Graphing Complex Networks of Meaning in Charlotte
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
“TO WEAVE FANTASTIC GARLANDS”: GRAPHING COMPLEX NETWORKS OF MEANING IN CHARLOTTE SMITH’S ELEGIAC SONNETS by Davita DesRoches Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honours in English Acadia University May, 2016 © Copyright by Davita DesRoches, 2016 This thesis by Davita DesRoches is accepted in its present form by the Department of English as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honours Approved by the Thesis Supervisor __________________________ ____________________ Dr. J. Saklofske Date Approved by the Head of the Department __________________________ ____________________ Dr. J. Slights Date Approved by the Honours Committee __________________________ ____________________ Dr. A. Redden Date ii I, Davita DesRoches, grant permission to the University Librarian at Acadia University to reproduce, loan or distribute copies of my thesis in microform, paper or electronic formats on a non-profit basis. I, however, retain the copyright in my thesis. _________________________________ Signature of Author _________________________________ Date iii Acknowledgements To Dr. [and Jedi Master] Jon Saklofske, my supervisor, for his undying enthusiasm and excessive but fruitful marginal questions. To my professors (and cheerleaders) in the Department of English, for welcoming a mathematical trespasser into your midst with open arms. To my father, Andy, for teaching me that everything — from a jump shot to a Bruce Cockburn song — is poetry. To my mother, Rebecca, for raising me on a strict diet of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, L.M. Montgomery and Bill Peet. To Bri, Andrea, and Gene, for the tea, pie, and long conversations that have sustained me these last four years and for being some of the most unapologetically brilliant women I know. To Charlotte Smith, for writing poetry that made writing two theses worth it. iv Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................... IV LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................... VI ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................. VII INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1: GRAPHING SONNETS ......................................................................................... 7 CHAPTER 2: A COMMUNITY OF GRIEF .............................................................................. 25 CHAPTER 3: THE INCONSTANT MUSE ................................................................................ 39 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................... 53 APPENDIX A: FULL TEXT OF KEY SONNETS ..................................................................... 56 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................. 62 v List of Figures FIGURE 1: A SPREADSHEET OF THE ELEVEN CATEGORIES .............................................................................. 11 FIGURE 2: A CLOSER LOOK AT SONNET VII .................................................................................................... 12 FIGURE 3: THE INITIAL VERSION OF THE GRAPH ............................................................................................. 13 FIGURE 4: THE FINAL, DIGITAL VERSION OF THE GRAPH ................................................................................ 24 FIGURE 5: THE SONNETS THAT REFERENCE DEATH AND GRIEF ...................................................................... 30 FIGURE 6: EMBRACING AND SUBVERTING TRADITIONS IN SMITH’S ELEGIAC SONNETS ................................... 47 vi Abstract This thesis uses basic modelling principles from graph theory to critically revisit and revive the complexity of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets. The graph of Smith’s collection acts as a visual and critical tool, revealing key patterns and motifs in the text and demonstrating the limitations of particular critical perspectives and biases. Although the graph shows many potential avenues of investigation, this thesis will focus on the way the graph prompts a critical re-evaluation of the representations of gender in Elegiac Sonnets. Biographical criticism of Smith’s sonnets has prompted speculation on how Smith merges her social position as a woman and as a mother with the experience of her poetic speaker. The collection and the graph’s model of the collection fracture this assumed correspondence into a complex network of voices that includes the sonnets’ many speakers and Smith’s frequent allusions. Ultimately, the graph does not uncover Smith the woman in Elegiac Sonnets but Smith the poet, who pushes the literary boundaries created by her contemporaries and the critical boundaries assigned because of her gender. vii viii Introduction Nicholas Roe, in his introduction to Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, reflects on Samuel Coleridge’s definition of the elegy from the introduction to Sheet of Sonnets as a “sonnet in which ‘some lovely feeling’ has overflowed the sonnet’s fourteen lines to voice a prolonged ‘effusion’ of feeling” (6). Critical perspectives on Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets have often focused on the intensity and subjectivity of the collection’s emotional effusion, attributing this intensity to Smith’s personal hardships. However, these perspectives often miss or diminish the ways in which Smith and her collection are critical as a point of entry into the broader concerns of the Romantic period — reimagining and reinventing poetic forms, exploring individual subjectivity in the wake of the Enlightenment and of the culture of sensibility, and complicating societal gender norms. The purpose of this thesis is not a figurative reinvention of the critical wheel as far as Smith’s work is concerned. Critical discourse to date on Smith’s work has introduced some compelling and productive arguments about Smith’s complicated portrayal of gender and human subjectivity. Instead, this thesis will take a fresh approach to mapping Elegiac Sonnets to reveal the persistent patterns, gaps, and inconsistencies in existing criticism of the collection. Revealing the unexplored potential of Smith’s sonnets presents a necessary challenge to gender-based assumptions that limit twenty-first century critical and cultural perspectives. In the introduction to a critical biography of Charlotte Smith, Loraine Fletcher addresses the issue of naming Smith in light of her complicated paternal and marital 1 relationships, an argument that demonstrates one of the primary critical struggles with Smith’s work. Charlotte Turner was married off by her father at 15 to Benjamin Smith, who did not manage his estate or wealth well and consequently spent most of his life debt-ridden and in debtors’ prison. She turned to writing as a way to support her eight children in the midst of her husband’s legal troubles and a court case that delayed the distribution of her father-in-law’s estate to her children (Curran xx–xxii). Fletcher asserts that the poet’s married name (Smith) and maiden name (Turner) are inappropriate due to her noted hatred for her husband’s name and the “inadequacy” of her father in her hour of need (4). Fletcher therefore decides to use Smith’s first name for the remainder of her book. Fletcher’s efforts to remove Smith from the complicated dynamics of these male relationships is symbolic of Anne Mellor’s critical effort to revive interest in female Romantic writers by distinguishing their collective concerns and by identifying these concerns as what Mellor classifies as feminine Romanticism, distinct from masculine Romanticism. Although Mellor notes almost immediately that these classifications are “endpoints on a continuum” not “binary opposites” (11), her work sets up a critical precedent in which the work of female writers is considered as female first and then Romantic, a precedent embraced by some Smith scholars, including Fletcher. Practically, this creates a space to address female Romantic writers without requiring the endorsement of masculine Romantic criticism for inclusion in the canon. Fletcher’s choice also seems to indicate an attempt to remove Smith symbolically from the patriarchal systems that primarily contributed to her sorrows. This removal proves problematic as a critical approach to Smith. Smith’s position within and response to the male-driven society of the eighteenth century is in fact key to the power and 2 resonance of her work. Her work is an act of both financial self-sufficiency and artistic prowess in a society and literary culture that condemned her to a lesser role (Curran xix). While Fletcher’s argument regarding Smith’s strained paternal and marital relationships certainly has merit, it is hard to imagine that a biographer of William Wordsworth or Samuel Coleridge would use “William” or “Samuel” as a result of complicated family relationships. Patriarchal cultures typically follow a male line of succession in which the dignity and continuity of the family name relies on its sons; thus Wordsworth or Coleridge would have the required agency to dignify their family name. To remove Smith symbolically from this culture is