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Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head English Language and Literature Vol. 58 No. 6 (2012) 1167-91 Public Identity, Paratext, and the Aesthetics of Intransparency: Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head* Bumsoo Jon I. Introduction This paper discusses the significance of the materiality of text in Beachy Head (1807), where Charlotte Turner Smith uses the margins of the printed page to challenge cultural formations of authoriality as they developed historically in relation to Lyrical Ballads first published in 1798 jointly by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Recent work in the burgeoning field of gender and authorship studies has turned to the analysis of Romantic women poets’ contribution to the dis- course of subjectivity, and to the complex issues of authority, the public image of (female) authors, “Romantic theatricality,” entrepreneurialism, and gendered resistance to dominant male Romantic forms of poetry.1 This paper builds on this literature to explore how, and whether, the material book pertains to the ways in which Charlotte Smith interrogates putative, “feminine” and “masculine” models of writing and self-fashion- ing in her contemplative blank-verse long poem, Beachy Head, which was published posthumously in 1807 but remained largely unread until the modern republication of her poetry in 1993.2 Participating within a broader revisionary current in Romantic women writers studies, this * I am grateful to Terence Hoagwood, Clinton Machann, Maura Ives, and James Arnt Aune for their insightful readings of earlier versions of this paper, one of which appeared in my dissertation, titled “Romantic Mediacy, Self- Consciousness and the Ideologies of Authorship” (Diss. Texas A&M U, 2012). This paper was supported by a Y. B. Min grant. 1 See Mellor; Wilson and Haefner; Feldman and Kelley; McGann; Behrendt; Trilling; Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality; and Hoagwood and Ledbetter. 2 Stuart Curran’s The Poems of Charlotte Smith (1993). References to Smith’s poetry are to this edition. My references to the text proper in particular are included in the text by line numbers, while an “n” is attached to a page refer- ence number to refer to an authorial note on that page. Smith’s notes were orig- inally attached to the end of the volume but reprinted in this edition as footnotes. 1168 Bumsoo Jon paper challenges received notions of Romanticism by attending to the signal role that Smith’s material practices play in the way she offers an alternative discourse of authorial personae and/in the book, a contribu- tion that remains little acknowledged in most accounts of Beachy Head. Thus the paper focuses on how Smith considerably enlarges the notion of what constitutes the “lyrical” by reimagining the authorial persona as a socially- and textually-embodied self as her use of print apparatuses and textual spaces in the poem radically re-defines and ultimately rewrites the print culture which effectually confines feminine writing. II. The Public Figure of Smith and the Autobiographical Impulse With the revival of scholarly interest in Charlotte Smith and other Romantic women writers in the early 1990s,3 modern readers began to explore how gender and poetic identity constitute a productive sphere of conflict within the poetics of loss and self-fashioning that Smith forged and Wordsworth, one of her greatest admirers, soon took up in The Prelude (1805, 1850). For example, Sarah M. Zimmerman argues that Smith and Wordsworth share a Romantic impulse to fuse biography and poetic ambition, individually fashioning a lyric persona that is an autobi- ographical fiction.4 In fact, this modern explication of Smith’s poetics of self-defense and self-promotion chimes with Smith’s contemporary read- ers, who used to recognize the poet’s autobiographical impulse as the most salient feature of her works; with the publication of Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Poems in 1784, followed by the multiplying editions of the collection from the same year onwards, and the appearance of The Emigrants in 1793,5 Smith has become a popular cultural figure whose 3 The renewal of critical interest in Smith has been enriched by Curran’s “The ‘I’ Altered” and his modern edition of Smith’s poetry; Fletcher’s Critical Biography; and Stanton’s Collected Letters. For discussions about the historical reception of Smith and other women Romantics, see Linkin; Linkin and Behrendt; and Newlyn. 4 See Romanticism, Lyricism, and History 51-72. See also Hunt and Hoagwood, who track the record of Wordsworth’s verbal, metrical and thematic echoes of Smith. 5 We haven’t seen yet any book-length study of the publishing history of Smith’s poetry. For shorter accounts of the versions of Smith’s poetic volumes and their current textual status, see Labbe’s headnotes in her recent edition of Smith’s Public Identity, Paratext, and the Aesthetics of Intransparency 1169 literary success—as well as critical discredit—are catalyzed primarily by her personal appeal and the fashionable side of her melancholy speaker.6 In 1786, for example, the Critical Review writes that they are “sorry to see the eye which can shine with so much poetic fire sullied with a tear,” tacitly accusing Smith of exploiting popular taste and femininity for the success of her Elegiac Sonnets volume.7 Given the cult of Charlotte Smith’s public figure and her appealing self-portrait in the widely successful Elegiac Sonnets, it is no wonder that, when Beachy Head, with Other Poems was published a year after her death in 1806 by Joseph Johnson, reviewers and readers alike showed a keen interest in seeing the posthumous volume as a kind of coda to the story of Smith’s earlier poetic speaker and her habitual mournful tenor. For instance, the conservative journal The British Critic, which had been highly unfavorable to The Emigrants for its evident “egotism” and inter- est in “propagat[ing] popular cant against order,” found Beachy Head to be “characteristic of the author’s mind, a sweet and impressive tender- ness of melancholy.”8 The Universal Magazine even drew a parallel between the book and “the quaint moralizing of Cowper, and the plain- tive tenderness of Gray.”9 The critical consensus was reiterated shortly after by the Monthly Review: The same tenderness and sensibility, the same strain of moral reflection, and the same enthusiastic love of nature, pervade all her effusions. It appears also as if the wounded feelings of Charlotte Smith had found relief and consolation, during her latter years, in an accurate observation not only of the beautiful effect produced by the endless diversity of natural objects that daily solicit our regard, but also in a careful study of their scientific poems; see also Curran’s textual notes in his standard scholarly edition of Smith’s poems. 6 Hoagwood offers a succinct outline of the contemporary tradition of “enveloping [Smith’s] work with a morose concentration on her miserable life” (142). For another discussion of the issue, see Zimmerman, “‘Dost thou not know my voice?’” 7 Review of Elegiac Sonnets, Critical Review 61 (1786): 467-68. 8 Review of The Emigrants, British Critic 1 (1793): 405; Review of Beachy Head, with Other Poems, British Critic 30 (1807): 171. In The Emigrants, Smith’s earlier blank-verse poem in two books, the author meticulously bal- ances the poem’s political elements with a poetics of sorrow familiar to her readers from the Sonnets. 9 Review of Beachy Head, with Other Poems, Universal Magazine 7 (1807): 229. 1170 Bumsoo Jon arrangement, and their more minute variations.10 The Monthly Review’s writer finds Beachy Head a steadily personal, unusually effusive and unartificial meditation on one’s life and nature, clearly encouraging readers to take their interpretive cue from Smith’s earlier poems. For all the contemporary reviewers cited above Smith’s posthumous volume Beachy Head, especially its title poem, supposedly constitutes a culminating, if subdued, account of her personal misfor- tunes and sufferings as all the readers curiously draw autobiographical parallels particularly between the poetic speaker of the title poem and Smith’s public profile—a lady “sullied with a tear”—developed in the earlier stages of her literary career.11 III. Audience, Rhetorical Situation, and the Publishing Context of Beachy Head My discussion of a shift in the textual politics of Smith’s autobiograph- ical appeal is manifold, and I want to address the matter, first, in terms of the changes in Smith’s own understanding of her audience, and in the ideological constraints on the production of the Beachy Head volume. Despite Smith’s influence as a popular cultural figure and her willingness to capitalize on it to address her financial and emotional needs,12 Smith’s popularity and the impact of her autobiographical appeal were in the process of waning for various reasons, including her prolific output and her own turn to political topics especially with the publication of the sixth edition of Elegiac Sonnets and Desmond in 1792, The Old Manor House in 1793, The Emigrants in 1793, and The Banished Man in 1794. The sixth edition of the Elegiac Sonnets indicates a “turning point” in the collection’s publishing history, as Zimmerman has suggested, in that Smith begins to allude more explicitly to the biographical sources of her 10 Review of Beachy Head, with Other Poems, Monthly Review 56 (1808): 99. 11 Review of Elegiac Sonnets, Critical Review 61 (1786): 468. 12 Stanton discusses what she calls, quoting the poet, Smith’s “literary busi- ness,” i.e., Smith’s close involvement in the processes of her literary produc- tion. Zimmerman also offers a convincing account of how well Smith herself understood the nature of “her readers’ receptivity to her solitary poet,” and thereby crafted the Elegiac Sonnets volume to make the most of the market for her dejected speaker (“‘Dost thou not know my voice?’” 112).
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