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DOLIVE, EMILY J., Ph.D. Staking Out Space: British Women’s War Poetry, 1780-1840 (2019). Directed by Dr. Anne Wallace. 251 pp. My dissertation engages with British women poets between the years 1780 and 1840, a period that saw prolonged conflict between England and France, domestic revolt, and eventually government reform. Scholarly attention to war in the long Romantic period has surged in the last decade, but sustained examinations of women as war writers have been slower. I argue that poets like Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, and critically overlooked Jane Alice Sargant utilized and manipulated popular formal approaches to war to make space for women, notably the forms of ballad, elegy, domestic narrative, and lyric. Female figures in their war poems are mothers, soldiers, and record-keepers who navigate different settings, or spaces, and create textual disruptions. Quotation marks, italics, and metrical variation often dramatize women’s speech, and sometimes silence, which at once critiques sociopolitical expectations that separate women from war and suggests that women remain vocal participants during war. To establish Romantic-era practices for reflecting on war and political conflict and to reveal how issues of gender changed the landscape of war writing, I turned to periodicals, manuscripts, and first edition poetry collections by each of the three core poets, some long out of print. In the outpouring of war poetry in Romantic periodicals, the spaces of battlefield, rural home, graveyard, and ocean become central. Thus, Robinson, Hemans, and Sargant – along with other periodical poets and contemporary authors like Helen Maria Williams, William Wordsworth, and Lord Byron – returned to and revised these spaces, framing each with distinct textual disruptions. Chapter one takes up the generic space of the ballad and the physical setting of the battlefield to argue that women’s battlefield ballads revised editorial practices popular during the ballad revival that suppressed oral variants and minimized women’s role in battle scenes. Instead, women’s ballads fill with quoted speech from women on the battlefield and mnemonic parallelism to suggest the possibility of women’s speeches being committed to memory, even passed down orally like the ballad itself. The second chapter turns to the battlefield’s supposed opposite, the home. In describing the rural English home, however, women created a domestic narrative that explicitly reveals the home’s closeness to the battlefield, which I term a “home-front poem” because of its blend of rural and militant language. Similarly, I term the reader-focused elegies in chapter three “wartime elegies.” Women poets in this genre call out to readers, asking them to closely read and even write monuments or headstones for fallen soldiers by repeating locative words, direct address, and subverting common elegiac personifications that might allow consolation instead of continued acts of mourning. The fourth chapter also considers the continued effects of prolonged war and loss by taking up the figure of the wanderer in women’s war lyrics. Here space becomes marginal, liminal, as first- person female speakers cross oceans or pace seashores to convey the precarious position women inhabit when engaging with war. Throughout the chapters, I analyze subtle manipulations of the printed page, such as pairing opposing poems on the same page, relying on mnemonic devices as if print were tenuous, shifting from ballad quatrains to couplets mid-poem, and using military terms to describe rural domestic scenes. These and other textual disruptions briefly return readers not only to an awareness of the printed page, but to gendered expectations of wartime participation and writing. Along the way, then, my project places Robinson, Hemans, and Sargant in war-torn cultural concepts of gender and authorship that their poetry helps reveal and reshape throughout the Romantic period. STAKING OUT SPACE: BRITISH WOMEN’S WAR POETRY 1780-1840 by Emily J. Dolive A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2019 Approved by _____________________________ Committee Chair © 2019 Emily J. Dolive DEDICATED TO: Wayne Bruce Dolive “Papa Wayne” Poet and Marine “The boy stood on the burning deck” ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Emily J. Dolive has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair._____________________________________ Committee Members._____________________________________ _____________________________________ ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee __________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................1 II. BATTLEFIELD BALLADS AS FEMALE SPEECH ACTS DURING THE REVIVAL YEARS...............................................................20 III. “SO DISTANT AND SO DEAR”: RECONSTRUCTING THE HOME IN WOMEN’S HOME-FRONT POETRY ...................................................63 IV. “READER, PAUSE!”: LESSONS IN MOURNING FROM ROMANTIC WOMEN POETS ..................................................................110 V. PERSONAL AND POLITICAL WANDERING IN THE ROMANTIC WAR LYRIC ..........................................................................151 VI. CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................195 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................203 NOTES .............................................................................................................................230 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Felicia Hemans celebrated the British Army’s first successful raid against Napoleon in Spain in an 1808 letter that also provides a starting point for this dissertation’s understanding of spaces: “though females are forbidden to interfere in politics, yet as I have a dear, dear brother, at present on the scene of action, I may be allowed to feel some ardour on the occasion.”1 Hemans recognized, at age fifteen, the expected separation of women from the “scene” or space of politics. At the same time, she negotiated her “interference” in and “ardour” for the Napoleonic Wars by citing her relationship with her brother George and her avid reading of military “intelligence” in the “papers.” In other words, this letter reveals Hemans’s awareness of the “scene[s]” or spaces in which she was “forbidden” – like battlefield or government – and suggests that her entry into, as she says, “the theatre of glory” and political debate was through the page, a second space. Indeed, Hemans mentions the recent publication of her poem England and Spain; or Valour and Patriotism (1808), which seems inspired in part by the “papers” she constantly “perused” and impatiently waited for as she composed this letter to her Aunt. In addition to the spaces of battlefield and page as extrapolated from this letter is a new picture of the so-called poet of domesticity or “the creature of hearth and home,” as termed by her early biographer. Hemans’s language of “glorious,” “the cause,” “gallant,” and “true heroism” is at odds with the midcentury celebration of her as 1 “intensely feminine [with] delicacy [and] softness” and her patriotic language is rarely scrutinized in scholarship today, which leads me to read her as a war poet throughout the following chapters.2 In each chapter, I take a cue from Hemans’s letter as I question how Romantic women used different genres of poetry, from the ballad to the lyric, as a space in which to “interfere” with war. My answer is that women poets manipulated expected tropes and structures of each genres – often with juxtapositions of bodies and language – as their female figures encountered obstacles to or proposed strategies for engaging with battle, death, and sociopolitical tension. To examine how Romantic women poets situated female figures within wartime settings and themes, I went to the daily “papers” Hemans was infatuated with in the 1808 letter. While many periodicals such as The European Magazine (1782-1826), The Poetical Register (1802-1814, and The Examiner (1808-1881) have been digitized, I am also indebted to the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina for allowing me access to early nineteenth-century clippings and broadsides, such as a series of “Loyal Songs” and “Ring the Alarum Bell!” (1803). These Romantic-era periodicals not only revealed war texts by Hemans that reviewers and scholars alike have overlooked – such as “Effigies” (1823) and “The Illuminated City” (1826) – but also revealed verses from countless men and women that celebrate or criticize the Parliamentary reports in the surrounding pages.3 Voices from average British subjects merge with those of professional authors and even legislators and noblemen in these pages, which creates a fertile source for tracing common strategies for navigating political conflict in a period that saw twenty-two years of war followed by an economic slump and fights for reform.4 2 Moreover, some periodical poems soon made their way into edited collections and even into anthologies today, such as Charlotte Smith’s first iteration of what would later be The Emigrants (“The
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