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Romance and Violence in Mary Robinson's Lyrical

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Romance and Violence in Mary Robinson's Lyrical ROMANCE AND VIOLENCE IN MARY ROBINSON’S LYRICAL TALES AND OTHER GOTHIC POETRY JACQUELINE M. LABBE In her Lyrical Tales (1800), published by Cottle in Bristol and with a title that Dorothy Wordsworth, at least, considered as uncomfortably close to her brother’s Lyrical Ballads, Mary Robinson writes a series of poetic “tales” deriving from competing genres; one finds “A Sanctified Tale”, “A Domestic Tale”, and “A Gypsy Tale”, for instance.1 One also finds “A Gothic Swiss Tale”, and it is here that Robinson reveals her concern with two genres each identified in their separate ways with female readers and writers: the Gothic and the romance. Although, in Lyrical Tales and in her other poetry, Robinson often makes love central,2 she appears uncomfortable with a reassuring “happy ever after”. Instead, she creates romances in which death, not love, is the resolution; where poetry itself sabotages the romantic relationship. For Robinson, genre works against itself: she infiltrates her romances with a tactical use of obfuscation, imaged through horrific dreams, narrative delay, or banality in place of climax. Leading her readers through a world of romance heavily tinged with the Gothic, to paraphrase E.J. Clery, she “recognizes that the [romance] is 1 In a letter to Mrs John Marshall of September 1800, Dorothy Wordsworth notes that “[William] intends to give [Lyrical Ballads] the titles of ‘Poems by W. Wordsworth’ as Mrs Robinson has claimed the title and is about publishing a volume of Lyrical Tales” (see Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787-1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver, Oxford, 1967, I, 297). For further discussion of the structural nature of Lyrical Tales, see Pascoe and Curran (n.2 below); and Lisa Vargo, “The Implications of Desire: Tabitha Bramble and the Lyrical Tales”, paper delivered at “1798 and Its Implications”, joint conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, 6-10 July 1998, St Mary’s University College, Strawberry Hill, London. 2 Although by no means its only centre; she also relies on satire, comedy, and autobiography, as critics like Judith Pascoe, Stuart Curran, Lisa Vargo, and others have shown (see Judith Pascoe, “Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace”, in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, eds Paula Feldman and Theresa Kelley, Hanover: NH, 1995, 252-68; Stuart Curran, “Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales in Context”, in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers 1776-1837, eds Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner, Philadelphia, 1994, 7-35; and Lisa Vargo, “The Claims of ‘Real Life and Manners’: Coleridge and Mary Robinson”, The Wordsworth Circle, 26 [1995], 134-37). 138 Jacqueline M. Labbe bound by the metaphysics of appearance, that [its metaphorics are] of necessity given over to superstition”.3 In Robinson, the romance is taken over from within by the supernatural, superstition, and unexplained Gothicism that belies and eventually explodes its “appearance”. Robinson uses dreams and manipulates delay and expectation in her verse; she structures her most forceful romances around the spectacle of the weakened, dying or dead man, and this in itself constitutes violence. Romantic love, in its very failure, figures and emblematizes its own emptiness, while heroines become the focus: in Robinson’s poetical romances they also function as the instigators, whether passively as in “Golfre” and “The Murdered Maid”/“The Hermit of Mont Blanc”,4 or more creatively as in “The Lady of the Black Tower”. However, the romance does not transform into a vehicle for female empowerment; on the contrary, Robinson seems to use violence constructively: that is, in disallowing romantic resolution, in filtering desire through violence, she demonstrates the weakness, the exclusions, figured by love, and she does so by associating it explicitly with violence. Moreover, Robinson especially responds to cultural pressure by openly representing that which is simultaneously authorized and suppressed: irrationality. The efforts made in the 1790s to repress transgression resulted in a black market of transgression, not to mention a kind of cultural romantic hysteria:5 curbs on free speech were matched by increased outbursts of public disorder; an increasing reliance on propriety found its evil twin in racy newspaper cartoons and knowing, arch gossip over the public figures of the demi-monde.6 If, as Harvey and Gow assert, “sexuality is ... associated in Anglo- American cultures with the transgressive individual, that aspect of self that emerges through lack of control, that exists and finds expression against reason”,7 then love and desire in the romance and their collusion with violence 3 Clery’s original phrase is “Romance recognises that the gentlewoman is bound by the metaphorics of appearance, that her mind is of necessity given over to superstition” (see “The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s”, in Reviewing Romanticism, eds Philip Martin and Robin Jarvis, Basingstoke, 1992, 73). 4 This poem is called “The Hermit of Mont Blanc” in the Lyrical Tales, and “The Murdered Maid” in Robinson’s Poetical Works. I discuss the significance of the name change in the course of this essay. 5 For instance, the refusal by the villagers of Racedown to believe that William and Dorothy Wordsworth really were brother and sister and not illicit lovers posing as brother and sister relies on a romantic reconstruction of reality as informed by transgression and violence against social codes and mores. 6 One such target was Mary Robinson, as we shall notice later (see also Judith Pascoe, “‘The Spectacular Flâneuse’: Mary Robinson and the City of London”, The Wordsworth Circle, 23 [1992], 165-71; Jan Fergus and Janice Farrar Thaddeus, “Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790-1820”, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 17 [1987], 191-207; Robert Bass, The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson, London, 1958, passim). 7 Penelope Harvey and Peter Gow, Sex and Violence: Issues in Representation and Experience, London, 1994, 2..
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