Love and Death in Felicia Hemans's Records of Woman
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Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy Love and death in Felicia Hemans’s Records of Woman Supervisor: Dissertation submitted in partial fulfiment Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels” by Fiorina Di Rosa 2008-2009 Di Rosa 2 Di Rosa 3 Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor, not only for her guidance, insights and interesting remarks on my work, but also for her enthusiastic way of teaching Victorian poetry that made me more curious about certain aspects of this era. During the course English Literature: Older Period, without which I would never have had the inspiration for this paper and the fascination for the Victorian era, my interest in this period grew stronger. I am also grateful to Dr. Marianne Van Remoortel for her constructive criticism. She has supported me throughout this paper and provided me with new points of view about certain elements. Furthermore, I am also indebted to my parents, who gave me the opportunity to broaden my field of interest. They have consistently supported me, even at times when they hardly had the time to think of themselves. No one could have done a better job at encouraging me when I needed it. Finally, I would like to thank my friends, whom I could always rely on, in particular those who were so kind as to read my dissertation and give me tips that allowed me to improve my writing. Di Rosa 4 Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... 3 Contents ..................................................................................................................................... 4 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 5 1. Introduction to the Victorian Era. ........................................................................................ 10 1.1. Victorian Poetry. ............................................................................................................ 12 1.2. Women in Victorian Poetry. .......................................................................................... 13 1.3. Female versus male poetry. .......................................................................................... 14 2. Felicia Dorothea Browne Hemans. ....................................................................................... 17 2.1. Her Life. .......................................................................................................................... 17 2.2. Literary career: chronology and features of Felicia Hemans’s work. ............................ 21 2.2.1. Chronology. ............................................................................................................. 21 2.2.2. Features of Hemans’s work. ................................................................................... 22 2.2.3. Hemans’s and the audience’s “taste”. .................................................................... 28 3. Records of Woman. .............................................................................................................. 29 3.1. Introduction ................................................................................................................... 29 3.2. Analysis of Records of Woman. ..................................................................................... 34 3.2.1. Death. ...................................................................................................................... 34 3.2.2. Love. ........................................................................................................................ 66 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 101 Works cited............................................................................................................................. 102 Attachment ............................................................................................................................. 105 Di Rosa 5 Introduction Felicia Hemans was without any doubt a very remarkable poet during her lifetime (1793- 1835). Even today she appeals to the modern reader, because of her clear representation of everyday life and other aspects of the Victorian era in her work. As Nanora Sweet explains “she was a remarkably productive and self-questioning writer who richly endows our self- questioning now about gender, culture, and the work of poetry” 1. But how popular was she? Has she always been popular? And why have scholars only recently started to investigate her life, almost two centuries after her death? Catherine Robson points out: Numerous critics have charted the major phases in the reception of Hemans’s poetry, showing how a rising nineteenth-century popularity came to founder in a long but eventually interrupted period of neglect in the twentieth century. 2 Some researchers claim that the reason for Hemans’s previous omission from literary studies is that only now people are willing to read her work, whereas before they were rather sceptical about it and were not inclined to make an effort to understand it. The period in which we live today almost accepts any genre. We live in very an open-minded time. This, however, has not always been the case. Sweet and Melnyk, for instance, consider the modernist period to be (partly) responsible for the relative ‘lack of interest’ in Hemans’s poetry : Perhaps modernism’s prolonged ‘crisis in state’ has numbed us into this ‘collective’ amnesia – until now. Certainly Hemans’s substantial yet elusive poetry is no modernist ‘verbal icon’ of ‘well-wrought urn’, but rather a voluminous, intertextual 1 Nanora Sweet & Julie Melnyk, p. 1. 2 Catherine Robson, p. 151. Di Rosa 6 poetry that we are only now learning to read, a poetry redolent with cultural implication, composed in an inter-artistic vocabulary. 3 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hemans was one of the most popular poets in Britain and the United States. She was successful enough to live off her pen. Between 1808 and 1835, the year in which she died, nineteen volumes of her work were published, some even appeared in multiple editions: By the 1820s, with increasingly appreciative reviews in the establishment press and a regular presence in popular magazines and ornate annuals, “Mrs. Hemans” had emerged as England’s premier “poetess,” celebrated as its epitome of “feminine” excellence. This icon sentimentalized a success born of industry and facility, business acumen and alertness to the literary market, as well as talent. Adept in a range of genres and verse forms, *…+ literate, imaginative, and intellectually appetitive, Hemans fashioned popular themes with a transhistorical, international range of subjects, drawing on literatures past and present, English and Continental. 4 Hemans was very flexible in her choice of themes and verse forms. This resulted in a large readership – men as well as women – of all walks of life: “Her books were cherished gifts and prizes; many poems were public favourites, memorized and anthologized, illustrated and set to music”. 5 In the second half of the nineteenth century, she was still successful, but already less so than at the beginning of that century. When feminism and new historicism gained ground, the interest in her work gradually increased again: Her work was attracting interest not as a historical curiosity from the shop of outworn tastes, but for its currency, for its sounding of dissonances in nineteenth- century cultural ideals. Her perspectives, moreover, seemed to cast in new lights the traditional canon of male “Romantic” poets. *…+ Her celebrity in her own day became S Sweet & Melnyk, p. 1. 4 Susan J.Wolfson, Felicia Hemans, xiii. 5 Wolfson, , xiii Di Rosa 7 her curse in literary history, and the modern recovery, in no small part, has been a project of rescuing her from the terms of her nineteenth-century popularity. 6 We can conclude that Felicia Hemans was very successful in her time, but sank into oblivion after her death. Only at the end of the twentieth century did people come to recognize her poetic abilities and importance again, which led to a renewed interest into the poet’s life and work. In the late twentieth century, researchers such as Stuart Curran started exploring who the real Mrs. Hemans was, and what her real intentions were. Later analysis became more and more convinced that her poems had a hidden meaning, not only her more troubling work, but even the old anthologies’ favourites: The difficulty of reviving Hemans is felt even by readers who take her seriously, such as Stuart Curran. In his pioneering essay of 1988 he hoped to identify a complicated poet, arguing that while Hemans’s contemporaries made her “synonymous with the notion of a poetess, celebrating hearth and home, God and country in mellifluous verse that relished the sentimental and seldom teased anyone into thought”, there were “other and darker strains *…+ that seemed to subvert the role [she] claimed and invite a sophisticated reconsideration. 7 Like Curran, a number of researchers tried to discover the - according to them - other and thus primary meaning of her work. These explanations will nevertheless always remain speculative. The idea to devote my master dissertation to Felicia Hemans’s poetry was suggested