Graphing Complex Networks of Meaning in Charlotte

Home , Elegiac Sonnets

“TO WEAVE FANTASTIC GARLANDS”: GRAPHING COMPLEX

NETWORKS OF MEANING IN CHARLOTTE SMITH’S ELEGIAC SONNETS

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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.

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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

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

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 to fail to applaud her skill in navigating the male- dominated world of literature and to exclude her from her rightful place in a literary line of succession. As it has been applied to Smith’s sonnets, revisionist interest in female writers therefore requires interrogation, particularly in its treatment of gender.

Several Smith critics, including Jacqueline Labbe and Angela Keane, identify the potential of Smith’s poetry to challenge critical analysis of Romanticism and gender.

Jacqueline Labbe, in Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry, and the Culture of Gender, argues that “Smith’s poetry encourages a rethinking of our approach to Romantic gender: her shrewd appreciation of the multiplicities of femininity indicate that, in Romanticism, the subject of gender is an open one” (20). In another study of Smith, Angela Keane argues that “Modern criticism . . . has recovered Smith’s work and made us ask questions about the gap between the writer and that work, and the proximity between the autobiographical unhappiness and its textual performance” (6). Keane frames Smith’s use of affect as an act of artistic agency and remediation rather than personal revelation, making her work crucial to a broader understanding of the Romantic canon. Labbe and

Keane do not, however, fully uncover the potential of Elegiac Sonnets as a text that complicates biographical criticism of Smith’s work and critical attitudes towards gender in Romantic literature, instead using the sonnets as a rhetorical stepping-stone for their broader arguments about Smith’s other works.

Although critical arguments like Labbe’s and Keane’s are compelling, the textual analysis cited in support of their arguments often relies on limited critical or editorial perspectives. For example, Stuart Curran, editor of an authoritative anthology of Smith’s poetry, identifies the six sonnets that he believes are directly linked to the death of

Smith’s daughter in an article titled “Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism” (72–73).

Subsequently, many critics (e.g., Hawley, Labbe, Raycroft, Robinson, Sussman) have accepted Curran’s categorization and used these sonnets as an example of how Smith draws on her personal experience in the collection. Brent Raycroft, in particular, characterizes the collection’s “notorious monotony of theme,” inspired by “gender- determined sorrows” (376). Even a cursory read-through of the sonnets, however, reveals a much broader concern with grief and despair, extending beyond the sonnets attributed by critics to Smith’s “gender-determined sorrows.” Fortunately, not all of Smith’s critics who address the biographical elements of her poetry use the same dismissive tone to describe the collection. Yet, many of these critics still do approach this collection as the personal reflections of a woman wrestling with great sorrow, citing claims like Curran’s without investigating the collection’s broader themes and images.

In an effort to resist such critical missteps, this thesis addresses both the limitations of existing criticism of Elegiac Sonnets and the unexplored potential of Smith’s collection.

The first chapter details a method that acted as a catalyst for this project, combining

distant and close reading. Using basic concepts from graph theory, a graph of thematic networks was created that models the complex internal logic of Smith’s collection, taking multiple critical perspectives into account while also revealing their limitations and biases.

Although unconventional and by no means exhaustive, this graph provides visual proof that critical treatment of Elegiac Sonnets to date has relied on a narrow, simplistic frame.

The other chapters consequently explore two of the many avenues for investigation opened by this graph.

The second chapter addresses the problematic critical trend of conflating Smith with her poetic speakers, making particular reference to the sonnets marked by Stuart

Curran as inspired by Smith’s grief over losing her adult daughter, Anna. With reference to critical theory about authorial performance, this chapter uncovers multiple voices invoked by Smith to wrestle with the complex implications of human grief for mothers, fathers and lovers alike. The poetic community offered by Smith’s collection is therefore not reflective of a self-indulgent, mourning poet but expresses an extended meditation on the multiplicity of human experience required to capture the essence of grief and despair.

The third chapter places Smith within the masculine literary line of succession evoked by her rich network of intertextual allusions. Smith alludes to the work of many canonical male writers (such as Shakespeare and Petrarch), while also drawing heavily on mythical female figures (nymphs, muses, goddesses). Smith’s work therefore invokes conventionally gendered literary traditions by alluding to prominent male authorities and creating a poetic universe of conventionally female sources of inspiration. This places

Smith in an educated, largely male poetic elite from which she claims agency to draw on and subvert canonical literary forms through the act of writing. Smith harnesses her

creative agency to resist all attempts — both by her contemporaries and by her current critics — to restrict her work to the societal and literary boundaries determined by gender.

Ultimately, this thesis acts not as a defense of the profound potential of Smith’s Elegiac

Sonnets, as the rich texture of her sonnets is defense enough. Instead, this thesis aims to introduce and begin to explore the network of meaning that already exists in the collection, presenting and strongly endorsing a critical approach that is surprisingly lacking from critical appraisals of this collection to date.

CHAPTER 1: Graphing Sonnets

Any critical approach to literature models its primary text. In the same way that a mathematical model takes a real world phenomenon and reduces it down to the key variables that influence its behavior, a literary critical approach identifies key features of the text that contribute to the text’s impact thematically or stylistically. Data-based models in disciplines such as graph theory must be computationally efficient, while allowing the final model to retain enough real-world complexity to be useful. Similarly, a critical approach in literary studies must balance its preoccupation with textual detail with the text’s broader concerns to be effective.

As with all models, there are strengths and weaknesses to any approach. In an essay entitled “Deformation and Interpretation” that exposes the limitations of traditional literary methods, Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels assert:

Scholars murder to dissect, as Wordsworth famously observed, and naive readers . . .

often tell us when they recoil from our interpretive operations, “You've ruined the

poem for me": that kind of comment . . . illustrates something far more important

than a protest against scholarly sophisticates. Often coming as a kind of blanket

judgment on reflexive interpretation, it implicitly asserts the deformative status of

critical method in general.

McGann and Samuels do not dismiss the common criticism that literary scholarship ruins the reader’s experience. Instead, they accept that this critique identifies a key issue with deformative literary critical methods. The critical dissection of literary texts can result in the loss of broad thematic or stylistic concerns in the interest of accurately cataloguing

detail. Conversely, a critical model that examines broad concerns may miss critical details.

In most cases, these models preserve enough of the text’s original complexity to be useful, and this deformation is a necessary evil to engaging with specific aspects of a text.

In the case of Elegiac Sonnets, the critical models to date do not adequately represent the complexity of the collection. Instead, a prominent thread of biographical criticism guides the models that have been applied, leading to multiple critical arguments dedicated to the sonnets’ revelation of Smith’s personal troubles. The internal logic of the collection, however, demonstrates more textual depth than can be attributed to the confessional writings of a troubled poet. To reintroduce complexity and to challenge this critical contamination of Elegiac Sonnets, this chapter introduces an alternative method for visualizing this internal logic, grounded in basic modeling principles from graph theory. In “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” Franco Moretti uses his amateur understanding of graph theory to create character networks in Hamlet. Although his understanding of the discipline is limited, his critical motivation provides a helpful framework for applying this method to Smith’s collection. Moretti describes his character networks as a way of “making the past just as visible as the present” within the temporal structure of the play (4). Although Smith’s collection does not have the same temporal dimension, the networks of theme and imagery revealed by this method connect non- sequential sonnets, transforming a linear textual ordering into a complex visual dialogue.

Similar to Moretti’s work with Hamlet, the graph created by the implementation of the method developed here (Figure 4) has undergone “a change of purpose,” which “is often what happens to a system of thought travelling from one discipline to another” (11).

This change of purpose occurred in the movement from graph theory to literary criticism

as the graph acts as a critical tool for this thesis as well as a visual tool. The graph incorporates various critical viewpoints into its networks from the primary text used for this thesis, The Poems of Charlotte Smith: Charlotte Smith’s perspective as an author and annotator of her text; Stuart Curran’s perspective as the editor of the collection of Smith’s poetry; and my perspective as a fresh, but still biased, observer and critic. The graph reveals the respective limitations of these critical approaches, ultimately challenging the claims and assumptions made about the text by all three. Thus, an exercise in modeling

Elegiac Sonnets’ poetic patterns and “turning them into a set of signs . . . in a two- dimensional space” becomes an argument that reveals how limited critical perspectives deform and contaminate complex texts (Moretti 11).

This chapter demonstrates finally that in addition to visualizing the text’s patterns and revealing a broader argument about critical bias, the graph exceeds the limits of the various critical perspectives that inform its creation to provide further avenues of critical inquiry, fulfilling the requirements for an effective model.

First, the choice of graph theory as a modeling technique for Elegiac Sonnets requires some clarification and justification. Graphs are used as models in many disciplines because a graph can represent any kind of relationship between a set of objects, from sonnets to subway stops. In the case of Smith’s collection, a single sonnet functions as a network of particular poetic devices that evoke the speaker’s emotional state or struggle, making graph theory an appropriate approach. A graph is formally defined as a group of vertices or points (representing individual sonnets in this case) and edges or lines between vertices (representing a connection between two sonnets). While reading through Elegiac Sonnets, I would often stop to note similar images or ideas in non-

sequential sonnets. As an alternative to committing all prominent images and ideas to memory, it became apparent that a holistic study of Smith’s sonnets required a more effective method to record patterns in the text. Informed by a theoretical and conceptual grounding in graph theory, this method when implemented placed these observed threads of imagery and theme in a network of thematic cohesion and collision, ultimately exceeding the scope and complexity of Moretti’s work, which used a single text and single data point.

To keep this visual network manageable, particular categories were selected as an attempt to address past critical perspectives on the sonnets while also allowing for new avenues of investigation. The first step in this selection process was a focused close reading of the sonnets, which noted their audience, allusions, imagery, characters, themes, and editorial commentary by both Curran and Smith. Many sonnets in Smith’s collection are written for purposes beyond the publication of Elegiac Sonnets and are therefore written in distinct voices, while others have no indicated purpose but contain prominent motifs. The categories were therefore determined by the sonnet’s purpose (i.e. adaptations of other works, Smith’s novels, reflections on Smith’s native region in England, the death of Smith’s daughter, and personal or professional correspondence), or dominant themes and images (i.e. the moon, a nightingale, innocence, solitary figures, the cycle of seasons, and mythical female figures) as an attempt to model the collection’s divisions as they are marked by Smith as author and Curran as editor.

Each sonnet was placed in one of the eleven categories listed above, and each category was assigned a color. Then, if there were logical divisions in the category, these were also indicated. For example, the mythical female figures category was divided into

four — goddesses, muses, nymphs, and queens — and the sonnets from Smith’s novels were divided into sub-categories for each novel represented. Each of these sub-categories was drawn as a complete graph, or a graph on n vertices with every vertex connected to the other vertices by an edge, using the category’s colour for both the vertices and the edges. An image of the spreadsheet used to create the categories and their subdivisions is included below.

Figure 1: A Spreadsheet of the Eleven Categories Although the categories listed above are based on some clearly marked divisions in the text, the diversity of purpose does not break the threads of imagery and theme that run throughout the collection. My hypothesis after reading through the sonnets was that there would be significant overlap between sonnets in the purpose-based categories and the selected motifs. The graph was therefore drawn with, on one side, the categories based on purpose, and on the other, the categories based on imagery and theme, to highlight this overlap in the next step of graphing the sonnets.

In the next step, I revisited the notes taken during the initial close reading to highlight secondary connections between individual sonnets and other categories. These connections were marked by an edge between the individual sonnet’s vertex and the corresponding category. The supporting quotation from the sonnet was then written on the edge to ensure that the graph was grounded in the initial close reading. For example,

Sonnet VII, which is one of the three nightingale sonnets, has an edge to the female figures category, “The pensive Muse” (7); to the innocence category, “the love-lorn youth”

(9) and “shepherd girls” (11); and to the solitary figures category, “soft minstrel” (2). In addition to these edges, each vertex was marked with a series of letters that mark major allusions in the sonnet’s text. In the case of Sonnet VII, the vertex was marked with an M

(Milton) and Sh (Shakespeare). A section of the finalized graph highlighting Sonnet VII and its edges is included below.

Figure 2: A Closer Look at Sonnet VII

The first version of the graph was drawn on two pieces of poster board, seen in

Figure 3.

Figure 3: The Initial Version of the Graph

From a quick glance at the graph above, it is clear that there are patterns and intersections of theme and imagery even among sonnets written for a variety of purposes.

What is not immediately clear, though, is how this method illuminates Elegiac Sonnets in a new way or how the method preserves critical integrity since the method was shaped by my own critical observations. Franco Moretti’s work in distant reading provides a helpful critical and theoretical framework for this method. Distant reading is most commonly understood as a method that expands its critical scope from the nuance of words on a page to significant amounts of textual data that can be collected, analyzed and visualized.

Moretti’s work with Hamlet, as detailed in “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” is based on simplistic data points — an edge between two characters that have any length of dialogue interaction (3). My method similarly involves a reductive analytical practice or a critical deformation, as McGann and Samuels would call it, reducing a shared theme or variation on a theme to a single edge. This deformation is necessary to accommodate the size of the collection and is grounded in multiple close readings of the text since the final graphing step required a second round of close reading to find the supporting quotations written on the edges. Compared to Moretti’s methodology, the intake of data from Smith’s collection was more ambitious, and the resulting graph provides more critical material than Hamlet’s social networks.

Additionally, the graph developed in this chapter exceeds the limits of previous critical deformations of Smith’s collection as it mediates and reveals three different editorial and critical influences. The first is that of Charlotte Smith. Her notes on the collection are included in the observations recorded in the close reading, and her authorial presence is felt in the various prefaces included in The Poems of Charlotte Smith, edited

by Stuart Curran. In the preface to the first and second editions of Elegiac Sonnets, Smith presents her poems as “some very melancholy moments” (3). Most critics draw particular attention to the preface to the second volume of the collection, in which Smith takes a defensive stance against those who would claim that she was preying on public generosity through the subscriptions she collected in advance of her second volume. She defends her actions by speaking at length of the many sorrows and “calamities . . . brought on my children” (Smith 7).

This emotional defense is in direct contrast to the methodical editorial Smith who guides the reader’s understanding by means of her textual notes, which highlight, among other things, allusions and botanical context for her sonnets’ natural imagery. As

Jacqueline Labbe notes, Smith employs “myriad Smith personae to complement her thematics and imagery,” which are “multiple, almost mutually exclusive positions”

(“Introduction” 5). Although Smith frames the collection, her authorial presence is not consistent or even singular but polyvocal in tone and purpose. The frame offered by

Smith in the prefaces ultimately has limited impact on the graph developed in this chapter.

Smith’s primary impact is based on her titles that define three categories: the translations, the reflections on Smith’s native region, and her personal and professional correspondence. Smith’s editorial care, as opposed to her prefatory assertions, has a more notable impact on the data collected for the graph.

Still, her prefaces speak to the melancholy that inspired these sonnets and explain some of the details of these injustices and indignities. For this reason, critics attempt to use Smith’s biography as the single entry point into the human experience portrayed in her sonnets. Michel Foucault describes such critical focus as the critic’s search for the

author function, fueled by “the belief that there must be . . . a point where contradictions are resolved, where the incompatible elements can be shown to relate to one another or to cohere around a fundamental and originating contradiction” (1484). In an attempt to create coherence, this search threatens to reduce complex texts to the perspective of the single social position occupied by the author, as with Elegiac Sonnets whose critics claim that Smith’s personal melancholy dominates the collection. The multiple functions of

Smith’s authorial voice revealed in her editorial notes contradict this simplistic approach, and Smith’s impact on the text is almost exclusively limited to clarifying certain allusions or images. Much of the biographical criticism employed is therefore merely extrapolated from an attempt to reconcile the various, contradictory author functions of Smith.

Biographical criticism of Smith’s sonnet draws primarily on the perceived affect of her prefatory persona as typified by Stuart Curran’s perspective as the editor of The

Poems of Charlotte Smith. Curran’s edition and editorial perspective is cited in the overwhelming majority of the critical work on Smith’s sonnets, so his edition of Elegiac

Sonnets (based on the ninth edition of the first volume of the sonnet collection) is authoritative among Smith scholars. Curran contributes a large portion of the structural categories in the graph developed here, including the sonnets from the novels (a distinction not marked by Smith), the sonnets reflecting on Smith’s native region, and the sonnets concerning the death of Smith’s daughter. His editorial notes are also helpful in identifying the three nightingale sonnets. As a result, Curran’s critical and editorial approach is an important one to include in the graph. However, his authoritative editorial presence does not erase his bias, and the graph reveals several limitations of Curran’s perspective.

In his introduction to The Poems of Charlotte Smith, Curran describes Smith’s attempt “to position herself midway between the realms of art and reality” (xxvi). Citing the implicit personal nature of the sonnet, Curran claims that Smith is on the one hand

“transmuting her personal sorrow into the brief liquidity of mellifluous song” (xxvi).

Curran notes that on the other hand, Smith also “emphasizes . . . that she belongs to a long tradition of singers and that her poems transmit a number of ventriloquized voices”

(xxvi). Curran’s assessment of Smith’s duality seems to indicate an appreciation of the potential fluidity of voice in Elegiac Sonnets. Still, Curran suggests that these dual identities function independently; for example, the ventriloquism of the novel sonnets is distinct from the personal tone of the sonnets written to her friends. Yet the complex connections symbolized by the secondary edges in the graph contradict this assertion. The graph instead reveals significant overlap in theme and image between Curran’s imposed dichotomy.

Additionally, Curran’s biographical analysis is not as clearly supported by the text as he claims. For example, the classification of the five sonnets allegedly written about

Smith’s daughter’s death is a point of tension in Curran’s edition of this text. In the editorial notes, Curran notes that Sonnet LXV is addressed to Dr. Parry, the doctor who attended to Smith’s daughter during her illness, a statement that is supported by Smith’s note on the sonnet as well (57). However, Curran’s addition to Smith’s note is an assertion that Sonnets LXXIV, LXXVIII, LXXXIX, XC, and XCI also allude to the death of Smith’s daughter (57). These allusions noted by Curran’s editorial notes are in the following lines: “By her, whose loss… I deplore” (LXXIV 13); “More fair was she on whose untimely grave/ Flow my unceasing tears” (LXXVIII 11–12); “never more the

form/ I loved…shall bless my sight” (LXXXIX 11–12); “‘such things were’,” an allusion to a line spoken by Macduff in Macbeth (XC 9); and “that form adored” (XCI 9).

From the list above, Sonnet XCI is the only sonnet with a reference to a female parent, although Sonnet XC does allude to Macduff’s sorrow as a father at the killing of his children. The other three sonnets refer to death, sorrow, and in the case of LXXIV and

LXXVIII, an unknown woman. Curran’s editorial assertion that these five sonnets specifically reference the death of Smith’s daughter seems to be an extremely specific extrapolation from biographical details that does not account for the 31 other sonnets that also explicitly refer to death, a pattern that is noted by the graph. This extrapolation is not entirely unfounded, but Curran’s claim is based on potentially ambiguous textual support.

Additionally, Curran’s classification fails to note the extent to which the entire collection is marked by references to death and grief. Thus Curran’s perspective is helpful but ultimately fails to capture the broader context of the collection.

The utility of the method for this thesis relies on its ability to incorporate and critique my critical bias as well. When I began my study of Smith’s collection, I was hoping to develop an argument on the intersection of Smith’s radical political views and her portrayal of womanhood, tracing a pattern of revolutionary approaches to womanhood through the work of other female Romantic poets. As I read Smith’s sonnets,

I was also reading Anne Mellor’s Romanticism and Gender hoping to draw some conclusions about Smith’s place in the gender politics of the Romantic period, a community-based critical approach to female poets similar to the critical approach used by Curran, Labbe, Wolfson, and Mellor. Two of the categories on the graph represent my critical preoccupation, the categories dedicated to mythical female figures and the moon,

a conventionally female entity. These are ultimately prominent categories as my bias was guided by initial observations in the text. The other categories that emerged during the first close reading of the text complicated my search for Smith’s approach to gender politics, in particular the solitary figure category populated exclusively by male figures.

Additionally, the allusions made by Smith to other literary texts are all to prominent male intellectuals and writers. It became increasingly clear that Smith’s writing does not evoke a proto-feminist revolution. Instead, both male and female voices populate her sonnets to the point that claiming the speaker’s “I” as always implicitly female is not possible.

The final step of this method was transforming the physical graph into the digital image in Figure 4 as the rest of the thesis was being drafted. Although the resulting image looks similar to the original graph, I conducted a brief third close reading to find explicit references to death captured in the graph’s black edges. The graph was further revised and refined as other critical sources prompted additional observations about the sonnets while drafting the second and third chapters. For example, based on critical commentary on the sonnets’ use of conventionally male or female entities, I included any references to the sun as well as the moon in the orange category. The method used to generate the graph of the collection was therefore dynamic, constantly adapting to discoveries and observations that challenged my critical bias, and ultimately captured an internal logic that exceeded my expectations.

Although Mellor’s definition of feminine Romanticism did not hold entirely true for

Smith’s sonnets, her chapter “Ideological Cross-Dressing,” which compares the

“masculine” Romantic characteristics of Emily Brontë with the “feminine” Romantic characteristics of John Keats, is a more relevant critical approach to Smith’s poetry.

Smith inhabits quite comfortably the space between what Mellor admits is a false binary of masculine and feminine Romanticism. Mellor describes Brontë’s “refusal to confine herself to the subject position of the woman in literary discourse,” which is also characteristic of Smith’s work (189). Smith’s poetry also falls within the category of feminine Romanticism as she does rely on a “self that is fluid, absorptive, responsive, with permeable ego boundaries” (Mellor 209). As Jacqueline Labbe notes, Smith “[uses] poetry to explore aspects of difference . . . through the creation of a community of voices”

(“Communities” 8). Her work is clearly that of a human being who has suffered great loss and hardship. In addition to this prominent pathos, the sonnets contain a rich multiplicity of poetic voices and thematic concerns. Smith’s collection therefore demands to be addressed on multiple levels of meaning beyond that of the literary damsel in overly emotive distress as portrayed by Brent Raycroft and Richard Terry.

Another of the strengths of the methodology of this thesis, then, is its ability to reveal inconsistencies between editorial framing and critical perspectives and the actual raw “data” of the sonnets. The graph reveals a colorful pattern of shared imagery and themes from the restrictive purpose-based categories to the more dynamic motif-based categories. The category that is most often critically aligned with specifics from Smith’s life — the sonnets that are allegedly inspired by her daughter’s death — is also the most divisive, revealing a broader thematic concern with death and loss within the sonnets that is ignored in favour of dissecting these sonnets through the lens of Smith as a victim of her tragic circumstances. As these inconsistencies were revealed, the graphing method continued to be a dynamic process that prompted constant revisions based on ongoing close readings of the text and additional critical sources. Rather than introducing any

reductive observational biases to the graph, these revisions were driven by new observations that augmented and complicated previous understanding of the sonnets.

Thus the development of the graph mirrors the development of this thesis as the various stages of the graph’s creation have been informed by ongoing research and the ongoing research reciprocally informed by the graph.

By incorporating multiple critical perspectives and exceeding their limits and individual biases, this graph also provides potential avenues for further study of Elegiac

Sonnets. For example, the thematic category concerning the passage of seasons has seven sonnets, with edges connecting an additional eleven sonnets to this category. This particular category highlights a motif observed in the collection in which the sonnets’ speakers compare the cycle of human life to the cycle of seasons. The speakers of these sonnets repeatedly celebrate the return of physical life in the spring, while recognizing that human hurt and despair is not restored to life and joy again in the spring. This motif was used by Thomas Gray in “Sonnet on the Death of Richard West” (published in 1775 but written in 1742) in which “the joyous springtime renewal of life is set against the poet’s lonely grief” (Fairer 294). Gray is alluded to in several of Smith’s other poems, but this particular connection has not been explored, leaving it open to further study.

The imagery of the passage of seasons informs the Sonnets’ larger concern with the natural world as an entity interacting with the human speaker. Smith’s collection engages with nature at the micro level, e.g., spider webs (LXIII & LXXVII), and at the macro level, e.g., the ocean flooding and eroding a seaside town in England (XLIV). In Smith’s sonnets, her speaker, “whose joy in nature only exacerbates despair, and whose isolation figures as an emblem of sorrow and loss,” often seems to be wandering through various

natural scenes alone (Labbe “Communities” 7). This motif positions Smith’s speakers as isolated figures communing or interacting with nature like the pilgrims, lunatics, and prisoners of war who populate the sonnets in the solitary figures category. This is just one example of the graph’s utility in mapping previously unidentified or unexplored connections in Elegiac Sonnets, simply by following the thread of a chosen category through a few degrees of connection in the graph.

The rest of the thesis explores the representations of gender revealed by the graph to push critical dialogue regarding Elegiac Sonnets past the one-to-one correspondence between Smith and her sonnets’ speakers toward an open-ended dialogue about the creative agency demonstrated by Smith as she explores the multiplicity of human subjectivity. To this end, these chapters examine key points of tension in the graph with further analysis exposing the gender politics that have impeded critical discourse on this collection.

The second chapter examines the poetic “I” by exploring the distinction between poet and speaker. As it is a particularly personal genre, critics who study sonnets conventionally conflate the poet with the speaker. However, the multiplicity or community of voices invoked by Smith to challenge this conflation is well documented but not fully explored. By incorporating other sonnets that reflect on death and grief, this chapter will address the tension inherent in Curran’s claim that Smith the artist becomes

Smith the mother in the sonnets that allude to her daughter’s death. The third chapter further explores the division of voice in the collection, examining the prevalence of allusions to masculine writers and literary traditions (e.g. Shakespeare, Pope, Milton, and

Petrarch) and the mythic female figures that populate these traditions (e.g. muses, goddesses, nymphs). These allusions place Smith’s sonnets within a patriarchal literary lineage, so the third chapter explores how these sonnets embrace, resist and reinvent these traditions. This combination of male and female authority implies a richly complex intersection of literature and gender that places pressure on assumptions made about

Smith as an author and as a woman.

The remaining chapters of this thesis therefore draw on both the graph and the close reading required to produce it to challenge critical assumptions regarding gender in

Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets. As with any critical model, the model created for this thesis is reductive and deformative by nature. However, its utility is demonstrated by the complexity that this model reveals. The graph generates a number of promising routes for investigation that take the biases of various critical and editorial perspectives into consideration. The strength of this method in particular is the way in which it reveals and challenges the claims and assumptions of these perspectives. The graph also reveals patterns and potential avenues for further study that were not considered by these various critical perspectives. Thus the results exceed the initial critical framework for the collection, pointing to undiscovered and unexplored potential in Elegiac Sonnets, which moves the collection past the limitations of biographical criticism and the gendered assumptions of current critical commentary. Though unconventional, the application of basic graph theory logic to Smith’s sonnets reveals a network that prompts a dynamic dialogue between text and critic, refracted through a series of critical and poetic perspectives.

Figure 4: The Final, Digital Version of the Graph

CHAPTER 2: A Community of Grief

“The limits of the sonnet can turn out not to be walls, but horizons.”

- David Fairer

The previous chapter reveals the walls imposed on Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac

Sonnets by critics and the horizons of the collection’s potential that have been previously neglected. To begin the process of uncovering such potential, it is important to address the complex problem of poetic voice. There is an implicit link between poet and speaker in the sonnet, which is a form that acts as the “perfect vehicle for crystallizing a fleeting experience” in the hope “that its localized ‘moment’ of exquisite feeling will be shared by a sympathetic reader” (Fairer 296). Unfortunately, the lingering eighteenth century preoccupation with sensibility and sympathy ends up as justification for equating the poet with the poetic speaker who is inviting the reader into his or her affective experience.

The worst of this conflation occurs when critics describe Smith’s collection as personally indulgent, such as Richard Terry who claims that “Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets . . . dwell relentlessly on Smith’s own misery and its resistance to any form of alleviation”

(52). Although Terry later concedes that Smith’s sense of despair stems primarily from the economic and social plight of her children, his initial analysis of Smith’s long poem

“The Emigrants” is that “Smith seems too self-consumed to feel real empathy” (56). He corrects this assertion by remarking “this perhaps wrongs the author” (56). This ad hominem speculation supports Terry’s larger argument that much of Smith’s poetry is primarily preoccupied with the “exercise of sympathy” (57).

William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley caution critics to avoid interrogating the

author’s intentions or the author’s state of mind to arrive at an intended conclusion about the text, since “Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle” (1246).

Biographical details, while important to the holistic treatment of a text, cannot precede the text in prominence or importance in critical discourse. The choice of an oracle as an analogy for an author indicates that an artist should be treated as a medium of thought and emotional experience as opposed to a puppet master. Terry’s attempt to understand

Smith’s motivation is an excellent example of the critical fallacy that fixates on Smith’s presumed emotional state as a woman— and particularly as a mother — to frame critical inquiries into poems that are temporally and thematically distinct from Smith.

This chapter addresses this critical fallacy by appealing to the graph presented in the first chapter to explore broader thematic concerns with grief and to challenge limited critical and editorial perspectives on the representation of Smith as a mother in Elegiac

Sonnets. In particular, this chapter addresses the death of Smith’s adult daughter and the perceived shadow that this casts on the collection. Elegiac Sonnets’ topical concern with death is not strictly the channeling of the pathos of a grieving mother; instead, Smith cycles through a fluid network of poetic voices to investigate loss, paradoxically containing an inexpressibly powerful emotion within 14 lines. This network challenges critical perspectives that rely on a singular subjectivity rooted in the poet’s biography and illustrates the nuances of grief through the fluidity and multiplicity of the collection’s poetic voice.

Instead of a singular subjectivity, the speakers implied by textual clues and allusions in Smith’s sonnets create a complex, un-gendered network of voices that add interpretative layers to Smith’s collection that cannot be unified through the (im)position

of Smith as mother. In the five sonnets marked by Curran as directly alluding to the death of Smith’s daughter (see Appendix A for full text), the strongest textual connection to

Smith’s own experience is found in Sonnet XCI in which the speaker is explicitly characterized as both artist and mother. The speaker holds a “portrait on my bleeding breast” (XCI 8) of her lost “angel” (13) with grief given agency as the force that

“Enshrines thy image in thy Mother’s heart” (14). Jacqueline Labbe notes the visceral imagery of this sonnet, claiming that “the very force and violence of the poem create fissures in the maternal speaker’s subjectivity . . . she displays an almost mythic grief”

(Culture of Gender 74). Labbe’s analysis goes on to dissect what she claims to be the performative nature of Sonnet XCI’s speaker, arguing that even the most obvious textual reference to maternity deviates from societal expectation. If the speaker’s grief is mythic and hyperbolic, the grief displayed in Sonnet XCI is rooted in convention and performance, as Labbe claims, instead of sincerity. Smith’s portrait of a mother’s loss is not the long-suffering and broken image that her critics suggest but an angry artist who is frustrated that her work can only “mimic” her lost child (1). Thus Sonnet XCI demonstrates the gap between human affect and its expression or performance in art, directly undermining biographically driven criticism of Smith’s work.

Sonnet XC also seems to make explicit reference to parenthood. However, the allusions that Curran as editor uses to support this claim are to the grief of fathers:

Macduff from Macbeth and Brook Boothby from Sorrows: Sacred to the Memory of

Penelope (a collection of sonnets written in memory of Boothby’s only daughter). Curran draws attention to the allusion made in Sonnet XC to Macduff’s line “I must also feel it as a man./ I cannot but remember such things were/ That were most precious to me”

(Macbeth 4.3.261–63). According to Curran, this particular allusion demonstrates

“Macduff’s inability to remain stoic after the murder of his wife and children” (Curran

77). Curran’s claim complicates the gender of the parental speaker, since Curran’s note seems to indicate that Smith as speaker and mother consequently channels Macduff’s visible grief. Additionally, Macduff’s children are murdered by order of Macbeth, which suggests a different experience of grief than that felt by Smith, who lost her adult daughter to disease. Thus, gender notwithstanding, Curran’s argument is complicated by the gap between his implied speaker (Smith) and the other voices invoked.

Another gap in this particular argument is the lesser weight attached by Curran to another allusion to Macbeth found in Sonnet LXXIV, referring to a line spoken by

Macbeth after Duncan’s murder: “Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!/

Macbeth does murder sleep,’ — the innocent sleep,/ Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care” (Macbeth 2.2.47–49). Also in Sonnet LXXIV, the speaker reflects on deep loss and grief over an unnamed “her, whose loss in anguish I deplore” (XC 13). The equation of Smith’s grief with Macduff’s in XC is complicated by the equation of Smith’s grief with the sleepless terror of Macbeth’s guilt and the literal blood on his hands in

LXXIV. The human experience expressed in these sonnets therefore does not clearly correspond to Smith’s biography, and these various allusions present diverse perspectives on grief and death that challenge Curran’s reductive critical findings.

Curran’s assertion that these sonnets are unified by the voice of Smith as grieving mother introduces an implicit gender difference to her speakers, socially and critically determined by assumptions regarding motherhood. Once this gender difference is introduced, Curran’s argument is destabilized by the choice of Macduff and Macbeth as

prominent male voices invoked by the same speaker but wrestling with opposite consequences of death. Labbe notes Smith’s fluidity of voice in these sonnets as

“transformations of the maternal voice . . . [that intimate] her understanding that her culture considered motherhood to be woman’s emotional zenith, and her exploitation of this [understanding]” (Culture of Gender 80). By Labbe’s analysis, Smith is aware of the gender difference imposed on her speaker and pushes its boundaries to challenge the assumptions of her audience.

The speaker’s gender is also ambiguous in the final two sonnets of Curran’s grouping, LXXVIII and LXXXIX. Labbe notes that “the muted reference to a lost ‘she’ can only be read as the lament of a mother if we follow Smith’s directions [or arguably,

Curran’s directions] . . . if we in effect degender them — then they transform into poems of lost love” (Culture of Gender 76). Again, Smith’s perceived references to maternal grief are inconsistent. The sonnets can alternately be read as a lover’s lament — “for never more the form/ I loved — so fondly loved, shall bless my sight” (LXXXIX 11–12).

Sonnet LXXXIX dwells on the physicality of the dead or absent beloved, and the “form” of the beloved and the “I” of the speaker are not strictly gendered in this sonnet. Similarly, in Sonnet LXXIV the speaker desires to rest next to “her” in death to “feel that loss no more” (14). The intimacy and proximity in death desired by the speaker suggests the grief of a lover as well as that of a mother. Like the mythic grief that Labbe highlights regarding Sonnet XCI, this image echoes the mythic fate of star-crossed lovers like

Romeo and Juliet who rest in the same tomb. As Labbe claims, the imposition of a mother as speaker and of maternal grief as the subject of the sonnets relies on the critical assumption of Smith as speaker, an assumption that is not always supported by the text.

Figure 5: The Sonnets that Reference Death and Grief

Although a close reading of Curran’s edited collection of sonnets confirms this overwhelming thematic concern with loss, the graphing method outlined in Chapter 1 reveals the extent of this concern by identifying 31 sonnets (shown in Figure 5) that explicitly refer to death. Curran’s analysis, while interesting, reduces a broader pattern to a single point of emotional reference, the death of Smith’s daughter. In Curran’s original category, Sonnet LXXVIII compares the dead “she” to flowers, “More fair was she on whose untimely grave/ Flow my unceasing tears!” (10–12). Similar imagery is employed in Sonnet XXIV, one of the five sonnets inspired by The Sorrows of Young Werter, in which Werter’s lover Charlotte “o’er the mournful spot shall weep,/ Where her poor

Werter — and his sorrows sleep!” (13–14). The mother and daughter imposed by Curran and subsequent critics on Sonnet LXXVII are therefore doubled by Werter, the dead lover, and Charlotte, the beloved in Sonnet XXIV. As in this example, the critical potential revealed by the graph introduces multiple levels of meaning that resist Curran’s previously reductive critical approach.

The five sonnets inspired by Werter act as a categorical mirror for the five sonnets allegedly inspired by the death of Smith’s daughter because of their explicit preoccupation with death. Anne Myers argues that Smith uses male speakers, like

Petrarch and Werter, “as a contrast to the female voice that runs through the rest of her work,” which highlights again the common critical assumption that Smith’s sonnets represent a single female perspective (379). According to Myers, the female speaker

“adopts many of the capacities traditionally assigned to the male poet, while her male speakers fail to demonstrate these capacities with the same degree of expertise and competence” (379). Myers essentially argues that Smith uses distraught male speakers to

highlight the emotional clarity and resilience of her female speaker.

However, Myers uses a limited critical framework, excluding the five sonnets categorized as the daughter sonnets by Curran. The speakers of these five sonnets do not display clarity and resilience even though these speakers are typically assumed to be women. For example, contrary to Myers, Labbe argues that the grief displayed by the mother figure in Sonnet XCI has a mythic, hyperbolic quality, displaying despair in the face of deep grief and sorrow, an idea that recurs in the other four sonnets in this category.

As with Curran’s analysis, the assumption that Smith is the particular female speaker in her sonnets fuels Myers’ speculation about the emotional state of the poetic “I”. Contrary to these critical perspectives, the combined effect of these various poetic voices is not an enforced gender dichotomy with particular kinds of affect assigned to a speaker based on gender. Instead, Smith’s poems invoke a community of voices, sometimes more than one in the span of a single sonnet, to reflect more broadly on grief and its extremes.

Myers makes the argument that Werter “cannot imaginatively transform his situation to . . . a state of peace and freedom from pain,” highlighting the anguish of the sonnets spoken by Werter (“Androgynous Sonnets” 382). In Sonnet XXII, Smith again invokes the apostrophe convention used in Sonnet XC, apostrophizing a personified solitude: “Ah, Nymph! That fate assist me to endure,/ And bear awhile — what Death alone can cure” (13–14). By invoking the nymph of solitude, a mythic figure that is tied to a place (or in this case, a state), Smith highlights how fleeting is the speaker’s reprieve from grief. As in Sonnet XC, death (or oblivion) is the solution to the anguish of the speaker. In Sonnet XC, the speaker desires that forgetfulness “could close/ These eyes . . .

/ So might this painful consciousness decay” (1–3). Invoking this “Sister of Chaos and

eternal Night!” (5), the speaker of Sonnet XC also seems to recognize that death or an existence devoid of memory is the only solution to the sorrow that the speaker feels.

These thematic and formal parallels in Sonnet XXII and XC highlight the shared experience of grief for their respective speakers. Thus Myers’ claims about Werter also apply to a speaker who is assumed to be female, destabilizing Myers’ argument and critical dichotomies of gender in Elegiac Sonnets.

Myers’ claim that Smith’s female speaker “loses neither her clear-sightedness nor her own control over her mind” is perhaps true for the sonnets under consideration in

Myers’ brief article on androgynous poetic voice (“Androgynous Sonnets” 382). Her argument is indeed solid regarding Werter as these five sonnets are steeped in overly emotive and hyperbolic language. As with Curran’s perspective, however, Myers’ conclusion is limited by the scope of her investigation into the treatment of gender and affect in the collection. Other sonnets in the collection marked by critics as the most intimately tied to Smith or to an implicit female speaker undermine Myers’ primary claim.

The spatial proximity of the Werter sonnets to the death and grief category on the graph was unintentional, but the overlap between the two highlights both the hyperbolic quality of the grief assigned to Smith as a mother and the true affect at the core of Werter’s story.

When these sonnets are considered together, the experience of each speaker reflects on the experience of the other, which creates a poetic community that is processing multiple realities of grief and ultimately resists the strong gender difference imposed by critics.

Such deterministic gender difference is rejected in favour of multiple perspectives that capture the essence of human grief. If the sonnet collection is intended as an exploration of human subjectivity, the poetic “I” relies on a lover driven mad, two

bereaved fathers, a mother trying to regain her lost child in her art, and a guilt-ridden usurper to voice the complexities of the emotional spectrum of grief, to name a few members of Smith’s poetic community. In his essay “The I Altered” in Romanticism and

Feminism, Curran argues that the collection is marked by a constant theme of “rootless exile . . . the whole portraying a disembodied sensibility at the mercy of an alien universe and without discernible exit from its condition” (200). However, Smith’s speakers are embodied as multiple characters and voices, although their physical manifestation may not match the critic’s expectations. Even if Smith is processing her own grief, Elegiac

Sonnets still make the argument that a singular experience — especially one determined by something as socially restrictive as gender — is not sufficient to encompass the breadth of this grief.

Mary Anne Myers, in her article “Unsexing Petrarch,” identifies this multiplicity as a result of Smith’s “[engaging] in imagined intersubjectivity” as an avid reader, most prominently with the sonnets inspired by Goethe and Petrarch (257). Myers describes the parallels between Smith’s invocation of Petrarch and Werter by comparing their ill-fated love affairs, although Werter “responds to his plight by shooting himself rather than by composing sad love poetry” (244). Petrarch, in Smith’s reincarnation, meditates on the death of his beloved in ways that again echo the original five sonnets connected to the loss of Smith’s daughter by Curran. As in Sonnet LXXXIX, the Petrarchan lover focuses on the physicality of his lost beloved, describing her by her “angel form” in Sonnet XV (7) and XVI (12), echoing the angelic imagery also invoked in XCI. The choice of “angel form” reflects on a broader concern with transcendence in the face of death. Sonnet XV imagines Laura, Petrarch’s beloved, returning from heaven as a source of reassurance:

“Ah! yield not thus to culpable despair,/ But raise thine eyes to Heaven — and think I wait thee there” (13–14). Again, death is portrayed as the only opportunity for peace from earthly sorrows and for reuniting with loved ones who have died. The Petrarchan sonnets carry a sense of hope as the beloved acts as a guardian angel, returning to cast symbolic light on the despair of her lover. If the Werter sonnets act as a mirror for the original sonnets categorized for their concern with death, the Petrarch sonnets act as a contrast, advocating hope instead of despair, another critical dimension drawn from the networking potential of the graph.

The network revealed by the graph expands into even more dimensions, creating a community of voices wrestling with the implications of death. Another male speaker selected from Smith’s novel Emmeline complicates the Petrarchan desire for transcendence. The sonnets written by Godolphin, Emmeline’s lover, reflect on the power of dreams that allow him to meet his dead lover in “Elysian bowers of bliss” (XXXVIII 3) though “these joys are mine in dreams alone,/ When cruel Reason abdicates her throne!”

(9–10). As in Sonnet XC, the constant reminder of what has been lost haunts the speaker.

Reason, as in other sonnets in the collection, is singled out as the “cruel” enemy of the bereaved and despairing, thus uniting the collection’s grieving community.

In contrast to the light of the angelic Laura in the Petrarch sonnets, the two sonnets attributed to Emmeline’s lover, Godolphin, are noticeably dark in setting, juxtaposing despair and hope in the collection’s search for transcendence. The first sonnet describes sleep and the second, sleeplessness. The same transcendence evoked by the Elysian tryst of XXXVIII is repeated in the hope that “the exhausted heart/ . . . While to the winds and waves its sorrows given,/ May reach . . . the ear of Heaven!” (XXXIX 11,13–14). Unlike

Petrarch who imagines the scene in which his lover returns from heaven, Godolphin essentially speaks his sorrow into the silence and void of the night desperately hoping that someone is listening through “the ear of Heaven” (XXXIX 14). Sonnet LXXIV shares the same darkness of setting. However, the transcendence of the night in XXXIX is noticeably absent in “the hollow wind . . . While night and silence reign” (LXXIV 5–6).

In the emptiness of LXXIV, the glorious vision of XV, and the ambivalence of XXXIX, each speaker is searching for confirmation that death does not mark the end of love. Thus

Smith’s collection adds texture to its discussion of grief by emphasizing both similarities and contrasts in its multiple voices of loss.

This texture is reflected in the collection’s use of chiaroscuro, highlighting the transcendent hopes of those left behind in the heavenly light of their beloved or in the dark, empty silence of sleepless nights. This juxtaposition of light and darkness is revealed as a nested concern within the network created by the collection’s death motif because many of the sonnets concerned with death are also connected to the moon category in the graph, which records references to the sun and stars as well as the moon.

In Sonnet LIII from her novel Celestina, Smith’s use of light and dark to reflect on despair is highlighted by the speaker’s reflection on the figure of the Laplander. Although this sonnet is not directly connected to the category concerned with death, the graph also invites critical investigation within two or three degrees of separation. Celestina, the sonnet’s speaker, compares her sorrow to that of an Arctic native enduring “long months of dreary night” (4) in expectation of “the sun’s glad beams” (6). In this sonnet, Smith relies on a Petrarchan volta after line 8 to turn from this meditation on the Laplander and to compare those who despair “Fond love forgotten, tender friendship past” to the

Laplander (11). Although this sonnet does not explicitly name death as the cause of this despair, the juxtaposition of light and dark in previous sonnets is expressed succinctly in the final couplet: “O’er the blank void he looks with hopeless pain;/ For him those beams of heavens shall never shine again” (13–14). For those immersed in grief, the distinction between light and dark is erased. The hope of transcendence is relegated to chimerical encounters with an angelic beloved and sorrows whispered to a dark and silent night.

This visual juxtaposition of light and dark is revealed to be a false dichotomy, like the gender difference imposed initially on the daughter sonnets in critical discourse. Both the dark of the void and the light of transcendence are revealed as products of the speakers’ grieving process, primarily reflecting the despair that threatens each speaker.

To this end, Sonnet XLIV reflects on a striking night scene in which a village is actively eroding into the sea and waves “[Tear] from their grassy tombs the village dead” (7). In her authorial notes, Smith reflects that bones from the village’s graveyard were known to wash up on the shore with other debris. The final couplet does not address this final indignity to the dead. Instead, the speaker is drawn back into their own despair, “I am doom’d — by life’s long storm opprest,/ To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest” (13–14).

Death is thereby closely tied to envy, and the despair of the living finds a mirror in the final indignities of death. By placing sonnets in such a complex network of meaning,

Smith explores shared threads of grief and emphasizes the necessity of difference to arrive at a collective understanding of human affect.

Elegiac Sonnets’ exploration of death is clearly more than just Smith’s self- indulgence. The network of grief revealed in the graph from Chapter 1 destabilizes the singular narrative of gender that has informed limited critical perspectives, such as those

challenged in this chapter. These perspectives fail to account for the moments when

Smith’s collection problematizes the female subjectivity that is assumed by readers and critics alike. Still, the scope of the graph is required to uncover even more of the complexity in Smith’s work. The graph reveals the other sonnets that deal with grief and death, most notably the five Werter sonnets, a sonnet inspired by Petrarch, and the sonnets from Emmeline — and further close reading prompted by the graph identifies a rich dialogue of imagery and language among these sonnets.

Although the common critical assumption is that Smith is the speaker of the five sonnets that allegedly refer to her daughter’s death, the variety of voices invoked for the sonnets above interrupts any attempt to claim a single voice and experience of grief as the source of these sonnets. This observation reflects a larger trend, identified by Jacqueline

Labbe, who notes that “the sonnets . . . are uniform in their tone, [but] they are much more varied in their speakers” (“Communities” 7). The sonnet convention of unrequited love is held in tension with a mourning mother. A depressed, despairing lover is aligned with allusions to two famous fathers. An eroding churchyard and Arctic wasteland become the setting for a soul’s battle between hope and despair. Elegiac Sonnets relies on this multiplicity of human experience to paint a more vivid portrait of the void of human grief, and this multiplicity is revealed by a more holistic treatment of the collection rather than the reductive and selective processes of existing criticism.

CHAPTER 3: The Inconstant Muse

“Ah! then, how dear the Muse’s favours cost,/ If those paint sorrow best—who feel it most,”

- Sonnet I

Quoting Alexander Pope in the line above, the speaker in Smith’s first sonnet highlights a prominent assumption about artists: that sensitivity to human affect corresponds to superior art. In the eighteenth century, women were believed to be naturally intuitive and emotional, but male writers appropriated this position for their male characters during the eighteenth century culture of sensibility, valorizing emotion and those who feel deeply. For a woman, emotion rendered her unfit for social and political citizenship; for a man, emotion rendered him an artistic icon or man of feeling.

The echoes of this culture can be found in the reception of Elegiac Sonnets even among recent critics. For some critics, the emotion of this collection and its perceived confessional qualities have disqualified it from the same intellectual and cultural prominence they attribute to Smith’s other texts and to male Romantic writers writing with a similar approach. Chapter 2 revealed the problem with claiming a one-to-one correspondence between Smith’s biography and her sonnets, demonstrating that Smith instead uses a network of voices and subjectivities — most of which are notably distinct from her own voice — to articulate the profundity of human grief.

To further challenge the limitations of biographical criticism, this chapter examines another way in which this collection challenges gendered expectations. Regarding form,

Smith places her work within the predominantly male European sonnet tradition, drawing on both Shakespearean and Petrarchan conventions. The sonnets also draw heavily on the

voices of many male contemporaries and predecessors, including British literary heavyweights like Milton, Pope, and Shakespeare. In her introduction to Romanticism and Gender, Anne Mellor uses Taylor and Lauria’s argument about gender and genre as a basis for her claims about genre in the Romantic period: “the derivation of poetic and dramatic forms from classical models . . . [locates] the genres of poetry and drama within the public sphere of the masculine gender” (6). Mellor proceeds to explain the generic division based on gender in contemporary Romantic literature; novels, mass-produced, popular texts, belonged in the realm of women while poetry, carrying the weight of education and historical significance, belonged to loftier expressions of male intellectualism (7).

Mellor highlights in particular the epic genre as a masculine form in the period.

Although Smith’s sonnets belong to a different formal genealogy, her sonnets carry echoes of the epic tradition as muses, goddesses, and nymphs populate them. On the one hand, Smith situates a male form (the sonnet) in a female-dominated mysticism. On the other, the exclusively male writers to whom she alludes are a problematic counterpoint to what could otherwise be a proto-feminist literary revolution. In addition, Smith does not fit the patterns of feminine Romanticism as Mellor identifies them, especially Mellor’s assertion that female writers portray a “cooperative rather than possessive interaction with a Nature troped as a female friend or sister” (3). As representatives of a mythical and natural world, the muses, goddesses and nymphs of Elegiac Sonnets are neither adversarial nor simple objects of male desire but are elusive and distinct from the collection’s human speakers.

Later on in her introduction, Mellor argues that female Romantic writers

problematize the masculine Romantic preoccupation with polarity, relying instead on

“sympathy and likeness” (3). Contrary to expectation, then, Smith’s work invokes polarity at first, by alluding to prominent male authorities, placing herself within the educated poetic elite and creating a poetic universe of conventionally female forces. Her rich ambivalence regarding this polarity, however, “[indicates] that the subject of gender is an open one” (Labbe Culture of Gender 20). Smith’s sonnets are politically radical, creating space for both male literary authorities and mythical female figures. Still, her sonnets draw heavily on the formal and thematic concerns of masculine Romanticism, pairing subversion with convention. Just as Smith the mother does not necessarily correspond with Smith the poet, Smith the woman does not correspond with Smith the artist.

Labbe claims that Smith’s poetry “[recreates] the poetic persona as a socially embodied self, responsive to and ultimately rewriting the culture which confines it”

(Culture of Gender 20). Although Labbe argues that Smith’s poetry rewrites gendered assumptions, this critical argument is based on assigning a self-conscious awareness of gender-as-construct to Smith, a hasty retrospective insertion of modern feminist discourse.

Labbe notes earlier that gender “becomes a critical tool that limits rather than enlarges understanding… we impose its constructs on a past unable to defend itself” (19). Labbe does not fully avoid the critical limitations she identifies, and now it is the literary critical culture of gender that confines Smith’s work. Elegiac Sonnets rewrites this critical culture by enacting a revolution of poetic agency not a revolution of female agency.

Sonnet I (see Appendix A for full text) evokes an unconventional depiction of the epic tradition, pairing an invocation of the Muse with the words of Alexander Pope. The

allusion to Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” is gendered in Pope’s text as “He best can paint them who shall feel them most” (366). Smith’s sonnet, by contrast, opens with an assertion of poetic authority with the invocation of the muse that “has . . . / Smiled on the rugged path I’m doom’d to tread” (I 1–2), closing with Pope’s words, de-gendered and transformed from the male bard addressed by Eloisa in Pope’s poem to the gender neutral

“those.” As a poet, therefore, Smith centers the authority of the poem’s speaker-poet in conventional sources but then partially removes the source’s gendered implications.

While Sonnet I introduces this ambivalent poetic treatment of gender, the sonnets that adapt Petrarch’s work also surprisingly complicate assumptions regarding gender and speaker in the collection. Curran, in his introduction to The Poems of Charlotte Smith, identifies Smith’s adaptations of Petrarch as four sonnets out of the “thirty-six poems in the collection distinguished as not being her personal expression” (xxvi). According to

Curran, then, the introduction of a male speaker or allusion replaces the assumption of

Smith as speaker. Alternately, Mary Anne Myers argues that Smith’s translation of

Petrarch’s work implies “[translation’s] etymological sense of moving meaning”

(“Unsexing Petrarch” 245). Myers highlights the ways in which Smith “melts” into

Petrarch, where “‘melt’ connotes an affective connection that dissolves the distinction between two identities, merging one into the other” (246). Myers’ analysis adds a complicated dimension to Curran’s strict structural claim. Smith’s collection is not split between Smith as speaker and Smith as ventriloquist. Instead, the collection is an exercise in shape shifting to explore “shared affect, regardless of gender” (Myers 251).

To further support this argument, Myers’ article highlights the use of “melt” in one of Smith’s Petrarch sonnets, “melting pity” (XIV 4), and earlier in Sonnet I, “soft Pity’s

melting eye” (9), arguing that in Smith’s time, melt was linked to “pity, poetry, and love”

(“Unsexing Petrarch” 245). The image of the poet, then, is that of a disembodied subjectivity that merges with the experience and affect of the human speaker of the poem.

This act is much more intimate than the sharp divisions in Smith’s work marked by

Curran. If applied to the remainder of the collection, Myers’ argument creates an interesting precedent in which the speaker is distinct from the poet in body but united in affect. However, the particular choice of Petrarch still requires interrogation. Myers makes the claim that Smith’s Petrarch sonnets are an example of Smith’s exploring the dynamics between speaker and object, ultimately giving Laura a voice in Sonnet XV

(240). The advantage to this exercise is that “pity eclipses love as the more possible and desirable connection between subject and object and between writer and reader” (Myers

249). Thus Myers, like other critics before her, sees the sonnet collection as an exercise in sensibility, generating sympathy from its readers by merging the poet’s sensibilities with that of the speaker, a critical perspective that is prevalent but quite limited in scope.

Myers’ argument is most effective when the Petrarch sonnets are considered in isolation. The graph’s record of allusions in Elegiac Sonnets forces a revision of the

Petrarch sonnets’ place in the collection by revealing Smith’s alternate treatment of

Petrarchan convention in other sonnets. Laura, the “nymph divine” (XIV 4) and “goddess”

(10), replaces the Muse in Sonnet I as the female figure Petrarch addresses. As the inspiration for Smith’s Petrarch sonnets, Laura is a symbolic muse. Yet, the speaker in

Smith’s Sonnets XIII through XVI is not the speaker of Sonnet I, no matter the degree to which the speaker or poet has “melted” with Petrarch. Sonnet XIV describes Laura’s physicality, “Loose to the wind her golden tresses stream’d,/ Forming bright waves with

amorous Zephyr’s sighs” (XIV 1–2). In this sonnet, Smith uses sensual imagery that evokes a desirous male gaze. In the sonnets that draw on Petrarchan tradition, Smith uses the masculine poetic convention of the objectified female. In contrast, Sonnet I does not embody or sexualize the muse, a key distinction between the speakers.

This distinction does not directly counter Myers’ conclusions about Smith’s preoccupation with the subject/object dynamic in the Petrarchan tradition. Sonnets XIII through XVI certainly explore the emotional resonance of the Petrarchan construct of unrequited, tragic love. However, the contrast between Laura and the muse of Sonnet I reveals the problem with the theory of the “melting” Smith, unless this melting of subjectivities can be understood simultaneously as poetic exploration and revision of the

Petrarchan tradition. Smith’s poetic versatility is on display in these poems, creating a dialogue among the sonnets by using the speaker’s treatment of the Muse in Sonnet I as an indirect critique of the male tradition that requires a sensual, embodied female muse.

On the one hand, Smith places her own work within established tradition. On the other, she reimagines the poetic cosmos so that a poet can be inspired without actively exploiting.

Smith continues to explore poetic agency by invoking another male poetic tradition, the doubly significant nightingale, to complicate gendered assumptions and explore marginal voices. The nightingale evokes both the story of Philomela, a violent myth that symbolizes the silencing of the female voice, and the masculine Romantic conflation of the nightingale with the poet. The graph highlights three sonnets about the nightingale: III,

VII, and LV. Sonnet III contains an allusion to Petrarch that initiates dialogue with the later Petrarch sonnets (14). Myers identifies this dialogue, characterizing the nightingale

as “a figure of melancholic song and shifting gender” (“Unsexing Petrarch” 251). Sonnet

VII introduces the nightingale’s gender fluidity, referencing “the pensive Muse” that

“shall own thee [the nightingale] for her mate” (VII 7). This sonnet alludes to a line in one of Milton’s sonnets: “Whether the Muse or Love call thee his mate” (“Sonnet to the

Nightingale” 13). As with the allusion to Pope’s poem, Smith switches the gendered implications of the line. Furthermore, the gender of the nightingale in Smith’s sonnet is assumed only by heterosexual expectations of the mating relationship insinuated with the

Muse. Thus Smith does not explicitly gender the nightingale even while invoking its symbolic value within masculine poetic tradition.

The nurturing Muse of Sonnet VII versus the ambivalent Muse of Sonnet I complicates the symbolic correspondence of the nightingale with the male Romantic poet.

The Muse “[protects] the song she loves so well” (VII 8) sung by the nightingale, the

“Sweet poet of the woods” (1). By emphasizing that the nightingale is poet of the woods,

Smith marks the difference between the human poet and the nightingale. This difference is also revealed between the “pensive Muse” (VII 7), who chooses the nightingale as mate and protects the nightingale’s song, and the “partial Muse” (I 1), who elevates the poet’s creative expression while exacting the price of poetic affect. Christopher Stokes notes that “Smith overthrows the convention found in . . . most other nightingale poetry by emphasizing disjunction rather than identification with the bird” (145).

In Sonnet III, the divide between speaker and nightingale is widened as the speaker mourns, “Ah! songstress sad! that such my lot might be,/ To sigh, and sing at liberty— like thee!” (III.13–14). The speaker expresses envy at the freedom with which the nightingale can voice its sorrows. Stokes argues that Smith wishes her sorrows could

remain private like the nightingale’s sorrows instead of having to publish her intimate emotions in her poetry, adding that Smith has realized that “the very enunciation of feeling in poetry seems to bind and imprison the self” (146). After all, Smith’s speaker understands that human sorrow is “untranslatable” like the song of the nightingale, and its public consumption will simply deform and restrict its true expression (Stokes 146).

However, by distinguishing the nightingale from the poet, Smith’s sonnets also remove the mythic and masculine assumptions imposed on the poet. If the critical assumption is of a female speaker, this female poet subsequently does not fall under the curse of

Philomela or the masculine exclusivity of Romantic poetry, thereby freeing the speaker from the masculine pattern of silencing women by violence and exclusion. Although the speaker reflects on the nightingale to wrestle with the mixed blessing of poetic expression,

Smith as poet uses the nightingale to explore the restoration of marginalized voices as a way to fracture problematic gendered assumptions that are tied to poetic conventions.

Thus far, the graph has revealed a network of sonnets that demonstrate Smith’s use of convention and subversion of convention, with the mythical female figures acting as a bridge between the Petrarch sonnets and the nightingale sonnets. The male authorities invoked thus far by Smith — Petrarch, Milton, and Pope — are placed in the masculine genealogy highlighted by Mellor. Even as Smith problematizes the conventions of their respective poetic traditions, her work does not mount a proto-feminist poetic revolution.

Instead, Smith enters these traditions with an awareness of each tradition’s strengths and frailties, making enough space for the inclusion of non-exploitative representations of female agency in art. Smith treats these male authorities as her peers, past and present, and not as direct antagonists.

This sense of shared craft, as opposed to antagonism, is seen in Smith’s allusions to literary figures from her native region in England in the category of sonnets celebrating the River Arun: Sonnets V, XXVI, XXX, XXXII, XXXIII, and XLV. The graph in Figure

6 shows the subset of the graph used for this chapter’s argument and reveals the links among these various categories.

Figure 6: Embracing and Subverting Traditions in Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets Bethan Roberts places the River Arun sonnets within the tradition of river sonnets started by Thomas Warton’s “To the River Lodon” (650). Daniel Robinson also highlights this poetic preoccupation, explaining that the river acts as “a symbol for the flow of human life” (450). As Roberts argues, the titular river of Warton’s river sonnet is “a metaphor for the influence and tradition it inspires” (649). In the graph, Smith’s river sonnets are

grouped as a cluster because of the prominence of their setting. These sonnets also refer to other motifs marked by the graph that draw the river sonnets from a specific English sonnet tradition into the broader stream of Elegiac Sonnets.

Smith’s Arun sonnets are not classically grounded like the other sonnets considered in this chapter and address a different but still predominantly masculine literary tradition.

Smith’s choice of setting “[invokes] the literary past . . . as she encounters . . . her west

Sussex predecessors Otway, Collins, and Hayley along the banks of the river” (Roberts

651). In his notes on the collection, Stuart Curran notes that William Hayley, a personal friend to whom Sonnet XIX is addressed, helped Smith publish her sonnets (25). In contrast to the historic separation between Smith and her previous allusions, her allusions to Hayley function on a different temporal and relational level.

Similarly, Smith describes William Collins and Thomas Otway’s influence on her writing in her own notes on the text. Otway, a popular writer, was born the son of a rector who lived and served in a small village along the River Arun (Smith 30), and Collins, another poet, was also a resident of the region, buried at the age of 38 near Smith’s place of birth where his grave was eventually marked with some of Hayley’s poetry (33). The poetic figures that populate these sonnets are tied to Smith either personally or spatially, which suggests a relationship that was not present with the earlier allusions.

In Smith’s rendering, the River Arun, although noted by the author as “an inconsiderable stream” (30), is a space of fertile creativity and poetic inspiration. In

Sonnet XXVI, this poetic fertility is particularly evident because of the reference to the nightingale (12) and “the mournful Muse” (3), two prominent motifs already noted in this chapter. Yet, the river is not merely a set piece. Instead, the speaker of Sonnet

XXVI promises the river that “kindred spirits . . . shall relate/ Thy Otway’s sorrows, and lament his fate!” (13–14). As the heart of the region that has inspired Otway’s work, the river is personified as a friend of Otway and a source of comfort to those who mourn for

Otway’s fate and the poverty of his late career (Curran 30). This sense of comfort and nurture is consistent with the sonnet’s depiction of the Muse. The Muse in Sonnet XXVI is reminiscent of the Muse in both Sonnet I and the nightingale sonnets, personified as a spiritual mentor who “bade her votary dream” (6). However, this Muse is tied to place —

“the mournful Muse thy course adorn” (XXVI 3) — and is seemingly unable to nurture

Otway beyond the river’s banks. The River Arun sonnets therefore mirror the ambivalence of Sonnet I’s speaker toward poetic inspiration as symbolized by the Muse.

In his analysis, Roberts takes an alternate approach, identifying “the male poetic tradition” of the space and emphasizing that “the linear motion of the river [evokes] inheritance-based male succession,” which excludes female poets such as Smith (656).

Sonnets XXVI, XXX, and XXXIII of the Arun sonnets are presented as if the speaker is observing rather than participating since these sonnets do not contain the “I” of the speaker. In Roberts’ analysis, as a result, the River Arun is marked exclusively as a space of male poetic inspiration because Smith is assumed to be the speaker. However, the river is populated by muses and in XXXIII, a naiad (1) and sea-nymphs (3), mythical figures connected to particular places or in this case, bodies of water. Even in this so-called male space, the female presence endures as the male poets die or move away. Additionally,

Smith, as the poet distinct from her speaker, has entered this masculine space and used her creative agency to valorize both the passage of time and the passage of regional poets.

Christopher Stokes also emphasizes Smith’s exclusion from this space in his

analysis of Sonnet XXXII, designating this sonnet as “a response to the sense of alienation found in trying to utter the female ‘I am’ in a language of poetic feeling” (151).

However, both Stokes and Roberts overlook two other sonnets — V and XLV — that explicitly reference the River Arun and therefore were included in the graph’s Arun category. These sonnets, as well as XXXII, have speakers who participate in the landscape, a poetic “I” that engages with the river’s nurturing and creative space. In

XXXII, the speaker hopes to meet Otway in the shadows of the early evening claiming that “these dreams . . . soothe the pensive visionary mind” (13–14). In Sonnet XLV, the speaker similarly calls upon the spirit of Collins, invoking his “visionary shell [lyre]” (12).

Although Otway and Collins are not physically present, the speaker enters into an almost spiritual communion with the River Arun’s past visionaries as their equally visionary peer.

Notably, the sorrows expressed by the speaker in all three of these sonnets echo the lament for Otway in XXVI. In each of these sonnets, the river Arun is a source of release and comfort to the living sorrows of Otway and the speaker, if not of “oblivion” (V 12).

The alienation marked by Stokes and Roberts is therefore not exclusive to the female speaker they impose on the other Arun sonnets. Instead the assumed female speaker is a peer to Otway and Collins in vision and affect.

In their readings, both Stokes and Roberts highlight Smith’s fluidity of form in the

Arun sonnets as she transitions between Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet forms.

Smith’s formal legacy is marked by the political radical John Thelwall, who claims that

“Over the epic field, Milton, of all British bards, triumphs without a rival, Shakespeare in the dramatic, and in the sonnet, Charlotte Smith,” equating Smith’s prowess to relative giants in the masculine canon (91). As a poet, therefore, Smith is a peer to the visionaries

of the River Arun. To impose a sense of alienation and exclusion on Smith through her poet speaker is to impose a false sense of inferiority because both Smith and her speaker participate as peers in the creative space of the River Arun.

Even as a peer, Smith remains critical of poetic traditions. In the second volume of Elegiac Sonnets, Smith ends the collection with Sonnet LXXXIV (see Appendix A for full text), another sonnet addressed to the Muse that acts as a bookend to match Sonnet I.

Sonnet I, although not particularly uplifting, is markedly more buoyant than Sonnet

LXXXIV in which the speaker mourns “In languid, hopeless sorrow” (7). The speaker of

LXXXIV feels as if the muse is drawing away from them and asks for a “sorrowing vigil” on their passing (13). The final line, “Where Pity and Remembrance bend and weep” (14), alludes to the final line of Thomas Gray’s “Epitaph on Sir William Williams” (Smith 71).

Although elegiac in purpose, Gray’s poem valorizes Sir Williams with his “eyes of flame and cool intrepid breast” (9), detailing his many military exploits and victories. Smith invokes this valorizing elegiac tradition in a sonnet that is a more melancholy tribute to a poet’s loss of inspiration and eventual death.

In contrast to Gray’s warrior, the speaker in Sonnet LXXXIV is described with

“faint eyes” (10) and a “heart . . . that bleeds” (11). By quoting Gray, Smith alludes to a particular tradition of valorous grief while introducing a perhaps more realistic view of grieving for the death of poetic inspiration. Throughout the collection, Smith has prioritized the ambivalence and difficulty associated with artistry — from the line quoted from Pope in Sonnet I to marking the trials of Otway — rather than its valor. Smith’s poets are neither the invincible, classical heroes of the masculine canon nor the elusive nightingales of the Romantic poetic tradition. Instead, they recognize that the Muse is

inconstant, that the nightingale’s song is enviable for its freedom from the claims of public fame, and that the rivers of inspiration ultimately dry up. Smith’s poetry does not mark particular spheres of female and male artistic energy. Instead, it celebrates a poetic line of succession while honestly assessing both the difficulties of the poetic position and the history of excluding and silencing voices in masculine traditions.

If epic and elegy are the realms of masculine discourse, as Mellor claims, then

Smith’s intrusion into these traditions creates more space for artists like her, who recognize the value of convention while also asserting a different world order that is not based on radical dreams of an egalitarian poetic revolution but on the radical reality that a poet can claim creative agency as she writes. Much of the revisionist treatment of Smith’s work is partially engaged in asserting that her work does in fact belong in the canon.

However, in Elegiac Sonnets, this is the axiom upon which Smith’s celebration and subversion of multiple literary traditions and perspectives relies. The question of belonging is therefore a false dilemma. The ease and comfort with which Smith moves through poetic forms and engages with canonical works is evidence enough of her rightful place in the line of poetic succession. Under Smith’s capable direction, the poetic space of Elegiac Sonnets celebrates the status quo, overturns existing systems, and encourages her peers to do likewise.

Conclusion

For me the Muse a simple band design’d

Of “idle” flowers that bloom the woods among,

Which, with the cypress and the willow join’d,

A garland formed as artless as my song.

And little dared I hope its transient hours

So long would last

- Sonnet XIX

In Sonnet XIX, Charlotte Smith expresses her gratitude to her benefactor, William

Hayley, for helping her publish Elegiac Sonnets. The humility of her address echoes the humility of her prefatory remarks to the various editions of her sonnets. Critics have noticed this humility and read the remainder of her sonnets through the lens of a confessional poet seeking the approval and sympathy of her audience for her life’s many sorrows. As with Smith’s Romantic contemporaries, however, her poetic persona is not the unifying force that it seems at first glance to be. The diversity of purposes and poetic voices found throughout the sonnets is enough to disrupt this assumed persona. Yet the inherent complexity in this diversity is both too broad to capture through focused close reading and too detailed to visualize as a simple network of meaning.

An initial reading almost immediately identified the bare bones of this network in the collection, but further and repeated close readings revealed an increasing potential for critical energies that could revise, refresh, and move beyond the stagnancy of biographical criticism. The strategy employed in this thesis to address this emerging complexity was the graphing process explained in the first chapter. The graph became a

dynamic part of the critical process of the thesis because it revealed, challenged, and exceeded the various critical perspectives that influenced the initial reading of the text.

Finally, when put into practice the graph informed the final two chapters by identifying potential threads of investigation. The close reading that was required to find specific overlap in language or image between sonnets revealed the potential of the graph’s sub- networks to extend the critical conversation beyond a single degree of separation or obvious connections. The graph was then subjected to further revisions because of the symmetric relationship between the development of the graph and the development of the thesis, with each revision uncovering more of the sonnets’ complex internal logic.

The network revealed by the graph mirrors the corresponding network of poetic personae used in Elegiac Sonnets, destabilizing assumptions about Smith as a poet who discloses her personal experience through her work. Critics like Jacqueline Labbe who characterize Smith as deeply self-aware and perceptive recognize Smith’s manipulation of gendered expectations as provocative for her audience, especially her contemporaries.

Elegiac Sonnets present a diverse community of speakers wrestling with grief from their particular points of reference, drawn together through the empty despair at the core of profound grief. Instead of bemoaning her position as an isolated artist, Smith rebels against the false divisions of masculine and feminine genres, placing her work solidly in the current of conventionally masculine forms while resisting their problematic history and their exclusivity. Smith enacts her creative agency in these traditionally masculine spaces while critics continue to look for signs in her speakers of her gender-determined distress. In this way, Elegiac Sonnets perpetuate the enigma of Smith’s authorial performance that is recognized, but still largely neglected by many critics. The graphing

techniques employed in pursuit of this enigma may not fully capture its essence, but the graph is undeniable proof that there is more work to do.

Appendix A: Full Text of Key Sonnets

Included below is the full text of a number of key sonnets from Elegiac Sonnets, as edited by Stuart Curran in The Poems of Charlotte Smith.

Chapter 2:

Sonnet LXXIV

“Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,”

Forsakes me, while the chill and sudden blast,

As my sad soul recalls its sorrows past,

Seems like a summons, bidding me prepare

For the last sleep of death[.]⎯Murmuring I hear

The hollow wind around the ancient towers,

While night and silence reign; and cold and drear

The darkest gloom of Middle Winter lours;

But wherefore fear existence such as mine,

To change for long and undisturb’d repose?

Ah! when this suffering being I resign,

And o’er my miseries the tomb shall close,

By her, whose loss in anguish I deplore,

I shall be laid, and feel that loss no more!

Sonnet LXXVIII

Wan Heralds of the Sun and Summer gale!

That seem just fallen from infant Zephyrs’ wings;

Not now, as once, with heart revived I hail

Your modest buds, that for the brow of Spring

Form the first simple garland[.]⎯Now no more

Escaping for a moment all my cares,

Shall I, with pensive, silent step, explore

The woods yet leafless; where to chilling airs

Your green and pencil’d blossoms, trembling, wave.

Ah! ye soft, transient children of the ground,

More fair was she on whose untimely grave

Flow my unceasing tears! Their varied round

The Seasons go; while I through all repine:

For fixt regret, and hopeless grief are mine.

Sonnet LXXXIX

Whether awaken’d from unquiet rest

I watch “the opening eyelids of the Morn,”

When thou, O Sun! from Ocean’s silver’d breast

Emerging, bidst another day be born⎯

Or whether in thy path of cloudless blue,

Thy noontide fires I mark with dazzle eyes;

Or to the West thy radiant course pursue,

Veil’d in the gorgeous broidery of the skies

Celestial lamp! thy influence bright and warm

That renovates the world with life and light

Shines not for me⎯for never more the form

I loved⎯so fondly loved, shall bless my sight;

And nought thy rays illumine, now can charm

My misery, or to day convert my night!

Sonnet XC

Forgetfulness! I would thy hand could close

These eyes that turn reluctant from the day;

So might this painful consciousness decay,

And, with my memory, end my cureless woes.

Sister of Chaos and eternal Night!

Oblivion! take me to thy quiet reign,

Since robb’d of all that gave my soul delight,

I only ask exemption from the pain

Of knowing “such things were”⎯and are no more;

Of dwelling on the hours for ever fled,

And heartless, helpless, hopeless to deplore

“Pale misery living, joy and pleasure dead:”

While dragging thus unwish’d a length of days,

“Death seems prepared to strike, yet still delays.”

Sonnet XCI

I can in groups these mimic flowers compose,

These bells and golden eyes, embathed in dew;

Catch the soft blush that warms the early Rose,

Or the pale Iris cloud with veins of blue;

Copy the scallop’d leaves, and downy stems,

And bid the pencil’s varied shades arrest

Spring’s humid buds, and Summer’s musky gems:

But, save the portrait on my bleeding breast,

I have no semblance of that form adored,

That form, expressive of a soul divine,

So early blighted; and while life is mine,

With fond regret, and ceaseless grief deplored⎯

That grief, my angel! with too faithful art

Enshrines thy image in thy Mother’s heart.

Chapter 3

Sonnet I

The partial Muse has from my earliest hours

Smiled on the rugged path I’m doom’d to tread,

And still with sportive hand has snatch’d wild flowers,

To weave fantastic garlands for my head:

But far, far happier is the lot of those

Who never learn’d her dear delusive art:

Which, while it decks the head with many a rose,

Reserves the thorn to fester in the heart.

For still she bids soft Pity’s melting eye

Stream o’er the ills she knows not to remove,

Points every pang, and deepens every sigh

Of mourning Friendship, or unhappy Love.

Ah! then, how dear the Muse’s favours cost,

If those paint sorrows best—who feel it most!

Sonnet LXXXIV

Wilt thou forsake me who in life’s bright May

Lent warmer lustre to radiant morn;

And even o’er Summer scenes by tempests torn,

Shed with illusive light the dewy ray

Of pensive pleasure?—Wilt thou, while the day

Of saddening Autumn closes, as I mourn

In languid, hopeless sorrow, far away

Bend thy soft step, and never more return?—

Crush’d to the earth, by bitterest anguish prest,

From my faint eyes thy graceful form recedes;

Thou canst not heal an heart like mine that bleeds;

But, when in quiet earth that heart shall rest,

Haply may’st thou one sorrowing vigil keep,

Where Pity and Remembrance bend and weep!

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