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Ann Batten Cristall

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Ann Batten Cristall Ann Batten Cristall 1769-1848 Ann’s Contemporaries o William Blake o Many critics believe her Poetical Sketches to stem from Blakes— though they both claim genre “Juvenilia” o Mary Wollstonecraft o Subscribed to Cristall’s book o Traded letters with Joshua o Sister, Everina, friends with Cristall through school-teaching profession Background o Baptized December 1769 o Close with Joshua throughout her adult life o Schoolteacher o Father: Alexander Cristall of Monifieth (Scottish) o Contempt for the Arts o Unpleasant and uninvolved o Mother: Elizabeth Batten o Compelled by the Arts o Financially supported Ann and her siblings’ studies (mother’s income) Publications u Poetical Sketches published in 1795 by Joseph Johnson u “A Lady on the Rise of Morn” (from PS) appeared in Gentleman’s Magazine (April 1, 1795) u Several verses from Poetical Sketches appeared in The Lady’s Magazine (or) Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, Appropriated Solely to Their Use and Amusement (May 1795) “The woman with the pen must pay a price, for by its possession she both literally and figuratively threatens to undermine a system of signification that defines her both as vulnerable and as victim. By the ‘defense’ of writing, she may defer her fate but never quite avoid it; her text is always recuperated by the necessity of her silence, her submission, her death.” -Ellen Pollack, The Poetics of Sexual Myth (7) A Fragment—The Blind Man “The Romantic fascination with fragmentation […] is conducive to a specific focus on injuries and deformities of the body: themes of disfigurement and amputation—and their metaphorical or metonymic application—have become a feature of critical interpretation […] as well as being a presence in the original texts themselves.” (Bradshaw 6,7) “Women’s secret but insistent struggle to transcend their anxiety of authorship” – “dramatize their own self-division” – “a female artist in particular is keenly aware that she must inevitably project herself into a number of uncongenial characters and situations […] a splitting or distribution of her identity.” (Gubar 73, 78, 69) “advocates the active and continuous dissension of internal forces […] as the key to imaginative and spiritual progress” (Cope 17) “her characters deliquesce into the natural world around them” (Larrissy 9) “she desires literally to ‘reduce’ her own body” (Guber 54) “anxiety of influence” as “the masculine authority with which [women] construct their literary personae […] seem to the woman writer directly to contradict the terms of her own gender definition.” (Gubar 48) Cristall’s Androgyny recalling-- Cristall’s speakers slip gendering verbiage, thus stability, and by excusing her ‘woman-ness’ from her pen, Cristall actively “places herself among contemporaries, selecting a non- traditional tradition,” allowing both her social performance as well as her language’s discursive performance to avoid visual consumption…. ….by effecting a “detached observer who describes the dalliances of others, and frequently allows their voices to take over.” (Connoly 29,30) --Blake’s Ambiguity Blake’s combination of “feminine rhetorical convention,” hinting at “possibly the pen of a woman patron”… …while simultaneously dressing his verse in the masculine “first person, usually collective plural,” disturbs the binary gendering structure of discourse, thus drafting a speaker whose “identity is subsumed in a group.” (Connoly 28, 29). From Ink to Air “projection of the idealized—and by definition absent— completion implied by its fragmentary form.” – “dependent on ideas of incomplete or ‘deformed’ identity and […] provides a witness to an agency and eloquence of an individual and irreducible nature” (Bradshaw 7) “the effort with which health and wholeness were won from the infectious ‘vapors’ of despair and fragmentation” (Gubar 58) o 'blank verse’ = blind, ‘blank’, vision o ‘Liberty’ = structure of social visibility/observation o à recalls Blake’s PS, “loss of liberty” o àintroduction of sound from “Song” poem: “vocal rage” o “vocal rage” = iambic pentameter stripped of rhyme (blank verse) o ABC’s PS: “’tis GOD’s voice which urges on the storm//broke the harmony” (formally, of iambic pentameter coupled with rhyme) (qtd. By Jung 22) o ‘Air’ = ”rage” = “voice” o à ‘the Air’—aural compensation, historically- dependent (designation by “the” connected to breaking the nostalgia with form) o ’of a Fragment’—new social subjective constitution based on aural instead of visual/inversely-voyeuristic (designation by “a” because the nature of said ‘Fragment’ remains uncertain) The fragment of form becomes the fragment of ‘soul’ and ‘self’; rhyme leaves iambic pentameter as voice splinters subjecting vision. Cristall’s text effects an imagined aural address in blinded binary constitutions. Social context puts Poetical Sketches in conversation with Poetical Sketches, as the visual body is that of the text (wrought by its own awareness of conventional constituents--possibly even further arguing for voice based on the early precedent of orality as verse). By dissolving herself into the text, Cristall “draws on the cultural association of female madness with poetry,” (Matthews 120)—including her nod to Blake’s work, which includes “Mad Song”—and joins in the written discourse, androgynously (and thus credibly) producing text so that the “human issues with which the poetry is concerned are resituated and deflected in various ways.” (McGann 143) Cristall pre-emptively takes on Romantic irony in what I will call a ‘revision’ of Blake’s PS, “eagerly constructing new forms, new myths […] give way to new patterns in a never- ending process that becomes an analogue for life itself” – “a form or structure that simultaneously creates and de-creates itself” (McGann qtd. Anne Mellor 21) “It is telling to see Cristall transform the terms that contain Blake’s achievement into positive attributes that empower her voice as wild and irregular,” (Linkin 129). And this opposed to her aforementioned “silence, submission, death.” And just for fun... Bradshaw, Michael. Disabling romanticism: body, mind, and text. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2016. Print. Cope, Jonas. “The Delights and Degrees of Passionate Sensibility: ‘Mental Fight’ in Ann Batten Cristall’s Poetical Sketches.” Romanticism: The Journal of Romantic Criticism and Culture, vol. 20, no. 1, April 2014, pp.15-29. EBSOhost,http://content.ebscohost.com/ContentServer.asp?T=P&P=AN&K=94953645&S=R&D=a9h&EbscoContent=dGJyMNXb4 kSeqLY4v%2BvlOLCmr1GeprBSsq64SreWxWXS&ContentCustomer=dGJyMPPd30m549%2BB7LHjfPEA- Cristall, Ann Batten. “A Fragment. The Blind Man.” Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive. https://www.eighteenthcen9urypoetry.org/works/cac95-w0160.shtml Green, Richard. “Cristall, Ann Batten.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 September 2004. https://www-oxforddnb- com.proxy-remote.galib.uga.edu/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb--9780198614128-e- 37323?rskey=nftvF7&result=1. Joosen, Vanessa. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubars The Madwoman in the Attic. State Jung, Sandro. The Fragmentary Poetic : Eighteenth-Century Uses of an Experimental Mode. Lehigh University Press, 2009. University Press, 2011. References and EBSCOhost,search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edspmu&AN=edspmu.MUSE9780814336465.8&site=eds-live. Ebook. Larrissy, Edward. The Blind and Blindness in Literature of the Romantic Period. Edinburgh University Press, 2007. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=222732&site=eds-live. Linkin, Kramer. “William Blake and Romatic Women Poets.” Women Reading Blake. Ed. By Helen P. Bruder. Palgrave Macmillan, Bibliography 2006. Print. McGann, Jerome J. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983. Print. Images: Images of The Lady’s Magazine – Eighteenth Century Journals Images of Joshua Cristall’s art – bing.com images of William Blake’s poetry -- bing.com Image of “A Fragment—The Blind Man” – Eighteenth Century Collections Online Images of Mary’s Letter from The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft.
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