Fellow Romantics

Male and Female British Writers, 1790�1835

Beth Lau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351936767
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Beginning with the premise that men and women of the Romantic period were lively interlocutors who participated in many of the same literary traditions and experiments, Fellow Romantics offers an inspired counterpoint to studies of Romantic-era women writers that stress their differences from their male contemporaries. As they advance the work of scholars who have questioned binary approaches to studying male and female writers, the contributors variously link, among others, Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, Mary Robinson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Austen and the male Romantic poets. These pairings invite us to see anew the work of both male and female writers by drawing our attention to frequently neglected aspects of each writer's art. Here we see writers of both sexes interacting in their shared historical moment, while the contributors reorient our attention toward common points of engagement between male and female authors. What is gained is a more textured understanding of the period that will serve as a model for future studies.

Chapter 1
Revisiting the Egotistical Sublime:
Smith, Wordsworth, and the Romantic
Dramatic Monologue

Jacqueline M. Labbe

This essay questions the period-bound nature of the dramatic monologue to suggest that the egoistic personae developed by William Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith function as its Romantic version.¹ Moreover, it questions the gendered binaries developed by critics proposing that male writers concern themselves with the Self while female writers pursue a feminine ethic of care for the Other. Instead, I will argue that both Smith and Wordsworth concentrate on establishing the parameters of the Poet, filtered through an exploration of the artfully-constructed Self. Looking in particular at Elegiac Sonnets and Lyrical Ballads, I will investigate how the “theatrical,” to use Judith Pascoe’s term, underpins and indeed creates the personalized narrators of the poems.² Instead of seeing the poems as thinly-disguised autobiographies, I read their presentations of sincerity and authenticity as dramatized, and the position of Poet as itself a role, a function made possibly by Smith’s and Wordsworth’s abilities to write Selves that are simultaneously Self and Other. The egotistical sublime, then, instead of functioning as an unconscious revelation of solipsism, becomes a tool by which the poets can act out fantasies of unified subjectivity. For the late eighteenth century, fascinated with an emerging culture of celebrity and individuality, Smith’s and Wordsworth’s poetry helped to form an expectation that the poetical was personal. It also undermined such expectations and created a space within poetry that critiqued these narrow parameters. For Smith and Wordsworth, the investigation of what constitutes a Poet is less gender-inflected than their explorations of themselves as poets. Each seems to critique a kind of ur-Poet, a Romantic construct characterized by the very ego that Keats associated with Wordsworth himself.

Keats is so very matter-of-fact in his identification of the “wordsworthian or egotistical sublime” and its contradistinction from his own version of the “poetical Character” as chameleonic and without identity that his definition goes by and large unchallenged.³ With its lowercase “w,” “wordworthian” becomes an adjective, detached from the person Wordsworth although derived from how Keats read him: as overwhelmingly inhabiting his poetry, and as a Self defined by an excessive writing of the Self. It’s not difficult to see that for Keats, Smith’s poetry would occupy the same space: writing wherein the “nature” and “identity” of the poet, far from being “annihilated,” take center stage and claim full readerly attention (279, 280). Smith, of course, encourages this response with her increasingly detailed and personalized Prefaces and Dedications; Wordsworth may be more retiring but the force of the poetry remains the same.⁴ However, to describe the autobiographical—perhaps more accurately called the meta-autobiographical— poetry of the two as dramatic or dramatized allows us to interrogate the certainty of Keats’s formulation. As far back as 1957, Stephen Maxfield Parrish described The Thorn as Wordsworth’s dramatic monologue; seeking to move the development of the genre back a poetic generation is not in itself new.⁵ Even for Parrish, however, The Thorn was proto-Victorian in its enactment of the monologue: Wordsworth wrote a poem not about a mother or a tree, but about a speaker whose nature was revealed through his own first-person narrative (101 passim). Turning to the meta-autobiographical poems of both Smith and Wordsworth allows for a more specifically Romantic version of the dramatic monologue to emerge: one in which the egotistical sublime is the pose rather than the drawback, and in which the writing of the Self is achieved through deliberately literary inscription and blissfully unaware elocution.

Interestingly, most critics who explore the autobiographically sincere and authentic in Romantic poetry focus on Wordsworth, and most acknowledge, at least in passing, the constructed nature of Wordsworthian sincerity, despite its self-conscious appearance as unmediated. Robert Langbaum, writing in 1957, notes that “whether the romanticist projects himself into the past, nature, or another person, he never forgets that he is playing a role,” and that sincerity is an “effect” to be “achieved.”⁶ David Perkins refers to “the drama of sincerity” and “the impression of spontaneity,” arguing that poetic form “compromises the ideal of sincerity.”⁷ Even Lionel Trilling calls poetic sincerity “a congruence between avowal and actual feeling.”⁸ But critics agree in presenting Wordsworth as somehow innocent, a kind of dupe of sincerity’s propensity to expose its own falsity in representation. He is a poet who strives for authenticity: “he writes as though he were talking to close friends or to domestic companions”; he “wr[ites] of a self in whose authenticity he utterly believed.”⁹ Leon Guilhamet probably takes this position furthest when he writes that, for Wordsworth, “the language of sincerity, drawing sustenance from truth, leads men to understand truth.”¹⁰ None of these critics, writing between 1957 and 1974, would have admitted Smith to the same plateau on which they placed Wordsworth, but her tone is equally intimate, whether crying out for succor in the Sonnets or recounting conversations with friends in the Prefaces. When she calls herself “an early worshipper at Nature’s shrine”¹¹ she offers the same “autobiographical illusion” and follows the same strategy of giving “facts from within” that Langbaum finds in Wordsworth (52, 78). For both poets, sincerity and authenticity animate much of the poetry; the question is not whether this is true, but whether the two poets are at the mercy of sincerity’s inherent insincerity, or whether they play with this tension and consequently with the picture of the Poet as authentic, emotionally open, transparently Selfed.

The concept of the sincere Wordsworth is informed by a critical investment in the idea of Romantic writers as moving against the mainstream of their culture, derived from understandings of their poetry as by definition experimental, innovative, and anti-cultural, coupled with an understanding of authenticity as a poetic goal, even if a compromised one. However, even as the Romantic poetry written by Wordsworth builds on its literary past, representing continuity as well as innovation, so too the poetic Self written into his and Smith’s poetry develops in a culture highly interested in public displays of personality and subjectivity. Studies of Wordsworth subsequent to Guilhamet’s began to note a more conscious and self-aware poetic stance: Frances Ferguson, in 1977, countered the isolationist egotistical sublime image of the poet by simply, and vitally, noting the “various provisions for an audience” even in Wordsworth’s seemingly most private poetry, which immediately introduces the idea of performance, even though Ferguson did not name this as such.¹² William Galperin extends Ferguson’s insight so that the audience becomes the guarantor of Wordsworth’s sincerity: the Authentic Self “was written as, and was the product of, an interchange with a hypothetical reader”¹³: the poet is compelled to create poetry in which his sincerity is maintained and verified. If the Romantic poet—Wordsworth or Smith—writes poetry that implies its own audience, however, then a performance has begun and authenticity itself is replaced by its dramatized understudy. Therefore, according to Sheila Kearns, writing about the self “involves … the performance of a reading of the self in and through the construction of the autobiographical text”; for Elizabeth Fay “romantic sincerity is also an aestheticization of the self.… [A]cting and being (acting the role of the self) are the same”; for Pascoe, “Wordsworth was drawn to dramatic realizations of the self” (219).¹⁴ Even Deborah Forbes, who attempts intriguingly to fuse the sincere with the performative, says that Wordsworth “is a sincere poet because he makes his sincerity questionable”: in other words, he now controls that of which he was previously understood to lack awareness.¹⁵

Curiously, even as they formulate a new critical understanding of Wordsworth as decidedly performative, and of the autobiographical poem as more dramatic than authentic, none of these critics explores the place of the dramatic monologue in Romantic autobiographical poetry—or rather, as I called it above, the meta-autobiographical. Indeed, Forbes rejects the idea fully, explaining that while a poem like Tintern Abbey could be a dramatic monologue, the readerly need to believe in a “speaker-poet” overrides this possibility; otherwise the speaker’s “imprecision” and “mysticism” becomes “laughable”: “it is truer to the poem, and to everything we know of Wordsworth, to believe that we are supposed to share the speaker-poet’s sense of awe in the face of things he cannot explain.”¹⁶ This reading, of course, re-engages with the sincere, since what seems to underlie Forbes’s comments is a desire to read the poem as truthful in the Guilhamet sense. Without “truth,” without a speaker-poet whose ego creates the sublimity of the incomprehensible, the poem fails. Forbes’s stance is very close to Langbaum’s, who judges that “Wordsworth never consciously discovered the dramatic monologue, though he is always hovering on the edge of the form,” writing instead dialogic “dramatic lyrics” where the subject is the Self rather than the exploration of another created Self.¹⁷ This frequent critical return to an evocation of Wordsworth’s Self suggests more the constancy of Keats than of Wordsworth; it seems precisely the discomfort Wordsworth’s technique arouses—the suspicion that his persona is not nearly as coherent as it pretends to be—that prompts so many readers to realign Speaker and Poet. As Fay points out, “Wordsworthian scholars do not like to regard William Wordsworth as invested in roles beyond that of seer and sage because the concept of role playing seems deliberately at odds with Wordsworth’s insistent sincerity.”¹⁸ For the purposes of my argument, it is exactly this insistence that allows the coherence of Wordsworth’s speaker to be questioned. Similarly, Smith’s insistence on sorrow and personal need, and its primacy for her readers both then and now, hints at its own artifice. For both poets, the poetry of the Self coupled with the exploitation of an expectation of sincerity—an expectation that each encourages—results in the Romantic dramatic monologue, a mode allowing each poet to engage with and simultaneously undermine the attractions of a self-focused subjectivity.

Once we begin to question not only a stressed sincerity but also an emphasized autobiography, then the key elements of the Victorian dramatic monologue are easily transposable.¹⁹ The dramatic monologue is spoken by a “first-person … speaker [who] is indicated not to be the poet” in the presence of a “silent auditor” with a “high degree of naturalistic presentation”; “the poet must convince us of the actuality of the character in order to secure a full emotional engagement.”²⁰ Of course, if the speaker is the Duke of Ferrara or a murderous madman then his difference from the poet is easy to maintain. The Romantic dramatic monologue explores exactly the figure of the Poet, dwelling on his/her tendency towards self-aggrandizement, intense introspection, self-conscious literariness. Critics have tended to read these poetic attributes as derived from the autobiographical self presented in the poetry, the unconscious self-exposure of the egotist. But in a culture saturated with spectacle—theatrical, political, journalistic, even poetic (think the Della Cruscans, for instance)—and increasingly fascinated by celebrity, then attempts by a poet to ascertain “What is a Poet?” are at least hinting towards a drama of self-representation, especially when the answer is that “He is a man speaking to men”: a man declaiming, performing, delivering a monologue.²¹ Or, in the case of Smith, a woman whose private sorrows are publicly pronounced: “toujours des Chansons tristes” (Preface to the Sixth Edition of the Elegiac Sonnets, 6)....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Revisiting the Egotistical Sublime: Smith, Wordsworth, and the Romantic Dramatic Monologue
• 2 Coleridge and Robinson: Harping on Lyrical Exchange
• 3 Romantic Ambivalence in Frankenstein and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• 4 “Something must be done”: Shelley, Hemans, and the Flash of Revolutionary Female Violence
• 5 Spiritual Converse: Hemans’s A Spirit’s Return in Dialogue with Byron and Shelley
• 6 William Wordsworth and Felicia Hemans
• 7 “Does not it make you think of Cowper?”: Rural Sport in Jane Austen and Her Contemporaries
• 8 The Uses and Abuses of Imagination in Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets
• 9 “Beautiful but Ideal”: Intertextual Relations between Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Percy Bysshe Shelley
• 10 Romantic and Victorian Conversations: Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning in Dialogue with Byron and Shelley
• Index