becomes in The Ruined Cottage a source of “comfort” and “happiness” for both the Old Man who tells her tale of unrelieved suffering and the Pedlar who hears it.⁵ Wordsworth's desire, as Marlon Ross has stressed, is rhetorically to conquer and absorb the female,⁶ and the philosophic mind he so precariously achieves is thus masculinist in its usurpation and exploitation of the (female) objective world. Recasting Geoffrey Hartmans argument⁷ in terms of gender, we might say that Wordsworth finally replaces (feminine) nature with the productions of the (masculine) imagination, inevitably substituting for his felt experiences of the physical world a linguistically mediated memory of them, mediations which confine his consciousness to a solipsistic subjectivity, one that is specifically troped as male.

The Prelude is not the only canonical Romantic poem that attempts to reassign the all-creating powers of a nature gendered as female to the masculine poetic imagination. In Coleridge's Kubla Khan, the sacred river Alph, the source of life itself, is procreated from a natural chasm which is initially imaged in terms that suggest the female birth canal: “That deep romantic chasm which slanted/Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover.” The earth mother, “with ceaseless turmoil seething,/…in fast thick pants …breathing,” both in orgasm and in the labor of childbirth, forces out the mighty fountain. But this bursting fountain, “Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst/Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,/Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail,” also suggests male orgasm and ejaculation. Together, female and male produce Kubla's kingdom and the sun and ice of his “miracle of rare device.” But in the final stanza, this procreative power has been potentially usurped by the male poet: inspired by a damsel with a dulcimer (whose song we never hear, who can sing only of a fallen or lesser paradise, of Mount Abora), the male poet “with music loud and long,/…would build that dome in air/That sunny dome! those caves of ice!/And all who heard should see them there.” Admittedly, this male poet is portrayed as a pariah about to be exorcised from the human community (“Weave a circle round him thrice”). Moreover, his control over the female voice is precarious at best—“Could I revive within me/Her symphony and song” (my italics)—does he possess her or she him? Nonetheless, the poet's desire remains one for total absorption of the female: “within me.”

The male poet's attempt to usurp female procreative power is troped again in Coleridge's Eolian Harp, where the window harp is imaged first as phallic, “Placed length-ways in the clasping casement” (the long, rectangular, Aeolian box harp fashioned by Robert Bloomfield in 1808 measured 31 ½ inches long by 4 ⅝ inches wide by four inches high⁸), and then, remarkably, as female, “by the desultory breeze caress'd,/Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover.” The male poet is then figured as the harp: “as on the midway slope/Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon,/…And many idle flitting phantasies,/Traverse my indolent and passive brain,/As wild and various as the random gales/That swell and flutter on this subject Lute!” Despite his guilty babblings, the male poet tropes his identity with that “one intellectual breeze,/At once the Soul of each, and God of all,” but the female voice in the poem is restricted to the repressive and already articulated metaphors of patriarchal Christianity, of the Nom de Pere; Sara speaks not for herself but only as a “Meek Daughter in the family of Christ.”

The oft-described exploration of nature found in canonical Romantic poetry thus often masks a sexual politics. Nature is usually gendered feminine by these six Romantic poets who adopt the traditional cultural met...