NAKED NOVELS: VICTORIAN AMATORY SONNET SEQUENCES AND THE PROBLEM OF MARRIAGE By Sarah E. Kersh Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English December, 2010 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Carolyn Dever Professor Rachel Teukolsky Professor Ellen Levy Professor Tricia Lootens For SN: without whom this project would never have been finished ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Over the past three years I have found that a dissertation—even in the humanities—is the work of a community and I am grateful for the generosity of a vast number of people. First and foremost, I was lucky enough to have an outstanding committee who pushed and challenged me at every turn. Many thanks to: Professor Dana D. Nelson—who was with this project at its beginning—for her indefatigable enthusiasm and continual encouragement which helped me make it through; Professor Ellen Levy who tutored me in the fine art of poetics even while in another country; Professor Rachel Teukolsky—who came later to the project—for her thorough readings and patient feedback; and Professor Tricia Lootens—who was there at the germination of this dissertation idea—for showing me a project like this was possible. Lastly, thank you to Professor Carolyn Dever who took a chance on me five and a half years ago. You have shown me such kindness, such strong support, and such willingness to share with me new areas of scholarship. You showed me new cities and new literature, and for that I owe such a debt of gratitude. To my entire committee, past as present, I hope my work will live up to the amazing scholarship you have done and continue to do. I am grateful to the Department of English at Vanderbilt University, as well as the Jacob K. Javits foundation which funded the first four years of my graduate work. The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Fellowship program generously supported my fifth and final year. I am especially grateful to Mona Frederick and the fellows who were brought together through this program and who offered to me their time, their editing eyes, and their interdisciplinary comments and suggestions: Elena Deanda, Gesa Frömming, Patrick Johnson, Gail McConnell, Rachel Nisselson, Matt Witt, and, especially, my fellow Victorianist, Elizabeth Meadows. Also instrumental in getting these thoughts off the ground in their fledgling states iii were the three working groups supported by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. These opportunities to talk across disciplines, theoretical backgrounds, and time periods were invaluable. Thank you to members of the Queer Theory Reading Group, the 18 th and 19 th Century Working Group, and the Reclaiming Citizenship Working Group. I am lucky to have been surrounded by a department filled with collegiality and support and I feel very indebted to both Professor Jay Clayton as Chair of the English Department and Professor Kathryn Schwarz as Director of Graduate Studies. The kind of community I enjoyed could not have existed without their institutional direction. Moreover, I am so grateful to have been mentored and taught by the faculty of the department. Professors Vereen Bell, Gordon Bigelow, Lynn Enterline, Teresa Goddu, Andrea Hern, Roger Moore, Mark Schoenfield, and Paul Young guided and trained me to be the teacher and scholar I am today. Many thanks to the administrative staff of both the RPWC and the English department without whom this document would not exist in any acceptable form or format: Janis May, Sara Corbit, and Polly Case. Thanks also to Donna Caplan, on whom I could count for laughs, for nutrition, and for a listening ear. Thanks as well to Sam at JJ’s Market—his kindness and his caffeine helped me through more than one rough writing patch. To my fellow graduate colleagues, past and present: Beau Baca, Elizabeth Barnett, Diana Bellonby, Rebecca Chapman, Alice Chuang, Matt Duques, Josh Epstein, Heather Freeman, Ben Graydon, Justin Haines, Emily Hines, Lauren Wood Hoffer, Donald Jellerson, Megan Minarich, John Morrell, Brian Rejack, Donika Ross, Freya Sachs, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Derrick Spires, Nicole Seymour, and Jane Wanninger. Thank you for being both colleagues and friends. As I discovered, writing is a long process and the road to coherency and clarity is littered with grammatical and theoretical debris of a seemingly insurmountable scale. I am so thankful iv for my writing group members Rachel Nisselson and Bethany Packard who encouraged me, prodded me, and cheered me along the way. Elizabeth Covington, Charlotte Amanda Hagood, and Sarah McCauley Passino offered sustenance for my soul, body, and mind. Virginia Woolf said: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well .” We dined very well indeed, ladies. I would be remiss not to thank my professors and mentors at Muhlenberg College. They taught me about poetry and, more importantly, gave me permission to love it. Gratitude also to those who were, above all, my dearest friends and confidants, who loved me even when the writing went poorly: Yeo Ju Choi, Lindsay and Robin Marjoram, and Jennifer Epting. And finally, thanks and love to Sarah Niebler. With you, everything (even a dissertation!) is possible. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................... iii INTRODUCTION Victorian Marriage: An Institution under Construction ............................................................. 1 Chapter I. QUEERING ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING’S SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE ......................................................................................................... 25 II. MODERNIZING LOVE IN GEORGE MEREDITH ....................................................... 63 III. A SPECTRUM OF VICTORIAN SEXUALITY: CHRISTINA AND DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI ..................................................................................................... 97 IV. INTIMACY AND FAMILIAL TIES: GEORGE ELIOT AND AUGUSTA WEBSTER’S SONNETS TO THE FAMILY ................................................................ 137 V. RADICAL DOMESTIC: MICHAEL FIELD AND WHYM CHOW, FLAME OF LOVE ........................................................................................................................ 181 CONCLUSION Re-contextualizing Tennyson’s Metaphors of Marriage ........................................................ 221 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................... 233 vi INTRODUCTION Victorian Marriage: An Institution under Construction “And then, there it was, suddenly entire shaped in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clean and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here—the sonnet.” — Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse “Compact, conventional, rigid in appearance, the sonnet has been, for six centuries, a miraculous wine- press through which the richest, the quintessential elements of the human spirit have been strained… There has been little effort to define the sonnet sequence…Such a narration, with all superfluous matter cut away, might be called a naked novel.” — Houston Peterson, The Book of Sonnet Sequences At the end of the nineteenth-century, poet Amy Levy (1861-1889) called into question the efficacy of the institution of marriage in her satirical poem entitled “The Ballad of Religion and Marriage.”1 Levy suggests that marriage has gone the way of the Judeo/Christian God, both of which the speaker of the poem disavows.2 Swept into limbo is the host Of heavenly angels, row on row; The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, 1 Not circulated during her lifetime, the poem was printed in a limited edition pamphlet in 1915. 2 Other poets like Edith Nesbit and Edward Carpenter also wrote poems calling into question the role of marriage as an outdate institution. Nesbit composed the companion poems “The Husband of To-Day” and the “Wife of All Ages” ( Lays and Legends 1886) and Carpenter composed his famous “Towards Democracy” (1883). 1 Pale and defeated, rise and go. The great Jehovah is laid low, Vanished his burning bush and rod— Say, are we doomed to deeper woe? Shall marriage go the way of God? (l.1-8) While tongue-in-cheek, the poem’s underlying message is that marriage, like religion, has no place in the modernity of the nineteenth century. Marriage and religion are in “limbo,” lost souls not yet destined for heaven or hell, but most definitely dead and gone. As Levy’s poem continues, she pokes fun at a domesticity that is as bland as boiled roast and hoping for a future—in a “million years at most”—where the emphasis is no longer on married “pairs.” Monogamous, still at our post, Reluctantly we undergo Domestic round of boiled and roast, Yet deem the whole proceeding slow. Daily the secret murmurs grow; We are no more content to plod Along the beaten paths—and so Marriage must go the way of God. Soon, before all men, each shall toast The seven strings unto his bow, Like beacon fires along the coast, The flame of love shall glance and glow. 2 Nor let nor hindrance man shall know, From natal bath to funeral sod; Perennial shall his pleasures flow When marriage goes the way of God. Grant, in a million years at most, Folk shall be neither pairs nor odd— Alas!