Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism

By Elisa Beshero-Bondar

Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism argues that early nineteenth-century women poets contributed some of the most daring work in modernizing the epic genre. The book examines several long poems to provide perspective on women poets working with and against men in related efforts, contributing together to a Romantic movement of large-scale genre revision. Women poets challenged longstanding categorical approaches to gender and nation in the epic tradition, and they raised politically charged questions about women’s importance in moments of historical crisis.

While Romantic epics did not all engage in radical questioning or undermining of authority, this study calls attention to some of the more provocative poems in their approach to gender, culture, and history. This study prioritizes long poems written by and about women during the Romantic era, and does so in context with influential epics by male contemporaries. The book takes its cue from a dramatic increase in the publication of epics in the early nineteenth-century. At their most innovative, Romantic epics provoked questions about the construction of ideological meaning and historical memory, and they centralized women’s experiences in entirely new ways to reflect on defeat, loss, and inevitable transition. For the first time the epic became an attractive genre for ambitious women poets.

The book offers a timely response to recent groundbreaking scholarship on nineteenth-century epic by Herbert Tucker and Simon Dentith, and should be of interest to Romanticists and scholars of 18th- and 19th-century literature and history, gender and genre, and women’s studies.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: May 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781644531228

Book preview

you.

Introduction

Epics for Women

To Miss Porden On Her Poem of Coeur de Lion

Proudly thy sex may claim thee, young and fair

And lofty poetess! proudly may tell

How thou hast sung the arms invincible

Of him the lion-hearted, in the snare

Of Austria, as amid the sultry glare

Of Palestine, triumphant; or the spell

Of poor Maimonne; or the thoughts that swell

When suddenly the old remembered air

Rings from the harp of Blondel; or the bright

And gorgeous train of England’s chivalry;

Or, worthy of his kingly foe, the might

Of paynim Saladin. Oh, proud of thee

Is woman! proud of thy bold muse’s flight!

Proud of thy gentle spirit’s purity.

— Mary Russell Mitford, Dramatic

Scenes, Sonnets, and Other Poems

Women poets once made themselves worthy of song for venturing into the worldly territories of epic poetry. Mary Russell Mitford’s sonnet praised the late Eleanor Porden Franklin as a woman epoist for her accomplishment of 1822, the publication of Coeur de Lion; or, The Third Crusade: A Poem, an epic poem of sixteen books. Mitford added a footnote to the published version of 1827, identifying Porden as my late dear and lamented friend Mrs. Francklin, a name readers would likely have connected with her husband John Franklin, the Arctic explorer. Yet Mitford’s sonnet is entitled To Miss Porden, and thus apostrophizes the poet before her marriage in 1823 and before her untimely death in 1825 at the age of 29. Mitford’s published celebration of Miss Porden disregards her brief period of marriage and motherhood, which might be understood conventionally in an age of conduct books as the apex of women’s domestic accomplishment. Instead, Mitford exalts Porden’s youthful powers in terms that presume to speak for women in general: Oh, proud of thee / Is woman! proud of thy bold muse’s flight! / Proud of thy gentle spirit’s purity (12-14). Woman must be especially proud of Porden’s epic production, and proudly may tell / How thou hast sung the arms invincible (2-3). Mitford apostrophizes in epic manner, creating of Miss Porden a transcendent heroic figure of the woman epoist who ventures into masculine territories to sing of arms and the mighty crusading King Richard I.

That Mitford could write in such a way of epic as the glory of a woman poet challenges assumptions about the genre’s essential masculinity, assumptions still prevalent in our time. Indeed, a long view of the ancient genre suggests that epic is at odds with women’s authority, since triumphant womanhood so often appears insignificant or threatening to the glory of nation and empire classically sung by men and for Man. As Bernard Schweitzer comments, epic has served in recent gender studies as a textbook example of a literary genre that essentially excludes women.1 However, nineteenth-century poetry offers many examples of deviation from the classical, even in appropriating poetic traditions. This poetry offers a challenge to overly simplistic views in our time regarding gender and genre, for how we define the capacities of a genre depends very much on our awareness of who contributed to it. Thus, to a modernist-oriented Susan Stanford Friedman, writing in the mid 1980s before the accomplishment of much of the recent reclamation work of Romantic women poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and H. D. appear to be breaking through barriers in perception of epic as a masculine genre, so that they develop for epic a new feminine literary form.2 Yet our expanding awareness of women poets of the Romantic era helps to reveal that Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh follows in the wake of significant precedents. Our grounds for assuming the dominance of masculinity in the epic post-1800 ought to be questioned. At the very least Mitford’s sonnet to Porden discloses that epic could be claimed as distinctly untraditional creative territory for women during Mitford’s time. Indeed, the genre served women writers in the early decades of the nineteenth century as a means to envision and experiment with extraordinary possibilities for gender and culture. This study places emphasis on strange and extraordinary possibilities realized in epic and epical poetry by and about women, in order to demonstrate how the epic genre contributed to a women’s literary historiography developing in the era of Romanticism.

Itself a little song of tribute to a greater song, Mitford’s sonnet explicitly claims epic poetry by women as poetry for Woman. As a sonnet admiring a contemporary woman writer in gendered terms, Mitford’s poem anticipates Barrett Browning’s widely anthologized pair of sonnets to George Sand, and the resemblance may be significant given that Barrett was Mitford’s long-time correspondent and friend up to about the time of her marriage to Robert Browning.3 In more muted and less explicit terms, Mitford anticipates Barrett Browning’s tribute to Sand as thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, since Mitford’s sonnet makes oppositional and potentially androgynous qualities the object of Woman’s pride—a combination of boldness and gentleness and an ability to sing of past military glory that had once been the province of male chroniclers in past ages.4 As Adeline Johns-Putra discusses and as Mitford’s readers might have known, Porden’s epic had featured as secondary characters two cross-dressing women warriors, Alasia and Almahide, who fight against Richard I and his forces. From Johns-Putra’s point of view, the androgynous image of woman in Porden’s poem is treated as unnatural and deviant, a sexual anomaly to be defeated and tamed by the virtuous Richard and his male knights.5 Yet even though they are of secondary interest in Porden’s poem, these sexual anomalies become focal points of international contention. Porden’s epic introduces and makes visible an extraordinary possibility in history in the strong-willed women who dare to fight as much against Richard’s imperial mission as against expectations of womanly conduct. Apparently most of the women warriors in Porden’s poem battle against Richard, with the exception of Richard’s wife Berengaria, whose intention for single combat against Alasia is prevented by one of Richard’s knights. That Richard’s queen would thus be prevented from fighting seems a recognizable home enforcement of gender-appropriate rules familiar to Porden’s English readers. At the same time, Richard’s enemies, generally treated respectfully in the poem, provide opportunities to represent foreign and exotic women as warriors against the ultimately triumphant English social order of the Lionhearted, so that such militant women appear pointedly alien to English readers of Porden’s time. While Johns-Putra sees Porden as muting the heroism of her women warriors to uphold finally a status quo sexual order, the scope of activity Porden devoted to women and their very centrality in the conflicts of the Crusades give her poem a structure and force that noticeably resists that sexual order. Women evidently stirred up serious trouble and could threaten the dominance of kings on the battlefields that Porden envisioned.

A movement of women characters and women’s concerns from the peripheries to central epic status marks the contribution of women poets to nineteenth-century epic poetry. This book, like Adeline Johns-Putra’s Heroes and Housewives, concentrates on women poets and the unprecedented emphasis on femininity in epics of the British Romantic era. However, my book concentrates on epics that reveal women’s engagement with historicity and the mutability of ideological power, and my selection of poems, my methods of research and textual analysis, and my findings differ from Johns-Putra’s in many respects. While Johns-Putra provides a valuable, wide-ranging study of women’s epic poetry, her survey gives selective readings of several lengthy poems, and these readings tend to reinforce ideas of domestic ideology and religious values. Her book delineates women’s poetry as following a normative view of epic to speak for the dominant values of the British nation and the proper place of women within it.

The story that I tell about women’s epics will be different from Johns-Putra’s because our perspectives on the epic genre and our methods differ in significant ways. My emphasis on the unconventional might well complement her book’s emphasis on the normative. I have selected poems as worthy of close study for the complex and unresolved questions they provoke, rather than for the closure they offer and the categorical solutions they appear to provide. I do not purport to be seeking out the ways in which women reinforced safe domestic and moralizing values as those registered in the numerous biblical epics of the period, and hence I do not offer much discussion of Christian epics in this book, while this topic is a significant focus of Johns-Putra’s study. Instead, my study foregrounds a range of extraordinary experiments with epic to which women poets contributed along with men poets associated with British Romanticism. The book investigates how women poets both emulated and exceeded the men poets of the time in their experiments with extreme, even radical changes in poetic form, versification, and narrative structure as well as in exploring exotic behaviors, peoples, and lands—to develop extraordinarily worldly poems that offer complex and alienated views of history and culture. My study considers epics by women in context with those of prominent male contemporaries to foreground commonalities as well as significant differences in their approaches to historicity, culture, and gender. I have selected epic poems that investigate female experiences of alienation and exile, poems that provoke questions about the mutability of identity and cultural authority.

Despite the tensions I have seen with normative values and domestic ideology in these poems, I do not qualify the epics by women in this study as a special subset because I would argue that even the most conventional-looking epic poems of this period are likely to contain similar ironic registers and questioning tendencies that feature prominently in the poems I have selected for this study. The poems discussed in this book permit exploration of how women poets worked with and against men poets in experimental revisions of the epic genre, revisions that Stuart Curran and Herbert Tucker have discussed as indicative and even formative of Romanticism. Certainly the five women poets whose work I discuss at length here were not isolated in their interests and neither can they be connected in a coherent school or subculture of deviant women poets. Rather I hope to show how women poets responded to issues of their contemporary moment and engaged in intertextual conversations involving men and women with locating and consulting available historical sources, cultural information, and world news. In closely investigating the complexities of this conversation, the book considers how women’s epics tended to prioritize female experiences and perspectives, and I suggest that women’s female-centered approaches to epic may have subtly shifted the grounds of intertextual conversation more to the domain of women’s interests by the 1810s and 1820s. I hope that my study will inspire interest in radical, questioning, and experimental dimensions of women’s poetry, as well as promote more detailed examination of texts that appear to reinforce tradition and convention.

The epics by women to be discussed in this book share certain patterns of plot and approaches to female roles in relation to historically significant issues. Most significantly they share an interest in women’s agency—their limits and capacities for effective action in moments of historical crisis. Nearly always the epic female agon begins her story with an awareness that her home no longer provides a shelter or has become dangerous to her or to those she loves. She must leave and enter the world beyond, and her travels, often cloaked in secrecy, provide a means of relaying to the reader the kinds of cultural conflicts that are changing the meaning of her existence and even her sense of identity. Quite often her land is in a state of civil war or under threat of conquest, and she experiences internal conflict related to the ongoing crisis that is also central to the epic’s historical narrative. The world in which she travels serves as a source of potential authority for her, and often she is faced with a choice of whether or not to act on that potential to become a public figure. While these opportunities and moments of decision rarely lead her to lasting positions of authority, they nevertheless expose complexities in the moment of cultural conflict that might not be apparent in a backward looking perspective on the closure of history. The female agon’s potential for public authority emphasizes the contingent sense of what might have been or what could have happened, to be considered alongside what is historically known and accepted. Thus the epics to be discussed in this book resemble each other in their association of women with extraordinary possibility as I have said earlier, especially in the ways that they envision a worldly scope of activity for women as travelers, negotiators, and commanders. Women’s subversive activities, their command performances, and their public speaking appearances are generally shown to have significant impact on the worlds that define their scope of activity, even if many of these narratives resolve tragically in silencing, physical containment, or annihilation of the female agon. If women’s authority is not imagined as lasting in these poems, the possibilities it represents set the tone for women’s revisions to the epic tradition in the Romantic era. It is the emphasis on the possible that characterizes these poems as experimental epics, and their interest in contingent female agency raises provocative questions about historical outcomes. Women’s epic narratives in the early nineteenth century suggest lost possibilities—that what became true was less than what was possible or might have been. Women’s experiences of history, as imagined in these poems, make for an unconventional approach to epic to the extent that they question outcomes and ironize triumphant closures. Frequently the verse editorializes an explicit challenge to progressive historical narratives.

Indeed the new experimental forms of verse appearing in the early nineteenth century call into question what exactly can be said to constitute an epic poem after the 1790s. As this book discusses, men as well as women poets found opportunities for epic to criticize classically masculine patriotic virtues, and to promote women’s interests as central to the well-being of the nation. I hope to show how a feminization of epic did more than exalt women as gentle domestic figures with refined sensibilities, and rather encouraged new ways of thinking about women’s too-long occluded importance in causing, negotiating, or resolving cultural conflicts. In a feminized form of epic, women’s views of history and cultural change take on more significance. As epic became the domain of the Muse Clio, it also became a poetic genre useful for women to theorize and speculate about women’s place in and out of history. In the productions of both men and women poets in the Romantic era, epic became a complex narrative art, and the most provocative experiments with epic offered unusual new perspectives on gender, historical time, and cultural crisis.

Not many studies of epic poetry during the Romantic period yet exist, although a good proportion of those that do address the contributions of women poets in some way.6 The study of nineteenth-century epics has attracted increasing attention in recent decades, but for the most part studies have not fully taken into account the way women epoists, or their male counterparts for that matter, engage with historicity and historiography. General discussions of epic’s manifestations in the nineteenth century and in the Romantic era always point out its extremes of difference from earlier forms, making the epic potentially difficult to identify and categorize.7 Changes in the way nineteenth-century literature associates culture with individual psychology appear to be the source of the most problems for identifying an epic. The attention to subjectivity and internal emotional experience in nineteenth-century poetry and literature in general raises questions about whether narratives that reflect on historical and cultural issues but are focused on a narrow selection of individual characters can count as epic. Since epic usually addresses the interests of a nation or a people, can a poem be considered an epic when the values of its characters do not accord with those of the audience projected by the text? Other serious questions must be raised about the body of the text: Must epics be written in verse, or might the historical novel be considered a new form of epic? Are poems divided into four, six, or ten cantos or books long enough to achieve epic size and scale, or to achieve epic status must a poem be subdivided into units above twenty? Is subdivision necessary at all, and what is its function in setting expectations for an epic narrative?

Different answers to these questions have been posed, and for the most part they consider the content and narrative development of the epic more important than its formal poetic attributes. Hermann Fischer in his categorical study of Romantic verse narratives attempts a schematic set of distinctions between epic, romance, and ballad, in which he considers a somewhat unwieldy range of criteria that can be distilled to considerations of the poem’s speaking voice, its projected audience, its tone and style of delivery, as well as the seriousness of its content. Fischer’s distinctions are useful in identifying a range of ways in which verse narratives address matters of historical or cultural interest in subjective terms, although his definitions of these forms attempt a timeless universality that cannot easily or neatly apply to the revisions of literary genres in the nineteenth century. According to Fischer, narrative plotting of historically significant events is a key way of distinguishing epic. Thus epics are distinct from ballads, because ballads work by climactic shifts from one event to the next rather than dwelling upon slow transformations and steady transitions. The difference of ballad from epic associates the epic genre with nations and civilizations on a large scale: ballads generally address the experiences of tribal units or families, too small a unit of society to be considered epic in content. The distinction Fischer draws between romance and epic is instructive regarding issues of intentionality and individuality. For Fischer (as indeed for Johns-Putra), epic is the domain of convention and archetype: the form provides a sense of heritage, gives meaning to cultural practices. Epic characters are limited in development to represent peoples and nations, and the audience of an epic typically shares the same values as the speaking voice of the poet. The voice of the epic poet, inspired by the muse to speak for the nation, conveys the high purpose of interpretation or illumination of the world, focusing on what the intended public consider to be its true and essential aspects.8 By contrast, in Fischer’s schema of verse narratives, romance does not necessarily speak to the interest of the entire culture and can be far less serious in its purpose. Romance may deviate from epic conventions in form and structure, and its scope appears to be more entertaining and invested in individual experiences. Ultimately it is romance’s association with subjectivity that distinguishes it from epic for Fischer, and provides him reasons for categorizing Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Byron’s Don Juan as romances. Indeed most of the verse narratives I discuss in this book would be considered romances rather than epics by Fischer, who writes a history of Romantic verse narrative as a story of how Romantic poets broke with normative epic conventions of the neoclassical age. Fischer discusses Romanticism as a period that rejected epic in favor of romance, which Romanticism raised to more serious national significance. Other and more recent explanations of epic are more useful to my approach in this book, but Fischer’s schematic definitions help to underline the conventional views of genre that cause problems for identifying epics as such in the early nineteenth century.

A more adaptive view shared by recent scholars considers nineteenth-century epic as a narrative genre preeminently concerned with historicity and in many ways difficult to distinguish from romance. This flexible interpretation is more accommodating to my selection of poems in this book, since I am interested in how poets reinvented traditional epic and romance forms to address issues of historicity and cultural conflict. In his seminal book on the importance of genres within Romanticism, Stuart Curran comments on the new interest in and unprecedented quantity of epic poems in early nineteenth-century England as unique in the history of Western literature, and as related to a collective experience of historical crisis, breakage with the past, induced by the French Revolution and subsequent threat of invasion.9 While Curran comments on a demand for epics as a source of national direction in time of crisis, Simon Dentith and Herbert Tucker discuss how the epics of the time tended to disengage from the here and now, providing a sense of distance from the cultural cohesiveness and traditional military heroism associated with epic. Dentith observes that epic became distinct in the nineteenth century due to an intervention of a sense of historical difference, a consciousness that the materials of epic belong to other places and times, not to modernity.10 Tucker expands on these explanations of epic’s new relevance to the nineteenth century in his thorough and detailed decade-by-decade history of the genre’s transformations in Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790-1910. Tucker’s dynamic view of epic’s permutations offers a cohesive response to the diverse perspectives on the genre’s engagement with time, culture, and historicity. Claiming that what is considered epic is best defined by the expectations of the moment of its production, he observes that Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland would qualify as an epic if it were written in the 1790s, but in 1875 it does not fit the notion of epic at that moment, by which point the imperial culture that epic had to bespeak or denounce asked of an ocean-going tale the wider scope of a collectivity differently conceived.11 This perspective suggests something very specific at work in the early nineteenth century, which for Tucker as for Dentith is related to a consciousness of distance and alienation from the plot of epic, as well as an interest in transience—an attention to individuals experiencing passage and transition. According to Tucker, With the nineteenth century became the modality of being: to exist was to be under development or in decline, on the make or on the mend, but at all events in process.12 This emphasis on modality relates to a new interest in narrative forms of understanding culture within time, and this, too, can be connected with the revival and reinvention of epic. While in the eighteenth century poetry synthesized collective wisdom by means of catalog, or survey, or dialogue, by the nineteenth century, narrative plotting would experience a resurgence, related to experiences of transformation and alienation from the past, as well as desires to locate and understand origins and first causes, to provide a glimpse of how great changes occur.13

For his emphasis on the historical and cultural work accomplished by epic poetry, and especially for his detailed decade-by-decade study of the genre, Tucker’s explanation of what epic came to mean in the early nineteenth century provides a definitive context for this book. Following Tucker’s account, epic for British poets of the Romantic era has less to do with the length of the narrative, with the expansiveness of its narrative canvas, or with its coverage of a large number of deities or heroic characters, as might be traditionally expected of epics in the classical or Miltonic style. Epic was redefined most noticeably in its handling of historical perspective in the way that a poem delivers multiple experiences of time—in a synchronic narrative of individuals experiencing a pivotal and time-specific series of events that is framed by a longer view, a diachronic perspective of cultural transformation. If the new versions of epic, with rare exceptions, took up many fewer pages than the Aeneid or Paradise Lost, their narratives more often concentered around internalized experiences of epochal crisis and identity conflicts in conditions of exile. Thus Tucker registers strong dissent from Fischer’s refusal to categorize Wordsworth’s The Prelude or Byron’s Don Juan as an epic on the grounds of over-emphasis on subjective experience. Fischer has failed to recognize how poets were complicating subjective experience and giving it a new epic significance.14 In Tucker’s terms, the very idea of the epic genre is "the privileged configuration that subsists between the conduct of a narrated action and the definitive patterns of the culture that it