Monstrous Hybridity: The Greco-Roman and Biblical Aesthetics of the Sea in the Long Romantic Period.

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the

degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

School of English, Media and Performing Arts,

University of New South Wales.

Mandy M. Swann

Supervisors: Scientia Professor Christine Alexander and Dr. William Walker

December, 2010. COPYRIGHT STATEMENT

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Date X h 11 < ©2010 by Mandy M. Swann All Rights Reserved. Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisors Christine Alexander and Bill Walker for their continual support and encouragement, as well as Cian Duffy, Peter Fletcher and Graham Harman for their generosity in providing much needed feedback on the project at important junctures. I also thank Dr Campbell Aitken, who provided editorial services related to standard D (Language and illustrations) and standard E (completeness and consistency) of the Australian Standards for Editing Practice. I am indebted to my fellow doctoral candidates, Emma Wortley, Mark Tutton and Ryan Twomey for their friendship during the research and writing of this thesis. Most importantly, I am especially indebted to my parents, Laurine and Arthur Fitzpatrick and my husband, Patrick Caldon, for their enduring kindness and love. Table of Contents Introduction: Critical transformations of the Romantic Sea...... 10

The Greco-Roman and Biblical Character of Romantic Seas...... 23

Chapter 1: The Feminine Supernatural...... 35

Homer and Hesiod...... 36

Heroic Battles with Sea Chaos...... 45

Chapter 2: Mare Nostrum, Virgil’s Aeneid...... 58

The Hero and the Sea...... 60

The Sea as Unreason and Frenzied Rage...... 71

Sea-Nymphs in the Service of Rome...... 78

Chapter 3: Salvation and Chasms of Blood, the Biblical Sea...... 84

God’s Control over the waters...... 89

Sea Monsters in the Bible...... 99

No more Sea...... 109

Romantic Seas, a Prelude...... 113

Chapter 4: Ann Radcliffe’s Pagan Sea Nymphs...... 115

Magical Sea Women...... 120

Chapter 5: ‘The Mighty Waters Rolling’, Wordsworth’s Poetic Seas...... 140

‘Never again can I behold a smiling sea’...... 145

Dreaming of Immortality...... 155

Chapter 6: ‘A thousand thousand slimy things’, Coleridge’s Unitarian Sea...... 168

The Light of “the One Life’’ on the Ocean...... 178

Chapter 7: Shelley’s Sea-isle Utopias in the ‘deep wide sea of Misery’...... 209

Utopian Seascapes...... 217

The Sea in Shelley’s “Vision”...... 241

Chapter 8:‘The destroying angel of tempest’, the Sea of Charlotte Bronte...... 251 Oceanic Vistas of Female Subjectivity...... 257

A Sea of Emotion in Jane Eyre and Villette...... 263

Conclusion: Romantic Seas, Sublime Pathways to God...... 283

Appendix...... 290

Bibliography...... 297 Illustrations

Frontispiece: Gustave Dore, France, 1832-1883, The Destruction of Leviathan (1865) engraving. The Dore Bible Illustrations, New York: Dover Publications, 1974. Image source: The Dore Bible Gallery.

Figure 1: John William Waterhouse, Britain, 1849-1917, Circe Invidiosa (1892), oil on canvas, 180.7 x 87.4 cm. South Australian Government Grant 1892. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Image source: Art Gallery of South Australia.

Figure 2: Sir George Beaumont, Britain, Peele Castle in a Storm (1805), oil on canvas. Dove Cottage, Grasmere. Image source: The Wordsworth Trust.

Figure 3: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Bodleian MS. Shelley e. 4, sketch and poem fragment. The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts: A Facsimile Edition with Full Transcriptions and Scholarly Apparatus, vol. 3, P.M.S. Dawson ed., London: Garland Publishing, 1987.

Figure 4: John Martin, Britain, 1789-1884, The Evening of the Deluge (1828) Mezzotint and engraving 597x817mm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Image source: The Web Gallery of Art.

Figure 5: J.M.W. Turner, Britain, 1775-1851, Sunset at Sea, with Gurnets (c. 1836-40) watercolour with body colour and chalk. The Whitworth Gallery, Manchester. Image source: The Whitworth Gallery. Gustave Dore, The Destruction of Leviathan, engraving (1865). Introduction: Critical transformations of the Romantic Sea.

Since the early twentieth century, critics of the Romantic period have described the portrayal of the sea in Romantic literature as aesthetically transformative, and Romantic aesthetic transformations of the sea as representative of a definitive break with Greco-Roman and biblical portrayals of the sea.1 2Myra Reynolds (1909), for example, claims the sea “waited” for the Romantics. For W. H Auden (1951), Romantic depictions of the sea are evidence of the “revolutionary changes in sensibility and style” of the Romantic era.3 In the short collection of lectures constituting Auden’s The Enchafed Flood: Or the Romantic Iconography of the Sea, the Romantic “attitude” to the sea is distinguished from Greco- Roman and biblical images and ideas about the sea (what Auden refers to as the “classic attitude”). Auden observes “new notes in the romantic attitude”4 to the sea and a poverty of religious belief is one of them: “the images of the Just City, of the civilized landscape protected by the Madonna . . . the rose garden or island of the blessed are lacking in romantic literature because the romantic writers no longer believe in their existence”.5 Without reference to the role of God or religious belief, Auden characterises Romantic seas as objects of desire and redemptive human experiences: to wander at sea amid the unknown is pleasurable for the Romantic and the mutable nature of the sea is liberating.6

Alain Corbin’s cultural history of English and French attitudes to the sea, The Lure of the Sea: The discovery of the seaside 1750-1840 (1988 in French and 1994 in English), describes a similar pattern of change: the period of 1750-1840 was one where “recollections

Klancher, Jon, ed., A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 1-2. Unless otherwise stated the Romantic period or Romanticism is taken to mean the cultural and historical “pivotal moment of modernity” or “watershed cultural moment” of the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, 1770-1840. Dates as well as terms continue to be contested. 1 “periodize”, to quote Klancher, in order to “construct an interpretative as well as historical frame of analysis”. Charlotte Bronte is included as a post-Romantic for a more comprehensive view of the portrayal of the sea outside these parameters. 2 Myra Reynolds, The Treatment of Nature in English Poetry> (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1909), p. 343. 3 W. H. Auden, The Enchafed Flood: Or the Romantic Iconography of the Sea (London: Faber, 1951), p. 13 4 Auden, Enchafed Flood, p. 21. 5 Auden, Enchafed Flood, p. 31.

6 Auden, Enchafed Flood. 1 paraphrase from pp. 20-21. My emphases. Monstrous Hybridity 11 drawn from ancient literature and the reading of the Bible” which had “formed a cluster of representations” inspiring feelings of “horror” and “repulsion”, loosened their hold on the “collective imagination”.7 When Corbin’s book was published, Auden’s 1951 lecture series

o was the most recent monograph on the aesthetics of the sea in English Romantic writing. In 2006 Samuel Baker described Corbin’s book as “foundational” to any study of the Romantic sea.9 Strictly, Corbin’s Lure of the Sea is not about an aesthetic break between the portrayal of the sea in Romantic literature and Greco-Roman and biblical images of the sea. Corbin’s work is about an aesthetic break between the sixteenth to seventeenth-century portrayal of the sea, with its basis in interpretations of Greco-Roman and biblical portrayals of the sea by biblical commentators and second-century Roman rhetoricians, and the eighteenth to mid nineteenth-century portrayal (which includes a discussion of Romantic poetry).10

When Corbin describes the imagistic “cluster” that instituted a “blindness” and “horror” in the dominant sixteenth and seventeenth century response to the ocean,11 he is describing the way predominantly French sixteenth and seventeenth century writers responded to and also used stereotyped Homeric, Virgilian and biblical sea images and associations. Biblical commentators and second-century Roman rhetoricians, as well as “cosmogonical theories” like those of Thomas Burnet which emphasised the biblical Flood, are identified in Lure of the Sea as important mediators of ancient and biblical texts. Corbin contrasts what he

7 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 1 and p. 15 respectively. g This observation does not include studies on individual Romantic writers, discussions of which appear in the relevant chapters of this thesis. In other literary periods, examples of recent analyses of the portrayal of the sea are Sebastion Sobecki’s The Sea and Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, Brewer, 2008). Sobecki builds on Anne Treneer’s, The Sea in English Literature: From Beowulf to Donne (Liverpool: The University of Liverpool Press, 1926), Philip Edwards, Sea-mark: the Metaphorical Voyage, Spencer to Milton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997) and The Story of the Voyage: Sea Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). The latter is a reader compiling accounts of voyages across the sea in the eighteenth century. 9 Samuel Baker, “Wordsworth, Arnold, and the Maritime Matrix of Culture”, The Wordsworth Circle 34.1 (2003), pp. 24-29. 10 Critics referencing Corbin have not always identified this distinction and Corbin’s claims are sometimes read as the Romantic “positive” view of the sea in contrast with the Greco-Roman and biblical “negative” view of the sea. 11 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 1. 12 Corbin, Lure of the Sea. Corbin explains that he is not talking about the Hebrew sea (note 5 to page 1). He does cite from the Bible but he is speaking of “images derived from” the “Judeo-Christian tradition” of the “Fathers of the Church” (pp. 8-10). When remarking on the Greco-Roman works, or “antiquity” Corbin is looking at “the reading of ancient texts reinterpreted by the humantists” (pp. 10-11). In the next chapter (pp. 22-23) Corbin notes the “new light” in which physic-theologians began to view the sea between 1690- 1730; that is as evidence of God’s perfect creation rather than the spoils of the Flood. Monstrous Hybridity 12 describes as the greater European Romantic admiration of the sea with the dominant sixteenth and seventeenth century horror of the sea—a horror based on images of the terrible ocean drawn by biblical interpreters and Greco-Roman commentators with their attentiveness to “everything in ancient texts that evokes fear and horror“.13

Corbin’s focus is on “codified” activities in relation to the sea and the shore, the “new practices that emerge surrounding” the sea and “coastal landscapes” before and over the Romantic period.14 He initially explores the “veil of repulsive images” that “prevented the seaside from exercising its appeal” in what he refers to, using a term similar to Auden’s though with a different meaning, as the classical age; that is, the period “since the Renaissance” (the sixteenth and seventeenth century).1^ Around 1750, Corbin argues, new practices reveal an aesthetic change in the dominant pre-Romantic response to the sea. Corbin notes a perceptual shift from repulsion to “the irresistible awakening of a collective desire”16 and the increase of “a whole lifestyle” involving sea bathing and visiting the seaside for pleasurable holiday making “taking shape on the sea-shores”.17 The increased Romantic appreciation of the sea is articulated in the delight taken in “coenaesthetic impressions”, in which individuals desire the “touching coolness of the sands” and the “power of the waves” and reveal in their poetry and prose an “admiration . . . for the infinite expanse of the waves”.18 Due to the fluid critical use of the terms “classic” and “classical,” I employ the term “Greco-Roman” to denote Homeric, Hesiodic and Virgilian works.

Corbin identifies the origins of aesthetic change earlier than the Romantic period; he remarks “well before the end of the eighteenth century, the ocean shores had been places of contemplation and delight”.19 In this Corbin partially undermines the critical paradigm of Romantic transformation, claiming instead a Romantic development of what had already begun. For Corbin, the Romantics “codify an emotional strategy that had been slowly

13 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 10. When Corbin refers to “ancient texts” here, he is including the Bible. 14 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 1.

15 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 1.

16 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 53.

17 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 86. 18 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 53. 19 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 163. Monstrous Hybridity 13

developing”.20 Nonetheless, Corbin describes the separation of mid eighteenth-century culture and literature from sixteenth to seventeenth-century portrayals of the sea (with their basis in Greco-Roman and Biblical texts). Therefore, Corbin’s Lure of the Sea fits within the critical paradigm of Romantic transformation—the critical tradition that characterises the Romantic age as part of a period of fundamental aesthetic change, an aesthetic change underpinned by a definitive break with Greco-Roman and biblical portrayals of the sea.

In Corbin’s reading of the Romantic sea, the aesthetics of the sublime and an inherent contrariness define the Romantic transformation of the sea. Corbin describes the Romantic sea as sublime within the aesthetic theories of Edmund Burke but he describes the sea as possessing qualities Burke would have divided as Sublime or Beautiful." Burke’s division between “The Sublime” and “The Beautiful” is an “essential, if not stable, opposition” which “dominated thinking on aesthetics” well into the Romantic period. An overview of Burke’s categories appears in appendix 2. Corbin notes that the ocean is “paradoxical”" for the Romantics. He particularly discusses the contradictory qualities ascribed to the sea by the Romantics for whom the sea is “unchanging” and “ephemeral”, a place of “emptiness” that is also “teeming with monsters”.24 Within the sea or on the shore, the Romantic viewer can experience the “shock of anguish” and ‘"joy”, and the Romantic sea is a “mothering sea” and also a “grave”.25 He situates the “Romantic model of contemplation” as the culmination of a “historic event” with “new itineraries for coastal reverie”, a “new wealth of emotions”,26 and the “end to the complicity between man and an Earth governed by God’s hand”. Corbin, like Auden, views secularisation as a founding characteristic of Romantic aesthetic transformations of the sea.

20 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 126. 21 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, pp. 126-127.

"" Nicola Trott, “The Picturesque, the Beautiful and the Sublime”, in Romanticism: An Anthology’, 2nd edn. ed., Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), p. 72. Burke is the only aesthetic theorist Howard Isham discusses in relation to the British Romantics, Corbin discusses Burke and Kant. 23 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 166. ?4 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 169, p. 165, p. 167 and p. 168.

25 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 171, p. 167.

"6 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, pp. 164-165. 27 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 126. Monstrous Hybridity 14

John Peck, citing Auden and Corbin, also describes a Romantic aesthetic transformation of the sea in Maritime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in British and American Novels, 1719-1917 (2001). The links between narrative depictions of naval life, subjectivity, national and economic interests form the basis of Peck’s monograph. Peck describes a “fundamental shift in attitude that occurred over the course of several centuries, whereas “earlier” the sea journey was “negative”, so in “classical and medieval literature a sense of fear and the evil of the sea predominates” but “by the time of the Romantics there is a sense

?o of excitement and liberation”.

In a compilation of essays edited by Bernhard Klein, Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture (2002), Ulrich Kinzel and Anne-Julia Zwierlein also discuss aesthetic transformations of the sea, though neither overtly separates the Romantic sea from Greco-Roman and biblical portrayals. In “Orientation as a Paradigm of Maritime Modernity”, Kinzel describes changes in attitudes to the sea wrought by new navigational techniques and experiences in sixteenth-century Europe. Zwierlein argues for the eighteenth-century’s re-casting of Milton’s demonic sea into a space of British domination that leads to great wealth in “Satan’s Ocean Voyage and 18th Century Seafaring Trade”. Both essays reveal ambiguities within the depictions of the sea they describe, and the sea remains an alien space of uncertainty and transgression. Additionally both essays describe but do not explicitly identify the persistence of stereotyped Greco-Roman and biblical images of the terrible ocean of chaos. Kinzel’s main point is that, with the exercise of attention to the power of the winds, the instability of the oceans could lead paradoxically to power and wealth. Nonetheless, he shows how the sea was still “unsteady” and “dangerous” as the prudent person attempted to navigate “perilous waters”. With reference to what Zwierlein views as the eighteenth-century revision of oceanic travel, she remarks: “Milton’s dangerous and delusive ocean has turned into the British passage to paradise, and the tainted

28 John Peck, Maritime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in British and American Novels, 1719-1917 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 14-15. 29 Bernard Klein, ed., Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2002), Klein and Gesa Makenthun, eds., Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2004). 30 Kinzel, “Orientation as a Paradigm of Maritime Modernity”, in Klein ed., Fictions of the Sea, pp. 28-48. 31 Anne-Julia Zwierlein, “Satan’s Ocean Voyage and 18th-Century Seafaring Trade”, in Klein ed., Fictions of the Sea, pp. 49-76. 32 ~ Kinzel, “Orientation”, in Klein ed., Fictions of the Sea, p. 41. Monstrous Hybridity 15

riches of Milton’s Ormus have turned into the well-deserved tribute owed to Britain by her colonies”. ' Zwierlien observes that the ocean is still considered to be unstable and a danger in the eighteenth-century. Moreover, part of the “well-deserved tribute owed to Britain” is based upon Britain’s skill and strength in dominating the wild ocean and, though she does not denote it as such, the symbolism of a great power controlling the sea has a Roman and biblical heritage that consciously fed eighteenth-century British national identity. Klein’s later publication with Gesa Mackenthun, Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (2004), is not concerned with the Romantic aesthetics of the sea; it is concerned with colonialism, resistance to colonisation, migration, contact zones and the notion of the castaway. ’4 Even so, Klein’s two collections inspire and explicitly invite historical,35 literary and aesthetic contextualisation of critically dominant conceptions of the Romantic transformation of perceptions of the sea.

Tim Rood remarks upon Romantic aesthetic transformations of the sea in The Sea! The Sea!: The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination (2004). For Rood, the Romantic sea is “the sea of youth ... the sea that stands for eternity, the sea to which we all long to return”.36 Rood links the fascination with the iconic Greek cry “Thalassa! Thalassa!”, exhibited in numerous references in a variety of nineteenth and early twentieth-century books and poems, to paradoxical Romantic images of the sea as the site of annihilation and salvation; emptiness and fertility. He links the shout to what he describes as the new and ambiguous feeling for the sea that developed during the Romantic era: “This new feeling for the sea arose from a complex interplay of desires and fears”. However, even according to Rood’s own analysis, this ambiguous feeling is not new to the Romantics. The original Greek shout is a show of unity before the disunity and bickering that besets the soldiers, and Rood

33 Zwierlein, “Satan’s Ocean Voyage and 18th-Century Seafaring Trade”, in Klein ed., Fictions of the Sea, p. 61. 34 Klein and Mackenthun eds., Sea Changes, chapter 7 and 10. An essay by Mackenthun, “Chartless Voyages and Protean Geographies: Nineteenth-Century American Fictions of the Black Atlantic” analyses American nationalism in relation to the issue of slavery. 35 Klein, Fictions of the Sea, p. 4. Klein notes: the “generalizations” of “the negative image of the evil sea and its many associated dangers . . . traditionally seen to be replaced in the 18th century might be crying out for historical contexts”. 36 Rood, Tim, The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination (London: Duckworth Overlook, 2004), p. 2. Rood cites Corbin (p. 59 and p. 78) but not Isham or Auden. Rood, The Sea! The Sea!,p. 83. Monstrous Hybridity 16 describes the Greek feeling for the sea as divided between the danger and liberation of sea travel.38

Howard I sham’s Image of the Sea: Oceanic Consciousness in the Romantic Century (2004), a broad survey of European images of the sea in Romantic poetry and art, is the only full-length study to date on the aesthetic portrayal of the sea in the Romantic period after Corbin’s Lure of the Sea.39 In Riverbank and Seashore in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Literature (2006),40 Gillian Hanson surveys but does not offer a detailed analysis of the appearance of water and sea themes and images in British novels of this period. In accord with the critical paradigm of Romantic aesthetic transformations of the sea, Isham claims “new images” of the sea were “found” by the “romantic imagination”.41 Like Corbin, he describes the sea as sublime within Burke’s aesthetics but discusses the character of the Romantic sea, its “beauty, sublimity, and terror”42, as beset by contradictions and in terms fitting both Burke’s sublime and beautiful categories. Isham’s conception of a Romantic “oceanic feeling” underpins his view that the Romantic experience of the sea was primarily one of “secular” union.43 He defines “that mystic oceanic sensibility, so significantly evident in the Romantic century” in terms of Romain Rolland’s “oceanic feeling as a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole”.44 In Isham’s view, Romantic portrayals of the sea are predicated on a perceived harmonic oneness between humanity and external nature. In his overview to Image of the Sea, Isham notes: “as secular

TO Rood, The Sea! The Sea!, pp. 207-8, p. 210. 39 Howard Isham, Image of the Sea: Oceanic Consciousness in the Romantic Century (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). As 1 revise this introduction two relevant full length studies are set to emerge: Sam Baker’s Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture (The University of Virginia Press), and Damian Walford Davies is researching a work titled Pageantry of Fear: The Poetry of Shipwreck, 1762-1878. Their parameters are different to mine: Baker’s as a historical revision of the Romantic notion of universal culture within Britain’s empire building projects, and Davies’ in its focus on shipwreck themes. 40 Hanson cites neither Corbin nor Isham but she does cite Auden. 41 Isham, Image of the Sea: Oceanic Consciousness in the Romantic Century (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), p. 59. I have focused on English literary texts, primarily poetry for my evidence. Corbin and Isham have a broader frame of reference when they describe this trend, but they apply their claims to English Romantic poetry. 42 Isham, Image of the Sea, p. 19. Corbin also remarks that from 1750-1840 people came to see the “sublime beauty of the ocean” (p. 53). Neither author discusses these contradictions as ambiguous within Burke’s divisions of the sublime and beautiful. 43 Isham, Image of the Sea, pp. 18-19. 44 Isham, Image of the Sea, p. xx. Monstrous Hybridity 17 thought began to displace the certainties of a sacral universe, the oceans that give life to our planet offered a symbol of eternity, rooted in the experience of nature rather than biblical tradition” 45 Isham’s addendum to sections on Keats and Wordsworth similarly claim the Romantic unites the sea with the “soul” in a “secular world”. Describing Romantic portrayals of the sea, Isham writes: “they felt the true wonder of human origins in nature herself ... the human soul sought its identity, even authenticity, in nature”, and “the Romantic imagination found new images to unite the human soul with the secular world into which it was abandoned in the nineteenth century—images of nature’s majesties”.46 Isham’s observations of a Romantic “mystical union” with the sea and new Romantic oceanic metaphors in a secular world act against one another. If Romantic portrayals of the sea constitute visions of “the human soul” mystically joining with the unknown and the limitless in nature, it is unclear how this indicates a new oceanic metaphor in a secular world-the world in which seas are “not just signs from ‘above’”.47

The central view established in the critical tradition of Romantic aesthetic transformations of the sea—most recently articulated in the work of Corbin and Isham—is that popular debates on the sublime, stimulated by the publication and translation of On the Sublime (often attributed to Longinus) in 1674, contributed to a new vision of the sea in which God and Greco-Roman allusion and imagery have little or no role. These analyses do not locate Burke within the British theistic discourses on the sublime or discuss Burke’s convictions that the natural sublime is a sign of the presence of God in the world.49

When Corbin and Isham situate the Romantic aesthetics of the sea within a process of secularisation, they add to the work of earlier critics such as M. H. Abrams for whom “it is a historical commonplace that the course of Western thought since the Renaissance has been

45 ~ Howard Isham, Image of the Sea, p. 1. 46 Isham, Image of the Sea, pp. 58-9. 47 Isham, Image of the Sea, pp. 19. 48 Corbin, The Lure of the Sea, pp. 124-5. Corbin admits that “the emotions generated by the sight of the sea . . . was to free itself only slowly from the patterns imposed by natural theology” but in his discussions of the lead up to the Romantics and the Romantics themselves he continually describes the sublime experience as separated from “the Creator”. 49 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 127. Corbin refers to the quality of power as a determining factor behind the sublimity of the sea but he does discuss Burke’s section on power where he describes natural grandeur as evidence of God’s power. Edmund Burke, “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful; with an Introductory discourse concerning taste”, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 12 vols., vol. 1 (London; John C. Nimmo, 1887), p. 143. Monstrous Hybridity 18 one of progressive secularization”.50 However, as Abrams observes, “it is easy to mistake the way in which that process took place”.51 In Natural Supernaturalism, Abrams does not argue for the end of Greco-Roman and biblical influence on the Romantics (and his discussion is principally about role of the Bible); for Abrams, “what distinguishes” Romantic writers is “their displacement from a supernatural to a natural frame of reference”. Corbin and Isham share this view, like Abrams they consider the Romantics as engaged in a reformulation of “traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation” into a “two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its transactions with nature”. 53

Corbin and Isham describe the eighteenth-century aesthetics of the sublime, delineated by Burke, as inaugurating new ways of appreciating the sea in which God’s presence is diminished, if not eradicated. Within their framework, nature “herself’ is the sole source of a set of emotions codified within the discourse of the sublime. I do not dispute Corbin’s cultural analysis; it persuasively explores the eighteenth-century fascination with the aesthetics of the sublime as a stimulus to “the crowds [that] were beginning to rush to Brighton in order to encounter the violence of the waves”. I disagree with Corbin’s separation of the sublime experience from conceptions of God. Corbin views the manifestation of the sublime in Thomson’s Seasons as a prelude to Romantic sublime sea encounters and his characterisations of God’s diminished role apply to the sublimity of Romantic seas.54 Corbin notes:

Of course this work [Thomson’s Seasons] is still marked by the image of the Flood; it reveals the influence of the Psalmist and of Milton. But a dizzying sense of boundlessness is definitely what animates the poem . . . Winds, flashing lightning, and waves join forces. As these hostile forces break loose, mankind feels threatened; and he forgets the Creator. The spectacle of unrestrained Nature gives rise to delight . . .

50 M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1971), p. 13. 51 Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 13.

52 Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 13. 53 Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 13. Abrams again describes (p. 226) the translation of “biblical myth into abstract concepts and non-supematural design” when he discusses a pattern of apocalyptic thinking in Western writing over a period that includes the Romantic age. The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1984). 54 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 125. As already noted, Corbin observes the influence of the Bible on Thomson’s text but describes the sublime effect as independent of it. Monstrous Hybridity 19

The tempest no longer appears as the manifestation of God’s wrath; it becomes the impenetrable movement of the unknown . . . The ocean unleashed brought an end to the complicity between man and an Earth governed by God’s hand. As a result the spectator’s position was drastically altered.55

Yet the English Romantics figure vastness and natural embodiments of infinity as signs of God and ultimately so does Burke. Burke is writing within the British theistic tradition in which the natural sublime signifies God’s material presence. Corbin remarks: “it is not only the immensity and negativity of the ocean, what Burke calls ‘privation’, that make it sublime, but also its power and its energy”.56 Corbin does not explore Burke’s observation that the epitome of terror and power is God, in whose presence the sublime affect is so overwhelming we are “annihilated before him”. Early in his treatise, Burke defines the sublime without mentioning God,57 but when he discusses the contemplation of the “Godhead” he observes “we are bound by the condition of our nature” to know God “through the medium of sensible

CO images”, by God’s “evident acts and exertions” in nature/ Isham declares that Burke

“identifies the ocean as the highest example of the sublime”,59 but for Burke, God is the highest example of the sublime. God’s power is “almighty” and “to be struck with his power, it is only necessary that we should open our eyes”;60 the ocean is sublime because it produces terror, it is powerful and full of energy, but inexorably the ocean is sublime because it is evidence of God’s greater power, terror and energy.

55 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 125. Corbin is describing a perceptual shift from the limit of the shoreline to the limitlessness of the horizon: “the limit, the reassuring divine boundary”, to the “glance . . . cast upon the horizon”. For Corbin this is a shift from a gaze fixed on the limits placed by God towards the limitless. He associates this shift in gaze with the aesthetics of the sublime. Corbin does not define this limitlessness as the limitlessness of God. 1 argue that the Romantics almost always do. 56 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 127. 57 Burke, “A Philosophical Inquiry”, in Works, vol. 1, p. Ill: “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling”. 58 Burke, “A Philosophical Inquiry,” in Works, vol. 1, p. 143. 59 Isham, Image of the Sea, p. 19. 60 Burke, “A Philosophical Inquiry”, in Works, vol. 1, p. 143. Monstrous Hybridity 20

The eighteenth-century discourse on the natural sublime is theistic and fundamentally dualistic.61 Cian Duffy comprehensively discusses the eighteenth-century discourse on the sublime and identifies Thomas Reid and Archibald Alison as its exemplars in Shelley and the

Revolutionary Sublime,62 At the beginning of Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man Thomas Reid declares, “Every existing thing must be either corporeal or incorporeal—that is obvious”.63 Following Reid, the sea is not in and of itself sublime or “grand”; rather it is “only truly grand” because it reflects the idea of grandeur whose residence is in the mind and whose ultimate manifestation is God.64 Likewise, Alison notes: “qualities of matter are not to be considered as sublime”.65 Nature can only reflect the sublime qualities of the mind or God. Early in his treatise Burke’s empirical concept of the sublime is distinct from the neo­ platonism of Reid and Alison: “whatever is in any sort terrible”, for instance the sea or God,

“is a source of the sublime”; that is, produces the sublime affect.66 However, describing the contemplation of the “Godhead”, Burke makes statements in accord with Reid and Alison’s neo-Platonic distinctions between mind and matter, cause and effect: the sublime affect or “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” is from the cause, “divine qualities” or God, and not the object, “the medium of sensible images”.67 Burke’s sensation- based empirical sublime is part of the eighteenth-century theistic discourse on the sublime despite his teleological differences with the neo-Platonism of Reid and Alison since, for Burke, God is the ultimate source of the sublime affect.

The sublime affect is, as Burke categorised it, “the annihilation of self’68 or Reid’s

“irresistible”69 emotional transport and Alison’s “bewitching reverie”70 in which reason fails

Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (Hildesheim: Olms, 1968); Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (London: Macmillan, 1941). Alison and Reid are exemplars of the theistic discourse. Cian Duffy comprehensively summarises what he calls the “theistic configuration of the discourse on the sublime” in Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 13-17, p. 17. 6" Standard critical readings of the Romantic aesthetics of sublime rely on the theories Burke or Kant. Duffy analyses Shelley’s atheistic reformulation of the sublime discourse; 1 come back to his analysis of Shelley in chapter 7. 63 Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers, p. 2. 64 Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers, p. 591 65 Alison, Nature and Principles of Taste, p. 402. 66 Burke, “A Philosophical Inquiry”, in Works, vol. 1, p. 131. 67 Burke, “Philosophical Inquiry”, in Works, vol. 1, p. 143. 68 Burke, “Philosophical Inquiry”, in Works, vol. 1, p. 143. Monstrous Hybridity 21 and “thoughts . . . have passed with so much rapidity through our imagination”.71 The common element within these characterisations is the definition of the sublime affect as a strong emotion or idea that overwhelms reason. Duffy describes the experience of the sublime affect in Reid and Alison’s theistic schema as the following:

For both Reid and Alison, then, the defeat of the understanding by the natural sublime is evidence that the power and grandeur of God is immanent in His Creation. For both men, the imagination enables the mind to overcome the defeat of the understanding and read the landscape of the natural sublime as the ‘signs’ and ‘expressions’ of Deity.72

For Reid, Alison and Burke, the sublime affect springs from overwhelming emotions or ideas which suspend reason: the overwhelming “emotion” or “passion” that constitutes the sublime affect is that which “robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning”, in which “we lose ourselves amid the number of images that pass before our minds”.74 Reid and Alison disagree with Burke on the type of emotions or passions capable of producing the sublime affect, in other words the type of emotions that have the power to suspend reason and in Reid and Alison combine with “trains of pleasing or solemn thought”.75 Fear and terror are too negative for Reid and Alison;76 they describe the sublime affect in terms of positive emotions such as “grandeur”77 and “elevation”.78 In contrast, “Negative impulses” and positive emotions are unified within Burke’s definition of the ultimate sublime effect. In Reid and Alison’s neo-Platonic version, natural objects are associated with mental qualities as part of the sublime affect. In Burke’s version, natural objects can produce this sublime affect directly. All three interpret natural objects, or the natural objects associated with “qualities of

69 Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers, p. 586.

70 Alison, Nature and Principles of Taste, p. 21. 71 Alison Nature and Principles of Taste, pp. 5-6. 72 “ Duffy, Revolutionary Sublime, p. 17.

75 Burke, “Philosophical Inquiry”, in Works, vol. 1, p. 131. 74 Alison, Nature and Principles of Taste, p. 6.

75 Alison, Nature and Principles of Taste, p. 6.

76 Against Burke, Reid does not allow terror to produce the sublime affect.

77 Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers, p. 591. 78 Alison, Nature and Principles of Taste, p. 325. Monstrous Hybridity 22 mind . . . capable of producing” these sublime associations and emotions,79 as signs of God in the world.

Bruce Graver observes the inadequacy and yet “profound effect” of the “story” of the “sharp” departure of Romanticism from “the neoclassical era that preceded it” and from the

orv influences of Greco-Roman literature. The story of the departure of Romanticism from the supematuralism of the Bible is also inadequate. The British eighteenth-century aesthetics of the sublime are theistic and dualistic. Within this aesthetics, the sea is portrayed as part of a cosmogony divided into the mortal realm and the divine realm. The sea is sublime within this aesthetics; that is, the sea is associated or equated with overwhelming emotions in which reason is suspended, because it is understood as evidence of the presence of God in the world. Corbin and Isham overlook the theistic underpinnings of Romantic descriptions of the sea because they misread eighteenth-century theories of the sublime as steps on the path towards a secular aesthetics. They fail to see the Christian foundations of Burke’s theories of the sublime and the crucial importance of supematuralism to eighteenth century theories of the natural sublime.

The English Romantic poets exhibit greater sensitivity to the contradictions of the biblical and Greco-Roman sublime sea than the sixteenth and seventeenth century predecessors Corbin discusses,81 repeatedly replicating these contradictions in their own visions of the sea. C. F. Burgess’ 1976 study of Joseph Conrad indicates that these contradictions fed into the later nineteenth and early twentieth century imagination. 82 Conrad’s representations of the sea move in extreme directions: “from love to hate at times, but existing, at most times, as a mixture of the two”, and in true Virgilian style, Conrad’s

OT seamen “have learned or come to leam never to trust the sea”. As noted, Rood also highlights the contradictory nature of the Romantic sea but describes it as part of Romantic aesthetic transformations of the sea. It is partly because Corbin and Isham do not situate

79 Alison, Nature and Principles of Taste, p. 110 80 Bruce E. Graver, “Classical Inheritances”, in Nicolas Roe ed., Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 38-48, p. 38. 81 According to Corbin’s characterisation, and Corbin admits there were exceptions in chapter 2. Auden notes that Shakespeare’s portrayal of the sea is contradictory (p. 21). 82 ‘ C. F. Burgess, The Fellowship of the Craft: Conrad on Ships and Seamen and the Sea (Port Washington, N.Y: Kennikat Press Corp., 1976). The continuance of Greco-Roman and biblical perceptions and icons of the sea is also visible (though not overt) in Burgess’ examination Joseph Conrad’s depictions of the sea. 83 Burgess, Fellowship of the Craft, p. 51. Monstrous Hybridity 23

Burke’s aesthetics of the sublime within the theistic discourse of the eighteenth-century that they do not view the contradictions visible in Romantic portrayals of the sea as continuous with the supematuralism of Greco-Roman and biblical portrayals of the sea. The aesthetics of the sublime (defined in simplified Burkean terms) and inadequate surveys of Greco-Roman and biblical sea images underlie claims for Romantic aesthetic transformations of the sea.

The Greco-Roman and Biblical Character of Romantic Seas

In this thesis, Monstrous Hybridity: the Greco-Roman and Biblical Aesthetics of the Sea in the Long Romantic Period, I chart a critically neglected aesthetic and ideological continuity between the portrayal of the sea in Romantic literature and Greco-Roman and biblical portrayals of the sea. Greco-Roman works and the Bible are foundational to the way Romantic poets imagine the sea. I show Romantic portrayals of the sea to be continuations of Greco-Roman and biblical aesthetic contraries. In Greco-Roman works and the Bible the sea is a monstrous hybrid of extremes: chaos and harmony, sterility and fecundity, hideousness and beauty, love and hate, violent loss and riches, renewal and destruction, suffering and salvation, good and evil, life and death, hope and despair.

Greco-Roman and biblical aesthetics, cosmogonies and systems of ethics are inherent to the Romantic representation of the sea and marine animals. Within Burke’s distinctions, the seas of the five writers discussed in this thesis are sometimes sublime and sometimes beautiful, and sometimes both. Romantic seas have both beautiful and sublime qualities, but it is the fusion of these qualities that becomes associated with the sublime affect, the “swell” of “emotions” in which reason is suspended, in Romantic portrayals of the sea. The

Of “irresistible” ' power of the Romantic sea to produce the sublime affect is based on its synonymy with contrary dichotomous sets of ideas and images drawn from Greco-Roman works and the Bible.

I identify the Romantic maintenance of Greco-Roman and biblical depictions of the sea in two main ways. First, I identify a general pattern I refer to as monstrous hybridity. Like the fabulous sea monsters of Greco-Roman works and the Bible, with their multiple heads, grotesque proportions and combinations of body parts, Romantic seas are hybrid fusions of

84 These dichotomies are somewhat different for each writer (as will soon be outlined) but each writer’s seas are a hybrid mix of extreme associations, images and ideologies. 85 Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, p. 586. Monstrous Hybridity 24

acute contradictions. Romantic seas reflect the extreme, ostensibly inextricable and dichotomous nature—the monstrous hybridity—of the ideas and emotions tied to the sea in Greco-Roman and biblical works. Second, I identify specific sets of dichotomies in Greco- Roman and biblical portrayals of the sea that endure and are resolved (to varying degrees) through appeals to supernatural presences in the work of Romantic writers. These specific dichotomous sets (detailed at the end of the introduction) are placed under the following headings: the feminine supernatural, the heroic sea journey, Roman masculine virtue and God’s control over the waters. The sublime force of the Romantic sea is based upon a continuation of the sublime dichotomies of the sea in Greco-Roman and biblical works.

My claim for the Greco-Roman and biblical character of the Romantic sea is primarily based on a comparative analysis of the portrayals of the sea in Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s

Aeneid and the Bible,86 with portrayals of the sea in the poetry and prose of Ann Radcliffe,

William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and Charlotte Bronte.87 The detailed comparative analysis of the portrayal of the sea in Greco-Roman works and the Bible is hinted at but unfulfilled in Auden’s brief lecture series, Corbin’s Lure of the Sea and Isham’s Image of the Sea™ I also examine the differences and similarities between the portrayals of the sea in the Bible and these Greco-Roman works. For each writer I consider details of biography: what they read and what is known about their religious, philosophical, political and social concerns. My focus is on their poetry, and in the case of Radcliffe and Charlotte Bronte, their fiction. But I also explore the details of their notebooks, letters and prose works and situate the portrayals of the sea by these poets within the cultural perceptions of the sea in late eighteenth to mid nineteenth-century England.

I argue for the ineradicable influence of Greco-Roman works and the Bible on Romantic portrayals of the sea contrary to the dominant critical paradigm of Romantic aesthetic transformation. I chose writers both the same and different to those chosen by critics working within this paradigm. Corbin, for instance, discusses Radcliffe, Coleridge, Shelley

86 The King James Bible was the dominant version of the Bible during the Romantic period. 87 Shelley’s materialist view of the universe makes him an exception to many (but not all) of the claims made about Romantic seas in this thesis; the discussion will continue on the understanding that he is the exception. Shelley’s work is discussed separately, usually at the end of a section and when I speak of the Romantics I mean the four other writers considered in the thesis. 88 At eighteen pages, Corbin’s discussion of the sixteenth and seventeenth century stereotypes drawn from Greco Roman and biblical sea images is the longest among these; Auden discusses the sea images from Greco-Roman works and the Bible in two pages and Isham in three. Monstrous Hybridity 25 and Byron, and Isham discusses Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats—both apply their claims to the Romantics in general. Radcliffe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Charlotte Bronte constitute a selection of potential writers from the Long Romantic period. Byron is absent, Keats is absent and though not always considered Romantic, Blake is also absent. The portrayals of the sea in the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge represent trends that are also visible in the portrayals of the sea by Byron, Keats and Blake. Similar arguments to those made about the theistic and dualistic seas of Wordsworth and Coleridge can be applied to Byron, Keats and Blake. Shelley’s seas constitute the exception. Therefore, while an exploration of the portrayal of the sea in the work of Byron, Keats and Blake is a future research path, I have opted to include Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Bronte instead. Radcliffe and Charlotte Bronte, not routinely considered poets or Romantics, are present to reflect my desire to look just before and just after the dates usually ascribed to the Romantic period as part of the Long Romantic period. I refer to them as Romantics. The emphasis I place on poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge, and on poetry in a thesis on the Romantic period, is traditional in some respects. In the recent Concise Companion to the Romantic Age (2009) Jon Klancher pointedly observes that the absence of a traditional focus on poetry is a reflection of critical developments in Romantic studies since the middle of the twentieth century. Every project sets its parameters and this thesis is no different. I focus on English Romantic poets, and the poetic language of writers in the Long Romantic period, because these are the sea presences that, to use Peter de Bolla’s colloquial formulation of the sublime effect, “move me” and as a result of their persistence in our schools and universities continue to “move” Western consciousness.90 I wanted to write about literary works that have had and continue to have the ability to create a hush in a room and provoke visible feeling. Therefore, I wanted to write about language, its often subtle but potent effects, which are (to an extent) universal within a common tongue, effects shown to operate upon the brain in a manner akin to music. A recent study conducted upon primates and humans shows that we respond to sounds which mimic species-specific joy, sadness, pain and rage,91 and this is part of what poetry and poetic language can do; this is part of an explanation for why the language of

89 Klancher ed., Companion to the Romantic Age, p. 2. 90 Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, eds., The Sublime: a Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 2. In his introduction de Bolla defines the parameters of the sublime through the query “what moves me”. 91 Charles T. Snowdon and David Teie, “Affective Responses in Tamarins elicited by Species-Specific. Music. ”, Royal Society’ Biology’ Letters 6.1 (23 February 2010), pp. 30-2. Monstrous Hybridity 26 masterful writers such as those I consider in this thesis have the power, even after hundreds of years, to “move” us—these writers are masters of language: rhythm, sound and metre that create, respond to and mimic the operations of human thought and emotion.

My thesis is about the way Greco-Roman and biblical images of the ocean permeate the sinews of the language of the five Romantics discussed in this thesis, how they are crafted into iconographical clusters and patterns of rhythm and sound, and how these reflect specific assumptions, belief systems and ideologies of the sea. This means that my methodology is substantially based around the analysis of the mechanics of language and allusion. I analyse poetic devices such as metaphor, simile, assonance, metre and rhyme. My poetic analysis is influenced by Angela Esterhammer’s deployment and revision of the speech act theories of J. L. Austin and John Searle in The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism. ~ It is also influenced by Simon Jarvis’ analytical marriage of the detailed assessment of poetic techniques (the subtle effects of form, metre and stress pattern) with a substantial consideration of the personal, religious, philosophical, social concerns of these poets. This blend of structuralist, linguistic and historicist analysis is also visible in

Susan Stewart’s recent book Poetry and the Fate of the Senses,94

This research began in a historicist-eco-critical mode, if by that is meant an analysis that focuses on historical contextualisation and “considers the environmental implications of the representation of nature”,95 but early in my research the complex aesthetics of the Romantic sea stimulated a methodological pluralism. I realised that I wanted to consider the Romantic sea primarily though “a study of literature”, one that acknowledges and explores the power of literature, and poetic language specifically, “to shape and reshape experience and feeling” and to explore “the aesthetic as a mode engaged richly and complexly with moral and political issues”.96 George Levine cogently describes the limitations of any analyses whose explorations put literature on trial for embedded ideologies and assumptions: analyses in which “the aesthetic [is viewed] as a strategy of mystification of the status quo”

Angela Esterhammer, The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 93 Simon. Jarvis, Wordsworth ’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 94 Susan Stewart, Poetry> and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002) 95 Steven Rosendale, ed., The Greening of Literary Scholarship (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002). 96 . George Levine, “Reclaiming the Aesthetic”, in George Levine ed., Aesthetics and Ideology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p. 3. Monstrous Hybridity 27

and literary texts are interrogated as if they were “an enemy to be arrested”.97 Damian Walford Davies also points to these concerns in his collection of New Historicist essays on

QO the limitations and future directions of New Historicism. This thesis employs comparative, linguistic, biographical and, to a lesser extent, cultural analysis; it is methodologically pluralistic because this combination of approaches best assists in providing the answers to the primary questions I want to answer:

• How do Romantic writers portray the sea and marine animals and how is this portrayal similar or different to the portrayal of the sea in Greco-Roman works and the Bible? • How does the use of language shape these portrayals? • What does the use of language say about the belief systems and culture of these writers and how does it do this?

Critical analyses of the Romantic sea need to acknowledge the religious foundation of eighteenth-century theories of the sublime. In the Romantic period the sea became sublime in poetry. The poetry and poetic language in the fiction of the writers considered in this thesis transformed the contradictions of the sea into divine or, in the case of Shelley, humanist paradoxes. I also place my analysis of Greco-Roman, biblical and Romantic seas within the dominant eighteenth-century theistic discourse on the sublime as articulated by Reid, Alison, and Burke. In the Romantic period, Greco-Roman works as well as the Bible were interpreted through the lens of this dominant eighteenth-century theistic aesthetics. All of the writers in this thesis position themselves within a version of the eighteenth-century theistic discourse on the sublime. With one exception—Shelley—the writers in this thesis read the sea as sublime evidence of the presence of a Christian or pagan God in the world. Most of them depict the sea and marine animals as expressions of God’s presence or the presence of the supernatural in the world.

I make the claim that the Romantic sea is theistic and I atomise core ideological and imagistic matrices that bind Greco-Roman and biblical portrayals of the sea to the portrayals of the sea by five writers I shelter under the label of Romanticism. I also show that Shelley’s seas are substantially different to those of the other four writers. In this, the thesis, to use

97 Levine, “Reclaiming the Aesthetic”, p. 3. 98 Damian Walford Davies, ed., Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an Orthdoxy (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 4-9. Monstrous Hybridity 28

Seamus Perry’s words, “leaves open a permanent, frustrating appeal to exception”.99 There are flaws to such appeals to exception but there are also advantages. Because there are important differences between Shelley’s portrayals of the sea and the portrayals of the sea by the other four writers, the similarities that do exist between Shelley’s seas and the seas of the other four are strengthened. Shelley’s sea is not theistic per se, but his concept of the material principle of Necessity recalls the God of the Bible. Necessity drives all in creation including the sea, and Shelley places man at the centre of creation.

The portrayal of the sea as “the purely mortal realm” or as “the realm of temporal existence on life’s voyage”—the material side of a material/divine dualistic universe—is a Romantic commonplace; it is also, Isham declares, “one of the most effective sea metaphors in English poetry”.100 I analyse the entrenchment of this sea metaphor in Greco-Roman and biblical paradigms.101 Generally, within the seascapes constructed by the Romantics humanity longs to escape the mortal world, to access and enter an immortal one; “nature herself’ or the sea “herself’ is figured as a conduit to that immortal world. The Romantic sea is often an emblem of the material world and human life made extraordinary or comprehensible by the presence of the supernatural. The beauty and significance of the natural world is predicated upon its existence as evidence of God, “something great”102 (to use Coleridge’s phrase), or some other supernatural presence in the world. Overall, the Romantics in this thesis write against the displacement of “the certainties of a sacral universe” by “secular thought” that for Isham define representations of the sea in the Romantic period. The aesthetics of Romantic seas depend on Greco-Roman and biblical allusion and are underpinned by Christian belief. Though Romantic oceans are to an extent “rooted” in the subjective “experience of nature”, the semantics of individual experience is given meaning by the Greco-Roman and biblical tradition. Allusions to this tradition are not

Seamus Perry, “Romanticism: The Brief History of a Concept”, in Duncan Wu, ed., A Companion to Romanticism (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1998), p. 4. 100 Howard Isham, Image of the Sea, p. 63. 101 An extension of this divide and another commonplace for the Romantics in this thesis is the portrayal of the sea as a material conduit to the immaterial realm of the divine. This is true for all the Romantics in this thesis but Shelley. 102~ Coleridge., Letter to Thelwall, 14 Oct. 1797, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1, ed., Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 349. Monstrous Hybridity 29

tokens of “homage” before moving on to “powerful realism”,103 nor as Corbin notes (of Thomson as a Romantic predecessor) are they insubstantial remnants compared with the evocation of (godless) infinity which “animates” Romantic writing.104 I claim that for the writers in this thesis all of the new “modes of contemplation” Corbin associates with Romantic experiences of the sea were mediated through Greco-Roman and biblical allusions and systems of belief, or to use the term Abrams attached to a contrary claim, Greco-Roman and biblical “supematuralism”.105 Pre-dominantly, the mysterious, the unknown and the limitless in nature are associated with supernatural presences and often a Christian God in the writing of the English Romantics.

Despite his emphasis on the secular character of Romantic seas, Isham’s reading of Shelley’s seascapes as “ideal” and “imagining[s] of a mystical union between nature and humankind” emphasise an otherworldly quality uncontextualised by references to Shelley’s continual depiction of the sea as a socio-political metaphor in a wholly material universe driven by the laws of nature. As I discuss in chapter 7, Shelley’s verse repeatedly exhibits scepticism about the allure of the mysterious and the mystical. Isham touches on this when he remarks that Shelley “had sought a world in which mind and nature would be united in harmony”, but in linking Shelley with a “Wordsworthian ideal of Nature”, Isham misconstrues the highly political and materialist underpinnings of Shelley’s seascapes as well as the intrinsically religious underpinnings of Wordsworth’s seascapes.106

My analysis of the fundamental religious nature of the Romantic seascape fits within a broader contemporary critical revision of Romanticism’s religious freight. The recent full- length studies of Colin Jager, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (2007), Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (2007), Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler, Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens (2006) and David L. Edwards, Poets and God: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake (2005) explore the role of religion in Romantic poetry. They build on R. L. Brett’s study Faith and Doubt: Religion and Secularization in Literature from Wordsworth

Isham, Image of the Sea, p. 20. Isham’s comments are on Falconer’s The Shipwreck here, but he uses this poem as an example of poetry that is a precursor to Romantic trends. 1 04 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 125.

105 Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 12.

106 Isham, Image of the Sea, p. 72. Monstrous Hybridity 30

to Larkin (1997) and Stephen Prickett’s many monographs, including: Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (1996) and Romanticism and Religion: the Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (1976).107

My five Romantics engage with the standard theistic configuration of the eighteenth- century discourse on the sublime as codified by Burke, Reid and Alison, but they add a pagan dimension to this discourse. Shelley is the exception and Shelley’s negative response to religious belief directly shapes his view. The sublime oceans of the writers in this thesis are situated within the aesthetic theories of popular British aesthetic theorists over the often more critically privileged theories of Immanuel Kant. The aesthetics of the sea and marine animals in the work of the Romantics are determined by their particular religious, political and social and personal concerns, reinforcing de Bolla’s separation of the British aesthetic tradition from Kant, and Duffy’s separation of Kant’s theories from the Romantic sublime (a generic term Duffy also calls into question).109 Peter de Bolla’s “aim” is “to de-couple the British eighteenth-century tradition of the sublime from the Kantian analytic” because the eighteenth century aesthetic of the sublime is too often equated with Kant’s aesthetics such that the sublime has been “understood as without political or ethical motivation since its affective registers are, according to the Kantian model, disinterested”.110 However, 1 acknowledge that Kant’s characterisation of the sublime as only “discoverable in mind” and unable to “be contained in any sensuous form”111 meshes well with the neo-Platonism of British theorists. Since the aesthetic contradictions emerging in Romantic treatments of the sea are often best demonstrated with reference to Burke’s well-known categories, I discuss these categories in this thesis. Nevertheless, in situating the Romantics within the broader theistic tradition, and that broader theistic tradition within the heritage of Greco-Roman

Individual essays treating of the sea imagery in the work of specific writers are discussed within the chapters themselves but two examples are: Thomas Dilworth’s “Symbolic Spatial Form in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and the Problem of God” (2007) and Emily Griesinger’s “Charlotte Bronte’s Religion: Faith, Feminism, and Jane Eyre” (2008). 108 Robert Kaufman exclusively focuses on Kant in the 2009 Companion to the Romantic Age in “What’s at Stake? Kantian Aesthetics, Romantic and Modem Poetics, Sociopolitical Commitment”, pp. 257-282. 109 Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, eds., The Sublime: a Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 2-3. Duffy, Revolutionary Sublime, p. 4. 110 De Bolla, The Sublime, p. 2. 111 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 92. “All that we can say is that the object lends itself to the presentation of a sublimity discoverable in mind. For the sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason”. Monstrous Hybridity 31

works and the Bible, I avoid an exclusive reliance on what has become known, in a token of critical familiarity, as the Burkean sublime.

In order to show that Romantic portrayals of the sea are built on a Greco-Roman and biblical foundation, I begin by drawing together key Greco-Roman texts with the Bible in order to examine the contiguities inherent in their representations of the sea and marine animals. In Greco-Roman works and the Bible, the sea and its creatures reflect both sides of the monstrously hybrid dichotomies already delineated—but overall one side predominates, and that is the side of chaos, sterility, hideousness and hostility to man. Aspects of the other side of the sea—harmony, fecundity, beauty, and salvation—appear less frequently and stand out more as irregularities or beguiling illusions, yet they are indelible components of the vision of the sea presented by the texts studied here.

The term ‘monstrous hybridity’ refers to the broader dichotomous, extreme and ostensibly inextricable nature of the ideas and emotions married to descriptions of the sea in Greco-Roman works and the Bible. I discuss four specific sets of dichotomies tied to the Greco-Roman and biblical sea that endure in the descriptions of the sea by Romantic writers. The four sets I describe are distinct but not mutually exclusive patterns within the greater matrix of the dichotomous ideas and emotions fused to the sea in Greco-Roman and biblical works. The feminine supernatural refers to the dichotomies embodied by figures like Scylla, Calypso, Circe and the Sirens in the Greco-Roman tradition. These dichotomies are: the immortal and the mortal, beauty and hideousness; the known and the alien; stability and chaos; fertility and barrenness; and passionate love and rage. These monsters, nymphs and goddesses of the marine realm inspire desire and repulsion, thrall and terror, hope and despair. Pre-dominantly figured through the sea voyages of Odysseus and Aeneas, the dichotomies of the heroic sea journey encompass another distinctive aspect of the monstrous hybridity of the sea in Greco-Roman tradition, they are: riches and poverty; identity and erasure; life and death; home and exile; community and isolation; trust and betrayal; limitation and infinity. The dichotomies of Roman masculine virtue are particularly evident in the Aeneid through the portrayal of battles with the release and containment of emotional extremes figured through sea imagery: serenity and rage, wisdom and irrationality, and mercy and bloodlust. In the biblical tradition, heroic battles with the dichotomies of the sea are instead depicted as God’s control over the waters, or God’s control over the following key dichotomies: form and formlessness; life and death; renewal and destruction; salvation and damnation; redemption and sin; and purification and punishment, changelessness and change. Monstrous Hybridity 32

In Greco-Roman and biblical works, and in the work of the Romantics, these dichotomous ideas and emotions overwhelm reason and are resolved (to varying degrees) by supernatural presences.

The sublime force of the Greco-Roman and biblical sea is based upon its monstrous hybridity and the supematuralism that underpins and, to an extent, makes this dichotomous nature comprehensible. In each tradition the monstrous hybridity of the sea is understood as evidence of the immanent presence of the divine in the world. In the Odyssey, the sea’s contraries are managed and escaped by the half-God hero Odysseus, but they remain unresolved and uncontained. In the Aeneid, through the figure of ships transformed into sea nymphs, the sea’s contraries are harnessed for the divinely sanctioned power of Rome and they take on the side of salvation, light and life. In the Bible, the contradictions of the sea are entirely expunged as part of God’s apocalyptic transformation of the earth.

1 I -) Though sea images and themes permeate Homer’s IlUad, “ the Odyssey is chosen for its more explicit portrayals of the monstrous sea extremes taken up by the Romantics. All of these works are inextricably part of the Romantic imagination as well as part of the wider English cultural psyche. The analysis of the portrayal of the sea in Homer, Hesiod, Virgil and the Bible is approached through dominant and repetitive images and associations. In the first chapter, Hesiod is included to give a broader view of the sea in Greek myths and cosmogonies, and Homeric and Hesiodic formulaic epithets are part of this analysis.

Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley were familiar with Homer, Hesiod and Virgil in the originals. The issue of which translation of Homer and Virgil is appropriate to use in a thesis of this kind is an interesting one. For instance, Wordsworth is known to have read Alexander

Pope’s translation of the Odyssey,113 Chapman’s and possibly William Cowper’s.114 In addition, Wordsworth is thought to have read John Ogilby’s115 translation of the Aeneid and is known to have read John Dryden’s. Wordsworth also translated several books of the

Homer, Illiad, trans. A. T. Murray, Revised by William F. Wyatt (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999), Book 15, Lines 187-193. Homer here implies the sea existed without Poseidon, Poseidon does not equal the sea. 113 Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1770-1799 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 75. Though Wu notes “Wordsworth was a less successful Grecian” than he was a Latinist, Wordsworth could read Greek and was “on his way to fairly serious Greek study” (p. 165). 114 Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1800-1815 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 111. 115 Wu, Wordsworth ’s Reading 1770-1799, p. 140. Monstrous Hybridity 33

Aeneid. As another instance of the variety of translations used by the writers in this thesis, Shanyn Fiske suggests Charlotte Bronte is likely to have read John Wilson’s summaries of “the best English representations of Homeric passages” including Pope, Chapman and

William Sotheby in a series of articles for the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.ll6 Given the lack of a single most appropriate translation, the originals are consulted and A. T. Murray and John Fagles provide English translations of Homer and Virgil. The popular translations of the Romantic period, Chapman’s Homer and Dryden’s Virgil as well as Wordsworth’s part-translation of the Aeneid are brought in where differences are interesting.

The Greco-Roman works and the King James Bible discussed in this thesis cannot fully represent the Greek, Roman, Hebraic or Judeo-Christian portrayals of the sea. Nevertheless, these works are significant among the many influential texts that gave the Romantics insight into Greco-Roman, Hebraic and Judeo-Christian portrayals of the sea. Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Bronte were not formally educated in the Greco-Roman tradition, their access came through husband or brothers, Wedgewood china and Blackwood’s Magazine, but the mark of this tradition is clear in the work.

The second section begins the discussion of Greco-Roman and biblical representations of the sea as they are expressed in the fiction and poetry of five writers within the Long Romantic period. I show that Greco-Roman and biblical images, allusions and belief systems underpin the very semantic structure and sublime force of the Romantic sea. The tempestuous, spirit-filled sea journeys of Greco-Roman works and the generative and purgative seas of the Bible are imagistically, allusively, ideologically and metaphorically inscribed into Romantic seas as oscillations of still and raging seas of emotion, creativity, the cycles of life, the sufferings and joys of experience and spiritual-perceptual existential transformations. In the case of Shelley they become humanist paradoxes. Most importantly, the Romantic sea continues the inherent supematuralism of Greco-Roman and biblical seas and their fusion of acute contradictions—their monstrous hybridity.

116 Shanyn Fiske, “Between Nowhere and Home: The Odyssey of Lucy Snowe”, Bronte Studies 32 (March, 2007), pp. 11-20, p. 13. Figure 1. John William Waterhouse, Circe Invidiosa, oil on canvas (1892) Chapter 1: The Feminine Supernatural.

WHERE CHAOS BEGINS, classical science stops. For as long as the world has had physicists enquiring into the laws of nature, it has suffered a special ignorance about disorder in the atmosphere, in the turbulent sea, in the fluctuations of wildlife populations, in the oscillations of the heart and brain. The irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side—these have been puzzles to science, or worse, monstrosities.1 2

For the Greeks, the sea, Pontus, (FIovtoc;) or Thalassa (0dA,aooa) was a deity, and its common Hesiodic and Homeric epithets are barren, (dipnyeio«;), surging (Kupcuvovia), wine dark (oivovj/), broad (supea), boundless (dTrcipnot;), fish-filled (ixBnoevxa), and bright (y^auKoq). The Homeric gods and goddesses associated with the sea are dread (5eivf|) and beautiful (5ta), unerring (vr|p£pif|^) and earth-shaking (evooixöcov). These oscillating conglomerations speak to the contradictory nature of the Greek representation of the sea and are apt components of an entity whose beings are regularly ascribed the power of metamorphosis. The sea and its creatures are represented by grotesque figures like Scylla, Calypso, Circe and the Sirens—monstrous in their combinations of chaos and order, the alien and the known, the horrible and the beautiful, vicious intent and gentleness.3 Entities devoid of beauty and inspiring loathing make apt objects of fear and emblems of chaos; but beautiful and hideous entities inspiring desire and loathing are the ultimate objects of fear and emblems of chaos.4 If, for the ancient Greeks, “Beauty was always associated with other values, like ‘moderation’, ‘harmony’ and ‘symmetry’”,5 these hybrid females with their misshapen

1 James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (London: Cardinal, 1989), p. 3. 2 “ Translated as “beautiful”, this word reads more as ‘godlike’ and ‘divine’. 3 Mark P. O. Moreford and Robert J. L. Enardon, Classical Mythology, 7th edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Moreford and Enardon give a very brief outline of the Greek sea’s paradoxical nature (p. 155). 4 Theognis, “Elegies”, in Greek Elegiac Poetry from the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC, trans. Douglas E. Gerber (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999): Lines 17-18. In the song of the Muses and Graces it is declared: “What is beautiful is loved; what is not beautiful, is not loved”. 5 Umberto Eco, On Beauty, trans. Alastair McEwen (London: Seeker &Warburg, 2004), p. 37. Feminine Supernatural 36 physiognomy matched by their disproportionate passions cannot be considered beautiful. In their simultaneous beauty and hideousness, Homer’s and Hesiod’s sea monsters, nymphs and goddesses are sublime: sometimes loved, sometimes hated, and always feared. Figures like Scylla, Calypso, Circe and the Sirens are embodiments of the feminine supernatural, a pattern of dichotomies inherent to the Greek sea: the immortal and the mortal, beauty and hideousness; the known and the alien, stability and chaos; fertility and barrenness, and passionate love and rage. The dichotomies of the heroic sea journey reflect another dominant pattern in the monstrous hybridity of the sea of Homer and Hesiod: riches and poverty; identity and erasure; life and death, community and isolation; trust and betrayal; and limitation and infinity. Homer and Hesiod resolve these dichotomies in appeals to the supernatural, in the bodies of sea monsters, nymphs and goddesses, and in the divinely orchestrated suffering journey over the sea that makes a hero.6 * *

Homer and Hesiod

On a Greek vase from the Late Classical period she coils; her maiden torso cascades into a swollen serpent tail and out of this torso the heads of dogs fling themselves. She waves an arm as if triumphant and beneath her miniature crabs and fish swarm. In the other arm she bears the trident—a mark of the sea. This is the sea monster Scylla, described as a plague to mankind (tske nf\p.a ßpoxoToiv 12.125)* by Homer, and “the mad bitch” in C. Day Lewis’ translation of Virgil,9 depicted over two thousand years ago, most likely by Asteas the signing artist. If we look hard enough through the distorting mantle of nostalgia which separates contemporary life and the ancient past, we might see Asteas at his table, hands moving along the vase, fashioning images of the narratives that throbbed around him. But perhaps it is an illusion to think that we can see the artist at all, or his world. What we can

6 The dichotomies of the heroic sea journey can be embodied by the monsters, nymphs and goddesses of the sea realm. However, they also characterise literalistic descriptions of the sea, and tropes and figures involving the sea without reference to female deities and therefore warrant a separate category. Nonetheless, battles with marine females, and the feminine supernatural dichotomies they embody, are intrinsic to the heroic sea journey. Paestan Red Figure, ca. 340 BC, held at the J Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California, USA. This Late Classical vase painting of Scylla is part of a larger scene where the bull-shaped Zeus is shown with Europa over the seas. g A more literal translation is: ‘she brings into being suffering for men’. 9 Virgil, Aeneid, trans. C. Day Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Book 1, Line 200. In Lewis’ translation the line reads: “You who have risked the mad bitch Scylla” but the Latin phrase “Scyllaeam rabiem” reads more like ‘Scyllean madness’. Feminine Supernatural 37 see, or rather what we are left with, are images like Scylla and other representations of human perception and imagination in an ancient world.

What does this Scylla tell us? What is she? Is she an emblem of the terrible power or the teeming life of the sea? Of course, the answer is that she is both and more; she is an emblem of terrible power because she embodies the teeming life of the sea. But to say that Scylla embodies a myriad of attitudes to the sea and its inhabitants is ultimately to say very little; for in meaning everything she is then emptied of meaning. In this chapter I distil the contradictory ideas and emotions tied to the sea in Homer’s Odyssey, Hesiod’s Works and Days and the Theogeny. While acknowledging the ambiguities inherent to the Greek sea, I theorise a specific answer to the question: how did Homer and Hesiod portray the sea and marine beings? For Homer and Hesiod, the sea is embedded in the monstrous hybridity of the marine female: in the conflict and reconciliation between chaos and stability, between threats to the natural order and endeavours to stabilise that natural order. The sea is a place of terrifying and wonderful efflorescence—with its oscillating and inextricable ideological and imagistic dichotomies and multitudes of dangerous gods, goddesses and bizarre creatures, it is fundamentally monstrous.

The contradictory portrayal of the sea in the works of Hesiod and Homer must to some extent reflect the history of ancient Greek interactions with the sea. Despite its many terrors, the sea was the main form of merchant transport and the main pathway to war in the ancient Greek world.10 Ironically, then, the sea is a key source of stability since it can bring the riches of trade and the spoils of war, it is crucial in the establishment of a kingdom or a household even as it can also bring exile, poverty and loss. This potential for the sea to bring riches and poverty, stability and chaotic doom is viewed as the workings of angry gods or the product of a human failure to perform the correct rituals; Pausanias describes examples of sumptuous temples built to Poseidon, and early in the Odyssey libations are poured out to him in supplication.11 In Homeric Hymn 22 “To Poseidon”, the volatile god is addressed

Moreford and Enardon eds., Classical Mythology, p. 24. Moreford and Enardon note that for the Greeks: “control of the seas, particularly the Mediterranean, was the key to power”. Also, Samuel Mark, Homeric Seafaring (Texas: A&M University Press, 2005), p. 24. Mark declares: “Passages from both epics [llliad and Odyssey] clearly show that the wealth and status of a household were dependent on the goods that ships and seafarers brought. Ships were the primary conveyances that allowed nobles to acquire necessary goods and to extend the social network . . . Ships are therefore a fundamental component of the economic prosperity of Homeric heroes”. Pausanias, Guide to Greece, vol. 1, trans. Peter Levi, S. J. (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 132. Feminine Supernatural 38 deferentially: “O blessed one, be kindly in heart and help those who voyage in ships!” 12 The importance of seafaring rules and rituals are visible in Works and Days in Hesiod’s lengthy proscriptions to Perses, and in the Odyssey as Telemachus goes in search of news of his father. The first thing Telemachus and his crew do once “they had made the tackling fast in

i 'y the swift black ship” is pour “libations to the immortal gods”.

The feminine supernatural dichotomies of fertility and barreness are embedded in the Greek conception of sea water. In Fragment 61 Heraclitus observes, “The sea is most pure and most polluted water: for fish, drinkable and life-preserving; for men, undrinkable and deathdealing”.14 In accord with this contradiction, one of the much repeated formulaic epithets associated with the sea in Homer’s Odyssey and Hesiod’s Theogony is “barren sea”

(aipuysioc; ttovtov). The Greek axpuysio^ or “unfruitful”, meaning “barren” and in general “waste and desert”, is an inescapable sea epithet in the Theogony. Yet this epithet is contradicted from the outset given the sea’s (Pontus’) many progeny: for instance Nereus, Thaumas, Phorkys, Ceto and Eurybie and then their voluminous offspring, and Aphrodite’s birth from her father’s tom genitals in the foam.15 The significance of formulaic epithets has been much debated. Milman Parry describes formulaic epithets as revealing an “essential idea”.16 Adam Parry remarks that the use of formulaic phrases signals that there is “a single best way” to describe an event or an entity. Parry states that in the construction of descriptions “there are established phrases, each with its special and economical purpose”. To quote fully:

The formulaic character of Homer’s language means that everything in the world is regularly present as all men (all men within the poem, that is) commonly perceive it.

“ Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, Lives of Homer, trans. Martin L West (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003). 13 Homer, Odyssey, Books 1-12, trans. A. T. Murray (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), Book 2, Lines 425-434. All references to the Odyssey refer to this edition and this translation unless otherwise stated and are abbreviated. 14 Heraclitus’ Fragments, in Jonathan Barnes ed., Early Greek Philosophy (London: Penguin Books, 1988). All of Heraclitus’ fragments are reproduced in Chapter 8 “Heraclitus”, pp. 100-126, this fragment appears on p. 104. 15 Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006). The “barren sea” is first mentioned in the Theogony, Line 131. Aphrodite is bom Lines 185-190 and Pontus’ progeny appear Lines 233-240, with their progeny following Lines 240-336. 16 M. Parry, “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. 1: Homer and Homeric Style”, HSCP, 41:80 (1930). Feminine Supernatural 39

The style of Homer emphasizes constantly the accepted attitude toward each thing in the world, and this makes for a great unity of experience.17

According to Adam Parry, not only does a formulaic epithet express something essential about its subject, it expresses a commonly held view, an accepted attitude. Adopting the definitions of Milman Parry and Adam Parry, the dichotomous mix of epithets in Homer and Hesiod describe an “accepted attitude” to the sea and say something essential about it in the “single best way”. Formulaic epithets encode the essential monstrous hybridity of the sea as the accepted way of viewing the sea in Homeric and Hesiodic tradition.19

The way in which the epithet “barren” is associated with the sea can be explained in a variety of ways. It may allude to the sea’s genesis from the earth without sexual union—its genesis from waste or nothingness. The sea’s barren nature may refer to its inhospitable, alien aspect, an aspect which endangers those who traverse it. Returning to Heraclitus’s Fragment 61, the sea’s barren nature can be related to the problem of salt water—salt water nourishes fish, but not man; man cannot be sated by salt water and therefore the sea is unfruitful or barren to him. With its links to desert and waste, dxpuysioq points to notions of inhospitality and alienness, aspects of the sea perhaps excessively felt by early seafarers, indeed, aspects capitalised on in heroic epics to mark out the nobility and worth of the adventurer.^21

Adam M. Parry, The Language of Achilles and Other Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 2-3. Adam Parry recognised that as ornaments, formulas might be used to suit poetic metrical needs (they are “easily used”) instead of pointing to any particularly important semantic need. M. Parry, “Studies in the Epic Technique” (p. 78). Milman Parry also notes that formulas need to be both easily used and “pleasing” in that a formula expresses, “a given idea in fitting terms”. 18 The significance of the formula is also discussed by Mathew Clark “Formulas, metre and type-scenes”, in Robert Fowler ed., The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 128. 19 Michael Clarke, “Manhood and Heroism”, in Fowler, ed., Cambridge Companion, p. 81. Of epithets, Michael Clarke says “Perhaps their cumulative function is to articulate a contrast: they suggest a simple and univalent image of the heroic generation, which acts as a foil to the complexities, problems and equivocations of the behaviour-patterns that are brought to the fore in the narrative”. 20 Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 104. 21 In the Odyssey, sea travel is undertaken in extreme circumstances, often as a part of warfare or encounters necessary to trade and the eventual return to the safety of land and home. Telemachus needs courage and assistance from Athena to seek word of his father, whom he presumes is dead. Odysseus is of course shipwrecked and held by Calypso on the island Ogygia. Moreover, the virtues of Odysseus are highlighted as a result of his harrowing sea experiences. Feminine Supernatural 40

The ambiguities inherent to Greek experiences of the sea underpin the dichotomies of the heroic sea journey in Homeric and Hesiodic works. Disaster at sea is ascribed to the anger of the gods, or the failure to perform the correct rituals or abide by culturally established travel guidelines. The patronage of Poseidon is necessary for successful seafaring. In the Book 7 of the Odyssey, Pallas Athene tells Odysseus of the nature of the Phaeacians and their seafaring triumphs: “Relying on the speed of their ships, these people cross over the great gulf of the sea, for this the Earth-shaker has granted them; and their ships are swift as a bird on the wing or as a thought” (Lines 33-36). However, as Hesiod brutally observes in Works and Days, the Greek pantheon is equally capable of good and evil and while ostensibly granting explanations and stability to the natural world, the gods are liable to unpredictable moods and random actions. In Works and Days, the speaker of the poem advises his no-good brother Perses, always referred to as “you great fool” (peya vf|7ti8), about seafaring (Line 26).22 At various times of the year sailing on the sea is even more dangerous than usual, for instance “when the Pleiades, fleeing Orion’s mighty strength, fall/into the murky sea, at that time blasts of all sorts of winds/rage” (Lines 619-621). The experience of “painful want” and flight from debt are associated with sea travel in Works and Days. Sailing on the “much- roaring sea” is full of evils and the speaker offers all sorts of rules that Perses should follow, and even then, it is up to the gods whether he survive or not:

Sailing is in good season for mortals for fifty days after the solstice, when the summer goes to its end, during the toilsome season. You will not wreck your boat then nor will the sea drown your men—so long as Poseidon, the earth-shaker, or Zeus, king of the immortals, does not wish to destroy them: for in these gods is the fulfilment, both of good and of evil alike. (Lines 663-669)

It is a precarious form of worldly stability that Hesiod imagines, since any stability wrought by tradition, ritual, or a conception of deities with their various functions is underpinned by the capacity for arbitrary acts of evil. The denouement of Hesiod’s view revolves around the constant possibility of disaster: whatever you do, whatever libations you pour or rituals you perform, if the gods so wish it, doom can befall you. A rational causality underpins the representation of seafaring and its attendant disasters by Homer, and yet Homer’s gods are

22 Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006). The Greek peya means big or great and vf|7ne is ‘not yet speaking’. All references to the Theogony and Works and Days refer to this edition unless otherwise stated. Feminine Supernatural 41 capable of evil as well as good. Disasters at sea have clear causal explanations applied to them: Odysseus blinded Polyphemus, therefore his father Poseidon continues to “rage unceasingly” (1.20-21); Menelaus and his crew failed to “make choice offerings to Zeus and other gods” before their journey, and so they became stranded on the island Pharos; Odysseus’ men consumed the “cattle of Helios Hyperion” and disaster befalls them (1.8-9). In all of these examples, while Poseidon’s anger might be viewed as excessive, each disaster has a clear explanation attending it. Hesiod’s notion of a more arbitrary worldly evil is diminished and propelled towards a different kind of brutality in the Odyssey:; the brutality of intention, where human beings are the toys of gods and, as expressed in Homeric Hymn 3 “To Apollo”, suffer agony and “live witless and helpless, unable to find a remedy for death or a defence against old age” notwithstanding “all that they have from the immortal gods”.

In Hesiod’s Works and Days the dichotomies of the heroic sea journey are tied to the sea through his proscriptions about seafaring to Perses. For Hesiod, the sea is connected with potential wealth and the prosperous home and community that can provide, yet the sea is also a deadly and unstable arena, a sublime fusion of contradictions, where witless humans are helpless in the face of danger unless immortal powers aid them. Fundamentally, seafaring is viewed as an evil by the speaker of Works and Days', he provides advice because he knows people are not only foolish enough, but greedy and desperate enough, to go to sea despite its dangers. In Works and Days seafaring is an unwelcome aspect of Greek society and it is even an unwelcome aspect of the human condition, since men need to acquire wealth and property to survive:

As for me, I do not praise it, for it is not pleasing to my spirit: it is snatched, only with difficulty would you escape evil. And yet human beings do this too in the ignorance of their mind: for property is life for worthless mortals; yet it is a terrible thing to die among the waves. (Lines 682-687)

Similarly, in the Odyssey Homer presents death at sea as worse than any other death, even death in war. Odysseus, having left Calypso’s island on a raft in Book 5 is struggling in the storm set upon him by Poseidon and he reflects on those “blessed” men who died “in the wide land of Troy” (5.306-310). He views as favourable the “bronze-tipped spears” hurled at him by the Trojans compared to the “measure of woes” he is experiencing at sea. If he had

3 Homeric Hymn 3 “To Apollo”, Lines 190-2. Feminine Supernatural 42 died in Troy, Odysseus notes, “Then should I have got funeral rites, and the Achaeans would have spread my fame, but now it is by a miserable death that it was my fate to be cut off’ (5.310-312). Death at sea is “a terrible thing”24 according to Hesiod, and for Odysseus, it is associated with debasement, impropriety, isolation and the erasure of his identity.

The mythopoeisis of Homer and Hesiod transforms the contradictions of the sea into the paradoxes of the Greek pantheon, the rituals established to appease them and the triumphant escape of the hero from the dichotomies of heroic sea journey and the feminine supernatural. The gods provide order and stability to an otherwise seemingly random world, but the gods are themselves unstable and therefore the sea is part of a cosmogony that has instability and randomness at its centre. Hesiod’s mythological sea is rooted in a cosmology predicated on contradiction and polarity, and on the creative power of violence.“ Stability, in the world of the Theogony is achieved through the perpetration of a series of perverse and savage acts: incest, child swallowing, the betrayal of the father and castration (Lines 126- 207). Hesiod’s Theogony presents an equivocal universe and such a universe, where fecundity springs from apparent nothingness and creativity is wrought from brutal struggles, is the perfect place of origin for the paradoxical sea Pontus and the dichotomies of the feminine supernatural embodied by sea monsters, nymphs and goddesses. Hesiod’s sea, as visible in both the Theogony and Works and Days, is both barren and glutted with life, the source of beauty and monstrosity, riches and deathly peril. It is a place rooted in the much hated gaping abyss of Tartarus where the defeated Titans languish in its “murky gloom”. 26 Furthermore, the sea is prone to terrible storms evincing its chaotic nature and its usefulness as a means of punishment.

In the Theogony, Pontus is characterised as boundless, barren, misty, salty, unfruitful, swollen and stormy. We meet Pontus early as a child of Earth, a child bom “without

24 Hesiod, Works and Days, Line 686. 25 Harris and Platzner, eds., Classical Mythology, p. 84. 26 Hesiod, Theogony. Hesiod tells us that Poseidon “set bronze gates upon” Tartarus (Lines 732) to keep the Titans in: “Around this [Tartarus] a bronze barricade is extended, and on both sides of it night is poured out three-fold around its neck; and above it grow the roots of the earth and the barren sea” (Lines 725-728). Tartarus is referred to as a “monstrosity” and it is “terrible for the immortal gods as well” (Line 743). Describing the limits of everything, Hesiod notes: “That is where the sources and limits of the dark earth are, and of murky Tartarus, of the barren sea, and of the starry sky, of everything, one after another, distressful, dank, things which even the gods hate” (Lines 807-10). Feminine Supernatural 43 delightful love”“77 and immediately Pontus is set apart as an offspring conceived without a father and without the pleasure of intimate contact. Pontus is thereby made immediately alien (as sexual intercourse is the main source of generation recognised by human beings). While the distinction between the sea and rivers or streams in the Theogony is clear, Greek mythology more broadly presents a confusing geography and nomenclature. In the Theogony and the Odyssey, Okeanos (f>K8avo<;) is the fresh water river that circles the earth while Pontus is an emblem of the boundless salty sea. As the idea of a circling stream faded during the Hellenistic period, these distinctions became less defined and mosaics depict old men with flowing beards and crab-claw horns who could be either Pontus or Okeanos. The Theogony illustrates the intimate relationship between the sea and the river when Pontus’ child Nereus and Ocean’s child Doris produce a myriad of children—the Nereids or sea nymphs. Despite this intimate relationship, Hesiod highlights clear distinctions between Pontus and Okeanos. As already seen, Pontus is conceived without sexual union whereas Okeanos is bom from the union of Earth and her son, Heaven (Lines 133-134). Hesiod also assigns different epithets to these bodies of water: Pontus has its repeated epithet “the barren sea” (dipuysioq 7iövxov) and Okeanos has its common epithet “the circling river” (i8?if|8VTO<; 7roxapoio). Additional epithets commonly referencing the sea are: “the boundless sea

T I seething with its swell” and “the barren sea seething with its swell”. Even in its nomenclature the sea is an emblem of hybridity. Pontus (7rovxov) is the commonly used word for “sea” but “thalassa” (O&taxooa) is also used. This interchangeability is visible in many works but an example from the Theogony will suffice.32 In lines 240-242 of the Theogony, we are told that Nereus and Doris bear many children in the “barren sea”, yet in lines 581-2 the monsters of the sea wrought on Pandora’s headband are described and the word “thalassa” is

Hesiod, Theogony, Lines 132-133. The words: axep, meaning ‘without’, (pi>a)Tr|TO<; or friendship, love, affection and ecpipepov, meaning ‘longing’, ‘desire’ and ‘charm’. 28 Moreford and Enardon, Classical Mythology, p. 150 note “confusion among sea divinities and duplication of their characteristics are everywhere apparent”. 29 Simon Homblower and Antony Spawforth, eds., Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3 d edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Katherine M.D Dunabin, Mosaics of the Greek and Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 30 In the Greek, ‘circling’ should read more like ‘perfect’ or ‘complete’. 31 Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Most, Lines 108, 13LWender translates these as “the boundless swollen sea” and “the barren sea with its swollen waves”, Lines 109, 134. 32 For instance, this interchangeability is visible in the Odyssey and Oppian’s Halieutica. Feminine Supernatural 44 used for sea: “all the terrible monsters of the land and sea”. Within Greek mythology Thalassa is often thought of as the female spirit of the sea or the female counterpart of Pontus.

Hesiod assigns a myriad of descendents to Pontus, some full of wisdom and beauty, others grotesque and hard-hearted. The offspring of Pontus are a mixed lot: there is Ceto with “her lovely skin” and Nereus the “old man” who is “truthful”, whose beauty, gentleness and righteousness can be contrasted with Phorkys’ pride and Eurybie’s “heart of steel” (Lines 233-240). The alien, inhospitable and wondrous nature of the sea which is firmly established in the Theogony becomes embodied in creatures associated with the sea, sea nymphs, monsters, gods and goddesses, the feminine supernatural.

In the Theogony, Hesiod’s Nereids, the fifty daughters of Nereus and Doris, reflect the sea’s diverse attitudes, personifying its contradictory nature; a role pre-empted by their generation from the union of the children of the salt sea and the fresh river. The Nereids are beautiful, but their very existence intimates that the sea is in dire need of control. Nereids are often represented as beautiful young women: Euame is “lovely in shape and blameless in form” and Psamathe is “graceful in body”; or they are presented as half-maid, half-fish creatures (Line 258). In Greek art, Nereus, like Poseidon, is often depicted as half-man, half- fish—adumbrating the sea’s contradictions.34 The various roles played by these nymphs, discernable largely from their names, suggests an underlying human need to assemble the sea into a definable set of entities,3 ' and to imagine beings like Eunice, who watch over and assist in sea battles, or Doto and Leagore who aid in the catching or assembling of fish. There are also nymphs such as Sao, Amphitrite, and Doto (again) who are associated with successful voyaging, the ability to rescue sailors and calm the sea. Hesiod tells us that these nymphs “know how to do excellent works” and mentions at least five different nymphs associated with calm seas or rescuing sailors: Sao, Galene, Melite, Amphitrite and Pherusa. This assignation of various entities to similar roles gives the sense of order over chaos. Equally, and with some overlap, there are five nymphs associated with the sea’s gifts, fishing and good catches: Eudora, Eucrante, Doto, Pherusa, Leagore and Euagore. Other nymphs reflect

33 The word KvcodaX. means all dangerous animals. 34 Speros Vryonis, Jr., ed., The Greeks and the Sea (New York: Artside D. Caratzas, Publisher, 1993), p. 25. Poseidon on Attic Vase Painting, 470BC. Nereus 490BC, Attic Red Figure held at Harvard University Art Museums in Massachusetts. 35 The names of the Nereides are not standardized among writers. Feminine Supernatural 45 the sea’s colours: Glauce is a manifestation of the blue-grey waters, Glauconome is the grey sea, and Galatea embodies the milky-white sea foam. Many of the Nereids personify the power of the sea: Dynamene is power, Hippothoe is the swift waves, Pasithea is all divine, and Themisto is an incarnation of customary law. Still more nymphs indicate the sea’s wisdom: Autonoe, Pronoe, Poynoe and Nemertes. The proliferation of nymphs indicates the multifarious aspects of the sea, and the human impulse to chart a seemingly unfathomable entity.

Repeated cultural and literary references to seafaring rituals and belief-systems indicate that for the ancient Greeks, the sea inspired desire, fear, and overwhelming incomprehension. Through the mythology Hesiod develops in the Theogony, the dichotomous ideas and emotions of the feminine supernatural are tied to the sea and embodied in sea monsters, nymphs and goddesses. Hesiod’s placement of these dichotomies into the bodies of monsters, nymphs and goddesses makes them controllable to an extent; it gives them a physical shape to engage with or battle and escape, if not overcome. In Homer’s portrayal of the sea, the hero’s struggles with feminine supernatural dichotomies and the dichotomies of the heroic sea journey pre-figure his divinely sanctioned homecoming. Odysseus escapes, though he does not resolve these dichotomies.

Heroic Battles with Sea Chaos

Odysseus lost, captive, struggling and tormented at sea is the driving image of Homer’s epic. Odysseus weeps on the shores of Ogygia, fights to survive in the sea while Poseidon rages against him, Circe wishes to ensnare him and the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis wish to devour him. In fact, the Odyssey begins with Odysseus’ experiences of sea-related affliction and the dichotomies of the heroic sea journey:

Tell me, Muse, of the man of many devices, driven far astray after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose minds he learned, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades. (1.1-5)

In its very essence, seafaring involves suffering and a battle with the dichotomies of riches and poverty, stability and chaos, debasement and sanctification, life and death, identity and erasure, home and exile, and limitation and infinity. When the nurse Eurycleia tells Feminine Supernatural 46

Telemachus that he has “no need to suffer ills on the barren sea and go wandering”, she is setting up an opposition between the home environment, albeit under siege by the suitors, and the wild water (2.369-370). Eurycleia speaks of wandering, aZaZpoGal, evoking notions of rootlessness and random movement—the kind of movement denounced by Nestor when he asks Telemachus and his crew whether they “wander at random over the sea, as pirates do, who wander hazarding their lives and bringing evil to men of other lands” (3.71-74). Homer’s sea is a place only to be traversed with a clear purpose. The lack of a clear purpose when travelling on the sea is linked with lawlessness (the Cylcopes are reviled for being “a lawless folk”). Argeiphontes (Hermes) tells Calypso that Zeus “bade me come here against my will./Who of his own will would speed over so great a space of salt seawater, great past telling?” (5.99-100) As “great past telling”, Homer’s sea is the vast, the infinite, the site of multitudes (Hermes makes his way “over the multitudinous waves” to meet with Calypso), notions set in opposition to order and stability and bound to feelings of terror and repulsion in Greek myth. The sea has its roots in Tartarus, that yawning abyss, and marine animals are “such creatures as deep-moaning Amphitrite rears in multitudes” (12.97). This image of Amphitrite’s multitudes is evoked in the context of Circe’s description of the evil Scylla and her taste for these creatures, creatures already identified as repugnant by Menelaus when he tells Telemachus of their horrific stench. The horrific stench of Amphitrite’s multitudes is the stench of the sea, as indicated by Odysseus’ “terrible” appearance when he faces Nausicaa covered in brine (6.137).

Given that the Homeric sea is in itself smelly and horrifying, filled with multitudes of threatening monsters and the embodiment of feminine supernatural dichotomies, it is unsurprising that many of Homer’s images of the sea revolve around an idea of combat. Not only is the sea an opponent, it is glutted with evil, unstable enemies: Scylla is “an immortal evil” and Charybdis “bubble[s] in utter turmoil” when she vomits sea water back up (12.118, 238). A recurrent phrase, “struck the gray sea with their oars”, is visible in Book 9 where Odysseus’ crew, “sitting well in order struck the gray sea with their oars” (9.104). Recurrent images of oars as forceful and deadly weapons suggest that the Homeric sea is an opponent to be “struck” (“iU7riov” from tuttico meaning to beat, strike and smite). The English associations of smite are evocative: they suggest notions of retribution and grievous physical and mental injury. In these visions of human interaction with the sea, the representation of the sea is that of a living entity, a vicious adversary, capable and deserving of the receipt of grievous injury. Feminine Supernatural 47

Marine beings are depicted as simultaneously attractive and repugnant, honest and sneaky. The contradictory nature of marine beings establishes their fundamental hideousness because these contradictions mark them out as unstable and as threats to order. The portrayal of female marine monsters, nymphs and goddesses denotes a perception of femininity and feminine power that revolves around notions of the perverse, the monstrous and the guileful. The demonstration of female marine power in the Odyssey threatens despair, delusion, evil and annihilation. Marine females, such as Calypso, Circe and the Sirens, are conceived as love-sick and witchlike;36 they can be fabulously beautiful but also vengeful and in possession of a terrible, intoxicating power, a power that lures men away from the forces of stability like home and family into chaotic doom. These marine females embody the irrational allure of the sea Hesiod evokes in Works and Days when he speaks of the “desire for storm- tossed seafaring seizing]” a man (Line 618). This longing or yearning (ipspoq) combined with a word akin to grasp or to take with the hand (oupsi) has very physical connotations: the sea grasps at men; it is a living forceful entity which is inherently personified. The Greek sea is not merely imagined as a skein of unconscious flesh; it is conceived as conscious and in possession of a diabolical will.

In the “Halieutica” (or Fishing), Oppian declares that he will describe the “wiles” of

*7 “the swimming brood of Amphitrite”. The concept of the wiles of marine figures is a recurrent motif in Homer’s construction of the sea and the divinities associated with marine environments. Odysseus suspects the sea nymph Ino of a “snare” when she tells him to leave his raft and use her immortal veil (5.356-364); Proteus is known for his “crafty wiles” as he morphs into various wild beasts, a leopard, a boar and even flowing water (4.455-460); and Circe, with all the appearance of a welcoming host, ensnares Odysseus’ men with her perverse spells and the Sirens promise wisdom with their monstrously sweet song. Odysseus

to himself is full of wiles, but his deceptions are positioned as responses to deadly threats, whereas the deceptions of marine entities are construed as the result of evil intent and a fundamental loathsomeness. Duplicity and betrayal act against natural laws and the stability

36 The idea of entwining is linked with the word siren. 37 Oppian, “Halieutica” in Colluthus, Tryphiodorus, trans. A. W. Mair (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), Lines 1-8. 38 Homer, Odyssey, Book 9, Lines: 421-23. Suffering at the hands of Polyphemus, Odysseus reflects “And 1 wove all sorts of wiles and schemes, as a man will in a matter of life and death”. Odysseus is also “the sacker of cities” Book 9, Line 504. Feminine Supernatural 48 such laws create; they are the weapons of fabulously beautiful goddesses—monstrous in their perverse desires—who threaten the order of home and family. Equally, duplicity and betrayal are the weapons of hybrid marine females like the Sirens, disfigured half-women/ half-birds, as insatiable in their desire to bring destruction upon those who pass by their meadow as their song is overwhelmingly alluring.

In Circe Invidiosa (1892), John William Waterhouse imagined Circe standing in the sea on the body of a coiling marine animal (Figure 1). She holds a bowl of phosphorescent liquid poison which she pours into the sea and the blue-green hues of the water merge with the peacock print garment that drapes over the goddess, with its attendant notion of illusion and false vision. In the background, the black-brown cliffs rise behind her and her black-brown voluminous locks fall down her back. In this painting Waterhouse has captured her unearthly beauty and the expression of monstrous intensity which intimates her capacity for evil. The confluence of beauty and monstrosity is more overt in Homer’s construction of Circe, yet Waterhouse’s atmosphere of unnatural magic complements Homer’s goddess and her association with “evil drugs”, bewitchment and “deadly wiles”. In the Odyssey, the arresting image of Circe is that of a beautiful witch in her shining abode, surrounded by freakish animals, concocting an enormous labyrinthine cloth which acts as a prelude to her perverse spell-casting (10.210-224).

Homer’s “dread goddess” is “fair-tressed”, her “great imperishable web” is “beautiful and glorious” (10.220-225) but her power operates around the flouting of natural desires and fundamental characteristics, and therefore it is inherently destabilising. The beasts that surround Circe’s home in the Odyssey should be ferocious, but they approach Odysseus’ men wagging their tails because they are bewitched. Homer’s imagery appropriates the potential for the grotesque in the presentation of the absurd. Not only do the “mountain wolves and lions” wag their tails instead of attempting to devour Odysseus’ men, but they also “stood on their hind legs” like house-pets begging for a treat. Unravelling nature’s laws in a further absurd image, Odysseus’ men are transformed into swine, yet they perversely remain human in mind. The Odyssey repeatedly implies that the rituals of hospitality are the mark of civilisation and order; Circe’s misuse of these in her fictional pleasantry and her tainted offerings, though less overtly savage than Polyphemus’ brutal consumption of six of Odysseus’ comrades, similarly flouts the expectations of civilised behaviour, behaviour that Feminine Supernatural 49 elevates human culture above barbarism.39 Circe drugs Odysseus’ men “that they might utterly forget their native land” and this aspect of her spell-casting is just as perverse as making them into pigs and penning them into pigsties; moreover it further evinces her deadly and destabilising potential. Calypso, too, desired Odysseus to forget his home and family, just as hearing the song of the Sirens beguiles men away from their potential homecoming. Odysseus’ escape from the volatility inscribed into guileful beings like Calypso and Circe, despite their bewitching beauty, and his return to Ithaca signal the importance of home and family as emblems of stability and order.

When the events of the Iliad are taken into account, Homer’s representation of female beauty can be seen as essentially intertwined with monstrosity; the monstrosity of war, death and cultural ruin. In the Odyssey, the overt combination of beauty and monstrosity in figures like Calypso and Circe marks them as forces contrary to harmony and order. Monstrosity without beauty is linked to all-out chaos and that all-out chaos can be seen in Homer’s portrayal of Scylla and Charybdis. In this respect, Scylla and Charybdis are exceptions to the monstrously hybrid combination of beauty and hideousness that defines Homer’s portrayal of marine females; yet, they are placed within a sea realm dominated by this mix. Close to Scylla, the whirlpool Charybdis vomits her water over and over again. Charybdis “in utter turmoil” is reminiscent of that gaping abyss Tartarus. Vast and murky, according to Hesiod Tartarus is an unstable force, held back by Poseidon’s heavy gates and pregnant with the Titans; it established a sense of order and stability (however precarious) by methodically assigning functions to the various gods and goddess.40 Charybdis’ power is so great that not even the Earth-shaker could save a person in her grasp,41 and rather than risk her abominable bubbling, Odysseus will sacrifice several of his crew to Scylla. Charybdis’ power is associated with the errant: the sea boils, avapoppupcGKS,42 as if in a cauldron, it is swallowed to reveal the earth and then disgorged. The Greek c^epsasie, suggests the visceral spewing forth of water. As the water is ripped away it grossly exposes the earth which is glossy-blue

39 th Stephen L. Harris and Gloria Platzner, eds., Classical Mythology: Images and Insights, 4 edn. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2004), p. 10-11. Harris and Platzner suggest that civilisation can be seen as something that is erected as a consolation to human mortality and as a means of elevating humanity above nature’s wildness. 40 Hesiod, Theogony, Lines 881-886. 41 Homer, Odyssey, Book 12, Lines 105-8. Of Charybdis, Circe tells Odysseus: “May you not be there when she sucks it down, for no one could save you from ruin, no, not the Earth-shaker”. 42 These words have the following meanings: avapoppbpeoKe, ‘to roar loudly, boil up’ and KUKtopevp or ‘to stir up’. Feminine Supernatural 50

(Kuavsri), suggesting a luminous glow derived from violent scraping. Moreover, brave men are afraid: not merely frightened, but physically held and transformed by sublime terror. Fear becomes a physical entity inextricably linked to the sea’s horrors and also inextricably linked to its captivating power: f|psi, meaning ‘to take with the hand’, is also used by Hesiod to explain the fabulous thrall of the sea.

In the Theogony, while less repeated than the epithet “barren sea”, the epithet “bright sea” suggests a more beautiful aesthetic to be found in the sea ,43 a beauty also expressed in figures like Galatea and Aphrodite.44 Aphrodite is linked with “gentleness”, though her birth is the result of violent castration and she is a mixture of traits. She is powerful since she affects both “human beings and immortal gods,” but she is also foolish, described as a “lightweight” by Harris and Platzner, and prone to “maidenly whispers and smiles and deceits”. Aphrodite, as the comely and gracefully proportioned maid is contrasted with an ugly, rough-featured Pan in a 2nd century BC sculpture in which she stands half-heartedly repelling Pan’s lust while Eros encourages the union.45 The discordant aesthetics intrinsic to this combination of beauty and repulsiveness, symmetry and semi-deformity is common in representations of Aphrodite: Aphrodite is often imagined as riding a chariot pulled by Tritones—half human, half-fish creatures.

The dual imagery of hideousness and beauty ascribed to the goddess Ceto is one example of the way sea figures become embodiments of the paradoxes, dangers and monsters of the sea. Ceto is a goddess of large marine mammals and sea monsters. In the Theogony, Ceto is “fair-cheeked” but she is more conspicuous as the mother of monstrosity. According to Hesiod, Ceto gives birth to all manner of horrific beings: human-animal hybrids like Echidna who is part woman, part dragon (and linked with fetid sea scum) and also the hundred-headed Ladon, who vigilantly guards the Hesperides. A vase painting of 425-401 BC depicts Ceto as an enormous marine creature, with a mouth full of teeth and a body full of spikes, being ridden by one of Nereus’ daughters as she transports armour to Achilles. In the Odyssey she is the mother of Scylla (12.125).

43 The translation ‘bright sea’ is from aka or lump of salt and 5tav or god-like, divine. 44 Aphrodite is sexual desire and she “grew up in the foam” as a result of severed genitalia being tossed into the sea. Hesiod, Theogony, Line 197. 45 Harris and Platzner, Classical Mythology, figure 6-17, p. 204. Feminine Supernatural 51

Scylla, though not beautiful like Circe, is in possession of a similarly perverse and destabilising birthright. Monstrous in the excesses of her body-parts and her indiscriminately voracious appetite, Scylla's very being is perverse: with twelve feet, six heads fdled with “three rows of teeth . . . full of black death”, she is a grotesque hybrid of other creatures. In Alexander Pope’s translation of the Odyssey, Scylla’s “parts” are “obscene” and “she makes the huge Leviathan her prey”.46 Scylla is described as “an evil monster”, her voice is like that of “a newborn whelp” and she is to be found in her cave “yelping terribly” (12.83-84). In her animality Scylla is placed firmly on the side of the wild brutes, that part of “mindless nature”, in the words of Harris and Platzner, that humanity differentiates itself from in its quest for order and stability.47 Unlike Ovid, Homer does not imagine Scylla as having once been fair, nor does he ascribe her hideousness to the perils of love and jealousy.48 Homer’s Scylla was always a monster, she was bom to be a monster and “a plague to mankind”; all in all she manages to snatch up six of Odysseus’ men, one for each head. Moreover, in her eager snatching of these men, who writhe like fish on the cliff, she shows herself to be a form of chaos because in Scylla’s power men, even the strongest and most capable of men, become like fish and are associated with sea dogs and dolphins—the other creatures Scylla devours for her meals. In the presence of Scylla, as in the presence of other seaside females, men are unmanned: they weep in despair and fear, lose control of their reason and forget themselves and those important to them. Odysseus’ men weep at the sight of Scylla and Charybdis, “We then sailed on up the narrow strait with wailing” just as they weep when transformed into swine by Circe and Odysseus weeps on the shore, a prisoner of Calypso’s amorousness.

In his cross-cultural study of recurrent mythological patterns, Donald Mills characterises the hero’s encounter with savage, watery chaos as a rite of passage, where his worth is proven and order is established. Mills’ work provides a lens through which to read Homer’s portrayal of Odysseus’ sea travels. Mills argues that,

these mythic narratives endeavour on the one hand to give meaning to the terrifying experience of the chaotic while on the other to provide the underlying conceptual

The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Alexander Pope (1726 repr. Montana, Kessinger Publishing, 2004), p. 259. Line numbers not given. 47 Harris and Platzner eds., Classical Mythology: Images and Insights, p. 9. 48 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding (London: W. Seres, 1567). The story begins Book 13, Lines 734-8. It is taken up again in Book 13, Lines 890 and goes over into Book 14 to Line 78. Feminine Supernatural 52

framework by which to ritualize, in ways meaningful to the life of their respective communities, the heroic victory over the chaotic.

Within Mills’ conception of the hero battling liquid chaos, a recurrent mythic theme he refers to as a “mythologem”,49the sea is an emblem of chaos and profanity which must be contained or vanquished by rituals and heroes. Adopting Mills’ argument, the barrenness of the sea in Hesiod and Homer is an expression of its chaotic savagery and even (to use the term Mills borrows from Mircea Eliade), its alien “profanity”. In his conceptions of the sacred and the profane, Mills employs the influential studies of Eliade and focuses on Eliade’s concept of the “sacred centre”. Importantly, for Eliade “the sacred” is diametrically opposed to “the profane”: “man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane”.50 Accordingly, Mills defines watery chaos in opposition to notions of stability, civilisation and the sacred. Therefore, the sea is “profane” and can never merge or resolve with the “sacred”; it is always opposed to qualities like beauty or calmness, and the mythological hero creates stability by overcoming the profanity of the sea. In my view, using Mills’s terms, the sea in Homer and Hesiod is defined by its mix of chaos and stability and it is that mix of attributes the hero has to manage, escape or resolve. The sea is monstrous and chaotic, beautiful and calm, and it is the inextricability of the two sides of the sea that makes it fundamentally monstrous and chaotic. The sea of Homer and Hesiod has both sacred and profane qualities that often merge but are not resolved, and which are managed or escaped but are always present.

Even today, Odysseus bound tightly to the mast of his ship is an easily recognisable icon of the dichotomies of the heroic sea journey in Western culture. In the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century this image became associated with the lengths painters would go to in order to achieve verisimilitude, authentic character and passion in their paintings of the sea. The stories about Joseph Vemet and J.M.W Turner having themselves bound to the masts of ships in the middle of storms—considered to be apocryphal by Turner critic James

Donald H. Mills, The Hero and Sea: Patterns of Chaos in Ancient Myth (Wauconda, Illinois: Bolchazy- Carducci Publishers, 2002), p. 6.

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), p. 11. Feminine Supernatural 53

Hamilton—are regularly repeated in articles about these painters.51 The perpetuation of these stories today flags the appeal of notions of artistic heroism—the appeal of the image of the god-like man, facing the terror of the sea, harnessing its power through representation and thereby, containing and defeating its unfathomableness.

The hero must be intimate with chaos in order to defeat it and so (in a depiction of the myth on an Attic Red Figure Vase, c. 500-480 BC) we see Odysseus lashed to the mast and the Sirens hovering close over him with their beautiful faces and their enormous wings, perching all over the ship. It is unclear whether the Sirens manifest physically on the ship in the Odyssey. Homer imagines the voice of the Sirens enveloping Odysseus: “So they spoke, sending forth their beautiful voice, and my heart desired to listen” (12.192-193); he imagines the creation of an intimacy which is mental and emotional. The Sirens speak to Odysseus, tempting him with promises of prophesy, wisdom and even sympathy: “we know all the toils that in the wide Troy the Argives and Trojans endured through the will of the gods, and we know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth” (12.187-191). Routinely figured as hybrids in Greek art, though not overtly described as such by Homer, the Sirens more overtly combine the monstrous and the beautiful in their physical form than do the goddesses Calypso and Circe, whose monstrosity lies more in their perverse desires and potent spells. Yet, like Calypso and Circe, the Sirens want to trick men and artfully draw them away from their homes and families:

First you will come to the Sirens, who beguile all men who come to them. Whoever in ignorance draws near to them and hears the Sirens voice, his wife and little children never stand beside him and rejoice at his homecoming; instead the Sirens beguile him with their clear-toned song (12. 41-45).

Moreover, the Sirens sit among “a great heap of bones of mouldering men, and round the bones the skin is shrivelling” (12.46-47), an image which can be paralleled with Odysseus, mouldering for seven years on Ogygia with Calypso—both signal a form of doom. The Sirens are a meeting place for order and chaos, combining hideous decay and beauty, female faces and bird bodies. Their seat of decay contrasts with their beautiful voices, as their

James Hamilton, Turner: The Late Seascapes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Ronald Rees repeats the story about Turner lashing himself to the mast and T. S. R. Boase repeats the story about Joseph Vemet. See Ronald Rees “Constable, Turner and Views of Nature in the Nineteenth Century”, Geographical Review 72. 3 (1982): 253-69 and T. S. R. Boase “Shipwrecks in English Romantic Painting”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 22. 3/4 (1959), pp. 246-332. Feminine Supernatural 54 ugliness contrasts with the potency of their persuasive charm—a charm so bewitching that despite all he knows, Odysseus’ heart “desired to listen” (12.193).

Homer’s Sirens are characterized in George Chapman’s translation as those “that taint/The minds of all men,/Whom they can acquaint/With their attractions”. Such men, because they were so entranced by the song, become the bones which hedge the seaside meadow in which the Sirens sit. Chapman interprets the Siren song as both a sexual enticement and a love song. It is “Shrill, and in sensual appetite so strong” and it also captures all a man’s affections—the song “will so soften” a man that he is “entirely overcome, and his wife and family are completely forgotten”. The Sirens are grotesquely contrary creatures since their identifying characteristic is their overwhelmingly gorgeous song and their assembly point is their pile of rotting bodies. The Sirens are death-dealing, full of guile and irresistible. In Pope’s translation “their song is death, and makes destruction please” and “And human carnage taints the dreadful shore”. Odysseus puts these forces of instability away from him; he leaves Calypso and Circe, and escapes the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, but perhaps not for long. In Book 11 of the Odyssey, Tiresias intimates that Odysseus will leave his home and family and travel the seas again (11.119-137). The monstrous hybridity of the Homeric sea underpins its sublimity, like the Sirens’ call it is mired in the fusion of aesthetic contradictions. A recurring motif in the Odyssey is the singing roar (iaxe) of the surging waves;54 the bonds of stability, home and family are not sufficient to withstand its captivating power.

The chaos of the Homeric sea is accentuated by emblems of monstrous disorder like Scylla and yet monsters like Scylla are also deployed within Greek culture to impose an order upon and make sense of the sea. The sea of Homer is both changeable and, as embodied by and populated by divine figures, eternal. Circe tells Odysseus “Scylla’s no mortal, she’s an immortal devastation”. With its mortal and immortal points of entry, the sea cave in Book 13 of the Odyssey further increases these contradictions. In Book 13, as the sun (the “brightest star”) draws up the day, Odysseus reaches Ithaca “at last” and the “deep-sea-going ship” enters the island’s harbour:

The Odyssey of Homer trans. George Chapman (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth editions, 2002), Book 12, Lines 56-84, 234-5. The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Pope, p. 257. Homer, Odyssey, Book 2, Line: 428. The Greek, ia^e, meaning to roar cry, shout, shriek, often used in reference to men shouting in battle. Feminine Supernatural 55

At the harbor’s head a branching olive stands With a welcome cave nearby it, dank with sea-mist, Sacred to nymphs of the springs we call the Naiads. There are mixing-bowls inside and double-handled jars, Crafted of stone, and bees store up their honey in the hollows. There are long stone looms as well, where the nymphs weave out Their webs from clouds of sea-blue wool—a marvellous sight— And a wellspring flows forever. The cave has two ways in, One facing the North Wind, a pathway down for mortals; The other, facing the South, belongs to the gods, No man may go that way... It is a path for all the deathless powers. (Lines 115-126)

In his Neoplatonic interpretation The Cave of the Nymphs, Porphyry transforms the separate mortal and immortal pathways of Homer’s sea cave into the immortal soul’s birth into a mortal body, a process where souls join their human form via the medium of water.55 This is a process also met in the underworld of the Aeneid, where pure souls leap into the Lethe to join a human body and enter the mortal world. For Porphyry, the sea is aligned with material or physical matter, since the soul enters the sea to become infused with matter and physical sensation; the sea is where the soul joins a mortal body and becomes subject to its mundane joys but also its pain and suffering and death. The sea, as part of the eternal processes whereby souls are made into human form and then released from this human form, can also be seen as delightful. For Porphyry the world is “obscure and dark” because it is made up of “matter” (or physical materials subject to decay), yet, via the “connecting power” it is “beautiful and delightful”.56

Porphyry, The Cave of the Nymphs, trans. Thomas Taylor (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Phanes Press, 1991), pp. 55, 34-35. Porphyry writes: “this term [nymph] is commonly applied to all souls descending into generation. For the ancients thought that these souls are incumbent on water which is inspired by divinity” and “it is necessary . . . that souls,... be corporalized, in consequence of being drenched in moisture”. 56 Porphyry, Cave of the Nymphs, p. 30. Porphyry notes that the ancients “were of the opinion that a cave is a symbol of the sensible world”. He speaks of being “liberated from this sensible life” thereby presenting “sensible life” as a prison. Similarly, Wordsworth describes the material world imposing its “prison shades” upon the soul. Feminine Supernatural 56

Porphyry presents a sea of contraries: immortal and mortal, full of pain and potential delight, immanent bodies as part of transcendent processes and “harmony consists of and

proceeds through contraries”.57 However, Homer’s sea is aligned with the obscurity, darkness and pain of matter and mortality in Porphyry’s symbolic reading. This is especially clear when, as part of the symbolism he develops through Homer’s sea cave, pure souls are also released from their bodies in the ocean from which they fly to their haven in the sky. According to Porphyry, in the Odyssey Homer “represented to us a man who passes in a regular manner over the dark and stormy sea of generation, and thus at length arrives at that region where tempest and seas are unknown, and finds a nation”. Porphyry’s argument is bolstered with references to Plato. He remarks: “according to Plato, the deep, the sea, and [the] tempest are images of a material nature”.5X Plato’s portrayal of the sea as the most material, mutable side of a universe divided between “order” and “disorder”, “unchanging” and “corporeal” “indivisible” and “divisible” is visible in the Timaeus. Here, the sea is part of the “perfect animal” of the world which “became a living soul through the providence of

God”.59 But the sea is the least equated with soul and intelligence since it is among those “uttermost parts of the world” where God places “the most senseless and ignorant and impure of men”. The sea, as the most extreme instance of “the waters”, is the “element” associated

with senselessness, impurity and “utter ignorance”.60

Porphyry places the sea firmly on the mortal material side of mortal/divine dualisms. But the Homeric sea is peopled by deities and the sea and the seashore are repeatedly the meeting places of the mortal and the divine, and the sea is a deity in the broader mythology described by Hesiod. Nonetheless, as already noted, the Homeric sea is also described as a place the gods avoid. Aristotle quotes and interprets Heraclitus when he remarks: “Surely

nature longs for the opposites and effects her harmony from them”.61 If harmony results from the merging of opposites, then Hesiod’s Ceto and Homer’s Sirens, and other dichotomous marine females, might be viewed as symbols of such a harmonic merging. However, to see

57 Porphyry, Cave of the Nymphs, p. 51. 58 Porphyry, Cave of the Nymphs, pp. 54-5. 59 Plato, “Timaeus”, in The Dialogues of Plato, 4 vols, vol. 3, trans. B. Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), pp. 641-2. 60 Plato, Timmaeus, in Dialogues, vol. 3, trans. Jowett, p. 667. 61 Heraclitus’ Fragments, “Heraclitus”, in Early Greek Philosophy Barnes ed., p. 114. Barnes assembles Heraclitus’ fragments, most of which are found through paraphrases and quotes in other works. Hence this section on Heraclitus’ view of opposites is found in Aristotle, On the World, 396b7-8, 20-25. Feminine Supernatural 57 them in this way is to ignore their inherent function as representatives of a deadly and unstable sea of dichotomous ideas and emotions, to be intoxicated by their monstrous beauty and potentially become lost and weeping on a far-flung shore. The sea is itself supernatural in Homer and Hesiod, and it is wielded by and wedded to the capriciousness of the Greek pantheon.

In Homer and Hesiod the sea’s aesthetic contraries are never resolved, and the sublimity of the Homeric and Hesiodic sea is based upon their inability to be resolved. The beautiful Nereids and Aphrodite, Calypso and Circe (exhibiting discordant aspects themselves), amalgamate with figures like Scylla and Ceto with her monstrous hybrid progeny. The lure of profits is inescapably intertwined with the often random dangers of sea travel, and as a testimony to the sea’s primal labyrinthine complexity, Nereus’ fifty daughters sprout out of it like unstoppable heads. In its monstrous dichotomies, the Greek sea is chaotic and therefore repugnant, powerfully random and therefore duplicitous, irrationally alluring and therefore evil.

Appropriately then, the monstrous hybridity of the Homeric and Hesiodic sea continues in the work of the Romantics as the bewitching allure of the feminine supernatural in Radcliffe’s poetic sea nymphs and Bronte’s representations of female desire and its frustration. Shelley’s poetry refashions the monstrous hybridity of the Greek sea into oscillations of violence and love driving the natural world and human nature. The dichotomies of the heroic sea journey are inscribed into the voyages of Wordsworth’s individuals struggling towards the hope of a Christian resurrection, and the material and immaterial divisions of Porphyry’s Neoplatonism underlie Wordsworth’s sea in the Immortality Ode. The transformation of Coleridge’s Mariner is based upon aesthetic contraries controlled by God; nevertheless, Coleridge’s water snakes are embedded in feminine supernatural divisions, and the heroic sea journey is visible in the Mariner’s sufferings on the Southern Ocean. For Aeneas and his crew, within the sway of the dichotomies of the heroic sea journey and Roman masculine virtue, identity is erased and the dead are unremembered, reason is defeated, and rage and bloodlust triumph. The divinely sanctioned Roman ideals of masculinity and nation offer the solution. Chapter 2: Mare Nostrum, Virgil's Aeneid.

In Book 2 of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius makes the sea a cognate of existential and emotional turmoil:

Sweet, when the great sea’s water is stirred to his depths by the storm-winds, Standing ashore to descry one afar-off mightily struggling: Not that a neighbour’s sorrow to you yields dulcet enjoyment: But that the sight hath a sweetness, of ills ourselves are exempt from.[. . .] Yet still happier this: to possess, impregnably guarded, Those calm heights of the sages, which have for an origin Wisdom: Thence to survey our fellows, observe them this way and that way Wander amidst Life’s path, poor stragglers seeking a highway:1

Lucretius’ storming ocean is an antonym to wisdom and serenity. Virgil, a student of Epicurean philosophy, also makes the sea equivalent to the extremes of the human mind and suffering in the Aeneid. Virgil’s sea is the interstice between the destroyed Troy and the fated new empire, the frenzy of the crowd, the ferocity of the man of war and the place where great men are brought low in death. But the sea of the Aeneid can also be gentle, its power contained and even wielded by Rome.

At the outset of the Aeneid, Virgil makes the tempestuous sea analogous to the frenzy of an irrational crowd, rising in tumult. After the terrible chaos set loose by Aeolus, where blackened seas devoured many of Aeneas’ ships and crew members in a cataclysm of monstrous waves and raging whirlpools, Neptune rises amid the din and takes control (1.167- 81). In Wordsworth’s translation, he describes Neptune as “Raised from the Deep in placid

G. E. Benfield and R. C. Reeves, eds., Selections from Lucretius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 28-29, Lines 1-10. This translation is attributed to Calverley and accords with the Latin line by line. 1 have chosen to include this translation as a result, instead of the translation by R. E. Latham. Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin, 2007), Book 1, Lines 167-181. All translations are from this edition, and refer to this translation unless stated otherwise. Book and line numbers appear in footnotes. All Latin quotations are from, Virgil, Aeneid, 2 vols., ed., G. P. Goold (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999). Book and Line numbers are given in text as numbers. Mare Nostrum 59

3 ...... majesty”. Ironically, in this initial storm description the God of the sea, Neptune, is the agent of calm whereas in Book 2, as Aeneas recounts the fall of Troy, we see Neptune wrecking his own city. Neptune’s role as a calming, relatively benign presence in this passage of Book 1 is even more ironic when compared to the vengeful sea chaos aroused by his Greek predecessor, Poseidon, to torment Odysseus. The Virgilian sea is thus a fusion of benignity and malevolence. The AeneicTs references to the sea are intermittent and routinely brief, except for the lengthier descriptions of storms and the other monstrous sea-related trials encountered by Aeneas and his crew. Nevertheless, the sea plays an important role as the conveyer of the hero and his race of future Romans towards, and away from, all kinds of wondrous and often tragic experiences.

Virgil creates a number of enduring and pregnant sea-related images that codify the dichotomies of the heroic sea journey, Roman masculine virtue and the feminine supernatural. These include: Aeneas and his crew, storm-tossed and desperately seeking their new kingdom; the headless body of Priam on the seashore; the somnolent lure of a calm ocean; Bitias’ great bodily strength giving way like a masoned pier falling into the waves; funeral pyres alight on the Italian beach after the gruesome battle of Book 10 and the vision of Dido’s death-fire from the sea; King Latinus as a rock around whom the sea-surge of war mongering and bloodlust rages, and Aeneas’ ships metamorphosed into lithe sea nymphs. Embodied in the physical forms of supernatural beings and appearing in similes, Virgil’s sea is irrationality and passionate fury, and yet Virgil’s sea is also, in the end, an emblem of lovely servitude. These images are similar to those in Homer’s Odyssey but they are also different. Even as it is successfully navigated, Homer’s sea is never conquered, never given over completely to the service of his hero, whereas Virgil’s sea becomes an instrument to be wielded by Aeneas.

In the Aeneid, Aeneas and his crew struggle within the contradictory matrix of the heroic sea journey. They also struggle with the dichotomies of Roman masculine virtue which centre on the release and containment of emotional extremes: serene authority and rage, wisdom and irrationality, and mercy and bloodlust. As in the Odyssey, in the Aeneid battles with the feminine supernatural—the immortal and the mortal, beauty and hideousness; the alien and the known; stability and chaos; fertility and barrenness and passionate love and

3 Wordsworth’s translation of the Aeneid (1819-23), in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 4, eds., E. De Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940-49), p. 290, appendix A, Book 1, Line 167. Wordsworth’s translations are of Books 1, 2, 3 primarily. Mare Nostrum 60 rage—partly define heroism. I established the presence of the feminine supernatural in sea monsters, nymphs and goddesses in chapter 1. In my analysis of Virgil’s portrayal of the twin sea serpents heralding the destruction of Troy, Dido’s love for Aeneas, and the transformation of ships into sea nymphs to secure the future of Rome, I discuss Virgil’s distinctive development of the feminine supernatural. Ultimately, through the figures of ships transformed into sea nymphs, the feminine supernatural comes under the control of Aeneas. In this, the sea’s dichotomies are harnessed for the divinely sanctioned power of Rome and immortality, beauty, the known, stability, fertility and passionate love are preeminent.

The images already described focus the analysis of the dichotomous sets of the heroic sea journey, Roman masculine virtue and the feminine supernatural. Each image offers particular insights into Roman culture and delineates the way in which the sea is placed in apparent opposition to notions of Roman masculinity and virtue—devotion to duty, ‘pietas’, dignity, ‘gravitas’ and authority, ‘auctoritas’. These notions underpin the incontrovertibility of the Roman right to spread its Empire over the limits of the world—until Book 9 when the sea, in the form of beautiful nymphs is brought under Aeneas’ command. When we reach the end of the Aeneid, Virgil’s sea has become a Roman sea, “mare nostrum” or “our sea”, an instrument of the Empire and a serviceable body for its fulfilment.*4

The Hero and the Sea

The most recurrent Virgilian sea image involves Aeneas confronting blackened wastes of water, with the vicious threat of death hung about the scene. The sea is a space of seeming infinite exile, dangerously gaping between Aeneas and his destiny; most importantly, it is a two-faced enemy, just as it is for Odysseus, one whose ambiguities Aeneas needs to confront repeatedly before he can found Rome. At the beginning of Book 3, Aeneas declares himself to be in exile: “So I take to the open sea, an exile” (“feror exsul in altum” 3.11-12).5 Aeneas is set then to roam, homeless at sea. This sea, like Homer’s, is a place of dislocated wandering completely at odds with the Greek and Roman veneration for the safety and stability of the home, embodied as it is in the great city state. Noting the inadequacy of English translations of the Aeneid’s opening which declare Aeneas’ destiny to “found” a

Bernard Knox, “Introduction”, to the Fagles translation, p. 1. Knox uses “mare nostrum” to refer to the Mediterranean “which the Romans claimed was “our sea”. 5 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 3.13. Mare Nostrum 61 great city, “dum conderet urbem” (1.5), Richard Jenkyns remarks on the visceral connotations of rootedness in the earth inherent to the Latin “condo” which means to bury, as much as to found.*6 Roman identity and stability are not merely based on the land, they are riven into its very depths and the sea is utterly alien to them.

The sea is a threat. Death at sea is always as possible in the middle of calm as in a tempest. In Book 1, Aeneas and his crew face a terrible death as Aeolus looses the winds onto the sea: “death, everywhere men facing instant death” (“praesentemque viris intentant omnia mortem” 1.91).7 The sea is especially unfathomable and therefore threatening and untrustworthy because it can contradictorily be serviceable and even gentle. In Book 7, a very different image of the sea is delineated. Instead of a chaotic black and deadly enemy, the sea is helpful and luminous: “the full moon speeds their course, its dancing light strikes sparkles off the waves” (“aspirant aurae in noctem nee Candida cursus luna negat, splendet tremolo sub lumine Pontus” 7.8-9).8 It takes daring to go to sea, fathomless, exhausting and changeable as it is, and the sea is never comforting or familiar, even after years of travelling; it is always a temporary interstice of fabulous and terrible adventure.

Troubled in his attempted settlement by the ill-omens revealed by the gory remains of Polydorus, Aeneas and his crew must wait for the sea to be safe to cross. Aeneas speaks of the uneasy task of trusting the sea: “Then in the first light when we can trust the waves” (“Inde ubi prima Tides pelago” 3.69).9 The sea of course is never trustworthy, as we see at the end of Book 5 when Palinuras is bewitched from his post at Neptune’s behest, who seeks the sacrifice of one man in exchange for the preservation of the rest of Aeneas’ crew. It is a calm sea and the intoxicating power of Morpheos, the god of sleep that results in Palinuras slipping overboard. Despite his awareness of the sea’s treacherous nature, Palinuras cannot save himself: in response to the seductive arguments of Sleep, Palinuras remarks,

‘You tell me to forget my sense of the sea?— the placid face of the swells, the sleeping breakers?

Richard Jenkyns, Virgil’s Experience, Nature and History’: Times, Names and Places (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 60. The idea of rootedness in the earth is a secondary meaning of “condo”.

7 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 1.109-10.

8 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 7.10-11. 9 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 3.83. Mare Nostrum 62

You tell me to put my trust in that, that monster?’10

The death of Palinuras, as imagined by Aeneas (below), suggests that to fall into the sea is to be entirely debased, lifeless and nameless, and to be stripped of one’s power. Aeneas, unaware of the interference of Neptune, rues Palinuras’ fate:

‘You trusted—oh, Palinurus— far too much to a calm sky and sea. Your naked corpse will lie on an unknown shore.’*11

Both Palinuras’ and Aeneas’ responses highlight the deceptive nature of the sea which, far from being an insentient entity, is personified as a conscious and murderous one. Palinuras’ remark is flecked with words that associate the sea with deception: “fallacibus”, “deceptus” and “fraude”. The sea is in essence a cheating, deceitful, fraudulent ensnarer and “quietos” (peacefulness) and “sereni” (serenity) are, for Palinuras, entirely absent from the sea’s true nature which is that of a monster (“monstro”). Accordingly, Aeneas’ helmsman is sceptical: if the sea is calm, this calm would have to be the result of the intervention of a divinity; “monstro” signals a divine omen or miracle. The portrayal of the sea as a fraudulent deceiver requiring the intervention of a supernatural presence continues in Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle”.

Virgil’s sea is not merely an insensate expanse which needs to be crossed; it fluctuates between vicious storming, with its gods requiring sacrificial appeasement, and other moments of gentle amenability to sailing or marble calm. In the Odyssey, phrases suggestive of combating the sea foe are commonplace, and a similar lexicon is commonplace in the Aeneid. Virgil’s sea, like Homer’s, is a living thing, its flesh an enemy to be cut and beaten. Book 5 opens with an image of violent wounding as Aeneas’s ships slice through the water, with the use of “secabat”, to cut: Aeneas’ ships move fast, “plowing the waves blown dark” (“atros

10 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 5: 945-7. 11 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 5: 970-2. 12 Palinuras declares: “You tell me to put my trust in that, that monster” (“Mene Huic confidere monstro?” 5.849). Mare Nostrum 63

i •> Aquilone secabat” 5.2). With the use of “feriunt” (from “ferio”, to strike, smite, beat, cut or thrust) in Books 1 and 3, the sea is represented as an opponent who must be slashed. In Book 3, Aeneas describes his crew’s violent strokes: “and shipmates race each other, thrashing the waves” (“certatim socii feriunt mare” 3.290).14 Earlier, in Book 1, the sea is both the victim of the winds set loose and a vicious agent of terrible agony and destruction: the winds are “like arms in attack” (“velut agmine facto” 1.82), and they “crash on the sea” (“incubuere mari” 1.84).15 Yet, the water itself attacks Aeneas and his crew with seeming agency and ferocity: it maliciously “strikes the stem” of the ship (“puppim ferit” 1.115).16 Here, the same vocabulary of combat which described the violence of Aeneas’ rowers (“ferit” and “feriunt” are both from “ferio”) is used to describe the behaviour of the waves:

a toppling summit of water strikes the stem and hurls the helmsman overboard, pitching him headfirst, twirling his ship three times, right on the spot till the ravenous whirlpool gulps her down.17

In this excerpt, the sea savagely tosses men from their ships; it toys with a ship, spinning it around three times (“ter fluctus ibidem” 1.116) and swallows it down: (“rapidus vorat aequore vertex” 1.117). The words “excutitur” (to cut out) and “vorat” (devour greedily) personify the sea and imply its malevolent intent. In the sea, great and powerfully strong men are mere fragile victims and playthings, as in Book 3 when, searching again for a settling place, Aeneas tells the story of surviving yet another storm despite the viciousness of the waves, which are described as “strewing, flinging us down the sheer abyss” (“disperse iactamur gurgite vasto” 3.197).18 When Aeneas tells us of his survival, he reflects: “So was I saved from the deep” (“Servatum ex undis”).19 The use of the word “saved” (“servatum”)

13 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 5.3. 14 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 3.345. 15 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 1.99 and 1.101. 16 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 1.136. 17 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 1.135-8. 18 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 3.238-9. 19 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 3.254. Mare Nostrum 64 provides an evocative intimation of the sea as a vicious, grasping opponent, from whose deadly clutches Aeneas is pulled by some unseen deliverer.

In Virgil as in Homer, sea water is fundamentally unstable and dichotomous, it is a boundary and a conduit between life and death, torment and peace, the material and the immaterial. Through seas, seascapes and rivers (the Styx and Lethe), water is associated with the improper burial and anonymity that prevents the soul from crossing into the underworld, as well as the ritual burials that sanctify the dead and give their souls proper passage. The sea erases identity and, as the river Lethe, water is the conduit to forgetting, and the medium through which immaterial souls join mortal bodies. As the “phantom” of Anchises tells Aeneas, the “great armies of souls” called by “God” plunge themselves into the Lethe “their memories blank so that/ they may revisit the overarching world once more/ and begin to long to return to bodies yet again.”20 Aeneas describes mortality as “the shackles of the body” as well as “the light of life”, and in Anchises’ creation story, life is a mix of the “divine” and “the flesh that is bom to die”. The Virgilian sea is the place where these contradictions co­ exist.

The sea is also positioned as a savage opponent in the Aeneid when a seascape prefigures the fabled apocalyptic tragedy of Troy’s fall. On Troy’s seashore, in the mins of the Grecian encampment, stands an unearthly large horse. Its monstrous wooden ribs rise to the sky (“instar montis equum divina Palladis arte” 2.15); every plank suggests the work of the divine and every minute that the Trojan men gaze mesmerised by its colossal expanse, the hidden Greeks are waiting. In another sea-related image, twin serpents move across the sea from Tenedos, where the guileful Greeks are encamped. Virgil’s twin serpents can be seen as a version of feminine supernatural dichotomies. The serpents are monsters, they are not explicitly female but as agents of Minerva, they embody the extremes of beauty and hideousness, the alien and the known, chaos and stability. It is their appearance, and their savage attack on Laocoön, which leads the Trojans to allow the Grecian horse to enter the city. As in the example of the fantastically large Trojan horse, immense size and its implication of the preternatural is important in the presentation of sublime evil in the Aeneid; as they move towards the Trojan shore, the snakes’ enormous bodies create turmoil on the waves (“sinuatque immense volumine terga” 2.208-9). In their sickening attack, the serpents trap Laocoön’s young boys and feast on the fragile bodies (“morsu depascitur” 2.215), their

“° Aeneid, trans. Fagles 6. 809, 867-869. Mare Mostrum 65

unnaturally large, coiling bodies (“ingentibus” 2.217) twist around Laocoön, and he cries out in agony as his body drips with their black venom (“atroque veneno” 2.221). Just as there is the suggestion of the divine in the gigantic form of the horse, the serpents appear to be linked with the gods as they slide away to Minerva’s citadel and coil about her shield (2.227).

Images of the sea are inextricably linked to the annihilation of Troy and the chaos that ensues. However, as pointed out by Bernard M. W. Knox in his famous essay, “The Serpent and the Flame: The Imagery of the Second Book of the Aeneid\ the serpent is a symbol of both destruction and renewal in Roman culture. Extending Knox’s observation, since the sea is the site of the appearance of the twin serpents, it is also linked with their symbolic meaning and becomes an agent of both the destruction and rebirth of the stability of the city-state . Knox describes the serpent imagery in Book 2 as offering “the promise of renewal given in the throes of destruction; the death agonies of Troy are the birth-pangs of Rome”. Hellish carnage and the promise of salvation are both the products of the sea. As a whole the Aeneid clearly illustrates this dichotomy: the sea conveys those who annihilate Troy but it also conveys Aeneas to the place where the great Roman Empire will stand and it ultimately becomes an instrument of the Empire. On a smaller scale, Book 2 offers three significant sea images which evince the sea’s dichotomous role: the massive Grecian horse is set, waiting on the shore; the coiling bodies of the serpents move across the sea bringing savage death to the ancient city of Troy; as the book ends, Aeneas stands with his small son and invalid father and other desperate and terrified Trojan refugees, and they step into ships and make their way out to sea towards Rome’s future glory.

In Book 2, Aeneas recounts the fall of Troy in the presence of Dido and her court. When he speaks of Priam’s end, he conjures an image of pitiable debasement and ignobility, where the sea is tied to the erasure of human identity. With its historical reference to Pompey’s death, Priam’s headless body strewn on the sands is a potent image of greatness besmirched and defiled. Though Priam does not die at sea, but at the hands of Pyrrhus during the fall of Troy, the presence of the sea in the picture of his final destiny accentuates the connotations of the chaotic unknown and the perversity of fate, since from the outset the Aeneid has presented a sea synonymous with bedlam, “the rabble run amok” and uncertain drifting. Concluding his description of Priam’s death, Aeneas remarks,

Bernard Knox, “The Serpent and the Flame: The Imagery of the Second Book of the Aeneid”, in Steele Commager, ed., Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1966), p. 125. Mare Nostrum 66

A powerful trunk is lying on the shore, The head wrenched from the shoulders, A corpse without• i a name.22

The irony of this image turns on the namelessness of the corpse. The lack of identifying marks on the body means that this powerful man, whose identity was once swathed in dignity, is now anonymous and is then in essence, not merely come to nothing, but actually besmirched and mutilated. It is the last line, “A corpse without a name” (“et sine nomine corpus” 2.558) in which a proud sovereign (“superbum regnatorem” 2.556-7) is shown, not only to be brought low in death, but to have his remarkable greatness (“ingens” 2.557) utterly erased through disfigurement. Consider the Latin, “truncus”, and its meanings, maimed, mutilated, disfigured or dismembered: as the body without a head is nameless, so the familial dignity and historical significance inherent to Priam’s identity is mangled. Without a name, Priam’s body cannot be identified and given a proper burial and he will be helpless on another shore, the shore of the river Styx.

In the Aeneid, the sea and its environs can be sites of both hallowed and unhallowed deaths. The image of Priam’s headless body on the seashore combines with other images that construe the sea as an obstacle to immortal peace and bind the sea to the erasure of the self. For all that the Sibyl warns Aeneas of future and graver dangers on land (“sed terrae graviora manent” 6.84), ' as in the Odyssey, sea-related deaths are often regarded as more terrible than land-related deaths because of the increased likelihood that a proper burial will be impossible. When faced with the possibility of death at sea, Aeneas echoes Odysseus’s speech in Book 5 of the Odyssey and proclaims how fortunate were those of his comrades who died in battle as heroes, their death known by their parents: “Three, four times best, my comrades/lucky to die beneath the soaring walls of Troy-/before their parents’ eyes!” (“o terque quaterque beati quis ante ora patrum Troiae sub moenibus altis contigit oppetere!” 1.94-6).24 The significance of parental observation in the moment of death is here interlinked with the prevention of anonymity and the assurance of a proper burial. In his analysis of Roman funeral rites, Paul

2“ Aeneid, trans. Fagles 2.690-2. 23 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 6.99-100 “You who have braved the terrors of the sea, though worse remain on land”. "24 Aeneid,* trans. Fagles 1.113-15. Mare Nostrum 67

Burke notes the importance of the display of ancestral images in the funereal customs of the Roman aristocracy, as well as the practice, which bespeaks the importance of identity, where the dead person is actually set upright on a bier in the funeral procession.^

Uncertainty surrounds a sea-related death: bodies are not easily recovered and in the absence of this tangible object of grief and finality, their family and friends are left with the anxiety and despair of the unknown. As Aeneas is shown in Book 6, the unburied are trapped, pleading yet cruelly thrust away by Charon in the underworld; they are destined to wait on the shores of the Styx, unable to cross. Aeneas is shocked by the pitiable fate of those whose bodies went without the proper burial when he visits the underworld, but he has already encountered several situations where the importance of the proper burial of the dead is dramatically impressed upon him. In the land he first thought to be the site for his new city, Aeneas bloodies the earth with the dark gore of a fellow Trojan as he attempts to tear what he imagines to be stalks from a tree, and when the betrayed Polydorus tells him of his savage treatment, Aeneas gives Polydorus a “fresh new burial”, and performs the correct rituals. It is important to note that part of the ritual described here involves the utterance of a direct farewell employing the name of the deceased: “our voices raise his name, the resounding farewell” (“et magna supremum voce ciemus” 3.68). With a similar emphasis on naming, Aeneas must perform burial rites for an old friend before he is allowed to delve into the underworld. Misenus’ body is strewn “out on the dry beach” (“atque illi Misenum in litore sicco” 6.162),2* drowned, as the story goes, by a Triton jealous of his musical abilities. In the ritual, Misenus is raised up on a pyre on the shore of the sibyl’s dwelling, Euboean Cumae, and we are told that Aeneas “voiced the last farewell” placing the man’s “own gear, his oar and trumpet-/under a steep headland, called after the herald now/and for all time to come it bears Misenus’ name”.29 Misenus is alive in this place; the headland not only bears his name but the word “dicitur”, to utter, to tell and assert, suggests an eternal voicing of the man’s name: Misenus’ name is now a “living name” (“aetemumque tenet per saecula nomen”

Burke, Paul F, Jr., “Roman Rites for the Dead and 'Aeneid 6’”, The Classical Journal 74.3 (1979), p. 222. 26 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 3.74—5

Aeneid, trans. Fagles 3.81-2. 28 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 6.194. 29 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 6.270-3. Mare Nostrum 68

6.2 3 5).30 Aeneas’ experiences in the underworld then, act less as revelation on this issue and more as a reinforcement of a well established belief. They highlight the significance of the identification of the dead in funeral rites, which thereby links them to their immediate family and their ancestors and ensures that they will be remembered.

In the underworld, Aeneas is consumed by the injustice suffered by those who were “robbed of death’s last tribute”, those who hover round the shores seemingly into perpetuity, pushed away continually by the ferryman. Leucaspis and Orontes, who had been crushed by violently breaking waves, are there and so is Aeneas’ pilot Palinurus, who begs Aeneas to at least “throw some earth on my body” (“terrain inice” 6.365-6).31 The sense of ignoble anonymity springing from the vision of a corpse lying on a seashore, begun by the description of Priam, is deepened through the similar image of the helmsman, Paliumus’ shoreswept body. Unknown to Aeneas, Palinurus’ life was taken by Neptune in return for the safe passage of the rest of the crew. While Palinurus does not drown, he is stabbed by “a band of brutes” (“gens crudelis” 6.359) when trying to climb out onto land. " It was the sea’s guile that put him in danger and it is the seashore where his unidentified body is ignobly tossed. Aeneas himself foretold of the sea’s ability to inscribe anonymity upon those it takes, declaring that Palinurus’ “naked corpse” would “lie on an unknown shore”, and on a shore it lies, as Palinurus reveals that “the stormwinds roll my body down the shore”. However, this shore appears to be known since Palinurus asks Aeneas to go back to “Velia’s Port”. It is only the Sibyl’s assurance of future honours that calms Palinurus’ distress, for while “the god’s decrees” cannot be “brushed aside by prayer”, the Sibyl reveals that people near Palinuras’ corpse will “appease” (“piabunt” 6.379) his bones with “due rites paid” and a cape that will bear his name. We are told that Palinurus “takes delight in the cape that bears his name” (“his dictis curae emotae, pulsusque parumper/corde dolor tristi; gaudet cognomine terra” 6.382- 3).33 Much is made of the significance of the endurance of a name and the honour of one’s name being applied to landmarks in the Aeneid; the sea’s ability to erase a person’s name in effect makes the sea an agent not only of anonymity and impermanence but ignobility, mutilation and eternal torment at the same time.

H. Rushton Fairclough translates this part of the line as “and keeps from age to age an ever living name”, 6.235, p. 549. 31 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 6.416. 32 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 6.408. 33 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 6.433-438. Mare Nostrum 69

The seashore is also the domain where proper funeral rites are performed. In Book 11, Aeneas’ decency and civil virtue, his “pietas” and Roman masculine nobility, is made manifest through his strict attention to ritual and tradition in the burial of his men, as well as through his decision to allow the Rutulians to peacefully bury their dead. The slaughter of multitudes of animals amid the fire as an effort to appease death’s voracity (a voracity that is actually their own), and the placing of impotent weapons amid the flames, undermines any symbolic control over death (11.196-9). Nonetheless, the firelights on the beach signal the sanctification of the dead. Through the recurrent theme of burial, the sea figures in images of debasement and sanctification; the erasure of identity and monuments to identity; eternal torment and escape from torment.

The image of a seascape, where flames lick at the dead bodies of the mighty brought low, as in Book 11, has several important precedents in the Aeneid, not least of which is Dido’s funeral pyre whose awful glow is visible to Aeneas and his crew as they make their way out to sea:

All the while Aeneas, steeled for a mid-sea passage, Held the fleet on course, well on their way now, plowing the waves blown dark by a Northwind as he glanced back at the walls of Carthage set aglow by the fires of tragic Dido’s pyre. What could light such a conflagration? A mystery— but the Trojans know the pains of a great love defiled, and the lengths a woman driven mad can go, and it leads their hearts down ways of grim foreboding.34

In this passage, irony is wrought in the image of cutting the waves given its links to the metaphorical wounding of Dido. A similarly ironical act of cutting can be seen in Aeneas’ hacking away at the moorings of his ships with his sword and Dido’s suicide with a Trojan sword. Aeneas takes heed of Mercury’s warning to set sail and cuts the cords of his ships’ tethers: “Tearing sword from sheath like a lightning flash,/he hacks the mooring lines with a

34 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 5.1-9. Mare Nostrum 70

naked blade”;35 Dido, despairing, takes a sword herself: she “clambers in frenzy/up the soaring pyre and unsheathes a sword, a Trojan sword/she once sought as a gift, but not for such an end”.36 Aeneas remembers his duty to Rome and Ascanius and is fixed in his purpose, just as his ship is fixed on its course and plows through the black waves.

The characteristics of extreme volatility and the capacity for irrational frenzy are shared by Dido and the sea. Through Dido’s supematurally orchestrated passion, she figures a version of feminine supernatural dichotomies. In the opening of Book 5, as Aeneas cuts his way out to sea he is characterised as “certus”, determined, settled and resolved. This characterisation distinguishes Aeneas’s mental state from that of the Carthaginian Queen whose mind is repeatedly described in Book 4 as wavering and unhinged (“dubiae menti” 4.55), and who is here viewed as mad (“furens” 5.6). From the outset of Book 4, Virgil has described Dido’s love for Aeneas as a wound; it begins, “But the queen—too long she has suffered the pain of love,/hour by hour nursing the wound with her lifeblood” and again we see Dido as “a wounded doe caught all off guard by a hunter”. In a fourth-century mosaic depicting Dido’s tragedy, Aeneas’ ships prick at the water and in line with them, Dido is pictured with an enormous spear driven though her body. Virgil establishes another irony through a reference to divine intervention and a complex array of fire images. Whereas divine interference strengthens Aeneas’ mind and makes him more determined to seek out his destiny, the interference of the Gods shreds Dido’s mental determination. Dido had been resolved against marriage or any involvement with love before Venus’ interference. With her fluctuating surges of emotion, Dido resembles the sea’s alternating moods of fury and calm, as well as its voracity which in turn can be seen to resemble the voracity and destructivity of fire. Dido’s love, in addition to being described as a wound, is also described as a flame, “His dictis incensum animum inflammavit amore” (4.54),39 and it is a fire, symbolic of marriage, which spells Dido’s ultimate doom in the cave with Aeneas. Love’s conflagration, in its

35 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 4.724-5. 36 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 4.801-3. 37 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 4.1-2 and 88. 38 M. J. H. Liversidge, “Virgil in Art”, in Charles Martindale, ed., Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Plate 2a. 39 R. G. Austin, ed., Aeneidos (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 53. In hi.s detailed. comment.ary, Austi n remarks on the all consuming nature of Dido’s love. Austin describes the line, “ardet amans Dido traxitque per ossa furorem” 4.101, as indicating that Dido’s passion is a flame that is “like a disease, sweeping her body”. Mare Nostrum 71

passionate excess, is easily transformed into an all-consuming inferno of spite and fury. Dido, in the frenzy of her loss, plans to set Aeneas’ fleet on fire and also to rip him to pieces and toss him into the sea; but thwarted in this by his early departure, with her mind unhinged by loss and despair, Dido sets herself upon a funeral pyre, literally and mortally wounding herself. Aeneas is himself wounded, he grieves for his loss and his “heart [is] shattered by his great love (“multa gemens magnoque animum labefactus amore” 4.395) 40 If Aeneas is “driven by duty now” (“pius” 4.393), this is a duty which lashes its way through him, just as his acquiescence to it carves its path through Dido.

The Sea as Unreason and Frenzied Rage.

Instead of being intrinsically opposed to one another, fire and water share fundamental characteristics in the Aeneid; they harness the destructive power of elemental violence, and as images, they recur as emblems of hysteria, irrationality, uncontrollable rage and unstoppable blood-lust. The correlations Virgil creates between fire and water are reminiscent of Lucretius’ account of volcanic activity, in which fire and water act together to produce a raging cataclysm.41 The ferocity of both elements makes them suitable emblems for irrationality and wrath; fire is used as an emblem of all consuming rage repeatedly in the Aeneid. However, a series of key images emerge within the dichotomies of Roman masculine virtue where, instead of fire, Virgil chooses the sea to encapsulate the irrational fury of a frenzied crowd and the insatiable bloodlust of wrathful warriors, emotional excesses which are diametrically opposed to the calm, reasoning ruler, the man full of piety, authority and restraint.

As early as Book 1, the sea tumult raised by Aeolus at Juno’s command is likened to “the rabble” (“ignobile volgus” 1.149) enslaved by passionate rage:

Just as, all too often, some huge crowd is seized by a vast uprising,

40 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 4.498. 41 Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E. Latham (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1981), p. 238. In Lucretius’ account of volcanic activity, the violent movement of sea water causes the generation of heat, resulting in fire bursting forth from the volcano. Mare Nostrum 72

the rabble runs amok, all slaves to passion, rocks, firebrands flying. Rage finds them arms but then, if they chance to see a man among them, one whose devotion and public service lend him weight, they stand there, stock-still with their ears alert as he rules their furor with his words and calms their passion. So the crash of the breakers all fell silent once their Father, gazing over his realm under clear skies, flicks his horses, giving them free rein, and his eager chariot flies.42

The correlation of the sea with sedition (“seditio”), raving fury (“saevitque”) and the low bom multitude (“ignobile volgus”) sets it in direct opposition, not only to the great man of state, but also to those highly valued Roman virtues of moderation and justice he embodies: a sense of duty and devotion (“pietas”), dignity (“gravitas”) and worthiness (“meritas”). In this passage Neptune is endowed with these Roman virtues as he takes on the role of the man of duty and dignity as he calms and silences the sea. However, the vision of Neptune’s savage involvement in the demolition of Troy indicates that he is also endowed with the raving fury inherent to his domain. In Book 2, Venus reveals to Aeneas the role the gods play in Troy’s destruction (including Neptune who also built it):

There, yes, where you see the massive ramparts shattered, blocks wrenched from blocks, the billowing smoke and ash— it’s Neptune himself, prising loose with his giant trident the foundation-stones of Troy, he’s making the walls quake, ripping up the entire city by her roots.43

Aeneas is the supreme incarnation of the Roman virtues but he too is filled with the capacity for maddened rage both as the epic begins and ends. In the Aeneid, the just authority Aeneas assumes through restraint is predicated upon the extreme force of his anger, and when he

4" Aeneid, trans. Fagles 1.167-184. 43 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 2.753-8. Mare Nostrum 73 does not control his rage, Virgil suggests it is because Aeneas’ rage is justice or a rage beyond justice.44

In Book 7 we are presented with a simile which overtly correlates the sea with the rising fury and surging blood-lust of men at war. This simile is startling in its simplicity, yet full of complex resonances linking it to the ambiguities of the foundations of Rome.

The battle lines form up. No rustic free-for-all with clubs and charred stakes- they’ll fight to the finish now with two-edged swords. A black harvest of naked steel bristles far and wide, and the bronze struck by the sun gleams bright and hurls its light to the clouds like a billow whitening under the wind’s first gust as crest on crest the ocean rises, its breakers rearing higher until it surges up from its depths to hit the skies.45

A few lines before this simile, Aeneas’ son Ascanius was full of wrath and had to be removed forcefully from the fray because of a divine suggestion that his destiny lay in the future of Rome. By endowing Ascanius with the proper sense of duty and masculine strength to take up arms and fight, Virgil establishes him as a worthy future ruler. However, in the prioritisation of restraint and in having other Trojans give way to their rage and sacrifice themselves for him, Virgil suggests that such a loosening of rage is necessary to begin Rome but that Rome’s future depends also on its control. The consummate savagery of the battle and its sublimity is animated through the picture drawn of the excess that triumphs over reason—the vastness of the sea, and its waves furiously climbing all the way to the sky.

In Book 9, the furore of battle and its extremes of passion and fury are again made analogous to a sea scene where tempests rage:

Aeneas’ rage is described as ungovernable (“indomitas” 2.594) in Book 2, and in Book 12 his rage is a conflagration (“fervidus”). Aeneid, trans. Fagles 7.608-16. Mare Nostrum 74

Cries rock the ramparts, up and down the walls— they’re tensing murderous bows, whipping spear-straps, weapons strewing the ground, shields and hollow helmets ringing out under impact—fighting surges, raging strong as a tempest out of the West when the Kids are rising great with rain that lashes the earth, and thick and fast as the hail that stormclouds shower, pelting headlong down on the waves when Jupiter fierce with Southwinds spins a whirlwind, thunderheads exploding down the sky.46

Compared to the ocean rising and the ferocious violence of elements acting in concert, nourishing each other, the warriors lose their individuality and their very humanity erodes as they form a massive army bent on destruction. It is as though there is only one thought to the multitude, one desire for violent slaughter. The armies, in their monstrous fury, break the calm of nature, just as the wind, hail, cloudbursts and sea, clamour together in a terrible onslaught of savagery.

In the opening of this chapter, I quoted from Book 2 of Lucretius’ De Rerwn Natura, in order to highlight the pairing of the sea with extreme passion and emotional turmoil, but this passage from Lucretius also highlights the veneration for the man of philosophy in Epicurean thought, for the man who stands back from emotional turmoil and restrains the extreme passions within him. It is “sweet” (“suave”), Lucretius tells us, to stand on the shore, calm while others are in the sea’s turmoil but real happiness exists in the serenity of the philosopher. Lucretius’ “calm heights of the sages” can be seen in Virgil’s presentation of King Latinus. Characterised using the language of the sea, Latinus is likened to an immovable rock (“ille velut pelago rupes immota resistit” 7.586), surrounded by the clamouring waves of a frenzied crowd, insensible to the will of Fate, screaming for war with the Trojans:

Suddenly all are demanding this accursed war, against all omens, against the divine power of Fate, they’re spurred by a wicked impulse. They rush to ring

46 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 9.757-65. Mare Nostrum 75

the palace of King Latinus round but he stands fast like a rock at sea, a seabound rock that won’t give way: when a big surge hits and the howling breakers pound it hard, its bulk stands fast though its foaming reefs and spurs roar on, all for nothing, as seaweed dashing against its flanks swirls away in the back wash.

But finding he lacks the power to quash their blind fanatic will, and the world rolls on at a nod from brutal Juno, time and again he calls the gods and empty winds to witness: ‘Crushed by Fate,’ the father cries, ‘we’re wrenched away by the tempest! My poor people, you will pay for your ourtrage with your blood. You, Turnus, the guilt is yours, and a dreadful end awaits you—- you will implore the gods with prayers that come too late! Myself, now that I’ve reached my peaceful haven, here at the harbor’s mouth I’m robbed of a happy death.’

He said no more. He sealed himself in his house and dropped the reins of power.47

Here the sea is linked to wicked impulses, ignoring divine omens, guilt and blind fanatic will. As in other images of the sea which align it to unreasoned fury and violence, the terrible din of the waves (“fragore” 7.587), and the relentless but pointless turmoil encapsulated in the vision of “foaming reefs”, the foam circling (“spumea circum” 7.589), are emblems of uncontrolled excess (much like the excess of Dido’s mad love), the results of which are almost assuredly despair, blood-letting and death.

In a later passage, where the enormity of the downfall of a strong, great man and its violent consequences is likened to a pier crashing into the sea, the sea becomes the surging

47 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 7.676-96. Mare Nostrum 76 rage of a bloody battle, a battle whose awakened intensity is aligned with a perverse and vicious monster. Bitias, the slain Trojan is

Huge as a masoned pier that falls at times on the shore of Euboean Baiae—first they build it of massive blocks, then send it crashing over, dragging all in its wake and it crushes down on the ocean floor as the waves roil and black sand goes heaving into the air and Prochyta Island quakes to its depths and the craggy bed of Inarime weighting Typhoeus down by Jove’s command. 4.S

Through this one simile, the sea becomes analogous to the Latins, surging with renewed lust for war, which is in itself linked with a vision of the potentially unleashed savagery of Typhoeus. The death of the Trojan Bitias and his brothers in Book 9 occurs in the midst of the bloody fighting that takes place on the threshold of the Trojan camp. The vision of fallen greatness here becomes ensnared in the spectacular mass of Bitias’ hard body, a masoned pier, crashing into the furious rising morass of warriors, who are then analogous to surging waves. As an enormous pier, Bitias encourages the war-lust of the Latins and enraging the Trojans—his body becomes as a walkway out of the Trojan camp over the sea of bloody struggle. In the above quoted passage, the blood-lust, intensified by Bitias’ fall, becomes linked to extreme consequences: so great is his fall that the blackened depths of the sea are exposed, islands quake, even that which represses the terrible hybrid monster Typhoeus rattles, intimating the possibility that this grotesque creature (hated by Zeus) will be set loose and that this creature, loosed, is much like the grotesque flood of the battle.

Many critics have commented on Virgil’s ability to characterise both the glory and the cruel waste of war;49 others have indicated that Virgil’s refusal to suggest an everlasting peace reflects an everlasting human predilection for conflict,50 and still others see Virgil’s

48 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 9.798-811. 49 McDermott, Emily A., “The ‘Unfair Fight’: A Significant Motif in the Aeneid", The Classical Journal 75.2 (1979-1980), p. 153. 50 James Zetzel, “Rome and its Traditions”, in Martindale ed., Companion to Virgil. Zetzel remarks: “wars to end war are a hope, not a reality. The achievement of peace involves brutality and violence, and those do not simply disappear”, p. 202. Mare Nostrum 77 aesthetic as asserting the “harmonious balance of opposites ... in which neither darkness nor light is dominant”.51 It is not simply the case that the Aeneid presents two sets of opposing qualities as inherent to the creation of the Roman state, where the first set involves qualities that incite crazed violence and disorder, such as maddened fury, irrationality and a crowd- mentality, and the other set pivots around the virtues that generate order and peace, such as worthy devotion, a sense of duty and restraint. Virgil’s epic presents a far more complex interrelationship between these sets of qualities. Virgil imagines characters, especially Aeneas, in which both sets of qualities reside but where unreasoned fury and crazed violence are products of a sense of duty and devotion and even demonstrate a man’s merit and worth. Through the delineation of the despair and pointless annihilation that is usually the result of extreme emotions running unchecked, Virgil establishes a hierarchy in which those virtues associated with peace, order and calm are pre-eminent and those qualities associated with fury and violence are positioned well below. It may be that unreasoned fury and crazed violence are necessary and unavoidable in the creation of a great empire and that they are even desirable aspects of masculine greatness; nevertheless, it is clear that these extremes of human nature need to be restrained, and are less valued than those of the devoted public man who can control the masses and offer order and peace.

Virgil’s images of the sea reflect this hierarchy, where order and peace are valued more highly than irrational fury and disorder. Throughout the Aeneid, the sea is aligned most often with unreasoned fury, cruel violence and chaos, but towards the end of the epic, the sea comes under the domain of the great man, Aeneas. The Aeneid ends with Aeneas’ brutal killing of Turnus to avenge Pallas’ death. Yet the final significant sea image in the epic is of sea nymphs under Aeneas’ control. The depictions of Aeneas’s “savage grief’, of him “flaring up in fury” and “blazing with wrath” are images of fire and not the sea (12.1104-9). Embodied in the shapely forms of ships transformed into sea nymphs, the sea facilitates Aeneas’ victory but in doing so its power is shown to be contained and its irrational fury checked and ordered.

51 Viktor Pöschl, The Art of Virgil: Image and Symbol in the Aeneid, trans. Gerda Seligson (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 173. Mare Nostrum 78

Sea-Nymphs in the Service of Rome

As an unfinished manuscript, the Aeneid is a problematic work upon which to base arguments about the overall position of various images or events. The obvious response to such arguments is, quite reasonably, that such and such an image or event may have been intended to appear earlier or later, or at this or that point. Therefore, the objection goes, we cannot really know if such images or events can be ascribed the weight of meaning associated with the position of images or events in completed works. One can always plausibly suggest that Virgil might have edited such and such an image out or put it somewhere else. The issue of the Aeneid'’s unfinished status, and the remarkable suggestion that it was supposed to have been burnt upon Virgil’s death,52 has been discussed and debated many times. My only addition to this debate, and one that is by no means unique, is to assert the validity of arguments about the position of images based on a text, which is in effect all we have. To speak of the effect of a certain image and its position in the epic is relevant because, try as we might to think of the Aeneid as a work in progress, we cannot help but be affected by what we receive and where we receive it, in its twelve books, as they are. I therefore draw attention to the final significant sea images of the Aeneid in Books 9 and 10 (with the exception of Aeneas’ briefly imagined sea-defilement of Tarquitus’ body), where the sea becomes an aid to Aeneas’ victory over the Rutulians. Due to their placement just before the final battles which will ensure the foundation of the Roman Empire, these images are pregnant with ideas of servitude. As Viktor Pöschl remarks (though less literally) in The Art of Virgil: Image and Symbol in the Aeneid, “the opening storm is a wave breaking against Roman destiny. Many waves will follow and Augustus will subdue them all”.

Virgil explains the failure of the Rutulian forces to bum Aeneas’ fleet by recounting a promise made by Jove to the Berecynthian Mother of Gods, a promise which intensifies the atmosphere of divine sanction that hovers inextricably over the epic:

‘one day, when their tour of duty is done at last and they moor in a Western haven, all the ships that survived the waves and bore the Trojan prince

52 Knox, “Introduction”, p. 11. 5 3 Pöschl, The Art of Virgil, p. 24. Mare Nostrum 79

to Latium’s fields—1 will strip them of mortal shape and command them all to be goddesses of the deep like Doto, Nereus’ daughter, and Galatea too, breasting high, cleaving the frothing waves.’54

The mortal nature of the ships will be ripped away from them as they are metamorphosed into goddesses (“mortalem eripiam formam magnique” 9.101), quite literally. Turnus’ men turn to Aeneas’ ships to bum them, but the ships evade the firebrands by leaping into the sea as goddesses:

Then an awesome voice descended through the air, surrounding the Trojan and Rutulian ranks alike: ‘No frantic rush to defend my ships, you Trojans, no rising up in arms! Turnus can sooner bum the Ocean dry than bum these sacred pines of mine. Run free, my ships—run, you nymphs of the sea! Your Mother commands you now!’

And all at once, each vessel snapping her cables free of the bank, they dive like dolphins, plunging headlong beaks to the bottom’s depths, then up they surface, turned into lovely virgins—wondrous omen— each a sea-nymph sweeping out to sea. 55

The overt supematuralism of these passages, in which ships literally become sea-nymphs is one of several key instances where Aeneas’ right to rule Latium is presented as divinely ordained. There are places in the Aeneid where the role played by the gods in Aeneas’ future is ambiguous, where even its very existence is called into question, as when Jove declares of

54 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 9.115-21. 55 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 9.132-43. Mare Nostrum 80

Aeneas and Turnus, “I make no choice between them”,56 and decrees that each man will weave their “own web” to “bring him to glory or grief’.57 The gods may be “inconsistent and confused administrators”,' but on the whole (with the obvious exception of Juno and a few assistants) the gods are everywhere pushing Aeneas towards the founding of Rome. Anchises shows Aeneas his future Roman people in the underworld, Neptune calms the seas repeatedly so that the hero’s ships may pass, Venus is constantly manipulating her son’s destiny—not least in seducing her husband, Vulcan, to make him craft divine armour for Aeneas. Jove, for all his proclamation in Book 10, sends the Furies as a sign for Jutuma to abandon her protection of Turnus and here in Book 9, Jove fulfils his promise to save Aeneas’ fleet in an unmistakable sign of favour.59

In the world of this epic, the sea is a place glutted with gods. There is a particular intensity to the depictions of the sea as filled with strange supernatural beings, and the sea as the site of extraordinary supernatural spectacles to a greater degree than the land. This particular intensity springs, at least in part, from the completely alien nature of the sea and its creatures and the sea’s real opposition to the notions of Roman stability, utterly located as it is in the earth. Moreover, while there are many perversely monstrous creatures inland in Roman mythology, Virgil’s epic primarily makes reference to those inhabiting the sea or those who dwell beside it such as the Harpies, Scylla and the Cyclopes. In Book 1, armed with his powerful trident, Neptune trips away across the sea in a horse-drawn chariot after calming the storm. His retinue is described; it includes the hybrid fish-men creatures, the Tritons and sea nymphs, who dislodge ships from rocks, assisting Neptune who then picks them up with his trident as if they were tiny, insignificant objects.60 A similarly bizarre spectacle is described in Book 5, after Neptune has promised to assist Aeneas’ fleet across the sea in exchange for one life:

and soon as Father Neptune had soothed the goddess’ heart, he harnesses up his team with their yoke of gold,

56 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 10.132.

57 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 10.135-6 58 Tracy H. L., “‘Fata DeunT and the Action of the '’Aeneid'", Greece & Rome 11.2 (1964), p. 194. 59 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 6.909-920.

60 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 1.167-70, 182-4. Mare Nostrum 81

slips the frothing bits in their chafing jaws, slacks the reins and the team goes running free, the sea-blue chariot skimming lightly over the crest and the waves fall calm, and under the axle’s thunder the sea swell levels off and the stormclouds flee from the wild skies. And now his retinue rises in all their forms, enormous beasts of the deep, the veteran troupe of Glaucus, Ino’s son Palaemon, wind-swift Tritons, Phorcus’ army in full force with Thetis, Melite, virgin Panopea out on the left,

Fair-Isle, Sea-Cave, Spray, and the Waves’ Embrace.61

For all its extraordinary entities, its raging tempests and disturbing power, the sea comes under Roman rule at last when, as nymphs, Aeneas’ ships meet him out at sea in an attitude of utter servitude. Returning from his mission to gain Evander’s support, Aeneas meets his ships turned nymphs as he sails back to camp:

As pressures gave no rest to his limbs, Aeneas sat astern, guiding the tiller, trimming sail, when suddenly, look-a troop of his comrades comes to meet him, halfway home, the nymphs that kindly Cybebe told to rule the sea in power, changing the ships to sea-nymphs swimming abreast, cutting the waves, as many as all the bronze prows berthed at anchor once. They know their king far off, circling, dancing round him and one, most eloquent of them all, Cymodocea swims in on his wake and grips his stem with her right hand, arching her back above the swells as her left hand rows the silent waves, and she calls out to Aeneas, lost to it all: ‘Awake, Aeneas, son of the gods? Wake up! Fling your sheets to the winds, sail free!

61 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 5.907-920. Mare Nostrum 82

Here we are, the pines from the sacred ridge of Ida, now we’re nymphs of the sea—we are your fleet! When traitorous Turnus forced us headlong on with sword and torch, we burst your mooring lines, we had no choice, and now we scour the seas to find our captain. The Great Mother pitied us, changed our shape, she made us goddesses, yes, and so we pass our lives beneath the waves.

These nymphs of the sea swim out to find their master; they slice the waves to get to him (“fluctusque secabant” 10.222), cutting their own element in an act of emblematic service. Aeneas is declared to be their king (“regem” 10.224) and Cymodocea tells Aeneas that she and all these nymphs are his (“classis tua” 10.231). In Dryden’s translation, Cymodocea (Cymodoce) rises above the waves exposing her “snowy breast” and “Her right hand stops the stem; her left divides/The curling ocean, and corrects the tides”.63 The nymphs frolic and dance around Aeneas ship (“lustrantque choreis” 10.224) and this choreography of luminous frolicking offers a distinct contrast to the viciously cruel waves hurtling down upon Aeneas and his crew in Book 1. Dryden describes the Nymphs as “a choir of Nereids” that “in a ring/inclose the ship”.64 The nymphs use all their considerable power to hurtle Aeneas’ fleet towards the fight; Cymodocea’s unearthly force is harnessed for the Trojans: “she closed with a dive and drove the tall ship on/with her right hand” (“dixerat et dextra discedens impulit altam/haud ignara modi puppim” 10.246-7).65 Here in this image, the lithe body of the nymph is vivid, her supematurally strong limbs guiding Aeneas’ ship and all her knowledge made an instrument for Rome. The phrase “haud ignara” (10.247) is revealing: translated it might read “by no means not knowing, or not ignorant”. Suddenly the sea ceases to be associated with the unfathomable. When the sea and sea creatures are controlled to fuel a Roman future, they lose some of their unnatural alien monstrousness, or more accurately, their unnatural alien monstrousness becomes a Roman instrument. The sea and sea creatures are finally allies of the first Romans.

62 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 10.263-85.

63 The Aeneid, trans. Dryden (New York: Collier, 1909), Book 10, Lines 226-28.

64 Trans. Dryden, Book 10, Lines 219-224.

65 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 10.297-8. Mare Nostrum 83

In the Aeneid, as in the Odyssey, emotional extremes such as unconstrained passion, wrath, baseness and cruelty are associated with (and often personified by) the sea. The more refined virtues, such as restraint and dutiful devotion, are located in a more exalted human ideal. Nonetheless, at the end of his epic Virgil puts the sea into the service of Rome and makes it Roman in a way that Homer never makes the sea Greek. Odysseus may put the symbols of the sea’s instability away from him as he leaves Calypso and Circe, and escapes the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis but they are never made his. While Calypso and Circe assist Odysseus, he is never their King and the sea forever seems to rage though he may survive its perils. In the Odyssey, the sea’s beauty lies not in its containment—containment is never the source of its appeal; rather it is in its monstrous excesses that the sea is alluring. Predominantly, Virgil contains the monstrous hybridity of the sea through the resolution of the dichotomies of the heroic sea journey and Roman masculine virtue in the triumph of Aeneas, the half-God hero. Virgil also makes the feminine supernatural a controllable Roman ally. In the Aeneid, the contradictions of the sea are ultimately harnessed and the sea is particularly beautiful when it is serving Rome in the form of sea-nymphs who are extremely willing to please.

The portrayals of the sea in the work of Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Bronte are underpinned by a Christian worldview, yet the allure of the monstrous excesses of the Greek depictions of the feminine supernatural and the Roman control of the feminine supernatural are also manifest. Virgil’s depiction of the control of the sea’s monstrous hybridity in the utopianism of heroism and the Roman state is also revised in Shelley’s utopian sea-isles and to a greater extent paralleled in the Bible. In contrast, in the Bible the sea is removed from God’s utopia. Chapter 3: Salvation and Chasms of Blood, the Biblical Sea.

The imagery of Greco-Roman texts like the Odyssey and the Aeneid directly and indirectly saturated English culture in the Romantic period, but so too did the imagery of the Bible. The King James authorised version of the Bible of 1611 dominated the English market from the seventeenth to mid nineteenth century.1 In fact, a persuasive argument can be made that while Greco-Roman works gathered around them either a very select audience of the formally educated and the wealthy (usually formally educated wealthy men), or were filtered into the popular consciousness through a variety of indirect means, the Bible was more directly accessible to the less formally educated and the poorest men and women, and therefore its cultural significance can never be overstated. In Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, describing what he sees as the unfathomable influence of the Bible on his psychology, Coleridge remarks that he is “unable to determine what I do not owe to its influences”.2 3 biblical images were more readily accessible to the English poor than Greco-Roman images due simply to the common practice of going to church.

Unlike the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Ancient Hebrews were not seafarers. Many cultural areas mentioned in the Bible, such as Jerusalem, are located in hilly regions. The landscape of the Bible is modem Palestine, a resource-poor area beset by aridity and unpredictable weather patterns.' The ancient Hebrews have been characterised as an “agricultural” people working with “limited resources” and with a relatively limited experience of the sea;4 so perhaps it is understandable that in Ancient Hebrew, oceans, lakes,

For discussions of the pervasive influence of the King James Bible: Bruce Metzger, The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Barker Academic, 2001). Metzger characterises the popularity of the King James Version as based on “its intrinsic merits and the verdict of English readers in general” and not on “royal favour or legal enactments”, p. 79. Also, Stanley E. Porter, “Modem Translations” in John Rogerson ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of the Bible (Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2001). Porter describes the “supremacy” that the Authorised Version achieved in England which lasted up till the end of the nineteenth century, p. 135. 2 S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection: and, The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit: to which are added his Essays on Faith and The Book of Common Prayer (London: Bell, 1884), p. 9. 3 David C. Hopkins, “Life in Ancient Palestine”, New Interpreter’s Bible: General Articles and Introduction, Commentary and Reflections for Each Book of the Bible Including the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, vol. 1 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), pp. 213-227, p. 215. 4 Hopkins, “Life in Ancient Palestine”, p. 215. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 85 and rivers are often all referred to as “seas”: the Mediterranean, the Dead Sea, the Red Sea, Galilee, the Nile and the basin in Solomon’s temple are usually denoted by the same Hebrew word, “yarn”.*5 * Shipping references occupy only a small place in the Old and New Testaments. Little by little the Phoenicians and Philistines had effectively cut off the ancient

Hebrew access to the sea.6 7Because of this, New Testament references tend to be about Greek and Roman shipping, they highlight issues of trade and the terrors of sea storms. In spite of these differences, seafarers and non-seafarers create similar portrayals of the sea.

In the biblical tradition, heroic battles with the dichotomies of the sea are instead depicted as God’s control over the waters. The images of the sea in the Bible revolve around the foundational dichotomies established in Genesis: form and formlessness; life and death; renewal and destruction; salvation and damnation; redemption and sin; purification and punishment; and changelessness and change. In Genesis, God’s power is initially manifest in the control he exerts over the formlessness of the primordial abyss which at his command becomes orderly and fruitful. Later, Genesis speaks of God’s terrifying wrath and the sea becomes a gruesome instrument of death and judgement. The sea is repeatedly represented as an emblem of God’s power and a mark of his omnipotence in the Bible. In his analysis of the Psalms, A.H.W. Curtis posits that the recurrent images of God’s “subjugation of the waters” are more than rhetorical flourishes or mere echoes of ancient Near Eastern myths. Rather, he argues that this motif indicates God’s “control over the waters” is a great mythical act and that its repeated use is evidence of its polemical importance in highlighting the historical tension between the worship of Baal and Yahweh. According to Curtis, for the writers of the Psalms, “it was necessary to claim that Yahweh could do all that his rivals could do”. Curtis’ argument pinpoints the crucial nature of God’s control over the waters as evidence of his sole dominion over the earth. Throughout his article Curtis writes of Yahweh’s “complete control over the waters”; I rephrase this as God’s control over the waters.

J. D. Douglas, ed., New International Dictionary of the Bible: Based on the N1V (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing, 1987), p. 909. This is also a tendency in the Greek, and in English translations. For reference to Solomon’s basin, Jeremiah 52: 17. 6 Robert R. Stieglitz, “Long-Distance Seafaring in the Ancient Near East,” Biblical Archaeologist 47. 3 (1984): 134-142. On page 139 Stieglitz notes: “The Hebrews historically were not a seafaring people, since the larger part of the Mediterranean coast was occupied by Phoenicians and Philistines”. The point is also made by Douglas, New International Dictionaiy of the Bible. On page 936 he observes: “the Phoenicians and Philistines . . . separated [the ancient Hebrews] from a coastline that was itself harbourless and difficult”. 7 Curtis, “Subjugation of the Waters”, p. 255. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 86

In the Bible, the dichotomies of the sea are depicted as signs of God’s divine power and presence in a mortal world. As a hybrid place of monstrously extreme ideas and emotions, the sea of the Bible has much in common with the Greco-Roman sea. As in the works of Homer, Hesiod and Virgil, the sublimity of the sea in the Bible stems from its coexisting and intermeshed dichotomies, its monstrous hybridity. The dichotomies associated with God’s control over the waters are not entirely different from the dichotomies of the feminine supernatural, the heroic sea journey and Roman masculine virtue in the Greco-Roman tradition. As in the Greco-Roman tradition, the sea’s dichotomies become fused in grotesque marine beings (though unfeminised). Even so, the dichotomies tied to the sea in the Bible are illustrated most often through spectacles of God’s omniscient power over wild oceans of water, and in the Bible the sea is only God’s tool. Yet the biblical sea is most distinct from the seas of the Greco-Roman tradition in its ultimate absence. In the Odyssey, Works and Days and the Theogony, the sea remains with all its contradictions. The sea also remains in the Aeneid with its aesthetic contraries harnessed for the future of Rome. In the Bible, the dichotomies of the sea are entirely expunged as part of God’s apocalyptic transformation of the earth.

Images of the sea are crucial to two of the most artistically, poetically and theologically influential books of the Bible: Genesis and Revelation. Images of the sea appear as part of biblical themes like the act of Creation, the Flood and the Apocalypse. In Genesis, the sea begins as a place of chaos (1:2).9 It is the infinite abyss and the unimaginable which must receive order before creation can begin. The narrative of the Flood positions the sea as an instrument of God’s punishment and purification. The Bible’s seas are often punitive, either as floods in the beginning or chasms of blood in the end,10 and there is no sea in the New Jerusalem’s diaphanous city (Rev. 21:1). The biblical sea is something to be dominated and is rarely considered beautiful. Marine animals are obscured within the mysterious abyss and they are the first in the list of animals over which man has dominion (Gen. 1:26). Even so, in

g These are innumerable but to offer several salient examples: the Genesis story of the “fall” of man is the basis of John Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost, and the final judgment of Revelation is the subject of John Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath (1851 -3) and also The Last Judgment (1853). 9 Here the “sea” is technically “waters”. 10 Holy Bible, authorised King James version (London: Collins’ Clear-Type Press, 1952). All references are to this edition unless stated otherwise. 1 reproduce the spelling and italics of this edition. When the King James Version was produced the italics were intended to indicate words not found in the original languages. The 1611 edition appeared in black letter font and as a result fewer italics appear in the 1611 edition than appear in the standardised text of 1769 (on which this edition is based). Salvation and Chasms of Blood 87

Genesis the creations of God are considered “good” (Gen. 1:10), and through the figure of the Leviathan, marine life is playful as well as an adversary of God. In Micah, the sea can be viewed as a symbol of expansiveness and greatness, a symbol of God’s power since he can command and control even the vast seas (7:12). Further, the sea absorbs all sin and can therefore be viewed as a purifier and saviour, and images of fish and fishing become attached to notions of salvation and the power of Jesus Christ in the New Testament (Micah 7:19).11 In Matthew, Jesus calms storms, fills empty nets with fish and tells his disciples “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men” (8:26, 13:47, 4:19). Nevertheless, while the sea can be associated with divinity, it is always a perverse entity, full of tempests or empty of fish: it is a space to be tamed and controlled, and whose taming and control is deemed miraculous—evidence of God’s immense power. In the Old Testament, the sea is viewed as a plague to be rid of as well as an unclean, wounded place. In Psalm 66:6 God is praised for having “turned the sea into dry land”, and Ezekiel 47:11 tells us that while there are many fish in the sea the “miry places thereof and the marshes thereof shall not be healed; they shall be given salt”. Ultimately, the sea is unwanted. After the old world is made new, purged of all evil and made fit for God to dwell with man, John tells us: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea” (Rev. 21:1). These claims have been made by many commentators, ancient and modem, and they are asserted in more general works of reference such as Bible dictionaries and encyclopaedias. In this chapter I do not seek to labour well-established material; rather, I build on it by explicitly highlighting the sea imagery as it exists in the King James Bible of 1769. This chapter will provide detailed analysis where in previous studies there has predominantly been, at least with regard to the sea, brief assertion and summary.

As in previous chapters, literary, cultural and lexical analysis underpin the methodology of this chapter. As many introductions to biblical studies will attest, the Bible is anything but one unified book: it is a “collection of books” and exists in a dazzling variety of translations and editions with its various books ordered differently and with additions and omissions depending on the edition. " Consequently, it could be argued that it is impossible to speak of recurrent images or repeated motifs and associations, even potentially within the same biblical book, given the variety of authors, dates and textual styles which are observable.

Micah 7:19. 12 “ Rogerson, J.W., An Introduction to the Bible (London: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 1-4, quote, p. 1. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 88

However, the King James Bible was the dominant version of the Bible available to the Romantics and it was the dominant version used in English churches in the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth-century; therefore my study here deals only with the order set by the King James Bible. My analysis is primarily literary, examining the semantics of English words and the tropes and figures created in English,13 but obviously the Bible is not a novel, nor is it one lengthy poem and nor was it written in English. Though considered by Christians to be the word of God and the result of his inspiration, the Bible is not the work of one author at one time.14 Nonetheless, my analysis is not and should not be based on the Higher Critical approach, which would involve an analysis of Hebrew, Greek and Latin translations, as well as issues of dating and a detailed consideration of the context of ancient Hebrew culture. This approach, though developing in Germany in the Romantic period was not extensively adopted in England.15 While I do refer to some details of ancient Hebrew culture and language, to employ Higher Criticism would be to analyse the Bible in a way that the majority of English society in this period and most of the Romantics I deal with (except Coleridge) would not have experienced and to employ a lexical and cultural knowledge to which they would not have had extensive access (again but for Coleridge).16 Received by the Romantics in English and bound up in one volume, the portrayal of the sea in the Bible is necessarily examined in English, and the various books are considered within a narrative- critical approach as they existed and were ordered in the standardised version of 1769.17

A good reference work on literary approaches to the Bible is A History of the Bible as Literature, 2 vols., David Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 14 1 am sensible of the censure of biblical scholars like Harry M. Orlinsky, “Enigmatic Bible Passages: The Plain Meaning of Genesis 1:1-3, Biblical Archeologist (Dec 1983), pp. 207-209. Orlinsky argues emphatically for the importance of a knowledge of how the original language was used in biblical interpretation, as well as a deep knowledge of the society of Israel in the Ancient Near East. He speaks of responsible interpretation and its basis in such a textual study. I agree with him absolutely. The claims 1 am making are about the King James Bible in the Romantic period and as such, the understanding required is, at its broadest, the society, culture and language of seventeenth-mid nineteenth century England. 15 Stephen Prickett, Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 108. 16 Prickett, Origins of Narrative, p. 116. Here Prickett notes that Wordsworth would have been alerted to some of the higher critical arguments by Coleridge. For a succinct discussion of Coleridge’s experience of the German critics, see also Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: the Tradition of Coleridge and WordsM’orth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 66-7. 17 In translation the Bible is to a significant degree the work of William Tyndale. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 89

God’s Control over the waters

Images of the sea in the Bible begin with a vision of the unseeable and the unimaginable: darkness and formlessness, a formlessness referred to as “chaos” in the seventeenth century by Milton in Paradise Lost. The chaos Milton interpreted as intrinsic to the expansive ocean of the primordial earth is less hyperbolic than an insight (happily coincidental) into what appears to be the foundation of Genesis’ creation story. As Prickett and Barnes observe:

The Hebrew word tehom in 1:2, usually translated as ‘the deep’, may be an allusion to Tiamat, the dragon of chaos who is over come in battle by Marduk in the Babylonian New Year creation story Enuma Hlish.18

The primordial earth is described as not only a void without dry land but as essentially all water. Just as it is God who imposes order on the formless deep when he divides it in two, so it is the firmament of heaven (his domain) which will hold up the expanse of water above and manage the enormous power of the water below. This is important because both the water above and the water below, the rain from the sky and the waters of the sea, are controlled by God, and while these separated expanses of water soon become emblems of fertility, they are also soon to become indicators of God’s wrath and instruments of his punishment.

The sea is first made equivalent to formlessness, the “deep” and the “waters” are synonyms for the unimaginable alien nature of the uncreated earth, and embedded within the dichotomies of formlessness and form. This early characterisation, because it is the first, can be seen as the paradigm upon which subsequent sea images in the Bible are crafted:

IN the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters

18 Prickett and Barnes, The Bible, p. 46. Milton would not have been privy to the knowledge gained by more modem biblical scholars. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 90

under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry laud appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters he called Seas: and God saw that it was good. (Gen. 1:1-10)

A significant opposition is established in this passage: the divine is contrasted with the abyss, the living consciousness of a spirit is contrasted with the oblivious nothingness of the void. The deep abyss is oblivion and absence, alien to man, whose place is the dry land and who is made in the image of God, conscious and clearly shaped. Formlessness is an association inextricable from the sea but it is also an association inextricable from the clay from which man is wrought. As such the sea’s formlessness is linked with (and is potentially a reminder of) the nothingness of pre-existence and also, the nothingness of death from which man seeks to escape in the promise of immortality.19 If the sea is life, since we are told “the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life”, so too, the sea is death because it is part of the original emblem of the formlessness and darkness that became living creation in God’s presence.

Light is a primal sign of God’s living presence. Light precedes the emergence of the shapes of life set opposed to, but also emerging from, the dark chaos of the unformed abyss. God is aligned with the presence of light in Genesisl:l-3 when his first creative act, after the creation of heaven and earth, is to call for light. This first utterance is wedded to both the darkness of the deep and God’s spirit movements over the water. The dichotomy of light and dark is evinced throughout the Bible: light is God, truth, faith, clarity, salvation, form and life, where darkness is evil, deceit, doubt, occlusion, damnation, formlessness and death. There is an intrinsic interrelation between light and life and darkness and death throughout the Bible. The dark abyss of the sea is the birthplace of the first living creatures and the darkness of Jesus’ death is the birthplace of the light of immortality for humanity. Death is linked with darkness and new life with angelic light but this light comes after, and even through, the shadows of death. In John 8:12, light is again metaphorically linked to life and it is also aligned with revelation and a journey lit by truth while darkness is associated with blindness, ignorance and also death; the passage reads: “Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” Sight and the ability to see are linked to God in John 9:13 where Jesus

19 My reading of Genesis is of the King James Bible in English. 1 am not commenting on Hebraic thought. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 91 declares: “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see”. Jesus’ death is symbolised in the darkness which covers the land in Matthew 27:45, but in Matthew 28:1-3 the angel which appears to Mary Magdalene “and the other Mary” in order to reveal Jesus’ resurrection is described using light similes: “His countenance was like lightning, and ~>0 his raiment white as snow”. After death, in the midst of a sepulchre, there is divine light." In the Bible the sea embodies the formless nothing of death that only God’s presence makes living and light figures the presence of God. The dichotomy of formlessness and form made comprehensible by God’s presence underpins the portrayal of the sea as a mortal conduit to an immortal realm in Wordsworth’s poetry, and the transformations of Coleridge’s Mariner through his perceptions of light on the ocean.

The incomprehensibility of the early watery earth is emphasised in Genesis 1, where we are presented with something which is nothing: a “void” which is “without form” and which is encased in darkness. The sea is largely unpredictable and unknowable according to Hesiod, Homer and Virgil, and as such it is also dangerous and alien. In Genesis 1, formlessness and God are opposed to one another: “the spirit of God moved upon the waters” but the spirit of God is separate from the water, and God’s actions upon the water are creative acts that transform the formless into form. The sea of the Bible represents the earth without life and is also a primal site of life.21 The acts of creation involve the removal of the darkness, the removal of formlessness, the insertion of dry land and the filling up of the watery abyss with living things. As a result of these creative acts, the fearful unknowability of the dark void is also partly removed, but only partly, as shall be discussed later in the chapter.

The Flood described in Genesis 7 and 8 re-creates the watery chaos of pre-existence. Yet, instead of a formless void to be filled with life, a vision emerges of the corruption and sin of man that must be viciously purged in a cataclysm which not only destroys most of humanity, but most other life forms:

Luke’s account of Jesus’ resurrection is more explicit on this point, describing the “two men” in the sepulchre where Jesus’ body should be as “in shining garments” (Luke 24:1-7). The lack of English attempts to visually represent the initial formlessness of the earth suggests its essential incomprehensibility in the Romantic period. The few paintings that do focus on the very first acts of creation pivot around representations of God’s magisterial act in the creation of light, not on the primordial masses of dark water. Both George Richmond’s The Creation of Light (1826) and J.M.W. Turner’s The Fourth Day of Creation (c.1840) feature God with his arm outstretched, ushering in luminous spheres of light amid dense clouds. There is only a hint of water (which might be the sea) in Richmond’s work but in Turner’s work the light seems to be spreading over a night sky. The incomprehensibility of a watery earth becomes terrifying later in Genesis as it is soon to emblematise, not simply a formless pre-existence, but the consequence of sin and the wrath of God. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 92

And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. (Gen. 6:5-7)

Romantic artists portray the Flood of Genesis as a raging sea. While the initial formlessness of the earth inspired few paintings, the Flood of Genesis was a more popular subject.22 In William Westall’s piece, The Commencement of the Deluge (exhibited 1848), the Flood becomes a sea whose deadly waters boil viciously around those remnants of life struggling to cling to dry land; a portrayal that is fitting given the account of the Flood in the King James Bible:

And the Flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth. And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark. And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days. (Gen. 7:17-24)

Depicted as the renting of all the form and order established by God in the act of Creation, the Flood involves the release of the power of water from above and the release of the waters of the “deep”. Through the depiction of the Flood in the Bible, the sea accrues an identity of caged savagery that must be locked away and is tied to the dichotomies of: destruction and renewal; damnation and salvation; sin and redemption; and, punishment and purification. The cessation of the Flood characterised as the stopping, the restraining, of a savage power locked

22 “ Here are only a few examples: Francis Danby’s colossal 1840 oil, The Deluge. William Westall’s piece, The Commencement of the Deluge (exhibited 1848). John Martin’s The Deluge of 1834. J.M.W Turner, The Deluge (exhibited 1805) and returning to the subject in Shade and Darkness—the Evening of the Deluge and Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) and The Morning After the Deluge, both exhibited in 1843. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 93 away once its objective—to purify the earth and purge it of evil—had been attained: “The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained”. As in the Odyssey and the Aeneid, masses of water become the vicious enemy of humanity, but they are also and equally an emblem of supernatural power. In the above passage a vocabulary suggestive of battle and the victorious seizure of control over a foe prevails: “the waters prevailed”; they allow “no rest”; “the waters assuaged”; “the waters were abated”, they are “stopped”, “restrained”.24 In all this description there is the intimation of disorder, terrible excess, drama and gruesome spectacle. The waters prevail “exceedingly”; they are so extremely voluminous as to cover the tops of mountains and, to borrow a phrase from the Aeneid: “praesentemque viris intentant omnia mortem” (“death, everywhere men facing instant death” 1.91).25 A visceral sensation of suffocation is achieved through the accentuation of the past tense in the repeated use of “was” and the focus drawn to the word “died”,26 given its position at the end of the line:

All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.

As the water closes off the dry spaces, so too it fills the lungs of “every living substance”; the masses of water are equated with mass death. In this passage the determiners “all” and “every” are repeated, signalling the all-encompassing nature of the obliterating force. This massive slaughter is also flagged through the repetition of “destroyed” and the contrast made by the reference to the tiny glimmer of life which is saved: consider the particularity of “only” attributed to Noah and his chosen creatures, and that immense quantity of living flesh that is not merely removed or taken away, but utterly expunged. An image is evoked of pulsing skin, flush with vitality and the dynamic motion of thriving limbs made ominously

"3 Genesis 8:2. 24 Genesis 8: 3-9 “God remembered Noah ... the waters asswaged” this edition spells assuaged as asswaged, 1 have corrected this in the quote given. Aeneid, trans. Fagles 1.109-10. 26 The italics indicate that several of the words “was” do not exist in the original language: more literally it would read “everything that breath-of spirit-of life in-nostrils-of-him from-everything that on-the -dry-land they-died”. 1 am indebted to Richard Treloar for this translation. While the Romantics may have been alerted to this through the italics, the effect in English remains. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 94 still, accentuated by the onomatopoeic “creeping” and the assonance of “creeping” and “beast”. The life that remains in the ark is emphasised and made particularly special because of the mass of life that is lost. The flood waters that become seas of God’s wrath are, at the same time, inseparable from God’s power to save and God’s power to purify and renew. As discussed later in the thesis, Charlotte Bronte uses Flood imagery to describe her heroine’s sublime emotional transports. Bronte embeds Jane Eyre’s helplessness in the midst of an emotional sea, and Lucy Snowe’s sacrificial ingestion of a sea of suffering, with images of drowning.

Since God’s ordering of the cosmos can be disordered if he chooses, as we see when God looses the water from the sky and from within the earth, the very existence of the water contained in the “deep” and held by the firmament of heaven is positioned as an ever-present potential threat and also a valuable assurance of God’s presence. When God assuages the Flood waters in Genesis 8:2, a scene is described in which the wanton disorder of gushing water is held back: “The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” The words “restrained” and “stopped” indicate not merely the cessation of action, but the forced cessation of action, implying that this intervention is necessary. In this excerpt the water is characterised as lacking its own restraint, it is unable to stop itself; mindless and orderless, it requires the intervention of a godly presence to bring it to order, just as Virgil’s sea, made analogous to a frenzied rabble in Book 1 of the Aeneid, requires the authority of a godly presence to still its rage. In Genesis, the very architecture of the earth is threatening, with water held back by the sky and water held back in the earth; there is the intimation of caged savagery, and this savagery is a watery chaos, which, but for the intervention of God, would extinguish all life.

The covenant established between God and the living earth should extinguish any lingering sense of threat linked to the sea: the sea may never again utterly destroy life on earth, but it is still a threatening and chaotic entity. Even though a covenant is established between God and man in Genesis 9,27 the repeated references to the sea as an instrument of punishment that appear in the Bible weaken this covenant as a complete absolution of the threat of the sea’s chaos. In various key points in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, raging stormy waters kindle fear in men’s hearts—the fear of God. Raging seas

27 In Genesis 9:11 God says: “And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a Flood; neither shall there any more be a Flood to destroy the earth.” Salvation and Chasms oj Blood 95 are used to signify God’s wrath, to cut down those massed against him, and to instil a righteous fear. The Red Sea brutally annihilates the mighty Egyptian forces pursuing the children of Israel; when Jonah turns away from God, a vicious storm besets his vessel; and the sea plays its part in the final destruction of the earth in Revelation. One of the miracles performed by Jesus is the calming of a sea storm; another is to walk on water. Both signify divine control over the primordial element and link Jesus inextricably with the power of the Creator. Moreover, they are instant signs of his divinity recognised easily by his disciples.

The sea is a tool of God’s punishment again in Exodus 14, where similar images of the chaos and the spectacle of water annihilating man and beast position it as an extreme force of obliteration, in whose midst, but for the grace of God, one will meet a terrifying death. Exodus 14 underscores several interlocking and recurring motifs which become associated with the sea in both the Old and New Testaments: the purification of the earth through water; the terrible fate of those condemned by God and the salvation of those he favours; and spectacular demonstrations of God’s power. The significance of the images associated with the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus 14 is primarily in their demonstration of the sublimity of God’s power:

And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the LORD caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry laud, and the waters were divided. And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground', and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left. And the Egyptians pursued, and went in after them to the midst of the sea, even all Pharoah’s horses, his chariots, and his horsemen. . . . And Moses stretched forth his hand over the sea, and the sea returned to his strength when the morning appeared; and the Egyptians fled against it; and the LORD overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea. And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharoah that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them. But the children of Israel walked upon dry land in the midst of the sea; and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left. (Ex. 14:21- 29)

While in contemporary literary critical theory the word “spectacle” has accrued Guy Debord’s ideas about the fetishisation of the image in modem consumer culture,"28 here “spectacle” simply means a striking or impressive sight. In the face of the spectacle of God’s

28 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), ch. 1, point 3. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 96 power, the Israelites become unified. When the walls of sea water that collapse upon the Egyptians, the Israelites become unified in their fear of God and in their belief in him:

Thus the LORD saved Israel that day out of the hand of the Eygptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the sea shore. And Israel saw that great work which the LORD did upon the Egyptians: and the people feared the LORD, and believed the LORD, and his servant Moses. (Ex. 14:30-31)

The vision of the Egyptians lying dead upon the shore and the awe of the Israelites in the face of God’s saving powers, visible in the use of the phrase “great work” to describe this mass of dead Egyptians, hearkens to other visions of the great brought low in death by the side of the sea—those mutilated corpses on the beach in the Aeneid. However, whereas the Aeneid’s great tend to be fallen heroes, in Exodus 14 the Egyptians are positioned as enemies of God; they are absolutely out of God’s favour and in the end they seem to know it: “the Egyptians said, Let us flee from the face of Israel; for the LORD fighteth for them against the Egyptians”.^ The death of the Egyptians is not mourned as a spectacle of greatness debased, but heralded as a spectacle of God’s triumph over his enemies.

The sea is God’s instrument of punishment; its manipulation is a demonstration of his almighty power which is blazened in dramatic spectacles of incongruity. The power of God, and the dichotomy created between those who are favoured with salvation and those who are condemned to death, is intensified by the creation of incongruous images of unnatural extremes: people walk on dry land in the middle of the sea as in Exodus 14:29 (“the children of Israel walked upon dry land in the midst of the sea”); the sea is parted such that on either side of the Israelites it forms great walls of water (again 14:29 “the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left”); at the command of one mortal man—who simply stretches forth his arm—the sea crashes in only on the Egyptians leaving the Israelites safe (14:27 “Moses stretched forth his hand over the sea, and the sea returned to his strength”). After all these incongruities, there is the picture of the once mighty Egyptians with their once elaborate chariots strewn dead on the sands: “Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the sea shore”. In the spectacle of the parting of the Red Sea, the incongruities of unnatural extremes produce the fear that leads to a belief in God. Through “belief in the LORD and his servant Moses” these incongruities become the dichotomies of punishment and purification,

29 Exodus 14:25. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 97 damnation and salvation controlled by God. From the outset of the Bible, the control of the sea is depicted as the ultimate emblem of God’s omnipotence, thus the characteristics of the sea represent what is in need of control. Fundamentally in the Bible, the sea represents the chaos of formlessness and changeability, remembering that formlessness is equated with nothingness and death. Belief in God makes death comprehensible, the death of perceived enemies becomes righteous punishment and damnation and those who remain living are read as those worthy of purification and salvation.

Control over the waters of the earth is evidence of God’s divine status; therefore this is a control that his son must also possess. In the New Testament, Jesus’ divinity is revealed several times in relation to his power over the sea. In Matthew 8:23-34 and 14:22-36, Jesus’ power over the sea demonstrates his link to God and sets him apart as divine, but the sea remains a force of chaos, which only responds to the command of God’s son. It is a threatening place of death, a place where demons fling themselves:

And, behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves: but he was asleep. And his disciples came to him, and awoke him, saying, Lord, save us: we perish. And he saith unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? Then he arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm. But the men marvelled, saying, What manner of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him! (Matt. 8:24-27)

A spectacle of greatness is created through this vision of Jesus standing up and manipulating the winds and the sea, a spectacle which builds upon similar visions of greatness from the Old Testament: the vision of God himself organising the waters at the beginning of creation; God causing the Flood and calming the Flood; God’s power acting through Moses as he divides the Red Sea. In this account, Jesus’ control over the sea is absolute; he has only to speak to the wind and sea and they obey him. In fact, the use of the word “rebuked”, with its connotations of chastisement for wrong doing, establishes Jesus’ sovereignty over the especially wild forces of nature, whose wildness is intimated in the line “even the winds and the sea”. The chaos of the wind and the sea appear particularly out of line because their behaviour is unsanctioned. Taken literally, fear and the threat of imminent death are inherent parts of the sea in this passage; metaphorically, the sea here acts as a more universalised emblem of life’s storms and sufferings, from which trust in God can rescue Salvation and Chasms of Blood 98 man.30 Nonetheless, the ability of God to communicate with the sea and the wild forces of nature, connect these elements with the divine, and suffering then is also divine. It is part of God’s plan for human redemption and therefore the sea, even as an emblem of suffering, is also an emblem of God’s mercy and salvation.

In Matthew 14 another enduring spectacle of greatness involving the sea is put forward when Jesus is seen to walk on water:

And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea. And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear. But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid. And Peter answered him and said Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water. And he said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt? And when they were come into the ship, the wind ceased. Then they that were in the ship came and worshipped him, saying, Of a truth thou art the Son of God. (Matt. 14: 25-33)

As in the previous examples of divine power over the sea, a dramatic spectacle is created through the juxtaposition of incongruous images and their ability to reveal the being of God or his influence: Jesus, a man, is able to walk on the liquid surface of the sea as if he were on dry land. Such a wonder is presented as the work of God and, as a result, Jesus is seen to be God’s son, just as God’s power over creation is shown in his manipulation of the chaos of water and God’s favour is shown in the way Moses is able to command the sea. In these images of Jesus calming storms and walking on the sea, the sea is still a place of fear and danger. Peter is “afraid”, he fears for his life and calls out to be saved. The wonder and awe created by Jesus’ actions rely on this portrayal; if the sea were not perceived as a danger, its control would cease to be a miracle. So long as Peter listens to Jesus, the word of God, he too can walk upon the sea; that is, he remains safe and can potentially do all manner of miraculous things. But when he strays from God he sinks: in God’s presence the sea is navigable, a place of faith and hope; without God, it becomes the monstrous opacity of fear and doubt.

30 Pheme Perkins, Reading the New Testament, 2nd edn (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), p. 226. In her chapter on Matthew, chapter 13, Perkins emphasises the broader messages inherent to the gospel. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 99

In the Bible, the sea is regularly a site of unmeaning contradiction transformed into divine paradox. The sea is used metaphorically to suggest the extent of God’s knowledge, as well as the expansiveness and formidable power of his judgements. For instance, in Psalm 36: 6, God’s “righteousness is like the great mountains” and his “judgments are a great deep”; and when God asks Job in 38:16 “Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? or hast thou walked in the search of the depth?”, he is pointing out Job’s limitations—Job cannot control

T I death, nor know the “breadth of the earth”. The sea, like other natural elements, is unknown and unknowable to man; it represents the extraordinary force of God and his intimate connection with what he has created. Thus his voice is “as the sound of many waters” just as his “eyes were as a flame of fire”. The sea does not represent God; it is a material object to be manipulated by God.

Sea Monsters in the Bible In the Greco-Roman works I have discussed, the dichotomies of the feminine supernatural—the immortal and the mortal; beauty and hideousness; the alien and the known; stability and chaos; fertility and barrenness and passionate love and rage—are embodied by female monsters, nymphs and goddesses. To varying degrees Homer, Hesiod and Virgil resolve these dichotomies by fashioning them into supernatural deities, and particularly in the Aeneid, the dichotomies of the feminine supernatural are harnessed for the divinely sanctioned power of Rome. In the Bible, the spectacles of God’s omnipotent power over the dichotomies tied to the sea include demonstrations of his omnipotent power over its inhabitants: fish, the Leviathan, the Fish of Jonah, and the Beast of Revelation.

In the Bible, just as the sea in its formlessness is alien and hostile to man, so are marine animals. As noted earlier, despite their primacy in the generation of species in the act of creation (or perhaps because of it), sea creatures are the first on the list of animals over which man has dominion:

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw

31 Job 38:17-18. 32 Rev. 1: 14-15. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 100

that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. (Gen. 1:20-22)

Before the earth can “bring forth” the more familiar living creatures such as the “cattle” and the “creeping thing[s]”, the sea brings forth life, and, as a result of poetic patterning, the first created marine animals are also the first to be dominated:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. (Gen. 1:26)

In the Lure of the Sea, Corbin describes the Bible’s marine creatures as obscured in the abyss and as utterly alien to man: “hidden in the mysterious darkness of the deep, [they] could not be named by man, and consequently were outside his domain”. "X "X As “outside his domain” and as unable to be named, marine animals are perhaps less able to be dominated, for as Elijah Judah Schochet remarks, “to bestow a name upon an entity, a name that would endure as its permanent designation, denotes a mastery of the nature of that entity, possibly even one’s lordship and dominance over that entity”.34 In Genesis 2:19-20, Adam is said to name “every living creature”, but only the “beasts of the field” and the “fowl of the air” are specified in this naming process. This would seem to exclude a lot of animals; for example insects remain unspecified, though they are arguably implied in “beasts of the field”. Marine animals are also among those creatures left unspecified. Moreover, their entire domain is unreferenced: animals in the sky and on the earth are named, but those of the sea are not mentioned. Unnamed and as such potentially unknown and unknowable in Genesis, marine animals are substantially set apart from other creatures and are early established as particularly alien to the life of man. Images of the biblical Flood repeatedly reinstate the sea and marine animals into a zone of punishment, fear and death. Marine creatures are depicted as part of the watery chaos that is loosed upon the earth. There is no mention of their death, yet in their apparent ability to survive such a cataclysm, there is no mention of God’s favour

33 Corbin, The Lure of the Sea, p. 2. 34 Elijah Judah Schochet, Animal Life in Jewish Traditions (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1984), p. 11 Salvation and Chasms of Blood 101 or of any grace granted to their own dynamic living bodies. Because the violent death-dealing sea is their home, marine animals are not only utterly alien to those beings on the land whose living breath has been taken, but also inherently part of the disorder.

Man’s dominion over the earth is symptomatic of his close link with the divine. In Genesis, the existence of life relies on the order made out of the formlessness of the abyss, and that formlessness is set in opposition to creation. God has already used the terror of a watery chaos to punish man in the Flood, and while the covenant is set in place with Noah, the sea continues to play its part as a threatening instrument of remonstrance. Over and over again, God’s greatness is asserted through a reference to his dominion over the sea. Similarly, man, made in the image of God, is granted control over marine animals first and this hierarchy of control suggests that the marine animal is a primal threat. The idea of the marine animal as a monstrous threat, a threat that only God can overcome, is perhaps most viscerally captured in the figure of the Leviathan, that “mythical monster associated with the sea”. 35

in Job 26:12-13 and Psalm 104:25-26, God is said to have made the Leviathan; he is the creator and destroyer of this monstrous beast, this “dragon” of the sea, and the immensity of his power is made manifest through the immense monstrosity of the creature he has vanquished. The Leviathan is variously described as “that piercing serpent”, “that crooked serpent” (Is. 27:1) and also as the “dragon” (Is. 27:1, Ps. 74:12-14) or simply “the serpent” (Amos 9:3). His domain is “this great and wide sea” (Ps. 104:25-6), “the bottom of the sea” (Amos 9:3), “the sea” or “the waters” and his fellows are “things creeping innumerable/both small and great beasts” and “the ships” (Ps. 104:25-6). In only one account is the Leviathan playful—Psalm 104:25-26. In his discussion of the references to the Leviathan in the Bible, of which he identifies six, C. Uehlinger comments on the passage from Psalm 104, where the monstrosity and viciousness, as well as the spectacle and terrible drama which characterise the Leviathan in Isaiah, Amos, Job 41 and Psalm 74 become deflated and the sea creature is seen as playful:

So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts. There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein. (Ps. 104:25-26)

35 C. Uehlinger, “Leviathan”, in Douglas cd., New International Dictionary of the Bible, p. 956. Leviathan is not named in Gen 2; references to the Leviathan occurs only in Job 41:1, Ps. 74:14, 104:26 and Isa 27:1. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 102

Only in this reference, through the word “play” and the suggestion that to play is the Leviathan’s function as decreed by God, does the Leviathan’s environment become pleasant and his manner apparently harmless. Yet, since God “made” the Leviathan “play”, the Leviathan’s behaviour is forced and its significance is less as an image of marine frolicking and joy, and more as another image of God’s omnipotent control. In all other accounts, the function of the Leviathan is to assault God’s enemies, to “bite them” or to prove, through its terrible monstrosity and viciousness, God’s power over all creation when he is destroyed because God has the power to kill “even Leviathan”. As God’s instrument of punishment, the Leviathan of Amos is a dark brooding presence at the bottom of the sea, ready to bite those who would seek to conceal themselves from God’s penetrating gaze.

The relatively few references to the Leviathan in the Bible do not detract from the enormity of his mythological significance and the enormous literal and visual impact he has made on Western culture. He is, as Uehlinger puts it, a “paradigmatic monster and [an] enemy of considerable mythological attire, he outweighs other representatives of chaos and evil”. The Leviathan’s characterisation as a serpent links him, in the mind of a Christian reader in the Romantic period, to the figure of the devil, as delineated in both the Old and New Testaments. Described repeatedly as a serpent, a “crooked serpent” or “piercing serpent” as in Isaiah and Job 41, the Leviathan is associated with the ultimate emblem of serpentine crookedness: the “subtil” and beguiling snake of Genesis 3. This devil-serpent is also one of God’s creatures: “the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made”, and this act of creation raises an enduring theological paradox: God created evil and he destroys evil, and both the creation and destruction of evil are

Schochet, Animal Life, pp. 28-29. Schochet sees the fact that God created the Leviathan, the playful Leviathan and the instruction to the “dragons, and all deeps” to praise God (Ps. 148: 7) as an indication of the way the ancient Hebrews demythologised the “original Leviathan, the terrifying hydra-headed monster of the ancient cosmogonies” and showcased the indomitable power of their God. However, he also acknowledges that in other writings, such as the prophets, the Leviathan “emerges as the symbol for a powerful adversary”. Made by God and used by God, still the Leviathan is a powerful adversary in many accounts, as Schochet himself acknowledges. 37 This is supported by Howard Wallace, “Leviathan and the Beast in Revelation”, The Biblical Archaeologist 11.3 (1948), pp. 61-68. Wallace remarks (p. 62) “there is no question but that the most famous monster of western civilization is the biblical Leviathan”. The serpent, devil and the figure of the Leviathan are linked by John M. Steadman in “Leviathan and Renaissance Etymology”, Journal of the History of Ideas 28.4 (1967), pp. 575-576. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 103 established as emblems of his power. This is particularly apparent in the various constructions of the figure of the Leviathan, especially in Isaiah and Job.

A vision of apocalyptic struggle emerges in Isaiah 27:1 due to its emphasis on God’s judgement and the polar opposition established between the Lord and the Dragon of the sea. Apart from asserting God’s absolute power over everything, even Leviathan, this passage implies the punishment of evil with phrases like “shall punish’’ and “shall slay’’. The force of this judgement, by the sword, suggests a wrongdoing that is terrible and deserving of death. References to the sword that is “sore”, “great” and “strong”, as well as the reference to slaying, intimate a violent struggle. God is on the one side, as emphasised by the evocations of his power through “strong” and “sword” (as well as the assonance of “Lord”, “sore” and “sword”), and the Leviathan is on the other. The Leviathan, devilish in its serpent form, is further set against the uncomplicated power of God (highlighted by the repeated single syllables) by the recurrence of double syllables in “piercing”, “serpent”, “crooked” and “dragon” which emphasise the duplicitous nature of this “crooked serpent”:

In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.39

Tova Forti, in a commentary on animal imagery in the Book of Proverbs, describes the serpentine dragon of the sea in Isaiah 27:1 as one of the “enemies of Yahweh” and also notes that in the Bible more broadly all snakes “are considered to be poisonous”.40 The Leviathan is repeatedly referred to as a serpent of the sea, crooked and often set opposed to God. The defining quality of the snake is its cunning, 1 and in Job 41:1-34 the serpent nature associated with the Leviathan reappears. Here the Leviathan is cunning, just as the serpent in Genesis is cunning and he is associated with “supplications” and “soft words”:

On the one hand God is responsible for the whole package and the universe of the Bible is therefore not dualistic. On the other hand a dualism is inherent to the universe through the opposition of God and what he creates. References to God as the creator of all including evil occur in: Is. 45:7 and Jer. 27:5. 39 See also Is. 51:9, “Awake, awake, put on strength,/O arm of the LORD; awake, as in the/ancient days, in the generations of old/Art thou not it that hat cut Rahad,/and wounded the dragon?” 40 Tova L. Forti, Animal Imagery in the Book of Proverbs (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 123-124. 41 Forti supports this idea on page 124. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 105

The figure of the Leviathan also has resonances for the portrayal of the sea itself: in Psalm 104, the sea is a place of fantastic efflorescence and extremes of gloriously frolicking creation, but in the other five portrayals of the Leviathan, the sea is merely the site of grotesque evil, threat and terror, where an evil creature lurks ready to bite—a creature so terrible that God battles with it and uses it to injure his enemies. As such, even if we put any demonic overtones aside, the figure of the Leviathan functions primarily as an instrument of God’s rage and revenge. In Amos 9:3, the Leviathan is imagined as a means to harm God’s enemies and those who seek to hide from him:

And though they hide themselves in the top of Carmel, I will search and take them out thence: and though they be hid from my sight in the bottom of the sea, thence will I command the serpent, and he shall bite them.

Here, as we have seen in the above mentioned Psalms and will see in the story of Jonah, the sea can be simultaneously construed as a place of God and his creations, and a dark extreme place out of God’s sight. Amos 9:3 presents the contradiction of actually being “hid from my sight” but also within the reach of God. God controls all life and has access to everything regardless of terrain: those hiding themselves will be found, “though they be hid from my sight in the bottom of the sea”. God’s omniscience and all-pervading might is illustrated through the allusion to physical and geographical extremes such as “the top of Carmel” and “the bottom of the sea”.

Leviathan and marine animals are thus simultaneously instruments of Gods’ punishment and adversaries of God. Yet, the Leviathan’s significance is also achieved through the incongruous image of the playful creature of God, and in Matthew 4:18-20 marine animals represent those who achieve salvation by listening to and living the word of God:

And Jesus walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. And they straitway left their nets, and followed him.

The sea is also a source of nourishment, even in the midst of “a desert place”: Salvation and Chasms of Blood 105

The figure of the Leviathan also has resonances for the portrayal of the sea itself: in Psalm 104, the sea is a place of fantastic efflorescence and extremes of gloriously frolicking creation, but in the other five portrayals of the Leviathan, the sea is merely the site of grotesque evil, threat and terror, where an evil creature lurks ready to bite—a creature so terrible that God battles with it and uses it to injure his enemies. As such, even if we put any demonic overtones aside, the figure of the Leviathan functions primarily as an instrument of God’s rage and revenge. In Amos 9:3, the Leviathan is imagined as a means to harm God’s enemies and those who seek to hide from him:

And though they hide themselves in the top of Carmel, I will search and take them out thence: and though they be hid from my sight in the bottom of the sea, thence will I command the serpent, and he shall bite them.

Here, as we have seen in the above mentioned Psalms and will see in the story of Jonah, the sea can be simultaneously construed as a place of God and his creations, and a dark extreme place out of God’s sight. Amos 9:3 presents the contradiction of actually being “hid from my sight” but also within the reach of God. God controls all life and has access to everything regardless of terrain: those hiding themselves will be found, “though they be hid from my sight in the bottom of the sea”. God’s omniscience and all-pervading might is illustrated through the allusion to physical and geographical extremes such as “the top of Carmel” and “the bottom of the sea”.

Leviathan and marine animals are thus simultaneously instruments of Gods’ punishment and adversaries of God. Yet, the Leviathan’s significance is also achieved through the incongruous image of the playful creature of God, and in Matthew 4:18-20 marine animals represent those who achieve salvation by listening to and living the word of God:

And Jesus walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. And they straitway left their nets, and followed him.

The sea is also a source of nourishment, even in the midst of “a desert place”: Salvation and Chasms of Blood 106

And Jesus went forth, and saw a great multitude, and was moved with compassion toward them, and he healed their sick. And when it was evening, his disciples came to him, saying, This is a desert place, and the time is now past; send the multitude away, that they may go into the villages, and buy themselves victuals. But Jesus said unto them, They need not depart; give ye them to eat. And they say unto him, We have here but five loaves, and two fishes. He said, Bring them hither to me. And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and took the five loaves, and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude. And they all did eat, and were filled: and they took up the fragments that remained twelve baskets full. And they that had eaten were about five thousand men, beside women and children. (Matt. 14:14-21)

More broadly, the Sea of Galilee is an important site for so much of what happens in the life of Christ: the Sea of Galilee is iconographically linked with Christ’s divine presence on earth as well as his power and mercy.

The Book of Jonah offers another ambiguous portrayal of marine life in which the marine animal is both a saviour and associated with hell. The account of Jonah’s sea adventures in Jonah 1 and 2 is often popularly referred to as the story of Jonah and the whale (though this zoological assignation is by no means absolutely verifiable). The key narrative components of the story of Jonah, in which a man tries to escape the will of God and is set upon by a storm at sea, are visible in many works of literature, not least one of the foundational works in the history of the English realistic novel, Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner. In the Book of Jonah, the sea is again punitive and pedagogical:

Now the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the son of Amittai saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. but Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. But the LORD sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken. (1:1-4)

The storm is overtly “sent out” at the will of God in response to Jonah’s transgression, which is not only to ignore the will of God but to “flee” from his “presence”. In this description of Jonah immediately heading to the sea in order to hide from God, we see again as we did in Amos 9:3 that the sea is both a site of God’s presence and a place out of the sight of God. In Genesis God moves over the water, but the water is differentiated from God; God’s presence Salvation and Chasms of Blood 107 is opposed to the water. Yet God acts through the sea and within the sea, and his all-powerful reach is symbolised by the depths of the sea. God’s creatures, both beautifully fertile and terribly vicious, are in the sea, nonetheless people descend to its depths to be out of his sight. When they are there, they are both hidden from his sight and exposed to his will.

The storm is primarily a punishment; it is a demonstration of God’s all-encompassing power and is intended as a lesson directed overtly towards Jonah who knows this himself and commands his crew as follows: “Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you” (1:12). The effect of the storm is similar to that wrought by the Flood of Genesis and the divided sea of Exodus; it generates fear, belief in God, and renewed devotion.

So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging. Then the men feared the LORD exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice unto the LORD, and made vows. (1:15-16)

On the one hand, the fact that the sea stops raging is a sign of God’s favour and his kindness. The chaotic water seems to signal death, which is why the crew were initially reluctant to toss Jonah into the water; instead, the sea receives him calmly. However, both in the excerpt and in what follows, the sea is a deadly threat and monstrous trial. It is miraculous that the sea ceases to rage. The effect of the passage relies on the fear the sea tempest has inspired; that the sea is calm is the work of God and that it storms is the work of God. Since the sea is calm as soon as Jonah enters it, the great fish sent by God is less Jonah’s saviour than it is another trial for him to endure: Jonah prays to God “out of the fish’s belly”. We are not told that he cries out in the water and in response is sent the fish, and the word “then” indicates that it is after being swallowed that Jonah seeks God. Yet, it is through the trials sent by God that Jonah comes to properly fear God and be willing to obey him, and in this way both the sea and the fish become Jonah’s salvation; nevertheless, they can be seen as his saviours only because they cause him to suffer. This is evident in the account of Jonah’s prayer from the belly of the fish:

Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. CHAPTER 2 THEN Jonah prayed unto the LORD his GOD out of the fish’s belly. And said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the LORD, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice. For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst Salvation and Chasms of Blood 108

of the seas; and the Floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me. Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple. The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me forever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O LORD my God. When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple. They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy. But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the LORD. And the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land. (1:17,2:1-10)

The “belly of the fish” and “the belly of hell” become correlated in Jonah’s prayer. On a purely literary level, the association is contrived through the close proximity of the lines in which the repetition of the word belly occurs: appearing three times every four lines, the recurrence creates a lexical pattern in which the fish’s belly is also the belly of hell and represents, along with the storm, Jonah’s “affliction”.

On a theological level, affliction and sin themselves are symbolised by the sea and the “great fish”, even as the sea belongs to God and the fish is an agent of God: in his prayer Jonah describes how God’s waters encompassed him: “all thy billows and thy waves passed over me”. Jonah is both closed in by God’s waves and closed out of God's sight. The blight of being cast away from God is associated with plunging to the depths of the sea, and being in the depths of the sea is also linked to corruption. Jonah cries, “thou hadst cast me into the deep, into the midst of the seas” and the depth of the water is all pervasive; it is linked to the bottoms of the earth and to the dark fathoms of corruption. Corruption is spatially denoted by depth, whereas salvation is denoted by height, by being “brought up”. The line, “yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption” occur after Jonah has described his descent into the water and, with alliterative force, detailed the sensation of sea weeds coiling about his head. It is only in affliction that Jonah prays to God. Literally, this affliction is emblematised by the sea storm and by being shut up in an enormous fish for three days and three nights. Anagogically, this affliction can be read as the weakness and corruption in which Jonah was mired when he attempted to ignore and escape the will of God. Like sea, marine animals are dominated by God; they are the tools of his wrath and mercy used to punish and purify, damn and save. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 109

No more Sea The sea is set in opposition to God as early as the first lines of Genesis and while it often does God’s bidding, often as an instrument of his wrath, it does not ultimately seem to be the place of God since it is cast out from God’s newly formed paradise-world at the end of Revelation. Herein lies another contradiction, for in Revelation 4:6 and 15:2, John reports catching sight of a glassy sea in front of God’s throne in Heaven. Since it is described as a “sea of glass like unto crystal” and “a sea of glass mingled with fire”, a distinction needs to be drawn between the earthly sea and this heavenly sea of glass because this glassy sea has few similarities to the sea on earth (at least prior to the apocalyptic hurling of fire upon it).

In Revelation 8: 8, as the seventh seal is opened and the second angel sounds a trumpet, the seas are turned to blood: “And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood”. The terror of this spectacle lies again in the incongruity of fire loosed on the sea, but it also lies in the image of immense volumes of blood, with its intimations of gaping wounds and violent death. As an original harbinger of life, the sea now becomes an expanse of sickening death. There is no quick annihilation of the earth God created; God punishes those construed as the wicked, and his punishment is drawn out and torturous, imagined as a multilayered spectacle of hellish gore. The seas turned to blood is just one part of the many horrors cast upon the earth which is beset by numerous violators: scorpions torturing men such that they desire death but cannot die, terrible conflagrations scorching all the earth, locusts shaped like horses with the faces of men with the power to hurt men, and those unforgettable figures, the four horsemen—War, Famine, Pestilence and Death.44 Many biblical scholars have attempted to explain away the images of hateful violence thrown up by the book of Revelation by ascribing them to a people in crisis, a people reacting to the horrors of their experiences at the hands of the Romans, a people needing to separate themselves from Roman culture. Chris Frilingos has argued against these apologists and noted that the violent imagery of Revelation reflects less an opposition to Roman culture and more an inscription within Roman culture, a culture fascinated by spectacles of death 45

In Revelation 13:1, the sea also becomes an emblem of sin:

44 Rev. 6: 2-8 and Rev 9: 5-10. Only “Death” is overtly named. 45 Chris Frilingos, Spectacles of Empire: Monsters, Martyrs and the Book of Revelation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 94. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 110

AND I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

This beast, with its signature number 666, makes war on the saints and blasphemes against God and all of heaven. The beast is an emblem of monstrous hybridity with leopard characteristics, as well as “the feet of a bear” and “the mouth of a lion”. The beast is a symbol of evil and he was bom in the sea.46 Yet the emergence of this beast is a sign of coming renewal and salvation as much as it is a sign of imminent destruction and damnation.

Towards the end of Revelation, when the shining perfection of the New Jerusalem is set before us, with its pure flowing river and its walls bejewelled and its streets become golden, we are explicitly told that there is “no sea” in God’s perfect city:

AND I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. (Rev. 21:1-4)

Revelation offers the last word, as it were, on the status of the sea and its relation to God. Among the “former things” that have passed away are estrangement from God; death and sorrow; and the existence of the sea.47 The horror of death and the sea are linked by the loose anaphora visible in the phrases: “and there was no more sea”/“and there shall be no more death”. The above passage provides a litany of those terrible aspects of man’s former life that will be removed, thereby accentuating the glory of the new world—a world that is finally suitable to receive God’s living presence. Revelation leaves little room for the middle- ground as St. Augustine observed when he wrote about the last judgement: “It will then

His number is described in Rev. 13:18, 13:6-7 describes his blasphemous nature and 13:2 describes his hybridity.

Sea images are also involved in the ending of time. In Rev. 10:1-6 a “mighty angel come[s] down from heaven” and he places “his right foot upon the sea, and his left food on the earth” and invokes (“sware[s] by him that liveth for ever and ever”) the power of God to end time (“that there should be time no longer”). Salvation and Chasms of Blood 111 become clear that true and full happiness belongs to none but the good, while all the wicked, and only the wicked, are to suffer deserved and supreme unhappiness”.48 In Revelation, the good are saved and the wicked are cast into hell and the sea is entirely expunged from the earth.

In the Bible, belief in God has made the dichotomies of the sea comprehensible. Formlessness and form, death and life, destruction and renewal, damnation and salvation, sin and redemption, punishment and purification, changelessness and change produce overwhelming “sorrow”, “crying” and “pain”, and are presented as comprehensible only by faith in God. In God’s shining city, the dichotomies of the sea are entirely expunged. Within the context of eighteenth-century aesthetic theories, the sublime affect—here the sorrow, crying and pain—produced by the dichotomies embodied by the sea no longer exist in God’s shining city. The sublime has “passed away”. Nonetheless, God’s shining city is the conclusive representation of the sublime in the Bible because it is evidence of God’s presence on earth; God “himself’, in transcendent splendour, lives there.

The extreme dichotomies of the biblical sea are depicted as signs of God’s divine power and presence in the mortal world. The monstrous hybridity, the opposed yet seemingly inextricable, nature of these dichotomies makes the portrayal of the sea in the Bible similar to the portrayal of the sea in Greco-Roman tradition. But God’s control over the sea in the Bible has more in common with the Roman control of the sea at the end of the Aeneid than with the unresolved dichotomies of the Odyssey. Yet, Virgilian and biblical cosmogonies are different: Aeneas gains momentary allegiance from the marine environment because overall the Roman pantheon divinely sanctions Roman ascendency, the God of the Bible is presented as omnipotent and therefore his control of the sea is absolute. Even so, there is a fundamental instability at the heart of depictions of the sea in the Bible which mirrors the instability of the Greco-Roman sea. The instability inherent to Greco-Roman depictions of the sea stems from the instability inherent to their cosmogonies—the gods stabilise the universe and yet are unstable themselves and capable of good and evil. A similar instability is visible in the Christian tradition. God, the antithesis of nothingness is present with this nothingness “in the beginning”, and God who is all good created good and evil.

48 St. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed., R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 966. Salvation and Chasms of Blood 112

Embodying God’s fertility, mercy and power, serpentine crookedness, monstrosity and evil, and linked to the Leviathan and the enormous hell-belly of the fish of Jonah, the marine animal in the Bible is frighteningly unstable. Marine animals are instruments of God’s punishment and evidence of his wondrous bounty; they are on the side of God and his adversary. Dominated and also indomitable, except by the hand of God, marine animals are beautiful, playful, enormous, terrifying and repulsive beings. The sea of the Bible is the residence of both the good and evil of Creation; it is the place where the beast of Revelation is bom and the means by which God punishes the sin of man in Genesis and Exodus. The complexities of the sea in the Bible are depicted as contained and resolved through appeals to the power and omnipotence of God; they are understood as God’s plan and become God’s cryptic paradoxes rather than irresolvable contradictions. Within the framework of the Bible, faith allows humanity to navigate this ocean of paradoxes; turning away from God in doubt or disbelief leads humanity to become sunk within the unfathomable abyss returned to its monstrous unmeaning dichotomous extremes. Inescapable as an influence upon the Romantic imagination, the imagery of the Bible, with its ability to produce vivid mental panoramas, creates sublime dramas in its descriptions of the sea. Romantic Seas, a Prelude.

In England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the seaside was increasingly an object of fascination. It attracted swarms of health seeking tourists who walked along the shore, took lodgings at the myriad of new structures built exclusively for their traffic or busied themselves in bathing machines.1 2Naturalists 3 collected their mementos of the earth’s disputed origins, and views of sea-mists and sea-scenes were recorded. Nevertheless, English perceptions of the sea and marine animals must be seen through the bulky lens of Greco-Roman and biblical sea images, associations and myths—the mental “furniture” that made up the educated gentleman’s (and to varying extents, the educated lady’s) consciousness.4

The Romantic sea is fundamentally theistic; that is, it is portrayed as evidence of the presence of God and gods in the world. The Greco-Roman tradition enters the Romantic sea through the interdependent, inextricable and dichotomous nature—the monstrous hybridity—of the ideas and emotions tied to the sea in Greco-Roman and biblical works. Particularly in the writing of Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Bronte, the dichotomies of the feminine supernatural and Roman masculine virtue are maintained as a femininity of powerful, independent, creative and passionate excess which requires both expression and restraint. The dichotomies of the heroic sea journey underpin the tormenting sea journeys, wrecks and drownings that define individual worth, virtue and transformation in the work of all the Romantics but especially in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Romantic seas encode the dichotomies of God’s control over the waters in explicit figurations of the sea as an instrument of God’s punishment, mercy and spiritual purgation—which they present as the

Edmund W. Gilbert, Brighton, Old Ocean 's Bauble (London: Methuen, 1954), pp. 20-28. 2 For comments on the quests of natural philosophers: Corbin, Lure, p. 97; Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, The Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending and Minding the Misconceived Gap Between Science and the Humanities (London: Vintage, 2003), pp. 133-34. 3 Dorothy Wordsworth, Feb 3 Diary Entry, from “The Alfoxden Journal”, in Stephen Greenblatt, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th edn, vol. 2 (W.W. Norton and Co, 2006), p. 391. Dorothy Wordsworth reflects in 1798: “Walked with Coleridge over the hills. The sea at first obscured by vapour”. Dorothy is delighted by the elemental harmony of a seascape, declaring: “1 never saw such a union of earth, sky, and sea.” 4 Simon Goldhill, Review of Tim Rood’s The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination, in Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 3 June 2005. 114 necessary precondition of resurrection and immortality. Within Shelley’s humanist revision of the Greco-Roman and biblical tradition, the sea’s monstrous hybridity becomes the opposition of intellectual, socio political tyranny, chaos and violence and intellectual, socio­ political liberty, peace and harmony. Yet in his ambiguous treatments of the principle of Necessity and by giving the control of the sea to man, Shelley’s sea retains the biblical notion of one controlling force (even though it is material) and man’s pre-eminent place in the world. Chapter 4: Ann Radcliffe 's Pagan Sea Nymphs.

In “The Sea-nymph”, a poem ascribed to the heroine of The Mysteries of Udo/pho, Ann Radcliffe offers up a female spirit of the sea—playful, powerful, and full of allusion to Greek myth—with her overtly siren-like “charmful pow’r” and ability to “breathe around/ Such strains as speak no mortal means”.1 2Similarly, in the poem “Morning, on the Sea-shore” from The Romance of the Forest, Radcliffe evokes a Greco-Roman seascape. Again she imagines powerful, feminine spirits frolicking in the sea; the “smooth and yellow sands” of this seashore belong to Neptune, and the joyous sprites, with their supernatural abilities and daring, “Have chac’d the waves unchecked by fear”. The traits ascribed to the female spirits which appear in many of the interpolated poems in The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, and the characteristics which delineate the sea environ in which they appear, also display a marked kinship with the sea spirits and sea environs evoked by Radcliffe in the poetic pieces affixed to the posthumously published Gaston de Blondeville. A distinct lexicon of the feminine supernatural appears in Radcliffe’s poetical seascapes; there are repeated references to vanishings, mists and eerie music, as well as to ethereal forms, fairies, sprites and nymphs. Radcliffe uses the terms “fairy”, “nymph,” “fay” and “sprite” interchangeably, and her magical sea women are all energetic and robust beings whose magic acts on the violent waves and the fascinating and dangerous creatures that dwell within them. Continuing the Greco-Roman tradition, Radcliffe’s seascapes are contradictory places of gentle magic and monstrous passion, freedom and servitude, mental renewal and madness, community and isolation.

1 Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Lines 21-28, 179- 181. Unless otherwise stated, all references to this novel and its poems refer to this edition. Line and page numbers will largely appear in the body of the essay. This is the case for all references to Radcliffe’s primary works.

2 Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, 1791 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), Lines 1-6, 288- 90. 1 also refer to several other works in my examples: Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance, 1790 (London: The Folio Society, 1987); Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, 2nd edn., 1797 (London: Penguin, 2000). Also Gaston de Blondeville, or The Court of Henry’ III. Keeping Festival in Ardenne, A Romance. To Which I Prefixed a Memoir of the Author, with Extracts from Her Journals. 4 vols., (London: Henry Colburn, 1826). Talfourd’s memoir is in vol. 1 and the “Miscellaneous poems” are in vol. 4. Pagan Nymphs 116

Radcliffe’s poetic interpolations depict an audacious style of femininity anchored in the dichotomies of the feminine supernatural. In chapter 1 I analysed the ways in which Calypso, Circe and the Sirens represent beauty and hideousness; the known and the alien; stability and chaos; fertility and barrenness and passionate love and rage, desire and repulsion, wonder and terror, and hope and despair. Reflecting Radcliffe’s domestication of the Greek myths of the Sirens and the Nereids, the feminine supernatural enters her work as a femininity of excess, opulently paraded beauty, dynamic physicality, almost unbounded independence and the unearthly ability to manipulate the sea. This is a style of femininity opposed to that of her virtuous, modest, and vulnerable heroines—the style of femininity supported by Radcliffe’s narratives. The dichotomies of the feminine supernatural enable Radcliffe’s heroines to craft and enforce a substantial degree of mental power and independence; it also allows them to resist another aspect of the feminised sea, the madness of unbounded passion, power and independence embodied in Udolpho’s Sister Agnes, formerly Signora Laurentini. Radcliffe’s heroines are emotionally overwhelmed, and their reason is suspended within the sublime reveries and mental transports involving the feminine supernatural. Nevertheless, the symbiosis established between Radcliffe’s nymphs and heroines allow these heroines to balance reason and sensibility.

Radcliffe is primarily known as an eighteenth-century Gothic novelist, a novelist whose heroines are plagued by fainting fits, often in the midst of labyrinthine castles and extended landscape descriptions while being pursued by depraved entities of all kinds—entities who turn out to be depraved in all too human ways. Much critical attention is given to Radcliffe's fainting heroines and her landscapes, yet her descriptions of the sea, both in relation to these characteristic traits and more broadly, have been largely ignored. With the exception of Myra Reynolds and Beatrice Battaglia, Radcliffe’s seas receive little comment from scholars. The critical attention to her poetry, with the exception of Ellen Arnold and Battaglia, is similarly scant.4 Though they are less extensive than her descriptions of mountains and forests, Radcliffe’s seascapes form an integral part of her narrative settings and dramatic

Beatrice Battaglia, “Ann Radcliffe in the Representational History of Venice: the Influence of Udolpho’s ‘Venetian scenes’” (paper presented at the ACUME European Thematic Network International Conference, “Cultures of Memory/Memories of Culture”, Cyprus 20-22, February 2004). In this paper Battaglia asserts the important influence of Radcliffe on the Romantics.

Myra Reynolds, The Treatment of Nature in English Poetry: Between Pope and Wordsworth (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1909), pp. 219-20. Ellen Arnold “Deconstructing the Patriarchal Palace: Ann Radcliffe’s Poetry in The Mysteries of Udolpho" Women and Language 19.2 (1996), pp. 21-9, p. 21. Pagan Nymphs 117 structures: they appear at almost every key juncture in the dramatic structure of The Mysteries of Udolpho and at many key junctures in The Romance of the Forest and The Italian. In her poems, seascapes are equally if not more prevalent than landscapes.5 In her novels and posthumously published work, there are seventy-four poems; just under half of these make reference to the sea. When Radcliffe’s poetry is actively included in our conception of her writing as a whole, her portrayals of femininity become haunted by pagan visions of sea nymphs; dynamic and benevolent, these nymphs or sprites are to be found singing or dancing in the sea or upon the shore, and the liberty and ease of their poetic lives directly opposes the confined and anxious states of the heroines in Radcliffe’s narratives. These nymphs are almost always female and they are always pagan.6 Nevertheless, most critics, if they talk about the sea at all, entirely ignore Radcliffe’s allusions to Greco-Roman myth and the pagan magic which pervades her poetry. Instead, a recent critical focus (for instance the work of Robert Mayhew) has been an attempt to identify the Christian theological subtleties that infuse Radcliffe’s nature descriptions and bespeak her preoccupation with the achievement of a middle-ground between reason and sensibility.7 Radcliffe’s poetic seascapes, with their pagan features, also operate as an important space where this fundamental preoccupation finds expression.

Radcliffe’s fiction has been described as a precursor to many of the Romantics’ favoured pre-occupations,8 and her appeal to the supernatural through Greek myth and pagan belief in her sea images reflects a motivation regularly ascribed to Gothic and Romantic

5 These are just a few examples: in Udolpho seascapes are part of the mysterious singing near the convent of St. Claire and the revelation of the performer’s identity resolves most of the novel’s conflict (pp. 87, 483, 655- 664). Seascapes are integral to Emily’s tragic journey with her father, a journey which is the catalyst for the novel’s action (p. 25). Radcliffe’s famed ‘Venice Scenes’ abound in references to the sea and the shore (pp. 174-89), and Emily’s first meeting with Valancourt (after their long separation) occurs as the result of her ship being wrecked near the de Villefort mansion (pp. 486-7, 501). In The Romance of the Forest, the sea is a turning point in the narrative: Adeline sees the ocean for the first time and leams more of Theodore’s fate (pp. 279-303). In The Italian, seascape descriptions are present when Vivaldi first glimpses Ellena’s face and when he lingers near her home in a state of passionate longing, (pp. 9-18). Seascapes are part of the scenes where the lovers overtly court for the first time (pp. 46-7), and seascapes are also frequently referred to during the course of Ellena’s trials (pp. 346-9). In A Sicilian Romance, Julia’s fate is partly determined by a sea journey (p. 127).

6 Radcliffe’s poetry also features wood nymphs, however the focus here is on the domain of the sea.

7 Robert John Mayhew, “Latitudinarianism and the Novels of Ann Radcliffe”, Texas Studies in Literature and language, 44.3 (2002): 273-301. Robert Mayhew asserts that Radcliffe’s nature descriptions have a “theological purpose”. 8 Rictor Norton, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), p.

11. Pagan Nymphs 1 18 literature, namely, the dissatisfaction with the pleasures afforded by reason and the desire for some kind of power or presence that transcends the visible world. This motivation is more complicated in Radcliffe’s fiction due to its overt emphasis on the production of a compact between such a desire and reason.9 Patricia Meyer Spacks defined sensibility as “emotional vulnerability and responsiveness” and “eighteenth-century female novels of sensibility” are those in which “female victims typically suffer endlessly and ingeniously, revealing their virtue by their acceptance of what Providence dictates”.10 In his biography of Radcliffe, Rictor Norton aligned reason with “order” and “propriety” whereas sensibility is aligned with

“disorder” and “passion”.*11 Radcliffe’s novels can be situated within these definitions, although Spacks’ association of sensibility with endless female suffering and Norton’s divisions do not adequately account for the nuanced treatment of sensibility and female suffering evident in Radcliffe’s work. In Radcliffe’s fiction, sensibility and suffering nourish female creativity and mental independence. Radcliffe aligns reason with personal, quiet reflection, self-control, common sense and the capacity to weigh up supported evidence; however, in the form of poetry and music, sensibility is presented as essential for the development of these traits.

The desire to achieve a middle-ground between reason and sensibility, so palpably reflected in Radcliffe’s fiction, can be better seen as the desire to balance sterility (the result of reason without the moderating influence of sensibility) and irrationality (the result of excessive passionate sensibility), or, as Norton put it: “the Augustan and Romantic impulses”. " For Norton, these impulses represent the influence of Unitarianism and Radcliffe’s “personal conflict between order and disorder”. In my view, a view also articulated by Mayhew, though Mayhew argues for the influence of Latitudinarian theology, the aesthetic Radcliffe achieves is one of symbiosis rather than conflict. A compact between order and disorder, as well as the delineation of a benevolent deity accessible through nature, is the foundation of her most idealised natural scenes and her most idealised characters. Radcliffe is careful to ascribe any references to indistinctness, nymphs or supernatural elements to weather phenomena, innocent fancy or superstition. She presents the presence of

9 Norton, Mistress ofUdolpho, p. 11.

10 Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Oscillations of Sensibility”, New Literary’ History 25.3 (1994), pp. 505-520, p. 506 and p. 505.

11 Norton, Mistress of Udolpho, p. 11. 12 Norton, Mistress of Udolpho, p. 11. Pagan Nymphs 119 sea nymphs as desirable when controlled in fanciful imaginings, poetry and art but not as part of reality or serious belief. Radcliffe’s compact between reason and sensibility is visible in her portrayals of the sea.

The pagan magic that pervades her writing, particularly her poetry, can also act against her attempts to achieve a compact between reason and sensibility because it taps into the otherworldly and explicitly magical elements that her contemporaries overwhelmingly saw as the great achievement of her work. Intended as airy and fanciful, or innocent diversions emblematic of the best aspects of a romantic sensibility, these airy supernatural fancies have become the cornerstone of her fictional legacy. Norton has detailed the fascination Radcliffe’s contemporaries had with the supernatural suggestion in her narratives. To offer one example, William Hazlitt declared that it was the potential of Radcliffe’s writing to make “the flesh creep, and the nerves thrill” which was most pleasing; he also assessed her “great power” to be that of “describing the indefinable, and embodying a phantom”.14 To differing effect, even the modem reader of Radcliffe is preoccupied with these aspects of Radcliffe’s writing. Often consumed by indignation at the idea of haunted abbeys and swooning women, as Sarah Kane points out, the modem reader tends to judge Radcliffe’s fiction negatively.15 Instead of being attuned to her careful attempts to mediate between extremes of reason and sensibility, the modem reader takes haunting and swoonings (and perhaps the delights of magical pagan nymphs in the sea) too literally. While Radcliffe attempts to erect a middle- ground between extremes of reason and sensibility, it is the aesthetic appeal of extreme sensibility which captivated her contemporary audiences and continues to draw modem critical attention away from her ideology of moderation. Yet, an ideology of moderation is intrinsic to Radcliffe’s particular Female Gothic mode: it underpins the power achieved by Radcliffe’s heroines, where, paradoxically, the excesses of Greco-Roman iconography and the sublime emotional transport they produce fuel her heroines’ attempts to balance conceptions of the possibilities of female strength, and the comforts of existing notions of female passivity. This chapter explores the pagan mythos underpinning a selection of Radcliffe’s fictional and poetic seascapes in The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of

13 Norton’s discussion is on pages 7-12. 14 William Hazlitt, “On the English Novelists”, in Lectures on the Comic Writers and Fugitive Writings (London: J. M. Dent & Sons., 1963), p. 126. 15 Sarah Kim Kane, “The Sublime, The Beautiful and The Picturesque in the Works of Ann Radcliffe,” (PhD diss., The University of Tennessee, 1999), p. 1 and p. 25. Pagan Nymphs 120

Udolpho and the miscellaneous poems affixed to Gaston de Blondeville.16 The examples I offer in this chapter reflect a broader trend.

Magical Sea Women

The inherent supematuralism of Radcliffe’s poetic sea nymphs and fairies is characterised by their placement within fantastical sea environments and a nomenclature that situates them overtly in the realm of Greco-Roman myth. This supematuralism is also evinced by their preternatural beauty, their ability to produce an intoxicating magical song and particular traits: the extraordinary powers to vanish, travel and fly across amazing distances as well as the ability to communicate with the natural elements and sea creatures, and to summon their aid. Given that Radcliffe could not read Greek,17 her knowledge of Greek myth has at least four plausible sources: English writers, her husband, English translations of Homer and Virgil, and her uncle’s pottery. To focus on the latter, it is likely that Radcliffe’s knowledge of sea-related gods, nymphs and marine animals was partly pictorial, inspired by the artists’ images used to produce the vast ceramic collection of her uncle, Thomas Bentley, and his partner Josiah Wedgwood.19

The Wedgwood & Bentley catalogue of 1799 cites their various depictions of the Greek mythical world in the form of cameos, intaglios, figures, candlesticks and pitchers. These include cameos of “Neptune upon his chariot, drawn by four sea-horses”, “Nereus and Doris, sea-gods, sons of Ocean and Thetis”, and “Nereide, a sea-nymph, daughter of Nereus and

16 Ann Radcliffe, The Poems of Mrs. Arm Radcliffe 1916 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University, 1979). On microform. It should be noted that the 1816 collection of Radcliffe’s poems simply gathered poems from her published novels and included no new material, whereas there are numerous poems affixed to her posthumously published novel Gaston de Blondeville which are not published elsewhere. 17 Talfourd notes her ignorance of the classics (Talfourd “Memoir”, in Gaston, vol. 1, pp. 6-7). Scott, Lives, p. 552. Scott writes that Radcliffe had “a gratification in listening to any good verbal sounds; and would desire to hear passages repeated from the Latin and Greek classics; requiring, at intervals, the most literal translations that could be given”. Norton quotes this passage as the words of William Radcliffe, appearing in The Annual Biography and Obituary, for the Year 1824, 8 (1824), p. 99. 18 Norton, Mistress of Udolpho, pp. 45-6. 19 Norton, Mistress of Udolpho, pp. 33-46. Norton does not make this claim, I base my claim for this on material to which Norton draws attention but dismisses. Norton makes a claim about the pictorial influence of Bentley’s interest in Gothic architecture, and remarks that despite Radcliffe’s uncle owning many Grecian intaglios, busts, statues and medallions (so many it took “twelve days” for these to be sold at his death, p. 33), Radcliffe’s writing displays “little sympathy with Grecian taste” (p. 33). He further states that her “references to mythology are limited to Bacchus, Hebe, the waters of Lethe, the three Graces and the court of Neptune”. 1 argue for more significance to be placed on her allusions to Neptune’s court in her poetry. Pagan Nymphs 121

Doris.”20 There is also a fascinating array of intaglios including “Two sea horses” and “A dancing nymph”.21 Records which detail some of John Flaxman’s artistic contribution show that Wedgwood and Bentley also produced large figures of Neptune, Triton and Polyphemus.“ Three other Wedgwood items from this period are particularly interesting: a black basalt ewer, a black basalt water vase, and a set of solid pale blue and white jasper candlesticks. The ewer’s handle is shaped as a deep-curving and scaly fish tail which joins a dolphin head as it meets the edge of the ewer. The water vase, advertised as ‘Sacred to Neptune’, depicts Neptune holding its spout and a “dolphin head and seaweed wreath” wraps around the vase. The candlesticks are Tritons which appear to be kneeling on rocks, they hold the candle openings (which resemble large sea-blooms with serpent-like stems) and their fish tails curl about the rocks which are dotted with more flowersf These Wedgwood items create a dichotomous supernatural vision of the sea: enormous sea-blooms twist and adorn the rocks where bearded hybrid sea-men (flourishing their strange half-fish bodies) crouch; the powerful Neptune rides, all in splendour, with his retinue of Queens and nymphs and doting aquatic creatures such as sea-horses (wondrous and alien with their own seeming hybridity) and dolphins, agile and ready to serve; and then there are the dancing sea nymphs—it is a vision of the sea that finds parallels in Radcliffe’s poetry.

Since the bulk of this section involves the analysis of Radcliffe’s poetry, I will initially address the issue of its quality. Some modem critics do not rate Radcliffe’s poetry highly, but many of her contemporaries found it fascinating.24 David Rivers, commenting on Radcliffe in Literary Memoirs of Living Authors of Great Britain (1798), described her poetry thus: “the beautiful verses interspersed among her tales, must raise her highly in the estimation of every poetical genius”.25 The poems Radcliffe placed in her narratives were deemed worthy of a

20 The catalogue is reprinted in Wolf Mankowitz, WedgM>ood (London: Spring Books, 1966), p. 216.

21 Mankowitz, p. 233. 22 Mankowitz, p. 110. The figures are recorded as having been produced before 1796. 23 The figures of Neptune, Triton and Polyphemus are mentioned on page 110 and the ewer, vase and candlesticks 1 describe from the photographs offered of these in figure pp. 64, 68 and 75 respectively. The candlesticks are dated 1785. 24 Tony Tanner, Venice Desired (Blackwell: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 17-19. Tanner dismisses Radcliffe's poetry as derivative. 25 David Rivers, “Radcliffe, Mrs. Ann,” Literary Memoirs of Living Authors of Great Britain, 2 vols. (London: Printed for R. Faulder, 1798), vol. 2, 181-2. Pagan Nymphs 122 separate collection in 1816 and several of her poems were set to music by John Percy,"26 suggesting that while readers may have often rushed over the poems, they were popular in and of themselves. 27

John Percy was an English tenor, organist and composer;28 though he is almost entirely forgotten today, his ballads were popular in the eighteenth-century. Based on popular plays and novels, John Percy’s compositions emerged from and tapped into the emerging middle class market of eighteenth-century England. All of the poems by Radcliffe that Percy set to music are from The Mysteries of Udolpho, these are: “The Sea Nymph”, “Air”, “The Last Hour of Evening”, “The Shipwreck” and “The Pilgrim”. Percy’s compositions are alternately simplistic and a little ostentatious, they include regular musical flourishes or ornaments that are at odds with the purpose the poems themselves serve in Radcliffe’s narratives. The poems or songs interpolated, especially in The Mysteries of Udolpho (and all of the Percy compositions thus found are based on poems from that novel) are intended to display the simple elegance, modesty and virtue of the heroine’s style, taste and morals. Radcliffe establishes a clear divide between those women who show off their talents, beauty and achievements and those whose talents, beauty and achievements are revealed to the sea or the countryside and are to be enjoyed for their own sake (and just happen to be overheard by a suitor or admirer). Nonetheless, it is the chance overhearing of the heroine’s song, and the personal indulgence of song and poetry that leads Radcliffe’s heroines towards their happy destiny, and more interestingly, defines their worth as creative, independent, morally worthy women. Moreover, the sea nymph figure is an exhibitionist, relishing the alluring power of intoxicating, possibly ornamental, song. A recording of two of these compositions, “The Sea Nymph” and “Air” is available in appendix 1.

26 I discovered Radcliffe’s poems had been set to music while researching at the Bodleian library at Oxford in 2008. This is a significant discovery, not only because it brings new knowledge about the influence of Radcliffe’s novels in the eighteenth-century, but it offers real evidence that her poems were far more popular than has previously been recognised. 27 John Percy “The sea nymph: (from the Misteries of Udolpho)” [title as it appears on score], Composed by John Percy, No. 3 (London: Printed for the author . . . and may be had at all the music shops, c. 1795), pp. 11-16. 28 Philip H. Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Bumim and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary> of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800 (Carondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), p. 262. Pagan Nymphs 123

Despite these revisions to the critical understanding of the popularity of Radcliffe’s poetry, it is necessary to admit that her poems, including most of those analysed in this essay, are stylistically childish. This is partly due to the reasons Sir Walter Scott observed: their descriptiveness is not always “precise in expressing the meaning of the author”, or they “display more liveliness and richness of fancy, than correctness of taste, or felicity of expression.”29 Even so, it is possible that her poems are also childish because they are usually intended to be so, put (as they so often are) in the hands or mouths of innocent, unsophisticated (yet virtuous) maidens, suitors or peasants. Even if these same poems can also evince, in Scott’s words, “the rich and beautiful colouring which distinguishes her prose composition,” I should still wish to distinguish them from the poems affixed to Gaston de B/ondevi/leM) Many of these poems (including some cited in this essay: “Shakespeare’s cliff’ and “Written on the Isle of Wight”), display considerable stylistic sophistication and deserve more detailed critical attention and acclaim. Moreover, they often feature sea nymphs, indicating that the motif of the feminine supernatural preoccupied Radcliffe outside her narratives and was a continual presence in her imagination.

Overt narrative and character parallels invite comparisons between the characteristics of the sea-nymph figure and Radcliffe’s heroines. Through these parallels, sea nymphs are engendered as the supernatural versions of her heroines and the embodiment of a style of femininity both contrasting and reinforcing that represented by Radcliffe’s heroines. The ancient Greek word “nympha” (vup(j>r|) is associated with “maiden” and “young bride”, and in Greek myth, nymphs generally symbolise innocence and are regularly the victims of lust. Similarly, Emily, Adeline, and all of Radcliffe’s heroines are young unmarried women, engaged or in love with virtuous men but with their chastity routinely challenged by hosts of other lecherous and unworthy suitors. William Hazlitt described Radcliffe’s heroines as “insipid, the shadows of a shade, continued on, under different names, through all her novels”.31 I would be less severe but Hazlitt is right; there is an unavoidable sameness to Radcliffe’s heroines: they are stock figures, almost entirely interchangeable, but more importantly, they represent a feminine model clearly endorsed by the author, making a

29 Scott, “Mrs Ann Radcliffe”, in Lives of Eminent Novelists, p. 575. to Sir Walter Scott, “Mrs. Ann Radcliffe”, in Lives of Eminent Novelists, pp. 575-576.

31 Hazlitt, “On the English Novelists”, p. 126. Despite this criticism Hazlitt is quite complimentary to Radcliffe and declares on page 125: “1 must say 1 like Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances better [than Madam D’Arblay’s].” Pagan Nymphs 124 discussion of one relevant to all the others. In my examples I have primarily focused on Emily and Adeline.

In The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, important connections are established between Emily and Adeline and the magical women of the sea. In Venice, Emily speaks of herself and imagines herself as a sea-nymph; she also imagines a “pensive wanderer” (178) whom she might soothe, just as her poetical nymph will soothe the cares of pensive sailors. The travels of Radcliffe’s nymphs of the sea mimic those of Adeline who moves from forest deeps to sights like Montanvert (263) and then to the shore of the “blue sea” (288) (though without the accompanying revelry and liberty). Radcliffe’s heroines are the pale shadows of the magical nymphs in her poems: they have a benevolent nature and yet lack the power to save. All are declared to be generous, sweet tempered and desirous to come to the aid of others: Emily has “warm affections, and [a] ready benevolence” and Adeline feels “sorrow” at leaving Madam La Motte despite her betrayal in allowing Adeline to be abducted by the Marquis (152). The persona of the sea nymph is a kind of wish-fulfilment for Radcliffe’s heroines. Because Radcliffe’s heroines are stock figures and the figure of the sea nymph recurs outside Radcliffe’s fiction, even in novels without poetic interpolations featuring sea nymphs, the vision of femininity embodied by these nymphs represents a potential alter ego for all of Radcliffe’s female protagonists.

In the creation of sea nymphs as the powerful alter egos of her timid heroines, Radcliffe borrows and to an extent domesticates Greco-Roman descriptions of the sea. The domestication of Greco-Roman myth is most explicit in Radcliffe’s manipulation of the Siren-song as a fundamental link between the feminine supernatural and her heroines. Like the sea-nymphs in Radcliffe’s poems, her heroines sing and play (usually the lute), sending men into raptures of love and lust. In The Romance of the Forest ’s “Song of a Spirit”, for example, exquisite music provokes an emotional outburst from both Adeline and the sea­ wandering spirit, and just as sea nymphs move this spirit to rapture and tears (161-3), Adeline’s song moves M. Amaud to the same (286). Simply by employing the names “sea nymph”, “Neptune” and “triton”, Radcliffe invokes a sea scene of magic and colours it with Greek myth, but aspects of the Siren myth also overtly define Radcliffe’s nymphs and fairies. She adapts their visionary powers and, most explicitly, their ability to attract and cast overwhelming spells with music. Emily composes “The Sea-nymph” after she has witnessed several of Venice’s most opulent spectacles, one being “something like a procession” which included the “fabled deities of the city”—Neptune, Venice, and tritons and sea-nymphs (178). Pagan Nymphs 125

Radcliffe’s description of the procession is filled with terms that qualify its magic by drawing attention to its make-believe aspects: it was “something like a procession”, the “fabled deities of the city seemed to have arisen from the ocean”, and the spectacle “appeared like the vision of a poet suddenly embodied” (178). Nevertheless, when these deities appear in Emily’s poem their magical power and supernatural world is unqualified and its preternatural beings flounce and sing unhampered by attempts to restrict them to the unreal world of fantasy.

In Udolpho ’s “The Sea-Nymph”, and in other poems which feature a singing sea nymph, spirit or sprite, Radcliffe strips the Sirens of their monstrosity and their vicious intentions, yet the sea is still dichotomous: it is the cruel instrument of a sadistic Neptune and the dwelling of gentle magic nymphs, it is stormy and gentle, lonely and sinister and a place of frolic and song. Udolpho ’s nymph—part siren, part nereid—lulls the cares of sailors and protects them from stormy deaths. This nymph lures the “trembling youth” to the ship’s edge with her song, and though she does not drown him with it, she could. Like the mythical Sirens, Radcliffe’s sea nymphs are partly defined by their ability to produce a song that is overwhelmingly alluring. As we have seen, Chapman’s translation interprets the Siren song as sexual enticement as much as a love song; even the great Odysseus cannot trust himself to resist this monstrous sweetness yet he still wishes to hear it.32 The Siren song is all enthralling, it overpowers reason and has the ability to alter the affections of men. With the same irresistible allure, the same rapturous qualities and capacity to emotionally “soften” and alter, if not the same malicious intent, Radcliffe’s poetic sea-nymph’s are defined by their ability to enchant men with their preternatural singing. The explicit reference to a bewitching song occurs early in “The Sea-nymph”, just as the nymph’s character and environment is delineated and defined:

And when deep sleep the crew has bound, And the sad lover musing leans O’er the ship’s side, 1 breathe around

•> •> Such strains as speak no mortal means!

Chapman, The Odyssey of Homer, Book 12, Lines 251-295, 239-40. Chapman’s account of Odysseus’ binding concurs with the literal translation found in the Loeb edition, see Homer, the Odyssey, 2 vols., trans. A. T. Murray (London: Heinemann, 1960), vol. 1, Book 12, Lines 165-201. 33 Radcliffe, “The Sea-nymph”, in Udolpho, Lines 25-28, p. 179. Pagan Nymphs 126

The even metric Radcliffe favours in her poetry reinforces notions of spell-casting and mental withdrawal from the uneven, sober truths of reason. The sibilance of the stanza takes on the subtle aura of a lullaby. Its insistent repetition joins with the rolling rhyme and the enjambment which rushes the middle lines, aurally suggesting the movement of the lover’s leaning and producing a hint of danger which is quickly erased a few stanzas on when the nymph, having teased the youth enough, declares “My song is hush’d, my wonders end!” Radcliffe combines the notion of the bewitching song of the three Sirens with more gentle and friendly sea nymphs. Radcliffe’s nymph, with her desire to soothe and care for sailors can be linked with the Nereides who were thought to befriend and rescue sailors; her nymph also shares traits with Amphitrite, an innocent nymph carried off by Neptune to be his wife,34 and the mother of dolphins and seal-like “sea-calves”.35 Radcliffe’s sea nymph also resembles Thetis, the unofficial leader of the Nereides with powers to change shape and the power of prophesy.36 However “The Sea-Nymph” also describes Neptune chaining the daring nymph, preventing her from rescuing drowning sailors—like Radcliffe’s heroines, the power of these nymphs is curbed by cruel male figures. For Beatrice Battaglia, Radcliffe’s development of the sea nymph is an assertion of female power.37 But Radcliffe’s sea-nymph is also a figure of female powerlessness, particularly since this nymph is an embodiment both of the city of Venice and Emily’s desires for liberty. Venice is the site of the first significant illustrations of the evil in Montoni’s intentions and as such the idea of delightful illusions and fairylands becomes underscored with notions of inner corruption—visually reinforced by Montoni’s crumbling abode—and the apparent unassailability of male power. The Siren-song connecting Radcliffe’s sea-nymphs and heroines is visible throughout The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, and the theme of beguiling nymph singing

Mary Grant, trans. The Myths of Hyginus (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Publications, 1960), Book 2, Part 17. Hyginus tells the story of Amphitrite’s initial flight from Neptune and how a dolphin persuaded her to marry him.

35 Chapman, The Odyssey of Homer, Book 4, Line 542, p. 81. 36 Sir James George Frazer trans., The Library> and Epitome of Apoltodorus (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1921), 74-5, Book 3, ch. 13, section 6. This provides an example of Thetis’ power of prophesy, where she tries to protect Achilles from his fated death in Troy. Due Thetis’ victimisation by Neptune, Udolpho ’s “The Sea-nymph’’, is linked more closely to Amphitrite. 37 Battaglia does not describe the sea nymph figure as part of a wider analysis; she focuses on the Venice scenes. Pagan Nymphs 127 continues throughout Radcliffe’s separately collected poetry (as noted in more detail in appendix 3).

The similarities and contrasts between Radcliffe’s sea-nymphs and heroines infuse her seascapes with dichotomies of audacious feminine beauty and modesty, strength and weakness, freedom and bondage, power and servitude, passion and loss, community and isolation, emotional transport and dangerous frenzy. Radcliffe’s poetic sea nymphs differ from her heroines in four main respects: displays of beauty, contrasting environments, experiences of fearlessness and liberty, and demonstrations of physical power and mirth. Radcliffe’s sea women never hide their beauty in veils or other forms of disguise. They deck themselves with jewels and gold, they laugh and play and charm all (including men) without shame. In “Morning, on a seashore”, we see their assertive and brazen prettiness in the following images: “And fairy forms, of fine aetherial dyes,/Advance with frolic step and laughing eyes,/Their hair with pearl, their garments deck’d with gold” (Lines 5,7-9). This aggressive display opposes the constant attempts made by Radcliffe’s heroines to hide their attractions. Even in the most wretched states of desolation and abuse, Adeline manages to veil herself: she wears a “light veil hastily thrown on” when La Motte first meets her. Vivaldi first meets a veiled Ellena, who is so modest that, when her beauty is briefly revealed by a gust of wind, she “hastily” shields herself from Vivaldi’s admiring gaze (10). In Venice, the site of all opulence, Emily’s modesty is attested to by the “thin black veil” she wears, and while her ability to feel deeply is asserted, her purity is unquestionable as her profile is described: “Hers was the contour of a Madona, with the sensibility of a Magdalen” (184). Emily’s attractiveness is marked by her “timid sweetness” (36) and her attire is never showy.

In opposition to the spare dank cells her heroines often inhabit, Radcliffe’s poetic sea is a place of opulence with veritable armies of dolphins, “pearly” and “secret” caves and magical shells; it has beneath its waves a palace with a “crystal court” and halls decked with precious jewels like sapphires, rubies and emeralds. Radcliffe’s posthumously published “Written on the Isle of Wight” and Udolpho’s “To a Sea-nymph” offer characteristic examples of the fantastical seas visited by and lived in by spirits and fairies. In “Written on the Isle of Wight”, the abode of the sea-nymphs is deep beneath the waves, adorned with opulent shells “of rainbow-tint” and “fairy pavilions”, the nymphs sleep in “diamond­ beaming” or pearl decked caves in “golden beds,/’Broidered with rubies, with transparent pearl,/ And emeralds” (Lines 152-173). They wander in “crystal court[s]”amid jewelled domes and “sparry columns” in “The Sea-nymph” (Lines 42-60). If we compare these abodes Pagan Nymphs 128 to the predominantly spare gloomy prison-rooms inhabited by Adeline and Emily (or Julia in A Sicilian Romance) while they are imperilled, the fantastical gorgeousness of the sea world is startling. Almost identical words and phrases recur to describe the scary chambers these heroines are forced to inhabit: Julie and Emilia are given rooms by the Marchioness that were “spacious but gloomy” with an “air of desolation”, which, like most other habitations presented to Radcliffe’s heroines, had “been for some years uninhabited” (23). Adeline reads the terrifying half-legible manuscript in a “large old chamber” which is in “lonely situation” and is “remote from the rest of the family” (140-1). Similarly remote, spacious but gloomy and lonely is Emily’s room in Montoni’s castle (234). The sense of dark mystery and isolation in these rooms is very different to the luminous vision of spirits and nymphs in glistening abodes, gaily enjoying each others’ company.

As in Udolpho ’s “The Sea-nymph”, the free and daring women in Radcliffe’s poetry go plunging “down a thousand fathom deep”, in storm and lightning and they easily ride the waves while guiding ships to safety (Line 1, 69-72). They do not fear the water, as Radcliffe’s heroines invariably do (though they also attend to its beauties): Blanche has to suppress her fear of the “expanse of waters” in order to get into her father’s boat (480); for Adeline, “when she considered that a plank alone separated her from death, a sensation of unmixed terror superseded that of sublimity” (293). In “Morning, on a seashore” such spirits frolic in the sea (Line 6). So fantastical is the lifestyle of these beings that they travel in “tortoise cars” in all their opulence of jewels and gold to exotic lands where they go exploring “the cavern’s inmost cell” and all nature’s haunts, mountains, woods, cliffs.' As Radcliffe’s heroines are shifted roughly from place to place, the little choice they have in what they do and where they go is striking, whereas these fairies of the sea are predominantly free. They choose to travel long distances and seek out riches, they have the power to survive physical trials, and they command respect and ritual praise from other magical beings. In Udolpho ’s “The Sea-nymph”, wood nymphs praise the generous sea nymph and send her garlands of flowers (Lines 13-16), a practice revived in the peasant ritual witnessed later in the novel by Emily (see appendix 3). Adeline represents the benevolent yet seemingly helpless nature of Radcliffe’s heroines when she remarks on her own powerless in response to the account of suffering in the decaying manuscript: “O that I had been near! yet what could I have done to save thee? Alas! nothing” (140).

Radcliffe, “Written on the Isle of Wight”, Gaston, vol. 4, pp. 221-230, Lines 167 and “Song of a Spirit”, Romance, p. 161, Line 3. Pagan Nymphs 129

Radcliffe’s spirits of the sea are agile and full of supernatural energy to “trip” their dances lightly on midnight sands, to ride the waves and plunge into their depths and traverse exotic locales, as is seen in the poems “Song of a Spirit”, “Morning, on the Sea-shore”, “The Sea-nymph” and “To a Sea-nymph”. Unlike Radcliffe’s heroines, these sea females usually appear at night and they revel in it. Emily’s superstitions are most aroused in the depths of night when a “thousand nameless terrors” oppress her as she sits, for instance, with the “gloomy light” of a small lamp in the Castle of Udolpho. Likewise, Adeline thinks she hears “sighs” in the wind “which the hour of the night and her own melancholy imagination conspired to raise” (114). In the dark shadows, where Radcliffe’s heroines usually experience fear, these nymphs dance and sing; the night is a time to rejoice, it is repeatedly described in

IQ Radcliffe’s poems as “the Moonlight hour”, “The Shadowy hour” and “the fairy hour”. Radcliffe’s heroines are usually only the observers of gay parties and revels. Julia, alone in her chamber, watches as “a solemn strain of harmony” wafts to her from a boat on the sea below. Emily “looked on at the happy group” (421) as she observes Maddelina dance with the Tuscan peasants, and Adeline listens to “dulcet and entrancing sounds” as she is locked in the Marquis’ “magnificent saloon”—a notable exception to the dreary rooms these heroines usually inhabit when persecuted (156). While sometimes the sea-nymphs are also watchers (as in Romance’s “Titania to her love”, 284-5) they are more often the revellers and their active assertions of their powers—to vanish and appear, to dance and sing for an audience— are all opposed to those traits which delineate Radcliffe’s heroines with their weak bodies and their oppressed minds. The magnificent physical energy of Radcliffe's sea spirits is also visible in “Shakespeare’s Cliff’, another poem from the 1826 posthumous edition of Gaston (Vol 4, 162-169). Dynamic movement is accentuated through verbs like “spring”, “perch”, “skirt”, “frolic” and “ride” and the alternating rhyme scheme used imitates the repetitive, and seemingly unceasing, physical movement of the spirit. The frenetic power of magical seaside beings is enviable, as visible in the lines below where the poetic speaker mourns her own lack of magical ability:

Yet, yet forbear! thou canst not spring, Like fay, from off this summit high, And perch upon the out-stretched wing Of the sea-mew passing by.

39 These descriptions are routine but examples can be seen in Romance’s “Titania to her Love” and “Air,” and Udolpho ’s “To a Sea-Nymph”. Pagan Nymphs 130

And safely with her skirt the clouds; Or, sweeping downward to the tide, Frolic amid the seaman's shrouds, Or on a bounding billow ride.

Ah! no; all this I cannot do; (Lines 21-29)

Unlike the nymphs and sprites of the sea, the poetic speaker of “Shakespeare’s cliff’ is trapped on the summit, bound by a myriad of limits and can only imagine such liberty. In “Shakespeare’s Cliff’, Radcliffe articulates the liberating effects of the poetic imagination for women: reason binds such extremes of female power to the unreal world of fancy but within poems and songs, preternatural women flounce and sing and their magical power is unrestrained.

The nymphs and sprites in Radcliffe’s poetry derive from the Greco-Roman tradition of the feminine supernatural and enjoy powers that her heroines do not. The charms of these nymphs or sprites do not revolve around submission, feigned or otherwise; rather their charms are all based around their commanding presence and their physical power, their brazen loveliness and their bewitching songs. When faced with the domination of Neptune, they escape through song or send their own servants to fulfil their wishes. These nymphs and spirits are energetic and robust; they are not fainters, nor are they pale and tearful. They provoke emotion but their emotional state is generally one of mirth. They can also be sexually provocative: they wear no veils, they flaunt their pearls and gold, and they draw out their music teasingly.

Radcliffe’s poetic sea nymphs and fairies are both like and unlike her fictional heroines, they share recognisable traits, but these sea nymphs portray a vision of femininity which is left unsupported by Radcliffe’s character and narrative structures. However, Radcliffe’s heroines achieve mental independence through their experiences of the feminine supernatural embodied in the figures of sea nymphs, sprites and fairies. The contrasts between the feminine supernatural and Radcliffe’s heroines lull her heroines away from their concerns;40 they function as sublime emotional transports through which reason is suspended, and in this

40 Radcliffe uses the word “lull” or “lulled” frequently to describe the affects of poetry or music, for example in Udolpho (p. 420). Pagan Nymphs 131 they reinforce the distinct self-hood of Radcliffe’s heroines and make them relatively immune to harm and control. As recurrent presences in the compositions or recollections of Radcliffe’s heroines, the feminine supernatural is escapist. Yet, the escape Radcliffe’s heroines experience allows them to reinforce their mental independence. Radcliffe’s interpolated poems signal a break with the narrative in a very physical sense: their different format, in the simplest terms, indicates a different space to the reader. This sense of a different space is also achieved via the concentration of particular poetic devices, including: regular meter, sibilance, liquid consonants, allusions to myth and imagery based around supernatural beings and power. Such devices assist in the production of the atmosphere of

“sweet delirium” hoped for by The Romance of the Forest’s Marquis,41 but also desired actively by all of Radcliffe’s heroines who regularly seek to escape their present concerns or “serious reflections” in the blissful release granted by the pleasures and “fanciful ideas” of art, music and poetry.42 Illustrating her only means of escape from male power, Emily sinks into a “reverie”, as she imagines “the coral bowers and crystal caverns of the ocean” where her sea-nymph would live, from which she is “recalled to mere mortal supper”. The use of the word “recalled” suggests that she was indeed elsewhere during her “reverie”. These mental transports are established in Radcliffe’s fiction as a means of escape from reality and the “more serious reflections” of reason; they are “airy” yet swarming with “fanciful images” and evocative of a state of sublime bewitchment.

Creative compositions are a means of self-assertion for Radcliffe’s heroines, who read, compose poetry and play music as well as being ever attentive to the natural world around them. These activities console and assuage pain, even if at times only briefly, by drawing the thoughts of Radcliffe’s heroines away from their misfortunes. Several critics have commented on these effects, including Beatrice Battaglia in “The ‘Pieces of Poetry’ in Ann Radcliffe”, and Ingrid Horrocks in “‘Her ideas arranged themselves’: re-membering poetry in Radcliffe”. For Battaglia and Horrocks, activities such as reading, composing and recalling poetry or music tend to diffuse any sense of a distinct self that Radcliffe’s heroines might possess (I will soon discuss Horrocks’ distinction between the effects of the experience of nature and the experience of poetry, music or quotation in Radcliffe’s narratives). For Beatrice Battaglia, the original pieces of poetry in Radcliffe’s novels perform a similar

Radcliffe, Romance, p. 161. 42 “ Radcliffe, ödolpho, p. 179. Emily’s sentiments are repeated regularly by all of Radcliffe’s heroines. Pagan Nymphs 132 function to the experience of nature for her heroines: “the most authentic relationship between the self and nature is one of complete oneness” and that “in Radcliffe’s Nature all the anxieties and fears of the painful journey of self-assertion seem to have disappeared.”43 For Battaglia, such an immersion in nature underpins the cathartic power of Udolpho and the effects of the interpolated original pieces of poetry are the same. Of Emily’s poem “The Sea- Nymph” Battaglia, writes: “the poetic self, far from attempting to absorb nature, dissolves and becomes part of it” (142). To an extent this view is also proposed by Ingrid Horrocks, for whom an escape from the distinct self of the heroine is considered to be the achievement of such poems, but Horrocks regards this escape as less a dissolution of self and more a coalescence of the self with other voices in a community of ideas. In contrast, I propose such activities are creative acts which reinforce the distinct sense of self that Radcliffe’s heroines possess by encouraging and establishing as modest and virtuous, the vision of the solitary, independently thinking, independently composing woman.

These heroines indulge and reinforce their sense of themselves through creative composition.44 When Emily composes “The Sea-Nymph” the independent aspects of her character are exhibited. Despite Montoni’s control over Emily’s abode, he cannot control Emily’s mind and nor can her aunt. In the midst of Emily’s anxiety over her future, she is able to create a poem like “The Sea Nymph” with its emphasis of a female nymph’s joy and independent wanderings over the waves, and even the self-assertion to break Neptune’s chains. The marine environment is presented as particularly suited to soothe and empower many of Radcliffe’s heroines. In Romance, Adeline’s “solitary indulgences” along the seashore, where she sings for instance “Morning, on a Seashore” with its bright imagery of romping, joyous and powerful sea spirits, “generally succeeded in calmness” and this is a calm that is maintained beyond that accessible through “company” (288). The reader is told:

It was in the stillness of solitude, the tranquil observance of beautiful nature, that her mind recovered its tone, and indulging the pensive inclination now became habitual to it, was soothed and fortified. Of all the grand objects which nature had exhibited, the ocean inspired her with the most sublime admiration. (288)

43 Battaglia,‘“Pieces of Poetry’”, pp. 141-42. 44 Radcliffe, Udolpho, p. 169. The phrase appears “she indulged her fancy”. Pagan Nymphs 133

Adeline’s “calmness”, despite her belief in the loss of Theodore, is the result of solitary reflection rather than the experience of community, and this kind of individual reflection and choice of solitude indicates her mental independence and strength. “Morning, on a Seashore” is presented as a recollection and not as Adeline’s own creation; the reader is told: Adeline “yielding to that taste for poetry which had seldom forsaken her, she repeated the following lines” (288). Nevertheless, Adeline’s intelligence is reinforced by the evidence of such recollections, as is an unconquerable sense of her autonomous capacity for inner joy in spite of suffering. After all the persecution she has experienced, Adeline has the power to imagine freedom from fear and mirthful celebrations, and this power to imagine, even if it is to conjure the composition of another, enables her to have control over her mental state.

Similarly, when Emily dips into the world of sensibility encapsulated in music and poetry, it often functions as a means of managing her emotions and maintaining self- sufficiency, as well as fortifying her consciousness of her individual desires and her confidence in her individual decisions. The experience of poetry and music enable Emily to resist Valancourt’s attentions until his essential virtue is revealed (540-541). Later in Udolpho, Emily “thought of Valancourt” while watching the sunset over the sea in a state of “tranquil melancholy” but instead of collapsing in tears or fainting, she “personified the hour” by writing “Song of an Evening Hour” in which she imagined moving “along the realms of twilight air” with the music “of sister-nymphs” fading (Lines 1-4). Emily’s “spirits” change after writing this poem; they become “in harmony with this scene” (541). Again, while uneasy about the intentions of Montoni’s men and fearful for her life, Emily “lost a sense of her misfortunes” after hearing the Tuscan peasants singing “To a Sea-Nymph” and watching them dance as part of a festival. Her “pensive melancholy” returns, but after such moments of respite Radcliffe’s heroine’s achieve a sense of balance between the often overwhelming terrors they face which threaten their lives and sanity, and the peaceful, even joyous, sights and sounds or imaginative flights which allow them both mental succour and mental independence. However briefly, as part of music or poetry sea nymphs are part of an idealised virtuous sensibility, the type of sensibility that mentally restores Radcliffe’s heroines, allowing them respite through imaginative contemplation, and yet also relaxing them such that their vicarious imaginative moment in the excesses of magic and opulence makes it more possible for reason to triumph over excess.

Insensibility and uselessness are the ungainly fruits of excessive emotion in Radcliffe’s fiction. Radcliffe’s heroines are characteristically physically weak and pale, and when Pagan Nymphs 134 overcome by oppression or emotion they faint. An emblematic example comes from Romance where, from Chapters 11 to 12, Adeline faints about every ten pages. St. Aubert warns against this kind of emotional excess: while dying in Emily’s presence he declares “Do not afflict me with this excess of grief’ (77), and “happiness arises in a state of peace, not of tumult” (81). Sea nymph figures are an important aspect of those creative pursuits, “that taste for poetry which seldom forsake[es]” them, which Radcliffe’s heroines largely remain able to enjoy despite their sufferings. By temporarily suspending the minds of these heroines from their own concerns (or by soothing their emotions such that their minds are not overwrought when they do think of their concerns) and by allowing them to vicariously experience power and freedom, sea nymph figures are important aspects of the creative processes which alleviate the intensity of piercing emotional extremes—extremes which can leave one open to the self-obliterating “contagion” of superstition, on which low spirits such as fear, loss and sadness feed. As an important aspect of these creative processes, the feminine supernatural embodied by Radcliffe’s poetic sea nymphs allows her heroines to overcome the dangers of “that phrenzy of grief’ which Radcliffe depicts as the result of the extravagant contemplation of suffering (288).

Radcliffe equates the sea with delightfully seductive reveries involving sea nymphs but she also equates the sea with the more sinister seductions of extreme passion and superstition. The figure of Signora Laurentini is an exemplar of the destructive results of excessive female passion in Udolpho. The seaside locale of the Convent of St. Claire and the de Villefort mansion facilitates the juxtaposition of the madness of Signora Laurentini (Sister Agnes) with images of the stormy sea, thereby infusing the mutability of the sea with notions of supernatural possession and the dangers of extreme passion. The chaotic sea was overtly associated with madness during the Renaissance and is still “one of the persistent figures of madness”.45 The sea and the insane were considered to be perfect partners; the unpredictability of the insane was viewed as similar to the unpredictability of the ocean. Of the sea, Corbin notes: “the violence of its winter storms was proof of its insanity”.46 The sea’s unpredictable changeability is borne out by the storm that besets Emily’s ship and eventually leads her into communication with the unpredictable Signora at the convent of St. Claire.

45 Corbin, Lure, p. 7. 46 Corbin, Lure, p. 8. Pagan Nymphs 135

Signora Laurentini is constructed as beset by all-consuming passions unmediated by reason; madness, seclusion and death are the ultimate consequences.

The ocean continued to “inspire horror” in the late eighteenth-century and into the nineteenth where it continued to be associated with notions of chaos, that “unruly dark side of the world”; that “abode of monsters”, punishment and sin.47 Sister Agnes’ irrational (apparently possessed) mental states are metaphorically implied by the storm that wrecks Emily’s ship, at first through the bewitching illusion of the reflection of the “deep ruddy glow” of the sun on the clouds, which, “seemed to fire the tops of the woods and the shattered towers of the monastery” (484). The repetitive juxtaposition of luminosity and darkness in Radcliffe’s storm description evokes the notion of two different and opposing forces. This is evident in the following contrasting doubles: the setting sun/gloom; lightning flashes/impenetrable darkness and torches flaming/blackness of night. Parallels are drawn between the emotional sensitivity of the “trembling” Blanche and that of the “tremulous water” and the “tremulous motion to the reflected landscape” such that the ocean seems to be an emotional living thing (482-3). Personification and the use of sensory imagery enhance the idea of supernatural forces and living entities crawling amidst the water and the atmosphere. Consider the following examples: “loud howlings of the tempest”; “gasping billows”; “signals of distress”; “thunder, that now muttered at a distance”. The auditory evocativeness of “muttered”; “clamorous”, “peal”; “howling”, and “gasping” suggest the intensification of emotional pain in a life-form in distress (485-6). As in the Greco-Roman tradition, the storming sea is depicted as a living entity; yet Radcliffe’s scene is that of the mutual distress of ship and ocean, rather than the combat between them.

Both Agnes’ outbursts and the storm, while potentially explainable, are infused with the rhetoric of the inexplicable. Early in the novel Agnes’ outbursts are thought to be unearthly premonitions of death. When her “strange” (70) music is heard in the “deepening gloom” (64) of the wooded shores near the convent, La Voisin tells Emily and St. Aubert that it is said to “warn people of their death” (68). Just as the storm rapidly changes the character of the sea, so Sister Agnes moves from lucid conversation to tempestuous madness; she can be “calm” but also “frantic” (575). Where the sea, which “had lately slept”, becomes swollen—its waves bursting “white foam” (484) on the rocks—so too, Agnes’ calm logic can turn to “shuddering” sighs and “madness” (575). The Greco-Roman nature of the sea is

47 Corbin, Lure, p. 10. Pagan Nymphs 136 accentuated through the feminine supernatural and its sublimely potent but sweetly false, airy reveries and illusions. On a severer note, as in Udolpho’s storm scene, Greco-Roman seas with their living magic become an embodiment of the dangers of belief in the preternatural and that force of destruction—superstition.

As a result of their journey through Gothic excesses warning them of the dangers of sensibility without restraint and the sublime escape offered in poetic visions of the feminine supernatural, Radcliffe’s heroines achieve a rational happiness. Radcliffe’s heroines glimpse the horror of passion unrestrained which they witness in figures of excess like the Marquis de Montalt or Sister Agnes. These heroines might teeter on the edge or walk a fine balance at times, but they always seek and valorise the triumph of a compact between reason and a moderate sensibility. The moderate sensibility embodied by Radcliffe’s poetic sea nymphs and the excesses of figures like Sister Agnes are resolved into a compact between reason and sensibility. For Radcliffe, this compact has its basis in the theology of Rational Dissent.

Radcliffe’s Christian imperatives have been remarked upon again and again. They have been asserted, by Mayhew for instance, as underscoring her descriptions of nature to the point where her natural scenes become incomprehensible unless they are viewed within a theological framework.4S Robert Mayhew and Rictor Norton have stressed the importance of theological influences on Radcliffe’s representation of the natural world. Thomas Noon Talfourd’s memoir ascribes a conservative Anglican piety to Radcliffe, but the influence of two less conservative nonconformist offshoots of Anglicanism, Unitarianism and

Latitudinarianism, have been persuasively shown to be present in Radcliffe’s fiction.49

However, where Norton has argued in favour of Rational Dissent as a key influence,50

Mayhew has argued for “the tenets of the so-called Latitudinarian school of Anglicanism”.51 Eighteenth-century Unitarianism emphasised the importance of scientific reason and expressed doubts about the nature of resurrection, suggesting a reluctance to entertain notions of the preternatural (beyond the figure of God) and to long too passionately for an existence

Mayhew, “Latitudinariansim and the Novels of Ann Radcliffe”, p. 284. Robert Mayhew asserts that Radcliffe’s nature descriptions have a “theological purpose”. 49 Thomas Noon Talfourd, “Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Radcliffe”, Gaston de Blondevil/e, vol. 1, p. 105. 50 Norton, Mistress of Udolpho, pp. 17-19. Norton argues that Radcliffe’s repeated references to a “Great Author”, “Deity” or “Creator,” are indicative of the influence of Unitarianism. 51 Mayhew, “Latitudinariansim and the Novels of Ann Radcliffe”, p. 274. Pagan Nymphs 137 in some other world.52 Latitudinarianism also stressed the importance of science and “showed a strong tendency to see God in the natural world, especially in natural laws, and tended to be sceptical about the supernatural”.53 For similar reasons Latitudinarian and Unitarian influences are visible in Radcliffe’s preoccupation with the achievement of a middle-ground between reason and sensibility, since both Latitudinarianism and Unitarianism displayed a highly intellectual and humanistic approach to religion and both developed doctrines that concerned “the interrelation between the natural and the supernatural”.54 Where Radcliffe’s Rational non-conformism comes to the fore, the desire for reason to mediate the excesses of sensibility becomes an express project of the narrative.

Radcliffe’s magical sea nymphs are part of what Radcliffe crafts as a virtuous sensibility which balances out the potential for sterility in a reason unsoftened by imaginative pursuits. Such a sensibility is an alternative to the excesses of the unhealthy sensibility embodied in, to use Diane Long Hoeveler’s words, “medievalism, superstition and uninformed prejudice”. Radcliffe’s fiction reveals both “the British and Enlightenment dread” of these excesses but it also acknowledges their “ambivalent allure”.55 In my view, expressions of sensibility, including poetic and musical compositions which feature sea nymphs, exist in a symbiotic relationship with reason in Radcliffe’s novels. I agree with Anne Williams that in asserting the crucial importance of female reason (consider the destruction wrought by women like Sister Agnes who have lost their reason), Radcliffe suggests a revision of the patriarchal family structure: women are reasonable creatures who can make good decisions about whom they marry and what to do with their property, and the perfections of marital love, companionship and virtue result from the expressions of female reason. As a result of their experiences of the feminine supernatural through poetry and music, Radcliffe’s heroines retain an independent mind and are therefore able to reason. But perhaps more importantly, if as Robert Miles has contended “the vocation of writer” is “a fundamental act of self-assertion”,56 then the creativity and solitude implied in the

5~ Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), vol. 2, pp. 2-3, p. 83. 53 Mayhew, “Latitudinarianism and the Novels of Ann Radcliffe”, p. 283. 54 .... Mayhew, “Latitudinarianism and the Novels of Ann Radcliffe”, p. 283. In my quotes in this paragraph, Mayhew was only referring to Latitudinarianism but in his introduction, Mayhew acknowledges many important similarities between Latitudinarianism and Rational dissent. 55 Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism, pp. 52-3. 56 Robert Miles, Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 32. Pagan Nymphs 138 composition or recitation of poetry and music gives Radcliffe’s heroines a powerful identity beyond that of love interest or wife. Radcliffe’s heroines are to become wives but they are also travellers in exotic, even dangerous realms of mountains and oceans, they are musicians and writers, intelligent enough to create and recall poetry and music, and reasonable enough to make decisions about property and marriage partners.

Radcliffe’s seas are infused with a dichotomous mix of ideas drawn from the Greco- Roman tradition. The sea’s ability to enchant is linked with the potent but sweetly false airiness of reveries and illusion and yet it is also, through images of storms and living magic, an embodiment of the dangers of belief in the preternatural and that force of destruction—superstition.57 The extraordinariness ascribed to the natural world in Radcliffe’s novels is allied with its imagined magical and mythological qualities, not the comprehension of its natural laws, and the most potent myths at work in Radcliffe’s fiction are pagan—not Christian. Yet, these momentary sublime reveries enable Radcliffe’s heroines to achieve a balance between reason and sensibility. Any power wielded by her heroines or achieved by them at the end of her novels, particularly in The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho, is based on the maintenance, and/or development of her ability to balance sensibility with reason. Radcliffe’s poetic sea nymphs can be located within this balancing act. As demonstrations of creativity and imagination, they are a component of the attractive sensibility that underpins the appeal and virtue of her heroines. In Radcliffe’s narratives, interpolated poems are often presented as enjoyable but harmless creative activities but these creative activities empower Radcliffe’s heroines to maintain a degree of emotional and mental independence and to have a degree of self-control, even as they are physically harried from place to place.

Radcliffe’s Female Gothic can partly trace its roots to Greek myth. Sea nymphs illustrate a style of femininity that opposes yet also complements the femininity of her heroines. Radcliffe’s sea nymphs are manifestations of the supernatural, contained as a fanciful piece of music or an enjoyable poem or reverie. Contained in music, poetry and reverie, these sea nymphs define the appeal of her fictional heroines in terms of sensibility, creativity, reason and education. As supernatural suggestions thus managed, these nymphs

57 The suggestion of pagan magic in a sea context is linked to the terror and superstition overtly in A Sicilian Romance, in the interpolated verse (p. 127) and The Italian, in the epigraph (p. 241). In Udolpho, Sister Agnes’ irrational, seemingly possessed, mental states are metaphorically linked to the storm that wrecks Emily’s ship (pp. 484, 575). Pagan Nymphs 139 also function as an aspect of the strength of Radcliffe’s heroines. Emily and Adeline gain mental respite and succour from writing poems or playing music and can be momentarily emotionally and mentally renewed and thereby able to face the challenges awaiting them with virtue and reason. It is not intended that the reader or heroine should seriously believe in sea nymphs or actually see them. But in their ability to compose a poem or sing a piece of music, to be inspired by and to enjoy the sea realm and imagine transcendent entities through these poems, they maintain and continue to develop a sense of themselves that is indomitable.

Radcliffe’s writing demonstrates the importance of ritualised magic (in the appropriate forms) within a rational universe. When Radcliffe chooses poetry and music as the vessels for the overt supematuralism underpinning the sensibility of her heroines, she displays the fascination for ritualised magic evident in Wordsworth’s verse. Radcliffe and Wordsworth both use Greco-Roman myth to inflect their seascapes with supernatural magic. However, when Radcliffe emphasises the containment of ritualised magic, while her work sympathises with the fascination for the supernatural revealed in Wordsworth’s poetry, it lacks the hunger. Chapter 5: ‘The Mighty Waters Rolling Wordsworth ’s Poetic Seas.

The sea is a mortal conduit to an immortal realm in Wordsworth’s poetry. Biblical images of purifying and punitive death crowd Wordsworth’s portrayals of the sea and Wordsworth’s seas act as emblems for Christian suffering, loss and hope for renewal and salvation; they also reflect a world filled with Greco-Roman supernatural spirits and symbolise the eternal processes of pure souls bom into the joy and pain of mortality.1 In response to the sublime force of the monstrous hybridity of the sea, Wordsworth most often invokes the resolving omniscience of a Protestant deity, but he does this within a universe he has furnished with Greco-Roman myth.

In the introduction to this thesis, I observed that Corbin’s Lure of the Sea has become a base text for critics exploring perceptions of the sea in the Romantic period. To reiterate, Corbin describes a pattern of changing late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century marine aesthetics (a pattern also described by the more recent work of Isham) in which the “recollections drawn from ancient literature and the reading of the Bible”, that had “formed a cluster of representations” inspiring feelings of “horror” and “repulsion”, loosened their hold on the “collective imagination”.2 Wordsworth’s portrayals of the sea do not fit the cultural patterns described by Isham and Corbin. Through their Greco-Roman and biblical allusions, Wordsworth’s depictions of the sea demonstrate a longing for the “certainties of a sacral universe” and a longing for the pre-eminent position given to man in such a universe. If eternity is the antithesis of mortal life, Wordsworth’s oceans are not symbols of eternity; they are symbols of the mortal side of eternal processes. Wordsworth construes “the oceans that give life to our planet”3 as symbols of mortal life and the mortal side of a mortal/divine dualism. These oceans are “rooted” in the subjective “experience of nature” but this experience is given meaning by the Greco-Roman and biblical tradition.

As noted in my introduction to the thesis, “pagan” refers to Greek and Roman mythical figures, gods, religious and cosmological ideas: in Wordsworth’s writing pagan references manifest namely as: Proteus, Triton, Sea nymphs, the concept of pre-existence and the broader notion of a spirit filled world. 2 Corbin, Lure, p. 1, p. 15. 3 Isham, Image of the Sea, p. 1. Mighty Waters 141

In his influential study Romanticism and Religion (1976), Stephen Prickett argued that religious experience is inherent to Wordsworth’s poetry,*4 and this point was taken up more recently by Deanne Westbrook in Wordsworth’s Biblical Ghosts (2001).5 This point is indisputable, and my discussion in this chapter adds to it through its focus on sea imagery. Yet, Wordsworth’s use of Greco-Roman references has been vigorously contested, with many critics downplaying, often with an air of dismissal, allusions to pre-existence, Proteus and other suggestions of the pagan supernatural.6 A notable exception is Alan Hill’s essay, “Wordsworth, Boccaccio and the Pagan Gods of Antiquity” in which Hill convincingly argues for the importance of the pagan supernatural in Wordsworth’s poetry.7 Allusions to Greco-Roman belief or mythical deities have been repeatedly portrayed by critics as remnants from Wordsworth’s pantheistic and questioning youth or deemed insignificant and no more than a lapse into convention or poetic adornment. When these arguments are made, Wordsworth’s comments in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads of 1800 relegating Greco-Roman allusion to the fate of the latter are usually cited.8 However, Wordsworth’s rejection of the superficial use of Greco-Roman allusion suggests that these allusions in his poetry operate on a far deeper level than artificial references to gods or scenes from the epics of Homer or Virgil. Greco-Roman references are semantically crucial to several works that are now part of the Wordsworth canon. Even in the latter part of Wordsworth’s life, where his conservative editing practices have been meticulously documented, pagan references remain. These are old arguments. I renew them to counter the diminished role ascribed to Christian and Greco- Roman allusion in Romantic portrayals of the sea within the critical paradigm of Romantic aesthetic transformations of the sea. I claim Greco-Roman references possess the explicitly supernatural magic Wordsworth manipulates in his seascapes to wed the mortal world to the

Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsw orth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 5 Deanne Westbrook, Wordsworth’s Biblical Ghosts (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 6 For the former view: Timothy Webb, English Romantic Hellenism 1700-1824 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), p. 24 ff. For the latter, David Rogers, “God and Pre-existence in Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode", Durham University Journal (1969), pp. 143-146. 7 Alan Hill, “Wordsworth, Boccaccio, and the Pagan Gods of Antiquity,” The Review of English Studies, New Series, 45.177 (1994), pp. 26-41. Hill does not focus on the sea. g Andrew J., George, Prefaces and Essays on Poetry 1798-1845, with a letter to Lady Beaumont (Boston: Heath, 1892), p. 5. In the 1800 Preface Wordsworth notes “except in a very few instances the Reader will find no personifications of abstract ideas in these volumes”. Wordsworth associated personifications with the practice of referring to pagan deities. Mighty Waters 142

otherworldly and to imbue the common man with elements of the uncommon, both Wordsworthian prerequisites for the contradictions of the world to be comprehensible, endurable and enjoyable.

Wordsworth’s portrayals of the sea demonstrate a preference for cosmogonies that have an explicit supernatural basis over cosmogonies that conceive mechanistic, wholly material “underpinnings of the natural world”.9 Throughout his poetry, Wordsworth expresses dissatisfaction with what he sees as an increasingly prevalent mechanistic view of the universe; a view which for him made the natural world and man’s place in it sterile, leaving little room for satisfying human relationships with each other or the natural world.10 In the face of a rational, mechanistic view of the universe, Wordsworth’s poetry depicts a hunger for ritualised magic and mystery and for intimations of a supernatural presence to grant special meaning and purpose to human life. For much of his life, Wordsworth’s religious experiences with the Church of England left this hunger unfulfilled. Other forms of Christianity and paganism are summoned in Wordsworth’s poems as antidotes or role models.

“The world is too much with us” (published 1807) is an earlier and famous example involving pagan references but Wordsworth’s scorn for the concept of a universe based on “Mechanistic laws” is also explicitly stated through pagan references in the later poem, “Cave of Staffa: After the Crowd had departed”.*11 “Cave of Staffa” invokes the paganism associated with this cave as a “fit school” with which to learn the folly of “presumptuous thoughts”:

Thanks for the lessons of this Spot—fit school For the presumptuous thoughts that would assign Mechanic laws to agency divine; And, measuring heaven by earth, would overrule Infinite Power. (Lines 1-5)

Scott McEathron, “Death as ‘Refuge and Ruin’: Shelley’s ‘A Vision of the Sea’ and Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’”, Keats-She/ley Journal 43 (1994), pp. 170-192, p. 177. 10 By “mechanistic view of the universe” I mean the view that the universe is based on material, non- supematural laws and processes. 11 “Cave of Staffa”, No. 29 Itinerary Poems of 1833, in E. De Selincourt and Helen Darbishire eds., The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth 2nd edn, 5 vols. vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952-9). All references to Wordworth’s poems refer this edition and volume unless otherwise specified. Mighty Waters 143

Later in Wordsworth’s life, when the Church of England had become more of a source of inspiration, when he found that in Cambridge “the Low Church” was “quite in disrepute, without any tendency to Popery”12 and he had come under the (as Juliet Barker describes it), “thrall” of Frederick William Faber,13 Wordsworth’s poems reflect a more overt biblical supematuralism: for instance, God’s overt control of the sea is visible in poems written in 1834, “On a High Part of the Coast of Cumberland” and “By the Sea-Side”. Such a pattern has exceptions though, and a delight in both the supematuralism of the Bible and the supematuralism of Greco-Roman works can be seen in poems throughout his life: “Sept 1802. Near Dover” suggests God’s control over the sea: “Even so doth God protect us if we be/Virtuous and Wise” (9-10). “Cave of Staffa” (No. 30) opens with an address to “Ye shadowy Beings, that have rights and claims/in every cell of Fingal’s mystic Grot”. These beings are “vanished . . . but subject to recall” and more importantly the speaker remarks,

Why keep we else the instincts whose dread law Ruled here of yore, till what men felt they saw, Not by black arts but magic natural! If eyes be still sworn vassals of belief, Yon light shapes forth a Bard, that shade a Chief. (Lines 10-14)

Wordsworth’s use of Greco-Roman belief in his poetry, in addition to Christian allusions, suggests that Greco-Roman belief adds something important to his worldview not entirely captured by the Christianity he experienced for much of his life. This something might be seen as the explicit supematuralism rejected by an English Protestantism beset by an idolization of, in John Keble’s words, “common sense and practical utility”.14 I have no desire to “tie” Wordsworth to the Oxford Movement; as Stephen Gill has observed,

The Letters of William and Dorothy, 2nd edn, vol. 2, ed., Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 28. Arranged and edited from first edition by the late Ernest de Selincourt. 13 Juliet Barker, Wordsworth: A Life (London: Viking, 2000), p. 274. 14 John Keble, “On the Mysticism attributed to the Fathers of the Church”, No. 89, in Tracts for the Times (New York: Charles Henry Publishers, 1839), p. 2. Mighty Waters 144

Wordsworth’s “commitment to the Church of England was hardly to be questioned”.15 Even so, the numinous power of pagan myth infused into “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood” venerates an explicitly supernatural construction of the universe. I have already quoted Jarvis’ characterisation of this veneration as the desire to “have back everything which has been taken away by sheer common sense”.16 Such a desire often propels Wordsworth away from the Church of England, leading him to seek out the supematuralism of the Ancients.

In this chapter, I isolate two poems in the Wordsworth canon which reflect trends visible throughout his portrayals of the sea. “Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont” and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood” (hereafter referred to as the Immortality Ode) are among Wordsworth’s most famous, most critically discussed and best loved poems. Their ideological force and enduring aesthetic power is a product of Wordsworth’s use of Greco- Roman and biblical allusion in his sea imagery.

In these poems, identity and erasure, life and death, home and exile, community and isolation, trust and betrayal, limitation and infinity are interpreted within the matrixes of form and formlessness, redemption and sin, purification and punishment and salvation and damnation. With varying degrees of certainty, Wordsworth suggests that faith in God’s control over these dichotomies assuages the pain, simplifies and grants meaning to (or blots out the question of) individual existence. Wordsworth portrays the potential for identity, life and home, community, trust and infinity to be extricated from erasure, death, exile, isolation, betrayal and limitation through a Christian faith that might explain form out of formlessness, and provide a moral guideline for redemption, purification and salvation. The oscillations of form and formlessness, life and death, and renewal and destruction overwhelm Wordsworth’s speakers with the pain of loss and existential incomprehension. To an extent, the presence of God assuages this suffering. However, Wordsworth also portrays the individual’s battle with the dichotomies of the feminine supernatural, but for Wordsworth these dichotomies are not embodied in female monsters or deities. The dichotomies of the feminine supernatural develop in Wordsworth’s portrayals of the sea through the distinction he draws between a

Stephen Gill, “Wordsworth and ‘Catholic Truth’: the Role of Frederick William Faber”, The Review of English Studies, New Series 45.178 (1994), pp. 204-220, p. 205. Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, p. 18. Mighty Waters 145 world seen as evidence of the supernatural (populated by deities and spirits), and a world seen as devoid of the supernatural. In Wordsworth’s poetic seascapes, belief in the supernatural makes the world beautiful, known (“ours”), stable, fertile, full of passionate love and a conduit to immortality, and disbelief makes it alien, hideous, chaotic, barren, and a terrifying place of death and despair.

‘Never again can I behold a smiling sea’

Wordsworth uses the sea to express an overt belief in God’s control over the dichotomies of human existence in several poems from 1803-1835. These poems are “September 1802, Near Dover” (1802), “Forms of Prayer at Sea” (1845), “On a High Part of the Coast of Cumberland” (1835) and “By the Sea-side” (1835). I will discuss these poems briefly before moving on to “Elegiac Stanzas”. The sea in these poems is interpreted as evidence of God’s power and judgement. The threats and dangers of the sea are (as in Jonah 1 and 2) under the command of God, and his power over the chaotic waters is (as in the Psalms and Matthew 8) evidence of God’s omnipotence for which thanks should be given. As in the biblical tradition, God’s control over the waters manifests in his control over specific dichotomies. In these poems Wordsworth’s seas encode the dichotomies of life and death; salvation and damnation; redemption and sin; purification and punishment. Consider “Forms of Prayer at Sea” which is reproduced below in full:

To kneeling Worshippers no earthly floor Gives holier invitation than the deck Of a storm-shattered Vessel saved from Wreck (When all that Man could do availed no more) By Him who raised the Tempest and restrains: Happy the crew who this have felt, and pour Forth for His mercy, as the Church ordains, Solemn thanksgiving. Nor will they implore In vain who, for a rightful cause, give breath To words the Church prescribes aiding the lip For the heart’s sake, ere ship with hostile ship Encounters, armed for work of pain and death. Supplicants! the God to whom your cause ye trust Mighty Waters 146

Will listen, and yet know that He is just. 17

“By the Sea-side” contains the similar notion of giving thanks to God for controlling the sea:

Ye mariners, that plough your onward way, Or in the haven rest, or sheltering bay, May silent thanks at least to God be given With a full heart; “our thoughts are heard in heaven!” (Lines 36-9)

The restraint of the sea in these poems is, as it is in Genesis and Exodus, evidence of God’s particular favour. Looking upon a calm sea, described as a “welcome change”, the poetic speaker of “By the Sea-side” remarks, “Some lodge in peace,/Saved by His care who bade the tempest cease”. The distinctions between the deserving “some” and the undeserving are marked in these poems, and such distinctions are not only features of poetry written by an older poet. Wordsworth expressed similar sentiments over thirty years earlier in “September, 1802. Near Dover”18 where the speaker recoils in horror as he contemplates the English Channel separating England from France:

I shrunk; for verily the barrier Flood Was like a lake, or river bright and fair, A span of waters; yet what power is there! What mightiness for evil and for good! Even so doth God protect us if we be Virtuous and wise. (Lines 5-8)

Sea storms are expressions of God’s wrath and “His” justice in these poems; they are his “voice” and the instrument of “the wisdom that begins with fear”. Those who end up at the

17 Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Part 3, No. 30., in De Selincourt and Darbishire eds., Poetical Works, vol. 3. 18 Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty, Part 1, No. 11., De Selincourt and Darbishire eds., Poetical Works, vol. 3. Mighty Waters 147 bottom of the ocean “as on a bed of death” are there because they have not warranted “His mercy”. They are “Offenders” who have not listened to his “softest voice” and rather require a “discipline” through “terrors”. In “On a High Part of the Coast of Cumberland”, Wordsworth writes in a similar vein:

Thou Power supreme! Who, arming to rebuke Offenders, dost put off the gracious look, And clothe thyself with terrors like the Flood Of ocean roused into his fiercest mood, Whatever discipline thy Will ordain For the brief course that must for me remain; Teach me with quick-eared spirit to rejoice In admonitions of thy softest voice! (Lines 13-20)

In “September 1802, Near Dover”, “Forms of Prayer at Sea”, “On a High Part of the Coast of Cumberland” and “By the Sea-side” Wordsworth refers to God in an association with his control over the sea and human mortality. Wordsworth speaks of “His care” in “By the Sea-side”, the “discipline thy Will ordains” and alludes to specific biblical episodes such as “the Flood” and the Christian doctrines of grace and eternal life with God in “On a High Part of the Coast of Cumberland”:

Whate’er the path these mortal feet may trace Breathe through my soul the blessing of thy grace, Glad, through a perfect love, a faith sincere Drawn from the wisdom that begins with fear, Glad to expand; and, for a season, free From finite cares, to rest absorbed in Thee! (Lines 21-26)

John Wordsworth died less than two miles out from land in Weymouth Bay. His ship, The Earl of Abergavenny, sunk beneath a heaving sea in the cold of a February night in 1805. In the months and years that followed, John’s death influenced the writing of several of his Mighty Waters 148 brother’s poems. “Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont” (1806) is among them (Figure 3, below), a work in which the poetic speaker records the end of a naive vision of the sea’s gentleness and imperturbable beauty. In “Elegiac Stanzas”, personal experience galvanizes Wordsworth’s poetic visions of the sea, but when Wordsworth writes about his personal experiences, biblical allusion enters his language, underpins his assumptions and echoes in his worldview.19 Further, “Elegiac Stanzas” was written during a period which led to Wordsworth’s serious adoption of orthodox Christianity.

Figure 2. Sir George Beaumont, Peele Castle in a Storm, oil on canvas (1805)

The presence of the biblical tradition in the sea imagery of “Elegiac Stanzas” is less overt than the above examples; nevertheless, in “Elegiac Stanzas” Wordsworth taps into an oceanic iconography laden with pagan allusion and Christian allegory through his use of the metaphor of life as a stormy sea. Wordsworth’s deployment of the ocean as a metaphor for life’s journey has its basis in the Odyssey, the Aeneid and the King James Bible, but when Wordsworth alludes to the hope of resurrection he makes the journey on life’s tempestuous ocean a Christian metaphor. The poetic speaker of “Elegiac Stanzas” erects dualistic parameters within which to view the sea: the sea can be beautiful and terrible, smiling and gentle or a vicious tempest, it can be the still glass of youth or the tossing waves of maturity. The aesthetic power of the sea in “Elegiac Stanzas” is the result of these dualisms. Yet what

19 The date for composition given in the Selincourt and Darbishire edition is 1805 but if it is to accord with Wordsworth’s sighting of Beaumont’s painting it must be, as Juliet Barker points out, some time after May 1806. Barker, A Life, p. 343. Mighty Waters 149

grants meaning to the contradictions of these transformations and contains their sublimity is the notion of the Christian journey and its hope in immortality.

Many critics have commented on “Elegiac Stanzas”, but they interpret references to the sea as references to the natural world in general and analyse it accordingly. The result is that very little is actually said about the sea and sea imagery in their analysis and only the briefest acknowledgment is made that it is the sea in this poem, and not a mountain or field or lake or stream that is employed as the vehicle for this dramatic change. Wordsworth’s use of the sea as a metaphor for existential and perceptual transformation is significant because, while partly associated with Greco-Roman seas of monstrous instability and betrayal, Wordsworth’s transformed and transformative sea in “Elegiac Stanzas” is primarily associated with the punishments and purifications of God.

The sea as an existential trial figures in texts produced much earlier than the Bible; in the Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish (long established as one of the sources of the Genesis text),“ battle with the sea is the origin of life on earth, and we have seen that both Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid imagined seas of vicious trial that their heroes struggled through before they could find rest in the stability of the land and the home. Wordsworth translated parts of the Aeneid, and records in the Fenwick note to “Composed by the Seashore” that as a child he “used to listen to anything said about storms and shipwrecks” with “mysterious awe”. However, Wordsworth’s conception of the sea and his use of this figure of the sea as a metaphor for life’s trials in “Elegiac Stanzas” has a particularly Christian flavour, partly because of the prevailing Christian doctrine of redemption and rebirth through suffering in the poem (which might equally have their basis in Greco-Roman works) and partly as a result of the final lines, which Edward Wilson has attributed to the influence of St. Paul.

It is not until the final lines of the poem that a vision of Christian hope is explicit. Throughout the poem we are offered a description of a sea which is at worst deceptive and

20 Thomas J. Brennan, “Wordsworth’s Peele Castle.” The Exp/icator 61.1 (2002), pp. 14-17, p. 15. The sea is not distinguished from the natural world. Also, Edward Wilson, “An Echo of St. Paul and Words of Consolation in Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas’”, The Review of English Studies [New Series] 43.169 (1992), pp. 75-80. Wilson discusses references to fortitude and St. Paul but does not analyse the sea in this context. 21 A. J. Wensinck, The Ocean in the Literature of the Western Semites (Wiesbaden: Sändig,1968), pp. 20-1. 22 Fenwick note to “Composed by the Seashore” in Poetical Works, De Selincourt and Darbishire eds., p. 397. Mighty Waters 150

cruel, and at best indifferent. There is no indication that God is controlling the sea for a clear purpose or that his voice can be heard in its movements. If anything, it is the castle (often read as a symbol of the poet himself or the suffering human figure amid life’s horrors) that might be a symbol of God since it is “cased in the unfeeling armour of old time”, just as in the Immortality Ode, immortality is a “Master o’er a Slave”.24 The castle might also parallel Lucretius’ wise sage looking on at all those swept up in life’s passions. As a betrayer, and with potential Lucretian echoes, Wordsworth’s sea in this poem reiterates a Greco-Roman motif. But overall the sea is an existential metaphor framed in Christian terms: its turmoil is an emblem for the violent assault of experience and the loss of innocence which must be endured with Christian fortitude and in the hope of resurrection.

Wilson highlights the importance of Christian allusion in this poem in his paper, “An Echo of St. Paul and Words of Consolation in Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas’”. He views the final lines, “Not without hope we suffer and we mourn”, as a statement embracing Christian fortitude and the culmination of the poem as an expression of Christian hope in resurrection with its inherent vision of a new world of permanence and uninterrupted joy. 25 For Wilson, the final lines “echo” Paul 4:13 where belief in the resurrection of Christ is employed to ward off the sorrow of mourners: “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him”T When viewed in the context of Wordsworth’s letters surrounding his brother’s death, the parallels with Paul 4:13 are clear since “fortitude”, Wilson notes, is for Wordsworth in these letters “granted and sustained by God”. One example of this is a letter written to George Beaumont (Feb 20th 1805) where Wordsworth writes, “I trust in God that I shall not want fortitude; but my loss is great and irreparable”. Wilson’s argument has implications for the depiction of the sea in “Elegiac Stanzas”: the sea is a Christian metaphor for life as an abyss of incomprehensible oscillations of joy and pain, peace and strife, companionship and loss endured till God’s eternal paradise is reached in death. The concept of an immortal realm resolves these oscillations into God’s control over life and death; renewal and destruction.

Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 144. Sacks makes this point. 24 Wordsworth, Immortality Ode, Line 120.

Wilson, "An Echo of St. Paul”, pp. 75-76.

“6 Wilson, “An Echo of St. Paul”, p. 79. 27 Philip Wayne ed., The Letters of William Wordsworth (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 66. Mighty Waters 151

The “mighty Deep” is a hybrid mix: it is “glassy”, “calm”, “the gentlest of all gentle Things”, a “deadly swell” and a “pageantry of fear!” Wordsworth equates the youthful perception of the ever smiling sea with false conceptions of mortal life in this, the false paradise of the earth. Melding references to the Christian paradise of Heaven with the Elysian fields of Greek myth, the scene in the speaker’s memory is a seeming “chronicle of heaven” (Line 22) and “A Picture of lasting ease, /Elysian quiet, without toil or strife” (Lines 25-6). The recollected picture of the sea is crafted into a vision of endless human innocence, happiness and peace; it is imagined as an icon of stability and “tranquil” permanence surrounded by an atmosphere of “bliss”. The naivety of this picture is foreshadowed through the repetitive suggestion that these things never existed in such phrases as “the light that never was”, “seemed a treasure-house divine” and “fond illusion”. Wordsworth characterises mortal joy as inherent to the fragile transience of the earth; real lasting joy is read as possible only away from its imperfections.

As noted above, the figure of Peele Castle has been critically aligned with the “self’ of the poetic speaker and God. Wordsworth’s poetic speaker reflects: “I saw thee every day; and all the while /Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea” (Lines 3-4). The reference to “a glassy sea” alludes to a biblical image: the image of the sea of glass which lies at the foot of the throne of God in the Book of Revelation. As I argued in Chapter 3, the sea in the Bible is both a place of God and set in opposition to God as early as the first lines of Genesis when it appears as the chaotic void God must control and make fruitful before creation can begin. The earthly sea does God’s bidding, usually as an instrument of his wrath, but it is cast out from God’s newly formed paradise-world at the end of Revelation. In the Bible, the division between the sea of glass in heaven and the sea on earth is a division ultimately between the imperfection of life on earth and the perfect paradise of God’s place of immortality, heaven. “Elegiac Stanzas” makes a similar distinction between the false paradise of the mortal earth, with its false “glassy sea”, and a true, eternal otherworldly paradise with the hope for immortality.

Nonetheless, the gentle sea of happiness and peace had been real: it was a “truth” even as much as the “truth” and reality of the “trampling waves” of loss and anguish. Conjuring up his former view of the sea, the poetic speaker constructs a vision of something meek and full of tenderness, something incapable of violence:

7X Wordsworth, “Elegiac Stanzas”, Lines 1-9, 11-12, 47-8. Mighty Waters 152

I could have fancied that the mighty Deep Was even the gentlest of all gentle Things. (Lines 11-12)

The rhythmic musicality of these lines, with their alliterative emphasis on “gentleness” and their assonance sweeping like tiny motions on the water, capture the seeming eternity of youthful joy; a joy which is abruptly contrasted with the sea of maturity, where its furious lashings against the crumbling castle mimic the assault of experience, the unassuageable pain of loss but more importantly, the incomprehensible alternating swell of tranquil bliss and “trampling waves” of pain.

Musing on Beaumont’s painting, Wordsworth’s speaker assents to the depiction of the monstrous instability of human experience presented best, now, through the darker violent side of the sea:

0 ’tis a passionate Work!—yet, wise and well; Well chosen is the spirit that is here; That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell, This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!

And this huge Castle, standing here sublime, 1 love to see the look with which it braves, Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time, The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves. (Lines 45-52)

The light touch of the water has turned deadly in these lines. The “deadly swell” reflects the inexplicable oscillations of human experience and the violence of this changeable sea is overwhelming. Human suffering is aurally encoded into the language of the poem through the trochaic force of “fierce wind”, the onomatopoeic effect and the violence of the plosive “trampling”, and the ominous assonance of “deadly swell”. When Wordsworth’s speaker describes the renting of the “illusion” of eternal happiness on earth, he speaks not simply in terms of perceptual change but in terms of a sublime transformation of the most valuable aspects of himself, his “heart” and “soul”. He speaks of a “power” lost and the humanisation—his perceptual wisdom wrought by suffering—effected by “a deep distress”. Mighty Waters 153

The sublime “deep distress” Wordsworth describes is overpoweringly transformative because, but for its suggestion of permanence, that sea of youth was not false (it had existed or “been”), and because the qualities of beauty, gentleness, light and bliss are inextricable from the qualities of ugly storm, vicious pain, darkness and loss. The monstrous hybridity of the humanised sea produces the speaker’s “deep distress” of incomprehensible and inassuageable suffering. In the poem, this suffering is incomprehensible and inassuageable without the Christian hope for an afterlife to transform the contradictions of the human journey—the extremes of joy and grief, community and isolation, life and death—into the paradoxes of God’s divine plan.

It is not the presence of sea storms or the experience of death at sea that signal biblical allusion in “Elegiac Stanzas”; it is the way human suffering, characterised in terms of a sea struggle, is read as a contradictory sublime voyage whose incomprehensibility is controlled by the Christian hope for resurrection. The sea’s turmoil in “Elegiac Stanza’s” is made analogous to both an acutely personal experience of loss and emotional anguish and a wider, more universal, conception of human suffering—suffering which must be endured with Christian fortitude till death, with its precious hope for resurrection and a paradise from mortal trials, ends it.

“Elegiac Stanzas” might be employed as a perceptual marker, a poem flagging the end of broadly positive images of the sea in Wordsworth’s writing, where the sea is beautiful, gentle, kind and eternally calm, and the beginning of broadly negative images of the sea in his work, where the sea is presented as repulsive, terrifyingly violent, vicious and chaotic. However, despite this poem’s emphasis on a catastrophic shift in vision, Wordsworth’s sea images before and after the death of his brother were mostly dichotomous blends of the luminous calm and the dark tempest. Before he wrote “Elegiac Stanzas” Wordsworth’s experience of the sea, in terms of what he read and wrote about it, had not been even in the majority untainted by visions of storms, danger and tragic death.“ To give just a few examples of Wordsworth’s early visions of turbulent and dangerous seas, as early as 1784 in an early prose fragment XI (iii), Wordsworth writes of a turbulent sea, dashing against majestic rocks (recalling Virgil’s description of King Latium’s response to the war mongering rabble in Book 7 of the Aeneid). From the onset, Wordsworth’s “vision” of the sea

29 Independent of sea-related affliction, Wordsworth lost his parents at age twelve, his exploits in revolutionary France lead to life-altering disillusionment and a love child. Therefore, his brother’s death could not be the primary catalyst for a loss of innocence, though it was the first time death touched his siblings. Mighty Waters 154 was imbued with a set of assumptions and associations seen through the lens provided by Greco-Roman works and the Bible. Describing what appears to be two warriors facing each other, he writes:

They gaze upon each other like two rocks which rise from the sea in dreadful majesty they stand unmoved while the [?waves] dash at their feet, "3 A and the storm howls round their heads.—

In fragment VI (1788), Wordsworth associates the sea with anger, the soul, storm and finally calm:

IN anger you may sometimes see the bottom of the soul. Sea. Storm. Calm.—

In “The Sailor’s Mother”, composed in 1802, the picture of the sea that emerges is one of danger and death, and the suffering of those remaining. These associations are intensified in the poem through the incongruous image of the majestic begging woman mourning her dead son, sadly and perhaps absurdly protecting his singing bird, which is her only link to him.'1 In “The Female Vagrant” (1798), the sea is linked alternately with brutality, “like a sea the storming army came,/And Fire from Hell reared his gigantic shape./And Murder, by the ghastly gleam, and Rape”, and gentle repose “-For weeks the balmy air breathed soft and mild/And on the gliding vessel Heaven and Ocean smiled”.

Descriptions of calm, inviting seas, without any attendant suggestions of their deceitful beauty or capacity for raging storm, death and suffering are rare in Wordsworth’s poetry, but it is true to say that even after John’s death, Wordsworth was occasionally capable of “see[.ng] a smiling sea”. The best example would be the unstained liquid benignity of the sea

The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols, vol. 2, eds. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 9-11. 31 DeSelincourt and Darbishire eds., Poetical Works, vol. 2., Lines 31-36. 32 Wiliam Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1798 (London: Penguin, 2006), line lumbers are not provided in this edition. Mighty Waters 155

in “By the Sea-shore, Isle of Man” (1833). In this poem, the sea is described as “sparkling”, “liquid Calm”, “unstained” and “crystalline”. It is even, in its translucency, declared to be “benign” and the act of “plunging in” is characterised as a “long embrace”. Personified as “thee”, this long embrace suggests the caresses of a lover. This association of the sea with a living, even loving entity is actually repeated in “To the Daisy”, another poem, written before “Elegiac Stanzas” which Wordsworth wrote in memory of John Wordsworth. While this poem recounts the storm and the shipwreck, the main description of the sea is one of calm: its gentle movements (mimicked by the recurrent sibilance in the lines describing John beneath the waves) seem akin to the rocking of a cradle. Under the swaying water, Wordsworth imagines his brother “in slumber quietly; /Unforced by wind or wave /To quit the Ship for which he died” (Lines 50-3). It is perhaps a macabre image, but there is no obvious ironic intent in these lines. Wordsworth even makes a marriage partner of The Earl of Abergavenny when he describes his brother as “found” at “her side” and remarks that “all claims of duty” have been “satisfied” and the sea itself is described as “what he loved”. In this poem the sea grieves for the loss of John. Wordsworth, imagining John’s sea side grave, which he never saw and which remains unmarked, declares, “The birds shall sing and ocean make/A mournful murmur for his sake”.33 In these early fragments and poems, the violence of storms and tragic death are already part of Wordsworth’s vision of the sea. There are intimations of the mysterious and transcendent amid the natural, the sailors’ “bodings” of potential danger, the seeming correlation between sea and soul, the waste and tempest of the plain in metaphysical accord with the psychological tempest and despair of the figures in “Salisbury Plain”.

Dreaming of Immortality

The sea is a Christian metaphor in “Elegiac Stanzas”, but in the Immortality Ode the sea is a pagan place. As the site of the soul’s birth into a mortal life and therefore its birth into the sensual joys and painful trials of mortal existence, the sea in the Ode invokes the Neoplatonism of Proclus and Virgil’s account of the souls on the banks of the Lethe in Aeneid VI, as well as, I propose, Porphyry’s descriptions in The Cave of the Nymphs of souls joining their human form via the medium of water. The sea is usually read as a symbol of immortality or the spiritual in the Ode, the place where the soul (in its purest immaterial

33 Barker, A Life, p. 239. Here Barker notes that John Wordsworth was buried 21 March 1805, in the churchyard at All Saints’ Church, Wyke Regis, overlooking the bay where he had lost his life. Mighty Waters 156 form) is most at home. Against this reading, I discuss Wordsworth’s ocean as the mortal side of a mortal/immortal dualistic cosmogony. Read within the context of the influence of Virgil and Porphyry, and the symbolic geography Wordsworth establishes in the Ode as a result, I argue that the sea is the place of the soul’s bodily birth into quotidian pleasure but also into terrible pain. Wordsworth’s poem places an acute emphasis on corporeal suffering and he constructs the body and the material world as a “prison” for the soul, when the “mighty waters” of the “immortal sea” facilitate this imprisonment they become part of an immortal process but they are aligned with its material, mortal side. In readings, as recently visible in Isham’s work, where the sea is a symbol of immortality or the “spiritual”, the sea itself is a supernatural place of joy and the end point of the journey of mortality, but as the material portion of immortal processes through which the soul joins the mortal body of pain and pleasure, I contend, it is a far more ambivalent symbol.

The significance of pagan allusion in the Immortality Ode, and for Wordsworth’s poetry in general, has long been the subject of debate. Briefly, in English Romantic Hellenism 1700-1824 (1982), Timothy Webb remarked that Wordsworth, though “sympathetic to the spirit of Greek poetry,” ultimately rejected pagan beliefs. For Webb, Wordsworth may have flirted periodically with notions of magical spirits and gods in some of his poems, but his final take on these influences was to view their “religious implications” as “unacceptable”.34 Yet, Wordsworth employs allusions to pagan myth and magic in poems that have become foundations of his poetical inheritance,35 and especially with regard to his perception of the sea, pagan images remain an inextinguishable presence in his poems, not out of accident or convention but as a result of their beguiling imaginative appeal. This significant role played by pagan allusion is at odds with the anxiety Wordsworth expressed about appeals to paganism; such allusions cannot be dismissed.

The Ode marries the idea of a Christian God and the Greco-Roman idea of pre­ existence which accounts for the “celestial light” encircling the child (Line 4). The Christian God is an important presence in the poem but the non-Christian idea of pre-existence is the foundation for the motif of the divinity of the child without which the Ode would cease to

34 Webb, Romantic Hellenism, p. 24. 35 Barker, A Life, p. 230. Barker describes the Immortality Ode as “the greatest [ode] William ever wrote”, foundational to a poem whose “lines and phrases have been used as titles for books and films, or become part of the common vocabulary” and not only that, this is a poem that was so important to the poet Wordsworth himself, so much an emblem of his poetry that he “chose to end every future edition of his poems” with the last four lines of the Ode. Mighty Waters 157 exist.36 The notion of a prior existence accounts for the “celestial light” which encircles the child, the “glory”, “the something that is gone”, the “immortal sea”, the “one delight” which all indicate a prior state which explains why the child is the one “trailing clouds of glory” (Lines 4, 53, 164, 191, 64). In the Immortality Ode, the child’s access to divinity occurs as the result of pre-existence. It is the adult who, having lost this, can only look for “shadowy recollections” and will only rejoin that blissful state upon death (Line 150). The intellectual structure of the poem relies on the conception of the child’s access to divinity, his access to that “celestial light”, an access which is based on the notion that his soul existed before his birth and that life on the earth makes him “Forget the glories he hath known/And that imperial palace whence he came”. The motif of the child’s inherent divinity is reiterated explicitly in all but one stanza of the Immortality Ode, and it is a motif crucial to any reading of Wordsworth’s most enduring and most recalled sea image: “the children sporting on the shore” and “the mighty waters rolling evermore”. Pre-existence is usually regarded as best exemplified in stanza five, yet it is the “immortal sea” of stanza nine which best explores the symbolic seaside travels of the divine soul.

In 1928 John Rea argued that the likely source of Wordsworth’s idea of pre-existence, as it is expressed in the Ode, was discussions with Coleridge on Proclus’ “doctrine of descent and gradual forgetfulness” garnered from Marsilio Ficino’s compendium of Neoplatonic excerpts in Latin.38 Wordsworth’s intimate knowledge of the Aeneid makes Virgil’s account of the immortal souls “drinking the deep draught of oblivion” on the banks of the Lethe an additional source for his imaginative rendering of pre-existence in “that immortal sea”. 39 Furthermore, Wordsworth’s exposure to Neoplatonic thought makes Porphyry’s The Cave of

36 This has been much debated. Juliet Barker observes the fundamental importance of the idea of pre-existence. Barker, A Life, p. 229.

37 . Barker, A Life, 229. Barker declares that the notion of pre-existence “conjured up the boy William, who could not believe in his own mortality, but expected, like Elijah, to be physically translated to heaven, and whose imagination was so strong that he could not conceive of external things having a separate existence from himself’. 38 John Rea, “Coleridge’s Intimations of Immortality from Proclus”, Modem Philology’ 26.2 (1928), pp. 201 - 213, p. 208. 39 Aeneid, trans. Fagles 6.216-8. Mighty Waters 158 the Nymphs another potential source40 Ficino’s compendium contains excerpts from Porphyry as well as Proclus.41

As discussed in Chapter 1, for Porphyry as for Wordsworth, the world is “obscure and dark” because it is made up of “matter” (or physical materials subject to decay), yet via the “connecting power” it is “beautiful and delightful”.42 Porphyry presents a sea of contraries: immortal and mortal, full of pain and potential delight, immanent bodies as part of transcendent processes. These contradictions are inherent to Wordsworth’s “immortal sea”. However, for Porphyry, “harmony consists of and proceeds through contraries” but in the Ode the existence of these contraries is depicted as more uneasy.43 In Porphyry’s interpretation of Homer’s sea cave, pure souls are also released from their bodies in the ocean from which they fly to their haven in the sky. Yet this part of the cyclical process is not explicated in Wordsworth’s Ode. Wordsworth’s focus is only on the sea as that which “brought us hither”—that place where souls become trapped within mortal suffering bodies but can briefly delight in their retained sensitivity to the divine on the seashore. As such, the sea itself is not delightful or divine in the Ode\ what makes the sea delightful is its relationship with divine processes and its access to the divine. Wordsworth’s sea in this poem is a place of pain where souls join mortal bodies.

Howard Isham reads Wordsworth’s “immortal sea” as the “oceanic medium of our soul’s life”.44 For Isham, the Immortality Ode taps into the “feeling of the wholeness of mind and nature”. This wholeness “reinforce[s] the spiritual dimensions of that ‘immortal sea’, which, rather than a fact of nature, is the sea within our souls, just as our souls are part of nature’s sea”.45 In this reading, the sea is the birthplace of the soul or the spiritual: the sea “within our souls” is the “spiritual” aspect of the self, just as the soul, our “spiritual” aspect,

The generative power of water is also visible in the Bible’s account in Genesis of the immortal God’s movement over the water and the resultant beginnings of earthly life. However, Wordsworth’s association of the sea with the place of the soul’s pre-existent state as it meets bodily form alludes to pagan belief. 41 Marsilius Ficinus, Iamblichus, De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum (Venedig 1503, Frankfurt: Minerva, 1972). Porphyry section pp. 126-149. 42 ” Porphyry, Cave of the Nymphs, p. 30. Porphyry notes that the ancients “were of the opinion that a cave is a symbol of the sensible world”. He speaks of being “liberated from this sensible life” thereby presenting “sensible life” as a prison. Similarly, Wordsworth describes the material world imposing its “prison shades” upon the soul. 43 Porphyry, Cave of the Nymphs, p. 51. 44 Isham, Image of the Sea, p. 48. 45 Isham, Image of the Sea, p. 49. Mighty Waters 159 is part of “nature’s sea”. Within Isham’s reading, the sea in the Ode is the “spiritual”, the spiritual essence of the soul or the element where the spiritual aspect of the soul is most at home. In contrast, I interpret “that immortal sea” of Wordsworth’s Ode as the oceanic medium of the soul’s entrapment in bodily life—the sea is where the pure essence of the soul becomes diluted and tainted in a mortal body. According to a symbolic geography where the sea is the “spiritual”, the soul is joined with the body on shore where, as a child, it plays close to the sea of immortality, but as an adult it travels further inland away from its divine realm. The real problem for this interpretation is the line “which brought us hither”, to quote the relevant section of stanza nine:

Hence in a season of calm weather Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. (9.162-168).

In these lines, the older man, “though inland” and fully immersed in the corporeal world, may “have sight of that immortal sea” which brought him “hither”; that is, here, inland and fully immersed in the corporeal world. In the context of Virgil and Porphyry, the older man may have sight of the sea that brought him into being as a mortal body with an immortal soul. The children sporting upon the shore possess an innocence akin to the pure souls on the shore of the Lethe involved in a seemingly eternal process of leaping into the waters to become people on earth, and so it is possible to view this “shore” as the site of God. In this way “the mighty waters rolling evermore” symbolise the ongoing process of birth and forgetting—the pure soul joined to a body which will die and one day return it to the shore and to God. In “Written after the Death of Charles Lamb” a similar idea is expressed where the shore is the place of the immortal soul (depicted as a ‘vessel’) and the sea is the place where a mortal life is bom:

Yet, thro’ all visitations and all trials, Still they were faithful; like two vessels launched Mighty Waters 160

From the same beach one ocean to explore With mutual help, and sailing—to their league True, as inexorable winds, or bars Floating or fixed of polar ice, allow. (Lines 101-106)

The image of pure innocence created through the vision of “children sporting on the shore” is intensified through the almost audible verisimilitude of the scene and its onomatopoeic elicitation of the roar of the ocean’s waves. Amid the repeated assertions in the poem of the pain of old age and the longing for youth, this image of children on the shore (in its halo of nostalgia) represents the exquisitely painful transience of human happiness. As the place of our mortal concerns the sea is not the medium of the soul’s life, it is the medium of the soul’s imprisonment in the corporeal with all its contradictory binaries of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, life and death. In the Ode, Wordsworth chooses the sea as the symbolic place where the soul becomes joined with a mortal body and begins to leave its divine origins. The aesthetic power of this symbolic seascape relies on its evocation of a world in which the divine is the opposite of the corporeal and death is followed by a magical transformation into immaterial transcendence. As the place where the soul is humanized, the sea in the Ode is an uneasy amalgamation of opposites: infused with physical sensation in the process of corporealisation, the soul is therefore always subject to pain as well as delight, suffering as well as joy, the experience of darkness and sin as well as beauty and light. The dichotomies of this sea of generation are also embedded in the ambiguities of the cruel and unjust relationship Wordsworth establishes between immortality as “master o’er” the mortal “Slave” (Lines 119), and the inextricability of the immortal light of the “visionary gleam” and “the children sporting on the shore” from the pain of the necessary “yoke” of decay and the coffin darkness of death.

At the end of the poem, Wordsworth is not interested in visions of immortality, where perhaps the soul separates from the body in the ocean and ascends into a lighted sky; rather, the speaker emphasises a vision of what remains in old age before the death of the body. In the Ode, and in “Elegiac Stanzas”, idealised human joy is the halfway state embodied in the image of the child on the shore; that is, the life of the divine soul in the mortal world when the soul is awake to supernatural forces. This ideal human joy is predicated on the hope of immortality, not its ultimate fulfilment, and it is mirrored in the cosmogony most favoured in Wordsworth’s poems—a mortal world underpinned by supernatural powers. Wordsworth Mighty Waters 161 equates this halfway state with perfected human communities and relationships, whereas for Shelley, as discussed in chapter 7, the achievement of these perfected communities and relationships relies on the removal of the belief in supernatural presences in the world and the human need for immortality.

Despite the favoured image of the divine child, the halfway state between the divine and the mortal, in Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode life after death is figured as a place of immaterial immortality. This is not always the case, particularly in Wordsworth’s earlier poems. In poems such as “We are Seven” (Lyrical Ballads 1798) and “A slumber did my spirit seal” (Lyrical Ballads, 1800), life after death is described in more natural, material terms, it is the “graves” that are “green” and “may be seen”46 or the “earth’s diurnal course,/With rocks and stones and trees”.47 But in the Immortality Ode, life after death is like the life before birth: it is a place of “God, who is our home” and the “Heaven” that is lost as we get older and to which we presumably return (5.65-66).

The speaker of the Ode imagines being able to travel back mentally to the site of the soul’s birth and that our senses can recapture or actually commune with the sights and sounds of that place: we “have sight of that immortal sea”, we can really “travel thither and see the Children sport upon the shore” and “hear the mighty waters rolling”. This demonstrates the transcendent power the speaker conceives as inherent to imaginative and poetic thought, a power possible with the “years that bring the philosophic mind”. Yet this transcendent power does not imply the removal of physical sensation. The harmony effected by the use of rhymed couples (be/sea, hither/thither and so on), as well as the harmony of the assonance which affects most of the words in these lines (for instance: “season”/“we”/“be”; “sea”/“see”; “Our”/“souls”/“rolling”, and “sport”/“immortal”/“brought”/“shore”), produces the instantaneity and immediacy of the leap of the soul to catch sight of its origins. This instantaneous vision is not only characterised in terms of sight, it is also heard and actually experienced bodily, because the soul “Can in a moment travel thither”. In the Ode, Wordsworth invests the human imagination with essentially supernatural powers to “in a moment” be both immersed in the corporeal world and glimpse the divine origins of the

46 “We are Seven”, in De Selincourt and Darbishire eds., Poetical Works, vol. 1, Line 37. 47 “A SLUMBER did my spirit seal”, in De Selincourt and Darbishire eds., Poetical Works, vol. 2., Lines 7-8. 48 Kenneth MacLean, “The Water Symbol in the Prelude”, University of Toronto Quarterly 17 (1948), pp. 372-89, p. 388. Kenneth MacLean observes that “Thought” for Wordsworth “was very much a matter of images” and that he would “not separate sensation from reflection, the sensuous from the intellectual”. Mighty Waters 162 human soul. The construction of a symbolic seascape with its reliance on the concept of pre­ existence for meaning and aesthetic pull, demonstrates the significant role played by pagan allusion in Wordsworth’s poetry. In addition, the supernatural power given to thought reveals the divine magic in the human, and draws the mature adult closer to that idealised halfway state of the child on the sea shore, as it also implies that the mortal world is underpinned by immortal powers.

Whether or not he wished to “inculcate such a belief’, according to Wordsworth’s own declarations his early experiences of subjectivity were best mediated by the pagan concept of pre-existence. In the Fenwick note to the “Ode” he remarks: the “dream-like vividness and splendour which invest objects of sight in childhood” are “in the Poem regarded as . . . presumptive evidence of a prior state of existence”.49 Juliet Barker draws attention to Wordsworth’s claim for the importance of pre-existence in the way he recollects the experience of childhood—the way the external world seems bathed in a kind of divine gleam. She declares the notion of pre-existence to be of paramount importance for Wordsworth because it “conjured up” a vision of his youthful self—“the boy William”. It is difficult to consider pagan belief as entirely “unacceptable” to Wordsworth since the aging poet had ample opportunity to remove such references which would “cause endless controversy because pre-existence [was] not a tenet of the Christian faith.” In the case of the Immortality

Ode he was even asked to do so.50 The Fenwick note to this poem can be invoked (and has been invoked) both to dismiss the significance of the reference to pre-existence and to assert it. This is largely because Wordsworth’s commentary on the poem, characterised by Herbert

Hartman as “inaccurate and misleading, if not indeed evasive”,51 is equivocal. Hartman was responding to the manner in which Wordsworth initially seems to reject the idea of pre­ existence in his exegesis and then musters arguments in its favour, even declaring, “and the fall of Man presents an analogy in its favour”, implying that far from being unacceptable, pagan belief exhibits important similarities with Christian belief.52 Wordsworth begins with a denial of the significance of the idea of pre-existence, declaring it to be “too shadowy a notion to be recommended to faith”. Then, in the next sentence he mounts a defence of the

49 Fenwick note to the Ode, ed., de Selincourt, pp. 463-4.

50 Barker, A Life, p. 229.

51 Herbert Hartman, “The ‘Intimations’ of Wordsworth’s Ode” (1930), p. 129. 52 Fenwick note to the Ode, ed., de Selincourt, p. 464. Mighty Waters 163

idea as a reasonable one since “there is nothing there [in revelation] to contradict it”; also since “a pre-existent state has entered into the popular creeds of many nations” and it “is known as an ingredient in Platonic philosophy”. Wordsworth employs more words to defend his inclusion of pre-existence and argue for its validity than to dismiss and reject it as a serious idea.

Theresa Kelley and more recently Alan Hill grant more importance to pagan references in Wordsworth’s poetry. In her analysis of “The world is too much with us”, the sonnet whose pagan reference Webb views as no more than a brief dip into nostalgia, Kelley maintains that:

Because Proteus and Triton inhabit the last two lines and not the earlier four in which the speaker discusses the belief in pagan gods as a “creed outworn”, the named gods of the sonnet in effect have the last words in the formal and thematic structure of the poetic argument. Thus while the speaker initially suggests that he is not pagan and so unable to invest the world with divine spirits, his inclusion of Proteus and Triton does precisely what the speaker implied he could not do: it reinvests the world with spirits.54

In Kelley’s view, Romantic poets emulate the transformations of the mythical Proteus since they seek “a poetic language which is capable of self-transformation” and since they employ the well established association of Proteus’ powers of transformation with the regeneration of spirituality and imagination (as in Wordsworth’s sonnet), “with poets as speakers or prophets who transform dead language”. Similarly, Alan Hill proposes that for Wordsworth the pagan creed is possibly “‘outworn’” but it is not entirely spent. Hill remarks:

it still retains its imaginative force and appeal which can be revived by the poet’s visionary power. There is a sense in which it remains a permanent part of man’s imaginative inheritance, a folk memory that is never entirely superseded.55

Wordsworth employs a rhetorical question involving Archimedes, appealing to a brotherhood of classical scholarship on the one hand and a universality of feeling on the other; Wordsworth uses approximately 180 words out of 244 in his defence of the use of pre-existence and only 64 words out of 244 to dismiss the notion. So, 74 per cent of his written output on this issue was devoted to the justification of his use of pre­ existence. 54 Kelley, Theresa M., “Proteus and Romantic Allegory”, ELH 49. 3 (1982), pp. 623-652, p. 628. 55 Hill, “Wordsworth, Boccaccio, and the Pagan Gods of Antiquity”, p. 32. Mighty Waters 164

Hill argues that the poem establishes the durability and lingering potency of pagan myth declaring that “it can still be a source of imaginative energy and power”.56 Like Kelley, Hill sees the reference to Proteus and Triton in the final lines of the poem as a living presence and not a dead echo, he characterises their inhabitation of the final lines as “a startling paradox” and as “an irruption”. Wordsworth’s poetry expresses a need for and a delight in cosmogonies pervaded by a supernatural force, and for the special community, purpose and meaning he sees as given to humanity through such a cosmogony. For Wordsworth, the world is devoid of community, purpose and meaning—essentially sterile—without the presence of supernatural spirits; his allusions to pagan myth and magic repopulate the sea and the world with those spirits and that magic.

Many later poems associate this special community, purpose and meaning with Catholic religious ritual and their overt expression of active belief in a supernatural force. Wordsworth invokes the same numinous mystery and gothic nostalgia invoked by Ann Radcliffe when he refers to “vesper lays/Sung to the Virgin” from a “bark” sailing along “Calabrian shores” in “By the Sea-Side” (Lines 24-26) and in “Stanzas: Suggested in a Steamboat off Saint Bees’ Heads, on the Coast of Cumberland”, the speaker expresses a dissatisfaction with the mechanistic view of the universe and suggests that the overt faith of the English Catholics is preferable to a nation where “the Genius of our age” leads to ideas that “Matter and Spirit are as one Machine”(Lines 154-8). In “Old Abbeys” Wordsworth alludes to an ecumenicalism, a “spirit”57 of religious faith, that transcends specific doctrine and this “spirit’ can be seen at work in the “bold credulities” capable of believing in and explicitly invoking “that Power who hushed the stormy seas” in St Bees (Lines 161, 151), and in the active faith that makes man offer thanks to an immaterial deity “with a full heart” believing that “’our thoughts are heard in heaven’” in “By the Sea-side” (Lines 38-9).

Wordsworth distanced himself from the Anglo-Catholicism now associated with the Oxford Movement; even so, reiterating Jarvis’ comment, the desire “to have back everything which has been taken away by sheer common sense” is reflected throughout his poetry and in part manifests as his later affiliation with the High Church. The Anglicanism of Wordsworth’s age had placed an emphasis on reason and naturalistic proofs of God, an

56 Hill, “Wordsworth, Boccaccio, and the Pagan Gods of Antiquity”, p. 26. 57 “Old Abbeys”, Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Part 3, No. 35, in De Selincourt and Darbishire eds., Poetical Works, vol. 3, Line 14. Mighty Waters 165 emphasis that the Oxford Movement in part reacted against. Wordsworth, speaking of his visit to Cambridge in a letter to Mr Reed (November 18, 1844), writes:

In matter of religion to which the thoughts of the Youth in general are much more turned than heretofore, I was pleased to learn that what is commonly called the Low Church, is quite in disrepute, without any tendency to Popery as far as appears.

During his visit, Wordsworth:

attended a meeting of the Cambridge Camden Society, the high-church group devoted to the revival of true ecclesiastical principles in the Church of England, its President, Thomas Thorp stated that [Wordsworth] ‘might be considered one of the founders of the Society. He has sown the seed which was breaking out now among them, as in other directions, to the recall of whatever was pure and imaginative, whatever was not c o merely utilitarian, to the service of both church and state’.

Being claimed for the Oxford Movement does not make Wordsworth a part of that movement but it does suggest some degree of shared principles. For R. L. Brett, Wordsworth’s overt alignment with the High Church in his later years means “only that he was politically and ecclesiastically conservative”, I argue that it means more than that; Wordsworth’s alignment with the High Church is the culmination of a lifetime of disappointing experiences with his local Grasmere church and a lifelong quest for the explicitly otherworldly in the material world and the mystical ritual and ceremony. At a more basic level Wordsworth’s experience of the Church of England for much of his life had been on the whole uninspiring. As Barker notes, after John’s death Wordsworth “had been forced to re-examine his religious beliefs and had become a committed deist and practising Anglican”; however, with an “insane” Rector, John Craik, and a curate, Edward Rowlandson, described by Wordsworth as full of “avarice & the love of strong drink”,59 it is easy to see

Letters of William and Dorothy, ed., Hill, p. 28. The second quote is from footnote 2 to this page. This meeting took place on 7 November. Barker, A Life, 279. “There had been little incentive to attend the Anglican church at Grasmere. The rector John Craik, had been insane for sixty-three years until his death in 1806. His curate, Edward Rowlandson, who officiated in his stead for forty years, was if anything even more infamous. William was unusually caustic in his judgement: ‘Two vices used to struggle in him for mastery, avarice & the love of strong drink: but avarice as is common in like cases always got the better of its opponent, for though he was often intoxicated it was never I believe at his own expense [. . . ]’. Craik’s successor, Thomas Jackson, was inevitably an improvement, but it was at Colerton that the Wordsworths began to attend church regularly, more from a desire to set a good example to the children than from personal preference. Even in old age, Mighty [Vaters 166 how Wordsworth’s desire for religious ritual and specialness remained unfulfilled by the Church of England for much of his life. Writing about St Oswald’s in Grasmere, E. Margaret Taylor explains that the church “as the Wordsworths knew it, was a comfortless place”: it was unheated until 1810, had a cracked bell and was infrequently whitewashed and without an organ, though there were “improvements” made over the years:

The congregation sat on benches, set on an earth floor covered with rushes. The ancient rush-bearing ceremony, still celebrated, had its origin in the annual sweeping out of the old rushes, and strewing fresh green ones in their place—very necessary, as aisle burials were permitted until 1840, when the floor was paved with its present slate flags.60

Later in Wordsworth’s life, his experience of the Church of England also improved as he came under the “thrall” of Frederick William Faber. Faber (described by Henry Crabb Robinson as an “ultra-Puseyite High Churchman”):

had taken the Lakes by storm in the summer of 1837, when, aged twenty-three, he was acting curate of Ambleside. Since then, he had been instrumental in securing the honorary doctorate for William at Oxford, paid many visits to Rydal Mount and established himself on intimate terms with the Wordsworths.61

Faber wanted Wordsworth to rid his poetry of less orthodox allusions, to pantheistic and pagan ideas, and Wordsworth did do this in some poems. Juliet Barker, taking a different view to Gill, writes about Wordsworth’s alterations to “Salisbury Plain” (become “Guilt and Sorrow”) remarking that Faber had “claimed” Wordsworth “the poet” and “man, and not just for the Oxford Movement, but also for Christ”.62 However, as can be seen in Wordsworth’s

despite a revolution in the quality of Anglican clergyman, thanks to the Evangelical and Puseyite movements, William remained unimpressed by most village sermons”. 60 E. Margaret Taylor, William Wordsworth and St. Oswald’s Church Grasmere, 4th edn. (Grasmere Church Publications, 2004), p. 5. 61 Barker, A Life, p. 474. Baker also notes of Robinson: “Though he still weakly protested his ‘utter dissent’ from most of Faber’s opinions, the sheer power of the young man’s personality had cast its spell”. 62“ Barker, A Life, p. 475. “The sailor’s declaration of trust in his Saviour’s name was a complete reversal of this position and an acceptance of the single most important tenet of Christianity. . . The inescapable conclusion is that all those ‘Thoughtful Conversations’ with Faber had led to a profound shift in his thinking. It was not a coincidence that, before the year was out, Faber persuaded William to nail a cedarwood cross above his bedroom window, ‘where the good old man’s pleased eye rests on it first thing when he wakes’. In Mighty Waters 167 defence of the use of pre-existence in the Ode, pantheism and pagan concepts like pre­ existence were not estranged from Christian belief for him; at least, belief in the one did not preclude belief in the other and at times, as in his use of pre-existence, the former expressed an experience of childhood which no other belief-system could. Pagan allusion offers Wordsworth a provocative imagery of the magical exotic and the explicitly otherworldly that his experience of the Anglicanism of his age, with its emphasis on reason and naturalistic proofs of God, could not offer him.

Pagan ideas contained an insurmountable power for Wordsworth; they offered explicitly otherworldly images that spoke to man’s primal “instincts” towards belief in the supernatural as he suggests of the “shadowy Beings” in “Cave of Staffa”, beings which again are not dead echoes but living magical forms. The Anglicanism of Wordsworth’s age, with its horror of superstition could not offer him such a vision. Wordsworth’s use of pagan belief and myth in addition to Christian referents added an intimation of that “something dark, of the old Sea[,] some reverential fear”,63 because the “mysterious awe with which Wordsworth used to listen to anything said about storms and shipwrecks” was mediated by the Greco-

Roman works and their mythical accounts of seas filled with deities, spirits and monsters.64

doing so he claimed not just the poet, but also the man, and not just for the Oxford Movement, but also for Christ.”

“Where lies the Land to which yon Ship must go?” Miscellaneous Sonnets No. 31, in De Selincourt and Darbishire eds., Poetical Works, vol. 3, Lines 12-13. Fenwick note to “Composed by the Seashore”, in Poetical Works, De Selincourt and Darbishire, eds., p. 397. Chapter 6: ‘A thousand thousand slimy things Coleridge ’s Unitarian Sea.

In his letter to Robert Southey of November 13, 1795, Coleridge likened what he saw as his friend’s corruption of the ideals underpinning their “pantisocratic” schemes to a foul stream, but asserted his faith that “however foul” Southey’s “stream” may “run here, yet it will filtrate and become pure in its subterraneous Passage to the Ocean of Universal Redemption”.1 The purgative and redemptive function Coleridge attributes to this oceanic symbol reflects a recurrent pattern in his representation of the sea. As noted in chapter 3, the sea in Genesis, Jonah, and Revelation is imbued with an ideology of redemptive and divinely orchestrated suffering. Coleridge was so steeped in the language of the Bible that its influence on his life and writing might be deemed incalculable, and claims about this influence redundant. However, returning to my introductory remarks, the re-assertion of the influence of Greco-Roman works and the Bible on Romantic poetry in this thesis is made in response to the prevailing critical paradigm of Romantic aesthetic transformation of the sea and its emphasis on a break between the portrayal of the sea in Romantic literature and Greco-Roman and biblical portrayals. Coleridge depicts God’s control over the waters, or God’s control over form and formlessness; life and death; renewal and destruction; salvation and damnation; redemption and sin; purification and punishment; changelessness and change through the Mariner’s perceptual transformations. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” these transformations allow the Mariner to properly read the signs of God in the world after his perceptions have been overwhelmed by the sublime thrall of doubt, superstition, despair and love.

I analyse Coleridge’s deployment of predominantly biblical imagery within his 2 representation of a Unitarian sea in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. As a Unitarian and

Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1. ed., Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 163. “ Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1817), The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edn., (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), pp. 812-828. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor and William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads 1798, London: Noel Douglas, 1926 [copy of original edition of Lyrical Ballads with the Bristol imprint on the title page, reproduced from original in the British Museum]. The 1817 version forms the basis of this analysis since it is the most widely studied and well known. However, 1 have consulted the Slimy Things 169 later a more orthodox Anglican, Coleridge did not believe in the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, yet the concept of purgatory, as a form of suffering determined by God leading to salvation, is embedded in much of his poetry and prose, and as Thomas Dilworth has observed, Coleridge “professes no personal disbelief [in purgatory]”.*3 * William Ulmer assessed Coleridge’s position thus: “Coleridge did think that suffering was good for us ... he subscribed to a Unitarian theodicy which envisaged mundane tribulation as an educative precondition for salvation”.4 Coleridge’s belief that “Virtue” is “the Absence of Vice from the Knowledge of its Consequences”, and that the experience of “Evil” can be put to work in

“the great process of divine Benevolence”, was not always visible in his poetry.5 Coleridge’s juvenilia reveals a distaste for suffering and little conception of its beatifying effects. In the early poem, “The Progress of Vice”, there is no suggestion that “the drear black paths of Vice” are conducive to virtue. Instead, the eighteen year old Coleridge writes: “Ah! close the scene—ah! close—for dreadful is the sight”, and in “Dura Navis” he speaks of sea terrors as entirely without redemptive purpose. In one of the two notes that Coleridge later appended to “Dura Navis”, he remarked: “such Verses” are the “strivings of mind and struggles after the

Intense & Vivid”.6 7In “Dura Navis”, as the fifteen year old Coleridge struggled after the “Intense & Vivid”, it was the idea of a life at sea and its travails that presented itself as he gave voice and imagery to the experience of perceptual failure, physical extremes, desperation and the despair that attends inassuageable suffering—themes that would later surface again, though in a far more complex form, in “The Rime of the Ancient. Mariner.. ”7

original 1798 edition to consider differences, especially when making claims about imagery and Unitarianism. 3 Thomas Dilworth, “Symbolic Spatial Form in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and the Problem of God”, The Review of English Studies, New Series 58. 236 (2007), pp. 500-530, p. 525. Dilworth notes that Coleridge did profess a disbelief in Hell, an intrinsic Anglican doctrine.

4 William A. Ulmer, “Necessary Evils: Unitarian Theodicy in ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, Studies in Romanticism 43.3 (2004), pp. 327-356, p. 341. Also, Robert Penn Warren, “A Poem of Pure Imagination” (Reconsiderations VI), The Kenyon Review 8.3 (1946), pp. 391-427. Ulmer disputes Warren’s analysis in terms of the importance he placed on Original Sin, but returns to Warren’s idea of the importance of “the One Life” allegory (p. 328). 5 Coleridge, “Lectures on Revealed Religion”, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1795 On Politics and Religion, vol. 1, eds., Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 108. Ulmer quotes the next sentence where Coleridge declares: “It was therefore necessary that Man should run through the Course of Vice & Mischief since by Experience alone his Virtue and Happiness can acquire Permanence & Security” (p. 341). 6 Coleridge, Collected Works, vol. 16, p. 5. 7 The poem will be referred to as “The Rime” or “Rime” from this point on. Slimy Things 170

In “The Rime”, the ocean is fundamentally a place of Christian suffering and perceptual transformation and Coleridge predominantly employs biblical imagery through the lens of a Unitarian theology. In addition, “The Rime” recalls the Greco-Roman dichotomies of the heroic sea journey, in which nightmarish struggles amid oscillating ideological and emotional extremes underpin heroism and the stability of identity, trust, community, home and nation. Coleridge further recalls the Greco-Roman tradition of the feminine supernatural through the aesthetic contraries that infuse the sea and marine animals of “The Rime”. Yet, a Christian ethos underpins and interprets the monstrously hybrid sea journey of “The Rime”, making the biblical sea viewed through Coleridge’s then Unitarian lens the more significant influence.

The aesthetic shift from (what Burke categorized as) the Sublime to the Beautiful, in the moment of the Mariner’s blessing of the water snakes, indicates the influence of Unitarianism. Coleridge’s portrayal of the sea’s violent horror and its purgative function, and in part its potential for beauty in Burke’s terms, can be aligned with the sea visions of Homer, Virgil and the Bible, but when the sea and marine creatures feature in an act of love, Coleridge produces a vision of the world’s interconnectedness that falls within the compass of a Unitarian ideology. Coleridge’s sea is both the place where the hell of spiritual failure and perceptual blindness is played out and the place where the presence of God in all of creation is asserted. As such, Coleridge’s sea in “The Rime” has more in common with the sublimity of the biblical sea, governed by one all-powerful creator and controller of the dichotomies of the natural world, than with the sea in the Odyssey and the Aeneid, whose sublimity is based on the chaos of a natural world influenced by a myriad of conflicting gods, a chaos escaped by Odysseus and wielded by Aeneas.

Two much debated critical issues arise from the claims that the Mariner is redemptively transformed and that the sea environment charts and effects this process: one is the issue of whether the Mariner can be said to be redemptively transformed, the other is whether he can be described as a symbol of any singularly definable entity or object or whether his allusive multiplicity makes him a representation of processes of symbolism itself.

As the complexity of Coleridge’s “Rime” makes “neat”8 claims about the overall poem nearly impossible, the claims made in this chapter are restricted to the portrayal of the sea and marine animals. I am aware of the interpretative dangers of reducing the poem to unworkable

g Paul H. Fry, ed., The Rime of the Ancient Manner (Boston: Bcdfort/St. Martins, 1999), p. 19. Slimy Things 171 generalisations, yet there are also dangers in dismissing the patterns formed by dominant inter-textual references and levels of narrative in the poem. Nicolas Reid notes that “Coleridge’s more than allusive technique (the poem’s conscious accretion of contexts) insists upon the genuine function of its own symbolic construction, for ‘The Ancient Mariner’ views itself not as an act of Christian mimesis but as the Romantic tool of exploration and the Mariner cannot be reduced to Cain or any other traditional figure”.9 Even so, the poem is—given the point of view of the prose gloss Coleridge added to the poem in 1817, the Mariner’s point of view, the didactic moral ending of the poem, and (to the extent that it is possible) the religious and methodological views of Coleridge himself—constructed as a Christian mimesis.10 Paul Fry expresses his discomfort with the idea that overall the poem charts a Christian transformation when he declares:

No one is quite happy with the neatness of saying, in the tradition of Robert Penn Warren, that the “Rime” is the Christian story of sacrificial trespass and redemption revisited as the Romantic theme of the redemption of nature by the shaping spirit of imagination. Perhaps the strongest objection to this view is that if the Mariner is truly the protagonist of this sort of story then he ought to somehow benefit from it. He should seem transfigured, dignified, holy—and not the “grey-beard loon” traumatized by survivor guilt, suffering through periodic fits of compulsive speech, whose supplementary punishment of this kind (we could call it being sentenced to community service) will be everlasting.1

The most salient interpretative issue raised by Fry’s remark is that the Mariner should be transfigured, and for Fry he is not. In a recent essay, Dilworth expresses his scepticism of critical accounts which claim that the Mariner’s suffering is out of proportion and without end. He points to the critical

failure to discriminate between profound good and the less profound evil, if evil it is, of the Mariner’s ‘penance’. The profound good consists of his blessing, his release

9 Nicholas Reid, Coleridge, Form and Symbol: Or The Ascertaining Vision (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2006), p. 49. 10 Jerome J. McGann, “The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner”, Critical Inquiry 8.1 (1981), pp. 35-67, p. 41. McGann discusses Huntington Brown’s descriptions of the multiple points of view in Coleridge’s poem. Huntington Brown, “The Gloss to the Ancient Mariner”, Modern Language Quarterly 6 (1945), pp. 322, 324. The points of view are: the Mariner telling the story of the voyage, the wedding guest who hears the story, the “minstrel [who authors the verse]”, “the pious antiquarian [who edits the verse]” and Coleridge or the “contemporary author . . . controlling all the others”. This latter quote is from McGann’s discussion (p. 41). 11 Fry, The Rime, pp. 19-20. Slimy Things 172

from life in death, his awareness of the general communion of all living things, his participation in that communion by returning to, travelling in and praying with, human society and his belief in love. 1 7

Dilworth contends that the Mariner’s suffering as a storyteller should not be overestimated. He rejects Raimonda Modiano’s claim that the Mariner’s fate is one of

“unrelieved torment” which is “bleakly absurd”,13 and contends that the Mariner goes from a living hell at sea “involving thirst, sleeplessness, isolation from all but corpses and complete spiritual alienation and aridity” to an “occupational calling, albeit one the Mariner cannot refuse, that of a prophet or evangeliser . . . The Mariner’s occasional ‘woeful agony’ and

‘burning heart’ are no worse than your migraines or my debilitating backaches”.14 In short, the Mariner goes from a life of thirst, despair and an inability to pray whilst being surrounded by the dead (yet unable to die), to being fdled with the love for sea animals, being able to bless them, being driven home by angelic forms (his thirst and exhaustion relieved) and his only pain being the burning need to tell his story periodically, the effect of which is to grant wisdom to the hearer. Like Dilworth, I regard this ontological transition as it is constructed in the poem as a sign of the Mariner’s redemptive transfiguration. Interpreted through the lens of Coleridge’s Unitarianism and his “System of Philosophy”, the transfiguration of the Mariner is presented as unavoidably spiritual if not Christian, especially given the emphasis Coleridge places on prayer and blessing as part of the redemptive process. Myth or fancy and superstition are part of Coleridge’s “System of Philosophy”, where “all knowledges” are harmonised and lifted up to “a higher point of view”.15 This “higher point of view” would later have meant Orthodox Anglicanism but, as Dilworth notes, it was Unitarianism that influenced Coleridge during the crafting of “The Rime”. Dilworth explains how such a system would work: “In the poem, pagan animism and sun-worship seem lifted up by

12 Dilworth, “Symbolic Spatial Form”, p. 526. 13 Raimonda Modiano, “Words and ‘Languageless’ Meanings: Limits of Expression in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’” Romantic Poetry, eds., Karl Kroeber and Gene Ruoff (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1993), p. 222. 14 Dilworth, “Symbolic Spatial Form”, p. 526.

15 Samuel Coleridge, Table Talk, 4th edn. (London: George Routledge and Sons. Undated), p. 136. Dilworth calls it Coleridge’s “cultural-anthropological-philosophical ‘system’” in “Symbolic Spatial”, p. 528. Slimy Things 173 medieval Catholicism, which may, in turn, be lifted up by the Unitarianism of Coleridge when he wrote the poem”.16

In part, the evidence that the Mariner has been transformed—and transformed by those particular metamorphoses associated with the sea in the Bible, the Odyssey, the Aeneid and contemporary voyage narratives—lies in his defining physical characteristics which repetitively dance about the lines with something of the quality of the formulaic epithet of Homeric verse: he is “ancient”, he has a “long gray beard” a “glittering eye” and a “skinny hand”.17 As a symbol, Reid declares that the Mariner cannot be reduced to one specific figure like Cain or Christ; nevertheless, there are common threads linking Coleridge’s Mariner to various seafaring figures and these common threads make it possible to identify specific traits if not one specific figure. Coleridge’s Mariner embodies the most common traits visible in popularly recognisable age-wizened and seafaring men. When Coleridge described his Mariner as “ancyent”, skinny, brown and in possession of a long grey beard, he tapped into an abundance of Greco-Roman, biblical, artistic and cultural allusions indicative of qualities vastly more significant than physical traits. Coleridge’s descriptions of the Mariner have broad inter-textual resonances where the physical wasting associated with age intimates wisdom, special power and the experiences of the divine, prophesy and revelation. While some of Coleridge’s chosen symbols, as Reid observes, intimate a delight in more obscure references,19 the potential allusive resonances emanating from the Mariner’s physical marks of age and exposure draw on a broadly accessible gamut of potential allusions ranging from popular eighteenth-century castaway figures to Greco seers like Tiresias and Proteus (often depicted as age wizened and bearded), and biblical figures like Moses, which link age and physical change to wisdom and the experience of the divinef20

The motif of the sea voyager encourages further parallels between Coleridge’s Mariner and Greco-Roman and biblical figures and voyagers of discovery. Shared features and

16 Dilworth, “Symbolic Spatial”, p. 529.

17 Coleridge “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1817), The Norton Anthology of Poetry’, 5th edn. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), pp. 812-828, Part I.

1 8 In the 1798 version. 19 Reid, Coleridge, Form and Symbol, p. 270. 20 Jane Austen, Persuasion 1818 (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), p. 16. In this novel, Austen reveals what a cliche the idea of the sea’s transformative powers had become when she satirises Sir Walter Eliot’s pompousness and vanity through his comments on the Navy. Slimy Things 174 motifs—representations of isolated men in literal and figurative storms, storms at sea, perverse sights and descriptions of the violence and mystery of the south sea—link the concept of the sea voyage and the figure of the Mariner with psychological and spiritual transformations. As noted earlier, critics have associated Coleridge’s Mariner with numerous wandering and suffering figures including: Cain, Christ, and the Wandering Jew. These figures are all possible contributors to the imaginative clay from which Coleridge wrought his Mariner, yet the Mariner’s symbolic status as a Mariner invites comparison with other likely figures—seafaring figures—drawn from reading he is known to have done. Some of the seafaring figures who might have gone into the mix are Captain Cook, Captain Bligh, Fletcher Christian and George Shelvocke’s crew member, Hatley. There could be many others, but these men are taken from the main voyage narratives that have already been shown to fascinate and influence Coleridge.21 Intriguing parallels emerge when Coleridge’s sea and sea figures in “The Rime” are compared with the figures whose travels he imaginatively participated in through reading, and through which he gleaned vicarious knowledge of fantastical sea extremes (those from the Bible and Greco-Roman works embedded deep in his mind as part of his childhood education). These figures are all pushed towards some form of transformative extreme. Many if not all of them experience strange sights on the sea, and embedded in their accounts is one particularly connotative image— man, alone or with a small crew, facing the extreme terrors and wonders of vast seas, terrors and wonders which leave their marks.

My view is that the Mariner suffers at sea and is constructed as redeemed through this suffering, a suffering which leaves marks on his body and allows him to perceive the light of God which manifests as an extended metaphor in the seascapes of the poem. “The Rime” depicts a voyage to faith within which the natural sublime, and the world itself, is interpreted as an expression of the love of God. The voyage over the sea is through the sublime: the pain of doubt, the wild fears of superstition, the terror of despair and the gushing of unconscious love. All of these emotions are depicted as unthinking; or, they are depicted as overwhelming perceptual states in which reason fails. For Coleridge, belief in God’s immanent presence

John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination 1927 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), pp. 26-7, p. 43. Livingston-Lowes’ study is monumental and is still the best of its kind; as Will Christie notes, it “remains a standing tribute and since that time each generation has only added to the library of the poem’s sources” (p. 113), in “Coleridge and Wordsworth in Pandaemonium”, Sydney Studies in English 31 (2005), pp. 110-121. Slimy Things 175 resolves this failure. Coleridge was incapable of imagining that there could be meaning in the natural world or human life without a belief in transcendence. Writing to John Thelwall he remarked:

My mind feels as if it ached to behold & know something great—something one and indivisible—and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty!—But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity!

The intimate exchange between the sea and the sun and the Mariner’s blessing of the water snakes is a poetic refiguring of Genesis 1, where God moves over the waters of the abyss and says “let there be light”, demonstrating what Coleridge now famously called “the repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am”. Noel Jackson, noting the letter where Coleridge writes of conducting “a multitude of little experiments on my own sensations and on my senses” ,24 proposes that such experiments were “central” to his work and that “for Coleridge inwardness is necessarily an ‘aesthetic’ in the broadest sense of that term—a form of cognition integrally related to the process of self-discovery”. In Coleridge’s construction of the Mariner’s journey, then, it makes sense (pun intended) that redemptive transformation should come through the senses. In her analysis of “The Rime”, Anne Williams writes: “the Gothic horror of‘The Rime’ was as close as he [Coleridge] could come to imagining the unspeakable”; that is, the possibility that “morality is a response to ‘meaningless’ change and loss. ‘Imagination’ defends us against this knowledge”. Having imagined the perceptual hell of what the world and the human journey would look like without a belief in a transcendent being, Coleridge’s response to this “Gothic horror” is to create an aesthetic shift in which there is an assurance of God’s presence and control over nature and in the lives of men. Within “The Rime” what Williams calls “Gothic horror” is presented as unthinking human violence, uncertain spirituality and the possibility of death without resurrection.

22 Coleridge., Collected Letters, 14 Oct. 1797 p. 349. 23 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: Everyman, 1997), p. 175.

24 Coleridge, Letters, vol. 2, p. 731. 25 Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Leiden: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 105-6. 26 Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 199. Slimy Things 176

In my reading, I am lending support for (and reviving and adding to) an old one, that is, Robert Penn Warren’s claim that in the poem “we arrive at the notion of universal charity, which even Mr. Babbit admits to be ‘unexceptional’ in itself, the sense of the ‘One life’ in which all creation participates”. Critics have been swift to release themselves from the grip of “the One Life” theory. The relief of Williams is palpable when she writes of Jerome McGann’s essay “‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’: The Meaning of the Meanings” as “a definitive escape from Warren” and “a refreshing demystifier of musty critical metaphysics”. One of the fundamental misconceptions about the idea of “the One life” entering a reading of the poem is that it necessarily implies that everything is straightforward and unambiguously tied up in a single coherent reading of the entire poem, the One life reading?* Williams remarks: “Even McGann, however, presupposes a Coleridgean ideology: the “meanings” have “one meaning”.“ Yet further explorations of the way the one life notion manifests in the poem, the way it might relate to its disunities the “interruptions, disruptions, and irruptions” are needed;30 “musty” or no, it is one of the many ideologies at the core of Coleridge’s thought and writing, an ideology inherent to the Unitarian beliefs Coleridge possessed when writing the poem and one which persisted in various forms in his later writings. Coleridge was a deeply religious man and his poem, in many of its threads, implies religious answers to what Williams calls “its discovery of intense, primitive anxieties fundamental to our very selves”. The nature of these religious answers and the way they function in the poem remains relevant.

I augment Warren’s claim, what Seamus Perry calls the “standard reading” of the poem as “some kind of One Life allegory”, in two ways:32 firstly, I analyse the importance of the shifting aesthetics of the sea and, secondly, I offer an analysis of the seascapes of the poem through the optics of a spiritual failure based on Coleridge’s development of an extended light metaphor. My argument in this chapter also extends William Ulmer’s cogent analysis of Coleridge’s belief in the importance of the human experience of suffering and the “typically

27 Warren, “A Poem of Pure Imagination” (Reconsiderations VI), The Kenyon Review 8.3 (1946), pp. 391-427, p. 392. 28 I refer to Warren’s reading as “the One Life” reading for the remainder of the chapter. 29 Williams, Art of Darkness, p. 182. 30 Williams, Art of Darkness, p. 182.

31 Williams, Art of Darkness, p. 199.

3“ Seamus Perry, Coleridge: The Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 282. Slimy Things 177

Coleridgean reverence” and “specifically Unitarian sanction” of the moral coda of the poem in his recent article, “Necessary Evils: Unitarian Theodicy in “The Rime of the Ancyent

Marinere”.33 However, my argument departs from Ulmer’s in its focus on Coleridge’s treatment of the sea and marine creatures and the dynamics of the poem’s inheritance of the sea imagery of Greco-Roman works and the Bible, as well as in my qualification of Ulmer’s observation of the aesthetic shift from the sublime to the beautiful in the moral coda to “The Rime.” I propose that this shift builds on the more significant display of the same aesthetic transition at the moment of the Mariner’s redemptive blessing of the water snakes. Nicolas Reid has influenced my interpretation of the light imagery in the seascapes of “The Rime” through his alignment of “Life-in-Death” with despair and his comment that the Mariner is able to overcome this despair “through his imaginative faculty (in recognising the beauty of

the sea snakes)”.34 For Coleridge, despair is associated with the inability to see God in the world. In my reading of the poem, I adopt Reid’s notion that the Mariner and the crew fail to imaginatively read the signs of God around them but I consider the Mariner’s experience of despair and redemption as part of a four-stage process which begins with doubt, develops into superstition and becomes despair, failures which are redeemed through his blessing of the water snakes.

The sea voyage in “The Rime” has been described by Dilworth as one that takes the

Mariner “to hell and back”.35 I suggest that the sea in Coleridge’s poem is more purgative than it is damning but this distinction little alters the hellish nature of the sea’s purgative function in the poem; what this distinction does alter is any simple assessment of Coleridge’s portrayal of the sea as positive or negative—it places an emphasis on the sea’s perceived duality as a place of repulsive, throbbing, miscreated life-forms and beautiful, sanctifying, coiling oceanic creatures of God. The former is a vision of the materialist’s world; the latter is the product of Unitarian faith. Furthermore, the purgative function of the sea implies that salvation is the product of suffering and that spiritual life is made possible through perceptual blindness and sin. In “The Rime”, Coleridge depicts a terrifying sea journey into the chaos of fear and despair out of which wisdom appears to be bom. As a tale of sin and repentance “The Rime” recalls the biblical story of the Flood as well as the act of creation. The Flood

33 Ulmer, “Necessary Evils”, p. 352.

34 Reid, Coleridge, pp. 50-52.

35 Dilworth, “Symbolic Spatial”, p. 529. Slimy Things 178 had acquired a cosmological relevance as a seriously debated theological theory among natural philosophers of the eighteenth century. Coleridge was among those fascinated by the writings of Thomas Burnet whose book The Sacred Theory of Earth had contributed to these debates. He had even planned to versify The Sacred Theory and Livingston-Lowes characterises Burnet as “Coleridge’s beloved Burnet”. Burnet characterised the modem sea as literally the vestige of God’s castigating Flood and therefore a hideous reminder of punishment. In doing so, Burnet and others like him made the idea of the Flood more contemporarily plausible, relevant and tangible: to look out onto a modem sea, as Coleridge and Wordsworth did when discussing the proposed ballad which eventually became “The Rime”, was to see God’s punishing hand at the same time as his act of redemptive renewal.36 In Coleridge’s poem the sea is a place of suffering and sin, the experience of which leads to a Christian redemption where God’s eternal presence in the world is acknowledged.

The Light of “the One Life” on the Ocean

Within the compass of Coleridge’s pronouncements on the efficacy of suffering in his 1795 lectures, the suffering inherent in Coleridge’s symbolic oceanic journey in “The Rime” necessarily precedes the Mariner’s development of an awareness of God’s presence in himself, others and in the natural world—a presence signified primarily in the imagery of light on the ocean and marine creatures. The figure of the Mariner moves from a state of immanence to a state of transcendence or from false faith to true faith. Intersecting with this pattern is the concept of “the one Life” rendered in the glistening of what is presented as divine light on the water, in the sky, on the bodies of marine creatures, on the bodies of men and in the eyes of the Mariner.

Light is integral to Coleridge’s conception of “the One Life”. In “The Eolian Harp” he writes:

O! the one Life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,

36 Thomas Burnet, The Sacred Theory of the Earth, 4th edn. (London: John Hooke, 1719), pp. 89-90. Slimy Things 179

Rhythm in all thought, and joyance ever where— (Lines 26-29) 1,1

In Coleridge’s writing, a lexical pattern similar to that encountered in the Bible emerges where light is truth, God, knowledge, love, hope and faith, and darkness or shadow is sin, despair doubt, uncertainty, corruption and death. Yet, as discussed in chapter 3, the paradoxes of the manifestation of light imagery in Coleridge’s poetry and prose can be paralleled with a similar paradoxical treatment of light in the Bible. In the Bible, God creates the literal light of the world and his son is its metaphorical light, but the light of life and salvation is often the result of the darkness of sin and death. The metaphorical dichotomy of light and dark is beset by contradictions in Coleridge’s poetry and prose, contradictions which reflect Coleridge’s religious belief that human suffering is often caused by God in order for humanity to be saved. In “Religious Musings”, Coleridge writes about the good that might spring from the evils of suffering and violence, speaking of the uses of evil he declares:

Lord of unsleeping Love, From everlasting Thou! We shall not die. These, even these, in mercy didst thou form, Teachers of Good through Evil, by brief wrong Making Truth lovely, and her future might Magnetic o’er the fixed untrembling heart. (Lines 192-197)

In the seascapes of “The Rime’’, light and dark are not in absolute opposition: light grows out of darkness, and what seems dark may also be light and vice versa. Shades of light and dark are ascribed, with an occasionally ambiguous morality; light can be lurid instead of angelic and darkness can be blessed instead of evil. Coleridge recounts a few excerpts from his “Lay sermons” in the last chapter of Biographia Literaria on the subject of “miracles worked for the outward sense of men”. The first excerpt displays his association of the sun with spirituality and revelation but in addition, in this metaphorical patterning, vapours of the

77 The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed., E. H. Coleridge, p. 100-2, “The Eolian Harp”. The “One life” lines were added in 1817 suggesting the persistence of this idea beyond his more radical Unitarian religious phase. Slimy Things 180 night are used to help purify the environment so the sunlight can be seen. Recounting his sermon, Coleridge writes:

It was only to overthrow the usurpation exercised in and through the senses, that the senses were miraculously appealed to. REASON AND RELIGION ARE THEIR OWN EVIDENCE. The natural sun is in this respect a symbol of the spiritual. Ere he is fully arisen, and while his glories are still under a veil, he calls up the breeze to chase away the usurping vapours of the night-season, and thus converts the air itself into the minster of its own purification: not surely in proof or elucidation of the light from heaven, but to prevent its interception.3S

Here, sunlight is linked with God and transcendence and the “usurping vapours of the night- season” might be viewed as doubt, yet light and dark work together: light needs dark as a purifier to remove any occlusion. Likewise, Coleridge’s common alignment of ice with indifference and the sun with the force of human tenderness, an alignment repeated in many poems, becomes paradoxical in “The Rime”. The pedagogical intention the Mariner gives his tale is that God’s eternal presence is in all things. As in Psalm 147, the ice, snow and cold are eventually seen in “The Rime” to belong to God, just as the sun and the waters are his.

Coleridge repeatedly develops associative links between the sea, light, the sky and God’s presence. Amid the fascinating scraps of ideas recorded in Coleridge’s notebook of September-October 1796, is “Item 273/G. 270”, which presents the image of lightning on the face of the sea as mimicry of the divine:

Sick, Lame, & Wounded—Blind, and Deaf and Dumb

Why sleep ye, O ye Watchman—

Wake from the sleep of whoredom. Trim your Lamp—

Sound, sound the Trumpets—for the Bridegroom comes-

O man, thou half-dead Angel—

A dusky light-a purpleßash

Crystalline splendor-light blue-

Green lightnings.—

38 Coleridge, Biographici, p. 361. Slimy Things 181

In that eternal and & delirious misery-

wrathfires—

inward desolations-

an horror of great darkness

great things that on the ocean

counterfeit infinity—39

Parallels are visible between this and the following lines from “Religious Musings”: “Fair the vernal mean,/Fair the high grove, the sea, the sun, the stars;/True impress each of their creating Sire!” (Lines 14-16). God’s presence in the natural world is imagined in the notebook entry as the “flash” of “light-blue-/Green lightnings” on water. In both this and the “Religious Musings” extract, the natural environment including: “the sea, the sun, the stars” is linked with light and made “fair” by God’s presence (“The Great Invisible”); they are the “symbols” by which God is “seen” (Lines 1-2). Coleridge’s letter to Thelwall of 14 October 1797 suggests the same in its insistence on the importance of God’s presence (“something great”) in the natural world to beautify the “universe” and make it and human life meaningful. For Coleridge, the essential truth of Christianity—the belief in an eternal deity and the promise of an afterlife—coloured everything; Christian truth illuminated the world with glimmering beauty and without this belief Coleridge felt everything would be dull and lightless, “what but an immense heap of little things?”40 Light in the sky, lighted bodies, but particularly light on the ocean become the evidence of God in the world in “The Rime”, and the above extracts indicate that this associative web did not exist in isolation. I propose that Coleridge illustrates the perceptual hell of a world without faith in God as the Mariner’s inability to see God’s presence in the light of the seascapes and creatures around him, until—as the result of suffering—the Mariner does see it and the marine realm is transfigured into a re-visioning of the biblical creation story.

In keeping with Coleridge’s belief that human suffering is redemptive, the Mariner experiences spiritual failings because they are part of the suffering which will make him a

The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1 [1794-1804, text] ed., Kathleen Cobum (London: Routledg & Kegan Paul, 1957), “Item 273/ G. 270”, September-October 1796. Coleridge, Collected Letters, 14 Oct. 1797, p. 349. Slimy Things 182 better Christian. A consideration of the various manifestations of light imagery in the seascapes of the poem as imitative of doubt, superstition and despair, offers a different prism through which to read the Mariner’s redemptive blessing of the water snakes. It offers a reading of the associative differences between the “parallel light shows” in the poem discussed recently by Thomas Dilworth (the hellish vision of the “deathfires” in Part II and the seeming blessedness of the aurora borealis in Part V), and it lends another dimension to the idea that a driving (though for some tired or embarrassing) moral of the poem is the

Unitarian doctrine of “the One Life”.41 Coleridge accesses a rich biblical heritage and employs a well-known poetic convention in his use of light on the ocean and in ocean environs to signify the presence of God but I read the light imagery as more than a signal for the presence of God in “The Rime”. The differing manifestations of light are employed in the poem to represent the Mariner’s perceptual and spiritual failure to recognise God in the world; the failure to recognise God is partly what Reid calls the Mariner’s failure of imagination, which he sees as “related to despair” and atheism.42 In my reading, the differing effects of light in the sea realm allegorise the spiritual failures which oppose salvation: doubt is represented in the occlusion of light through an Antarctic ocean realm of mist and ice; superstition is linked to the magnification of light in the bloody red heat of the vast Pacific sea and its decaying marine animals, and despair is signalled through the image of the sun imprisoned on the broad waves of the sea and through the pustule whiteness of the figure of

Life-in-Death.43 These spiritual failures are failures of perception and figures for the sublime affect within which reason fails and the imagination is led to God.

James Cook, explaining the purpose of his voyages in the “General Introduction” to the first volume of Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, reveals the Southern regions’ deep entrenchment in the conceptual unknown when he writes that his voyages seek to discover “whether the unexplored part of the Southern Hemisphere be only an immense mass of water, or contain another continent ... a question which had long

Thomas Dilworth, “Parallel Light Shows in Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’”, The Explicator, 22 June (2007), pp. 212-215. 4~ Reid, Coleridge, p. 51, 54. 43 The fourth stanza of Part II offers a way to read the light imagery and its relation to God in the poem which lends support for the categories 1 have adopted. Consider the line: “Nor dim nor red, like God’s own head/The glorious sun uprist”. In my view, these lines translate to the duller prose: the sun rose up and it was not dim or red, rather its brightness was similar to God or the light of God and faith in God is not dim and it is not red. Slimy Things 183

engaged the attention, not only of learned men, but of most of the maritime powers of Europe”.44 Descriptions of voyages to the mysterious region of the south—the area designated on one early map with just the word “Fog”45—share similar features, one of them being the extraordinary climactic extremes encountered as ships travel further and further south. All of these descriptions emphasise elemental extremes, the threat of death and the alien and/or bizarre nature of the sea or surrounding environs and the creatures in the sea (or linked with it). In the voyage narratives about the Southern ocean there is a pervasive sense that this geography is even more alien, even more unknown and even more mysterious than other sea regions. When Coleridge has the Mariner declare: “We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea”, he crafts an atmosphere of extreme isolation: the shock force of the plosives (first/burst) finishing in the hushed sibilance of “silent sea” mimes this isolation which is even further intensified since it comes after the Albatross’ death. With the declaration that the Mariner is “the first”, not only does Coleridge denote him as an old wanderer through an alignment with Le Maire’s sixteenth century Portuguese expedition— the historical “first” (according to Cook) to “burst” into the Southern Ocean—but given the lack of historical information, an even earlier period is possible making the Mariner potentially immortal, filled with some kind of odd everlasting power gleaned from unknown seas. Analogous to the incomprehensible primal abyss of Genesis, in the eighteenth-century the Antarctic was an embodiment of the unknown, doubt or perceptual uncertainty, and incomprehension.

As the Mariner’s ship travels into the southern ocean, the build up of personification makes a violent adversary of the marine environment. Initially, the personification of the sun (“out of the sea came he!”) conjures a cheery friend out of the elements; the intimate exchanges between the sun and the sea, here and elsewhere in the poem, invite parallels with God’s movement’s over the ocean in Genesis 1, but any associative links with fruitfulness and divine blessing are quickly altered with the personification of the “STORM-BLAST”:

And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he Was tyrannous and strong;

44 James Cook, A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, vol. 1 (London: W. Strahan and T Cadell, 1777), p. 4. 45 Livingston Lowes, Xanadu, p. 107. Slimy Things 184

He struck with his o’ertaking wings, And chased us south along.

With sloping masts and dipping prow, As who pursued with yell and blow Still treads the shadow of his foe, And forward bends his head, The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast, And southward aye we fled. (Lines 41-50)

In these lines, as in the Odyssey and the Aeneid, the marine environment has lexically become the pulsing flesh of a malicious enemy, in the face of which men cower. Coleridge portrays a battle in which the ship and the men, instead of cutting through the sea and the winds of the storm as in these Greco-Roman works, are its helpless victims. The ship is “chased”, they are “struck”, they “bend their head” in anticipation of another blow, they “fled”. The storm is also imagined as a winged creature: “he struck with his o’ertaking wings”. This is a prelude, as Sally West suggests (given Coleridge’s reference to the rushing wings of the mythical Vuokho in “The Destiny of Nations”), to the ambiguous figure of the albatross.46 Among their other intertextual possibilities, the storm blast’s “o’ertaking wings” has allusive links to the “owlet Atheism” in Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude” and to Milton’s image of the presence of the divine: “with mighty wings outspread/Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss/And mad’st it pregnant” (Lines 19-22).47 Returning to Coleridge’s “System of Philosophy” and its levels ascending towards Christian truth, each winged creature represents a reading of the possibilities and potential forms of transcendence. The paradoxes inherent to the winged storm, which forces the Mariner’s journey into the extremes of the southern sea realm, foreshadow the coming physical and spiritual transformations through various degrees of faith.

In “The Rime” the atmosphere of the Antarctic sea region is predominantly one of all pervading occlusion and impenetrability, which I consider to be an expression of the Mariner’s spiritual and perceptual blindness or incomprehension—his failure to recognise

46 Ernest Coleridge, ed., The Poems, “The Destiny of Nations”, Lines 93-5 and “Fears in Solitude”, Lines 80- 86. Sally West, Coleridge and Shelley: Textual Engagement (London: Ashgate, 2007), p. 148. 47 John Milton, Paradise Lost. A Poem in Twelve Books (London: Printed by S. Simmons, 1674). Slimy Things 185

God in the realm of snow. This inscrutable atmosphere is created by the accretion of references to phenomena which obscure the light of the sea realm: the “mist and snow”, the “drifts” and “snowy clifts”, “cloud”, the “fog-smoke white” and enormous opaque blocks of ice (Lines 51-77). The fluctuation of images and associations embedded in Part 1— entrapment/a clear path, no life/albatross, dismal sheen/green as emerald, stasis/movement and fear/wonder—illustrate the Mariner’s doubt and uncertainty. On the one hand the mood generated through the images and associations is one of awe-inspiring wonder given the fantastical sights of colossal jewel-like ice forms on the water “floating” by along with “drifts” of vapours and snow: verbs like “grew”, “came” and “floating” evoke a strangely mobile environment around a stationary ship. On the other hand, the stanzas of Part I oscillate in their evocation of wondrous fantasy and terror in the face of the unknown. The Mariner and his crew enter the Antarctic region amid the combative semiotics of stanzas eleven and twelve which describe “the STORM-BLAST”, yet the next stanza is imagistically full of the curious sensory magic of this realm of ice, with the steady creep of “wondrous cold”, the gathering white of “mist and snow”, and the luminous sylph-like choreography of the “ice, mast-high” as it comes “floating by,/As green as emerald” (Lines 51-4). As a realm of “mist and snow”, this Antarctic sea environment is akin to the Land of the Cimmerians where Odysseus meets Tiresius on his last stop before he travels to the underworld. Such a potential reference is alluring with its connotative possibilities of a journey to the joyless nothingness of death’s kingdom. In the alignment of blood sacrifice with the ability to speak later in “The Rime” (the Mariner sucks his arm in order to cry “A Sail!” and Tiresias needs to drink of the bloody pit in Odyssey 11 before he can speak to the waiting hero), there is another forewarning that violence and death will precede the Mariner’s redemptive transformation. Even more compelling is that, in the reading of voyage narratives, Coleridge was discovering fabulous intersections between real places, myth and the “Old Ocean”.49 Despite these Greco- Roman parallels, as a place of occlusion and doubt the Antarctic reflects the first stage of the Mariner’s failure to recognise God in the seascape and therefore the predominant influence of the biblical sea.

The Mariner is unable to recognise the presence of God in the Antarctic. In the stanzas that follow the storm, the sea of ice is characterised both as a zone of alien terror and

48 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. George Chapman (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2002), Book 11 Lines 25-97. 49 Ernest Coleridge, ed., The Poems, “Religious Musings”, Line 361. Slimy Things 186 entrapment, and a place of community between man and bird—a seeming holy place lit by the ‘‘white Moon-shine” (Line 78). In some lines the realm is lifeless and threatening: the drifting presence of enormous cliffs of ice sends only a dismal sheen through the snowy atmosphere; their threatening sounds like savage beasts magnify the sense of danger and uncertainty imbibed by the swirling mists and fogs, and the presence of the albatross is odd in this otherwise apparently sterile world. Nonetheless within this mix of alien terrors, the Albatross is also “hailed ... in God’s name”. It comes “Through the fog” as if to pierce it and its circling above the ship (“round and round it flew”) has resonances of geometrical perfection. In the presence of the bird the ship is no longer trapped in the ice and the crew are no longer isolated; the Albatross partakes in meals with them as a dinner guest and comes to the ship for “play”. It is an everyday friend, following like a faithful dog, and it seems an angelic thing as it “perched for vespers nine/Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke while,/Glimmered the white Moon-shine” (Lines 76-8). Responding to the importance of the presence of misty pin points of light in the Antarctic seascape, in his illustration of this image Gustave Dore renders the community of bird, crew, ship, sky, sea, and ice through the specks of lighted snow in which the entire seascape is dotted and merged in a pattern of glistening particles.50 The Antarctic seascape is sublime; it metaphorically renders the failure of reason most readily through the Mariner’s unaccountable killing of the albatross.

Christian theology underpins Coleridge’s portrayal of the albatross. Modiano has remarked that the motive behind the slaying of the albatross in the poem can never be fully established but that it might be more workable to view the bird’s death within the context of the literature of ocean discovery, in which explorers so often “articulated fears of survival and uncertainty about the disposition of indigenous beings”, than to place it alongside Christian doctrines like original sin.51 Modiano’s comment is important in the context of the Unitarian disavowal of the doctrine of original sin,52 and the well established influence of discovery literature on the poem.' Even so, Christian notions are unavoidable in analyses of Coleridge’s depiction of the bird. The imperfect rhyme merging “cross” with “Albatross”,

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Illustrated by Gustave Dore (New York: Dover Publications, 1970). Opposite page 14. '1 R. Modiano, “Sameness or Difference? Historicist Readings of‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”’, Fry, ed., The Rime, p. 112. 52 Ulmer, “Necessary Evils”, p. 342.

53 Livingston Lowes, Xanadu, p. 114. Lowes comments on Coleridge’s interest in discovery literature all through his book. Slimy Things 187

suggests the bird is a sacrificial Christ-like victim of unthinking violence. The Mariner is unable to recognise the presence of God in the Antarctic and in the bird, and in shooting the bird, like those that crucify Jesus, he is unaware of the implications of his action. Additionally, there is little to suggest that the Mariner fears the bird as a bad omen, unlike the

melancholic Hatley,54 or to indicate that the Mariner intended to eat the albatross as explorers often did. I read the Mariner’s slaying of the Albatross as an act of unthinking violence in the same way that Coleridge would later interpret the violence against a hawk “with ruffled

Feathers resting on the Bowsprit” as “unthinking”.55 Will Christie offers an analogous lens

through which to view “the Mariner’s spontaneous violence against the bird”56 when he quotes Wordsworth’s “The Borderers”, the lines of which I partly reproduce below, where Oswald remarks:

Action is transitory-a step, a blow, The motion of a muscle, this way or that, ‘Tis done-and in the after-vacancy c 7 We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed;

The Mariner’s misreading of the Antarctic sea realm is a product of his uncertain Christian faith and his spiritual blindness. His lack of clarity over the albatross’s status as a Christian soul indicates his failure to recognise the presence of “the One Life” in all creatures because, while the bird is interpreted overtly as a pagan spirit by the crew and in the prose gloss of Part II, it is still a bearer of God’s light in the context of Coleridge’s philosophical system and his view of the “unsensualising” virtue of superstitious belief. As Coleridge’s metaphorical treatment of such phenomena in the Lay Sermons indicates, the mists and vapours of the ice in the poem suggest the mysterious workings of God to bring the light of faith through the vaporous mists of doubt and superstition. Like the ice that “did split with a

54 Hatley’s violent action against an albatross was part of the primary inspiration for the poem. Kitson, ‘“The Eucharist of Hell’”, p. 12. The idea of unthinking violence is possibly infused with (going back to Kitson’s argument about attitudes to cannibalism) anxieties that “the self is prey to savage desires”. 56 Will Christie, Coleridge: A Literary Life (London: Ashgate, 2006), p. 105. 57 William Wordsworth, “The Borderers”, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 6 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1849-1850), Act three, “Scene , the Wood on the edge of the Moor” . Slimy Things 188 thunder-fit”, a passage is cut through the occluding vapours of doubt and uncertainty towards God and faith (Line 69).

In Coleridge’s thought, superstition can be viewed as a stepping stone towards true faith; it takes the mind away from the ordinary and propels it towards the transcendent or the sacred in the world. In Part II of “The Rime”, many members of the crew dream of vengeful Antarctic spirit and, in this, adopt the superstitious pagan cosmogony of a spirit filled world—an idea reinforced when the narrative gloss and Burnet epigraph were added in 1817:

And some in dreams assured were Of the Spirit that plagued us so; Nine fathom deep he had followed us From the land of mist and snow. (Lines 131-4)

Coleridge makes superstition part of a process in which the mind is “unsensualised” and led away from the everyday towards the contemplation of higher things in “The Destiny of Nations”. In “The Destiny of Nations” superstition is a necessary part of a socio-cultural evolution towards what Coleridge, when writing the poem, would have seen as the true faith of Unitarianism. The superstitious mind of “The Rime” fluctuates in a paranoid reverie of appeals to varied supernatural presences for causal explanations. Within the context of the reading I have given of the Antarctic—that its obscuring mists are synonymous with an uncertain faith—the possibility of spirit forms everywhere is preferable to the uncertainty of God’s presence in Part I. In accordance with the schema laid out in “The Destiny of Nations”, superstition leads towards the development of the ability to recognise the true light of God in “The Rime”, yet superstitious acts are more overtly signs of spiritual failure in Part II of “The Rime” than they are in “Destiny”. At this stage of the poem, the crew’s superstitious dreams about these spirits are part of their fluctuating judgements about the Mariner’s violent act and signify their paranoia as well as their lack of an anchored faith in God. The superstition of the crew runs rampant and produces extremes of fear. The lurid bloody glare of the sunlight in the seascape of Part II of “The Rime” is a metaphorical rendering of these extremes, where the true light of God is set ablaze amid fickle judgments and inverted ritual idolatry. 58

58 Superstition may be part of a process towards “a higher point of view” in Coleridge’s “System of Philosophy”, but in “The Rime” it is another spiritual and perceptual failing which besets the Mariner. Slimy Things 189

In “The Rime”, without a true faith and the recognition of God’s all-encompassing presence, moral certainty is lost and unthinking violence and uncontrollable fear. As in the Bible, without God’s presence and control of the ocean, the fundamental goodness and order of creation is undone and all hell breaks loose. In the wake of the Mariner’s unthinking violence his ship continues to move with the wind: it enters the Pacific Ocean and travels to the Equatorial line. The fact that the “sun now rose upon the right” is simply part of the reality of the ship’s course (in the Southern hemisphere travelling North), but in the context of the Mariner’s forbidding annunciation of the “hellish thing” he has done, this inverted sunrise denotes a Southern sea region which is even more diabolical and perversely topsy­ turvy (Line 91). The sense of community and friendship established with the imagery of the albatross, serenely partaking of religious sacraments with the crew, is brutally wounded and extinguished in the violent final lines of Part I, but in Part II the wound seems to gush anew in the all-consuming penitential anguish of the Mariner’s exclamations: “but no sweet bird did follow,/Nor any day for food or play/Came to the mariner’s hollo!”. This loss of community is accentuated when, after the alliterative rush of the ship’s movement the wind dies, the tide is stilled, and a pervasive silence falls among them: “And we did speak only to break/The silence of the sea!” In “The Eolian Harp”, Coleridge writes: “The stilly murmur of the sea/ Tells us of silence” (these lines, 11-12, existed in the 1795 version), suggesting the peacefulness of a companionable, loving home, whereas in “The Rime” “The silence of the sea!” underlines the ship’s isolated existence amid a seemingly lifeless sea. The image of an abyss of seeming lifelessness recurred in “Kubla Kahn” (1797) with its images of a “sunless sea” and “lifeless ocean” (Lines 5, 28).59 Coleridge’s pairing of the aural nothingness of “silence” and “sea” in “The Rime” highlights the perversity of the Pacific sea environ. Throughout Western literature, oceans are defined by aural images: often as waves of rhythmic fury or harmonic melody. The sense of unnatural fellowship is further iterated in the vision of a ship full of men surrounded by the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, devoid of that most basic necessity of life, fresh water, and the meta-vision of the ship as an unreal nightmare piece of art. In the context of these images and the crew’s unstable attitudes to the Mariner’s crime, the stalling of all natural motion depicted in the horrible stilling of the ship mimes the crippling power of faithlessness:

59 'The Eolian Harp” and “Kubla Kahn”, The Norton Anthology’, pp. 426-428, 446-448. Slimy Things 190

Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. (Lines 115-18)

The metre and stress patterns in these lines are regular, even rigid, like the gilded frame of an oil painting granting the prettiness of order to a depiction of its inverse. These lines intimate the macabre nature of the eighteenth-century fascination with shipwreck paintings. The horrible calming of the Mariner’s ship is suggestive of the stilling of tragedy in art; the snapshot in oil of what was real death and real suffering. Yet the regularity of the lines, “As idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean”, is soothing in its iambic musicality.

In stanzas three and four, a causal relation is established between the crew’s lack of true faith and the doom which is to befall them. When the Mariner interprets his act as “a hellish thing” that would “work ’em woe” (Lines 91-2)—producing great suffering well beyond himself—a causal link is established between what happens to the crew and their changing convictions (or lack of conviction) that makes them what the gloss describes as “accomplices” in the Albatross’ death. What condemns the crew is less their complicity in the act, when they declare “twas right” to slay the bird, than the lack of substance and integrity in their beliefs visible in their oscillating and superstitious readings of the environment. Coleridge associates superstition with the din of false and changing oaths in his writing elsewhere, as in “Fears in Solitude”, published the same year as “The Rime”, where he produces the following seething lines: “Oh! blasphemous! the Book of life is made/A superstitious instrument, on which/We gabble o’er the oaths we mean to break” (Lines 70- 72). Similarly, the crew “gabble” their “oaths”:

And I had done a hellish thing And it would work ’em woe: For all averred I had killed the bird That made the breeze to blow. “Ah wretch!” said they, “the bird to slay That made the breeze to blow!”

Nor dim nor red, like God’s own head Slimy Things 191

The glorious sun uprist: Then all averred I had killed the bird That brought the fog and mist. (Lines 91-102)

As in Revelation, where fire hurled is on the sea to punish the wicked, in Part II the entire seascape is a purgatorial ocean of fire. The Pacific reflects a “bloody sun”, the ship itself is alight, and the sea is a deadly red swarming with bizarre creatures. Within the Christian ethos that binds the poem, the sublime horror of the sea at this point in “The Rime”, like the bloody seas of the apocalypse, can only be made comprehensible, good, worthy of love and beautiful in a world where God is present and a true faith exists. Part II begins promisingly, as the light of God seems to shine on the ship as it moves on a clear course and the Mariner’s perceptual blindness has ostensibly lifted despite, or even because of, his crime. Yet this promising beginning quickly fades; the Pacific Ocean is an alien place and perceptual blindness is transformed into the experience of sensory extremes which intensify directly after the crew’s oscillating superstitious assertions about the Albatross’ death (Line 106). The ship and the bodies of the crew become literally immobilised through heat and thirst under a sky ablaze with the red light streaming from a “bloody sun”. Within the sublime thrall of superstition, light becomes savage and unreal: the “bloody sun” burning in the sky, the “death-fires” (Line 128) dancing on the ship’s rigging and the nightmare glowing of marine creatures in the water signal extremes of light, heat, and rot and act as parallels for the instability and emotional extremes of the crew. Consider the portrayal of light in stanza seven:

All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon. (Lines 111-114)

The strange power of these lines is partly achieved by the instantaneous eruption of the image of the red hot sky bleeding over the ocean—the result of the word “all” which, in its immediate assumption of the present tense, engulfs the reader. This strange power is also the result of the intense evocation of the colour red given the lexical associations of “hot”, “copper” and “bloody” (the assonance merging “hot” and “copper” suggestive of the Slimy Things 192 spreading of bleeding metal). The Mariner’s perception of a tiny sun standing above the ship like a brand or marker demonstrates the superstition that is taking hold of the crew—that the ship is set apart and marked for punishment. The sun, “right up above the mast” marks the ship in two possible and interrelated ways: the ship is marked because it is stained with guilt and/or the ship is marked out for severe punishment. As a “bloody Sun” this marking accrues intimations of apocalyptic gore and violence. There is already the blood stain of the Albatross’s death upon the ship and the Mariner has already suggested in the line “and it would work ’em woe” that there may be more blood needed in order to pay for his violent act. As Coleridge was well aware, the Catholic doctrine of purgatory held that it was fire which would purge the sins of those in purgatory and additionally, many pagan religions believed that fire purified evil.60 The Mariner’s ship, marked by the sin of an unthinking cruelty, sits under a flaming sky which will soon bear witness to the practise of ritual persecution.

Resonating with the biblical sea of the apocalypse, the Mariner’s vision of a red sky above the sea during the day is mirrored at night in the sickening glow of a rotting sea and the violent flicker of fire-light along the rigging. In his analysis of Coleridge’s imaginative processes in the construction of the “death fires” (Line 28), Livingston Lowes remarks on the links these fires have with three phenomena: the atmospheric phenomenon caused by an electrical field in which plasma flits along the ship’s rigging (the corposants), the fire lights that “fly about the church-yards” (“the thing which they ought to be”), and the glow which emanates from rotting fish.61 Lowes speaks of the way these phenomena “merged”.62 Thomas Dilworth remarks on Coleridge’s deliberate misreading of the corposants, which (he observes), sailors regard as a positive omen.63 Combining the remarks of Lowes and Dilworth, the evocative allusions which coalesce in the vision of the “death-fires” at sea can be viewed as an intimation of the way the Mariner misreads the natural environment again in Part II due to the superstition which is taking hold of him and the crew. Under the influence of superstition, the seascape is seen through the optics of sublime emotional excesses and

Ccleridge had read about such religions and their often violent rites in the literature of discovery which fascinated him. Lhingston Lowes, Xanadu, pp.78-80. Livingston Lowes, Xanadu, pp.78-80. Thomas Dilworth, “Parallel Light Shows in Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”’, The Explicator, June 22 (2007), pp. 212-215, p. 212. Slimy Things 193 paranoid fear which sees the surrounds as menacing, and marks the ship out for punishment: the sun bears down on them in particular, as does the light on the rigging and the surrounding glow (perceived as diabolical) of the creatures. All of these are seen as bad signs, signs of punishment, yet what they should reveal to the Mariner is “the One Life” embedded in the light of God on all which he is only to recognise in Part IV. The superstition reflected through this seascape serves the same purpose as the punitive seas of the Bible: the sea embodies the false faith and terrible suffering that leads to the salvation of true faith.

Coleridge’s rotting sea of slimy things alludes to a pagan supematuralism but in the Mariner’s appeal to Jesus and within the sea journey of perceptual and spiritual transformation where only the belief in God makes creation good, this sea continues the biblical tradition. The Mariner’s mistaken sense of being surrounded by things Other to nature and Other to God is viscerally recorded in the lament: “The very deep did rot: O Christ!/That ever this should be!” (Lines 123-4). His perception of the sea as unnatural is reinforced by his vision of the marine animals as, in Ower’s words, “nightmarish and infernal”64 miscreated beings; they are repulsive “things” without names which behave wrongly as they crawl “with legs” upon the water, and the water (which should be at least clear liquid) seems an aberrant substance. Lowe points out that one of the sources which inspired Coleridge’s sea speaks of its “corruption” by slimy red marine snakes, and this notion of the sea being impure filters into the Mariner’s perception of the sea at this point in the poem.65 Such an account evokes the fire-red of the serpents of Aeneid 2. Aeneas, speaking of the signs of Troy’s impending destruction at Dido’s court, declares, “Over the calm deep straits off Tenedos swim/twin, giant serpents, rearing in coils, breasting/ the sea-swell side by side, plunging toward the shore, their heads, their blood-red crests surging over the waves.66 For the Mariner, the southern sea, figured alongside ominous displays of supernatural magic and swarming with alien creatures, is impure and elementally perverse, as it is most often in the Aeneid. The sea appears to be decaying and is akin to “a witch’s oils”; it exhibits qualities that make it appear abnormal, “slimy”, but also in this link to witchcraft, unlawful and

John B. Ower, “Crantz, Martens and the ‘Slimy things’ in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’”, Neophilologus 85 (2001), pp. 477-484, p. 482. 65 Livingston Lowes, Xanadu, p. 45. Lowes quotes from Purchas: Samuel Purchas, Purchas, his Pilgrimage; or, Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages (London: Printed by William Stansby for Henry Fetherstone, 1617) [electronic item], p. 1086. 66 Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Fagles, Book 2, Lines 203-6. Slimy Things 194 possibly evil. The creatures themselves, since they do not swim but rather “crawl with legs”, seem to be the products of an oceanic realm which is against nature/unnatural. In the midst of these unrecognisable incongruities, which seem alien to creation, the Mariner appeals to Jesus, who saves man from sin and evil, and not God the Creator (“O Christ!”, Line 123). In his further exclamation, “That ever this should be!” (Line 124), he perhaps implies that an unholy mark is on this antipodean world. The Mariner’s exclamations imply that what is so abhorrent is the perversion of creation, not the absence of creation. For the Mariner, the southern sea appears to be diabolical without the touch of God to make its creatures “good.”67 Coleridge makes a similar analogy between unknown seas and seemingly ungodly marine animals in “The Destiny of Nations” where “mis-shaped prodigies” exist in the “abysm” of

z: o “the untravelled realms of Ocean’s bed” eliciting a similar horror.

The crew retreats into what Coleridge would have considered a form of primitivism in their oscillating assessments of the Mariner’s crime, their dreams of polar spirits, their ritual purification of him in an iconographic exchange of the cross for the dead albatross, and the curse in their “evil looks”.69 The Mariner does not resist the placement of the albatross, signalling all at once his Christlike acceptance of persecution, his participation in the superstitious rite, or his acceptance that some form of devilish magic or heavenly judgment (the possibilities are both) has fixed the bird to him. The crew make the Mariner a scapegoat for a crime in which they have become complicit, and by marking him with the Albatross, they symbolically crucify him using an inverted idolatry.70 Such behaviour suggests that the world, with its bloody sky, its devilish light about the rigging and its abortive unfamiliar marine animals has become inexplicable to them and they respond, as many indigenous cultures (and European cultures for that matter) are known to do, with symbolic acts and shaming sacrificial rites embedded with the emotional excesses of fear and hate.71

67 Holy Bible, Genesis 1:31 “And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good”. 68 Coleridge, “The Destiny of Nations”, The Poems, ed., E. Coleridge, Lines 98-102. 69 Kitson, “’The Eucharist of Hell”’, p. 3. Kitson notes what he calls the Romantic association of non- European, ‘Primitive’ races with “moral degeneration”. 70 Many critics have commented on the various links to crucifixion in this act including, Dilworth, “Symbolic Spatial”, p. 508. 71 Coleridge “Fears in Solitude”, in Selected Poetty and Prose, ed., Stauffer, pp. 64-70. Coleridge extensively commented on the European capacity for savagery, as in “Fears in Solitude” (Lines 41-60), but he saw it as a backward step away from civilised culture. Kitson comments on this as well in “’The Eucharist of Hell’”, p. 5. Slimy Things 195

Despair triumphs in the midst of these superstitious extremes. The ritual placement of the Albatross, marking the Mariner as a sinner, has failed to save the crew, and in Part III, the Mariner’s perception of light amid these seascapes enters another phase of distortion. Neither dim, nor red, the light of faith is imprisoned in the ribs of the spectre-bark and glimmers pus- white on the face of “Death-in-Life”. Like Reid, I view Coleridge’s garishly feminine “Life- in-Death” as a figure of despair, despair that is also signalled in the “wicked whisper” that will not allow the Mariner to pray, but whereas Reid considers the crew’s ritualistic exchange of the cross for the albatross as a sign of their despair, I see it as an act of superstition. Their despair is more evocatively present in the imagery of the imprisoned sun on the water with its connotations of the loss of all hope.

The image of the sun’s light imprisoned between the ribs of the spectre-bark on the sea, can, if linked to Genesis 1, intimate a blocking of creation: the divine presence does not sweep majestically over the chaotic abyss to germinate the seeds of light and life; rather, the light of life is trapped upon this sterile chaos. As already noted, in “Fears in Solitude”, Coleridge depicts atheism as an owl “Sailing on obscene wings” closing its eyes to “the glorious sun in Heaven” and then demanding: ‘“Where is it?”’ (Lines 81-6) A similarly audacious blocking of God’s light occurs “when that strange shape drove suddenly/Betwixt us and the Sun” (Lines 175-6)—the sun that had “Almost upon the western wave/Rested (Lines 173-4)”. Moreover, if despair blocks out the presence of God and enslaves it behind “a grate”, then despair could be seen to function as a disbelief in its antithesis to salvation and its denial of the transcendence of God. Equally important to the notion of God’s eternal presence in the world is the promise of an afterlife and liberation from corporeality. Patrick Keane has commented on the relation between the spectre-bark and slavers; in such a reading the sun’s broad burning face behind the grate becomes a symbol of those men and women trapped in the hulls of slave ships and points to another human failure to recognise the presence of God in everyone and everything. In “The Rime”, hope is light streaming from a faith in God, and is as antithetical to despair as God’s transcendent nature is antithetical to the immanent nature of humanity. The associative links between the allegorical vision of “Life-in-Death”, the unreachable sun, and the repetitive prominence of images of death and decay intimates that without the light of God and faith in an afterlife, human death is a mere heap of bones

72 Patrick, J. Keane, Coleridge’s Submerged Politics: The Ancient Mariner and Robinson Crusoe (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994). Slimy Things 196 arching toward the sky and without a real and abiding faith, joy is just a “flash” and men are trapped within the bounds of their own fragile bodies.

Apart from the transient joy of the crew (aurally indicated in the lines “And all at once their breath drew in,/ As they were drinking all”) and the cannibalistic suggestions of the Mariner’s ingestion of his own blood, there are no indications of oscillating waves of belief or efforts towards ritual acts. Instead, there is an overwhelming sense of exhaustion and the creeping escalation of an endless expanse of dread. If the Mariner’s utterances, his eleven exclamations and six questions from stanza three to ten are considered within the framework of biblical number symbolism, they intimate the faithlessness of despair in their allusion to the eleven days the children of Israel spent in the “terrible wilderness” failing to enter the “good land” God provided due to spiritual weakness and “dread” (Deuteronomy 1: 2-32). They also point to the presence of evil in their potential reference to the beast of Revelation, and the divisive nature of man as the sixth day marks the creation of man, the “living soul” whose body must die, from “the dust of the ground” (Genesis 2). Ironically, the Mariner’s utterances suggest God’s embedded presence even in his seeming absence.

In a world without hope, the universe is an amoral random collection of events. The figure of “Life-in-Death” personifies such a world:

Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Nightmare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man’s blood with cold. (Lines 190-194)

Hers is a garish attraction which is actually repulsive and productive only of the absence of feeling since she “thicks man’s blood with cold”. Her characteristics denote an earth that is only earth: her hair, “yellow as gold”, evokes worldly not spiritual wealth, and in conjunction with her other features of brash, amoral beauty, the light from “Life in Death’s” skin (“as white as leprosy”) intimates that within the compass of despair, the sea (an emblem of the world) is a place where man is separated from his fellows. The Mariner “lives” on while the crew die, but this is only part of Coleridge’s poetic suggestion; man without hope for an afterlife is living death, a briefly bright thing in a skeleton amongst other skeletons. Paralleled Slimy Things 197 with the bride of Part I, who is surrounded by her family and friends as she participates in the sanctification of human love, Life-in-Death represents the absence of faith, community and sacrament. Unanchored by religious sacrament or faith, the Mariner’s association with bodily corruption is increased by the presence of despair’s “leprous skin”—fixed to the dead bird and soon to be surrounded by dead men, the Mariner is awash in a white that is made analogous to decay.73 In Life-in-Death Coleridge draws upon many of the dichotomies of the feminine supernatural: a traveller on the spectre-bark, she seems immortal yet she figures mortal life without the promise of immortality; she has an ostensible beauty but an inherent brazen hideousness; and the bark seems known at first (a rescuer of hope), however it soon becomes an alien terror heralding despair. The images of light in the seascape, which follow the description of “Life-in-Death”, are ghoulishly blanched: there is little in the form of natural light in the sky, the stars do “rush out” but their light is “dim” (Lines 199, 206). The steersman’s face is lit eerily by human light and the crew die in the “thick” night, with its suggestions of the complete absence of God and faith. The sun has already descended so quickly that there is a sense that the light of God has fled and that it has been pushed down by the all-consuming despair of the crew (signalled perhaps in the “strides” of the night). When the crew fall down “with a ghastly pang”, their faces in the light of the potentially devilish “horned moon” (again the realm of the southern sea is perverse), twilight is brief (the gloss tells us that there is “no twilight”) and in these extremes of day and night, night—the absence of God and faith—has “won”.

In its purgatorial role, Coleridge’s sea fundamentally continues the biblical tradition. In Parts I-III, the Mariner’s changing perceptions of the manifestations of light in the natural world have signified his spiritual failures: his doubt, superstition and despair. After the suffering he has experienced in the earlier parts, and the “seven days, seven nights” fixed by the “look with which they looked on me” (the look more “horrible” than the “hell” of “an orphan’s curse”) in Part IV, the Mariner experiences a perceptual transition marked in the sequence of observations surrounding the “shadow of the ship” stanzas. In this sequence the Mariner moves towards his recognition of “the one Life” as a beautiful light (“Nor dim nor red”). From stanza ten onwards, the Mariner comes to see the moon and the stars, the sea and the water snakes as part of a community of living things.

73 However, in Part IV, the crew “nor rot nor reek”, Line 254. Slimy Things 198

Deathless but surrounded by the dead, initially in Part IV the Mariner’s inability to pray and the enduring curse in the eyes of the dead indicates that his perceptions are still marred by despair. Nonetheless, the Mariner begins to see “the one Life” in stanza ten where the moon’s ascension is given associations of gentleness and community—associations made explicit in the 1817 gloss which speaks of them as in possession of “their native country and their own natural homes” and their arrival producing “silent joy” (gloss to lines 263-271). The Mariner’s perceptions of the sea begin to change after his vision of the gentle moon: “Her beams bemocked the sultry main,/Like April hoar-frost spread.” Although the water in the shadow around the ship remains diabolically red in stanza eleven, and retains its links with superstition and fear, the associations of seasonal renewal in the description of “hoar­ frost” on the “sultry main” transform the ice imagery of the polar region (and its fellowship with occlusion and doubt) into the brilliant reflection of a transparent pure light connotative of the presence of God. However, the most significant perceptual change of Part IV occurs in the sequence of the “shadow of the ship” pairs where the Mariner’s revulsion in the face of the “slimy things” in the water turns to love:

Beyond the shadow of the ship, I watched the water snakes: They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coiled and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire.

O happy living things! No tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware. (Lines 267-287) Slimy Things 199

In stanza eleven of Part IV, the Mariner still mistakes the light of the sea within the ship’s shadow as a “still and awful red” even after he has recognised the pure light “like April hoar-frost” upon the “main” outside this shadow; even so, in the next stanza (above), the water snakes, visible outside the ship’s shadow, move in tracks of shining white and “elfish light” as if their bodies are coloured by the silvery lit water, and in stanza thirteen, “within the shadow of the ship”, the water is suddenly no longer a ghoulish red with its associations of slimy mis-created life and unholy charms; rather, the snakes are “blue, glossy green, and velvet black” engendering a “golden fire” which, as a burning that does not bum, is akin to the fire Moses saw on the mountain of God. This transformation occurs in midst of a perceptual trinity and an intensification of visual focus which becomes reduced to one vision—the beautiful and beloved water snakes. In stanzas ten to eleven the Mariner looks upon the various aspects of the natural world using three movements: he looks up at the moon gently moving, out at the sea past the ship’s shadow, and then in at the sea in the ship’s shadow. In stanzas twelve to thirteen, he uses only two movements: his gaze goes out on the main to the white-lit water snakes and then in to the ship’s shadow to see their “rich attire”, and for both of these he declares, “I watched”. The Mariner’s attentive ‘watching’ signals a deeper concentration on the movements of the snakes, and in stanza fifteen the Mariner’s focus is utterly singular as he declares: “O happy living things!” Formerly the site of overwhelming hideousness and suffering, here the sea is the home of overwhelming beauty and love. The change from three to one suggests both the anti-trinitarianism implicit in Coleridge’s Unitarian beliefs and the essential perceptual realisation of “the one Life”. In one of the travel accounts which is established as an influence on Coleridge’s images of the water snakes, Father De Bourzes emphasises the importance of attending carefully to the light from marine creatures, the “sparkles of light”, in order to fully understand such “wonders of nature” and notes that he is able to do so because his “window looked directly down upon

,t”.74

De Bourzes, “A Letter from Father Bourzes to Father Estienne Souciet, concerning the Luminous Appearance Observable in the Wake of Ships in the Indian Seas, & c. Taken from the Ninth Volume of the Missionary Jesuits”, The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 28 (1712-1713), pp. 230-35. [Online resource]. Livingston-Lowes quotes Father Bourzes on page 37 of Xanadu and his chosen excerpt is often quoted by critics; however, the original is viewable online and is worth reading in full. Slimy Things 200

Especially in Part II (in what I will call their infernal stage), the burning light of the sea creatures evokes notions of doom and hell-fire. In the midst of the Mariner’s superstition, the lighted marine animals are lurid, coloured with gruesome hues suggestive of unnatural magic and doom in their links with the “death fires” and the sea “water, like a witch’s oils”:

About, about, in reel and rout The death-fires danced at night; The water, like a witch’s oils, Burnt green, and blue and white. (Lines 127-30)

Earlier in Part IV, a similar perceptual sweep involving three movements had signalled the Mariner’s faithlessness and despair: in stanzas four and five of Part IV, the marine creatures, the “thousand thousand slimy things”, are aligned with the Mariner, who views himself as a sinner who has caused the death of other men and is trapped alive in death:

The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.

I looked upon the rotting sea, And drew my eyes away; I looked upon the rotting deck, And there the dead men lay. (Lines 236-43)

Without the infinite presence of God, as seen in Coleridge’s already cited remark in his letter to Thelwall, nature is a mere heap of little things. When the Mariner looks upon the sea and upon the dead men in these earlier stanzas he can only see immanence, the rot of water, the rot of the deck, and death with no sense of an immortality to come. Looking on nature without a belief in God, Coleridge intimates, is to look on something that cannot transcend the decay of matter. The perceptual change that transforms previously hideous beings into lovable beauties pivots around the Mariner’s experience of perceptual failure and the escalation of his sufferings. Slimy Things 201

As a place of suffering and punishment that leads to the recognition of God and the possibility of the transcendence of matter, the sea is biblical. For John Beer, God’s presence is always available in the natural world but the Mariner does not see it at first; as a slight modification of this, the natural sublime (as the language of God), is present as a potentiality

which is fulfilled when the finite mind of man is able to coherently read the signs of God.75 Coleridge’s suggestion, in his pairing of the colours of the lighted water snakes in Part II and Part IV, is that these marine creatures are the same creatures but that the Mariner’s perceptions have changed, and the light is now the light of true faith because the Mariner is ‘watching’ or reading the language of God more attentively. Using a similar colour scheme, now transformed in Part IV by what is characterised as an unconscious recognition of their beauty, the Mariner describes the water snakes as in possession of a “rich attire:/Blue, glossy green, and velvet black” inside the ship's shadow, whereas without they are surrounded by white: “They moved in tracks of shining white”. As they coil, their tracks are a “flash of golden fire”, the creatures are no longer aligned with a burning that is unholy (“witch’s”) or linked with mis-read corposants (“death-fires”):

Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coiled and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire.

If nature is altered as a result of human perceptions, and the beliefs which guide human perceptions, then nature is what human beings create. Reid suggests this when he speaks of the Mariner’s redemption as the result of his imaginative faculty which allows him to perceive God in all of creation.76 Yet, as Christie observes, the Mariner’s blessing is an “unself-conscious act of love ... It is the gesture’s very unconsciousness—its

Beer, Visionaryp. 143-45, Reid, p. 58. Similarly, in his reading of the poem Reid speaks of nature as God’s symbolism which the Mariner attempts to decipher. My contribution to these interpretations is to suggest that in “The Rime” God’s presence in nature is a potentiality which is fulfilled by faith. Faith transforms the natural world. Reid, Coleridge, Form and Symbol, p. 52. Slimy Things 202 spontaneity—that seems to underwrite its authenticity.”77 The Mariner’s unconscious blessing seems to contradict the conscious activity implied in the notion of an imaginative act unless his sufferings during the “Seven days, seven nights” in the face of the curse of the dead men, and his sufferings at sea more broadly, are taken into account.

As an emblem of purgatorial suffering Coleridge’s sea parallels the sea of the Bible. To return to Coleridge’s letter to Southey of November 13, 1795, I suggest that the Mariner’s unconscious blessing is possible only because his perceptually blighted “stream” is filtrated in the “Ocean of Universal Redemption”. The Mariner’s unconscious blessing of the water snakes is a necessary perceptual change which is the result of his extensive sufferings at sea—it is not a spontaneous act of God’s grace or some inexplicable or random act. This perceptual change is particularly visible in the symbolism of his sufferings during the seven days and nights in the presence of the dead men’s curse. Faulting the doctrine of original sin, Joseph Priestly has it that humanity is “possessed of sufficient power to do what God requires of them”;78 that is, to attend to his commandments and particularly to “see God in everything”, and since God “despises nothing that he has made”, the Mariner’s crime is evident: he has despised the sea snakes and so it is necessary that his perceptual change pivots around them. If sufferings and punishments are “corrective and salutary, terminating in good, which is also sufficiently agreeable to the language of the Scriptures, with respect to all punishment, present and future”, then that the Mariner suffers at sea is entirely consistent with Priestley’s and Coleridge’s idea that suffering is necessary in order for some people to achieve “the greatest possible good”.79 Considering the change that is effected—that the Mariner no longer despises the sea snakes but marvels at their beauty—the Mariner’s experience of the curse in the eyes of the dead over seven days and nights is numerically allusive: God created the world in seven days and declared all to be “good”—effectively, as proposed in my introduction, the Mariner’s blessing charts what Coleridge called the “repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”.80 In Genesis, God’s presence transforms the dark nothingness of the abyss into a created world full of

77 Christie, Coleridge, p. 101. 78 Joseph Priestley, “The Institutes, Appeal, and Familiar Illustration”, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestly, vol. 2 (New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1972), p. 432. 79 Priestley, “The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity”, Theological and Miscellaneous Works, pp. 507-508, 514. Coleridge, Biographia, p. 175. Slimy Things 203 living things made and declared by God to be “good”. Coleridge’s poem has detailed a spiritual perceptual parallel where true faith allows the Mariner to see God in the world and is thus an act of creation within which the sea and its creatures are transfigured.

Purgative suffering produces the sublime affect in which reason is overwhelmed by doubt, superstition, despair and finally love, transforming the Mariner such that he is able to properly read the signs of God in the sea of the world. As in the biblical tradition, Coleridge depicts God’s control over the waters. Coleridge portrays these dichotomies through the Mariner’s perceptual transformations. Through faith the seascape flourishes with loved created forms, light becomes purifying, sin is redeemed and the Mariner becomes a saved and apparently changeless teller of tales. Without this faith, the seascape is incomprehensible amid the formlessness of the vaporous Antarctic, the sin of unthinking violence and the punishment and damnation that follows.

In “The Rime”, Coleridge’s sea is sublime because its monstrous hybridity produces the sublime affect. In other words, Coleridge’s sea is sublime because he depicts the power of extreme, ostensibly inextricable dichotomous ideas and emotions to overwhelm human reason through his descriptions of the sea, and the sea is ultimately interpreted as an expression of God in the world. Coleridge’s depiction of the sea and marine creatures in “The Rime” is also consistent with Burke’s category of the sublime but Coleridge’s portrayal of the Mariner’s blessing of the water snakes is best fitted to Burke’s category of the Beautiful. For Burke, the Sublime object aroused emotions turning chiefly on the delight evoked by the observation of pain and danger. By comparison, the Beautiful object arouses “tender”, affectionate emotions relating to the love of humanity or living things. Within Burke’s categories, the sea is also sublime: the mists and snows of Part I produce the requisite obscurity, the “silent sea” is boundless and the crew and the Mariner experience solitude, pain and fear, a bizarre power is suggested by the burning water and imaginably foul smells waft from a decaying ocean. But in the moment of their blessing, the aesthetic qualities of the water snakes are in accord with Burke’s category of the Beautiful: their “rich attire” is overtly variegated (though stronger than the dilated hues of Burke’s categories), yet more importantly, the water snakes are loved. For this brief period, Coleridge momentarily extracts the water snakes from the monstrous hybridity of his sea in “The Rime”.

81 Burke, “A Philosophical Enquiry”, Works, pp. 62-76. 1 paraphrase Burke. Slimy Things 204

The Mariner’s acknowledgment of God’s life in all intensifies after his blessing of the water snakes and becomes marked in a series of pregnant images. Amid these, and again purely with reference to Burke’s categories, beautiful sea images intermesh with the sublime transforming the dominant character of the ocean. For instance, as the Mariner returns to his “own countree” the bay is depicted as a mix of sublime and beautiful images which suggest joyous wonder rather than pain and danger:

The harbor-bay was clear as glass, So smoothly it was strewn! And on the bay the moonlight lay, And the shadow of the Moon.

The rock shone bright, the kirk no less, That stands above the rock: The moonlight steeped in silentness The steady weathercock.

And the bay was white with silent light, Till rising from the same, Full many shapes, that shadows were, In crimson colors came. (Lines 472-483)

Coleridge’s aesthetically beautiful water snakes resemble the visions of beauty presented by voyagers like Father Bourzes and Captain Cook in their accounts of the dazzling globules of life in the water, but in its expression of love Coleridge’s depiction of the water snakes is unique.82 Employing Burke’s categories, Ulmer has commented on the significant shift from the sublime to the beautiful in the final moral message of the poem, what he calls the “All things both great and small” lines. The same shift is equally significant at the moment of redemption as, in effect, the sign of that redemption. In defence of the “all things great and small” moral, “regularly bludgeoned for their sing-song piety”, Ulmer claims the Mariner’s moral expresses a typically Coleridgean reverence and that such a sentiment

82 “ De Bourzes, “Luminous Appearances”, in The Philosophical Transactions, pp. 230-35. Slimy Things 205

o o “enjoyed a specifically Unitarian sanction”. Adding to Ulmer’s claims, Coleridge’s beautiful living things are uniquely Unitarian, most particularly because they are marine animals usually seen as fascinating yet alien or simply monstrous or as sport and food during

OA the Romantic period. Because marine animals are largely reviled, Coleridge’s overt inclusion of the marine creature in “the one Life” situates it as the most suitable exemplar of the eternal expanse of God’s reach—even in the most far flung abysses, the most “untravelled realms of Ocean’s bed”, the “caverns measureless to man,” God is present.s5

The Mariner’s blessing of the water snakes is a significant episode in the poem, but it is only one episode. Images of the monstrous hybridity of the sea continue to proliferate throughout the remainder of the poem: beautiful images of a benign sea aglow with the one life mix with the violence and horror of the splitting of the bay, the sucking down of the ship and the ship boy’s spontaneous madness (Part VII). The dichotomies of form and formlessness; renewal and destruction; salvation and damnation; redemption and sin; purification and punishment; changelessness and change persist; but God’s control of the sea is reaffirmed in “The Rime”. I claim that after the blessing of the water snakes, the sublimity of the sea is suffused with the wonder and joy coming from the assurance of God’s presence and control over nature. Before the blessing of the water snakes, the sublime visions of the sea were imbued with spiritual uncertainty amid an atmosphere of seemingly diabolical chaos: the seeming alien sterility of “the silence of the sea” becomes the comforting silence of “the bay was white with silent light”. The sublimity of the sea of “The Rime” is predicated upon the sea’s monstrous hybridity—its extremes of beauty and hideousness, calm and violence, renewal and destruction, suffering and salvation, light and darkness, life and death—made comprehensible by the belief in one omnipotent God.

0*2 Ulmer, “Necessary Evils”, p. 352. 84 Priestley, “Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity”, in Theological and Miscellaneous Works, p. 508. Ulmer also cites this (p. 352), he also notes Coleridge’s view of animals, his sympathy with “trapped mice and tethered asses”. 1 add to this list. Priestley does not explicitly mention marine animals when he speaks of God’s “one family” and in no other poem does Coleridge present marine animals in this way. Yet, I contend it is both because of Coleridge’s personal empathy with animals in the world, expressed in a variety of poems including “The Death of a Starling” where he commands “ye Loves! And Venus!” to “weep”, Line 5, and the Unitarian views on this subject expressed by Priestley (to repeat: “the lower animals differ from us in degree only, and not in kind”), that it is possible for Coleridge to present marine animals as capable of inspiring love. 85 Coleridge, “The Destiny of Nations”, The Poems, ed., E. Coleridge, Line 102 and “Kubla Khan”, Norton Anthology> 5th edn, Line 4. Slimy Things 206

The Mariner’s expression of love for the water snakes separates the vision of the marine world in “The Rime” from the marine world of Homer, Virgil and to an extent the Bible, though this expression simply reflects the biblical sea through a Unitarian lens. When Parts II and IV of the poem are compared, Coleridge’s marine creatures appear to share the hybrid nature of Homer’s marine beings. Recalling the Sirens for instance, and the sea’s dual allure and terror for Odysseus, the “slimy things” are both horribly repulsive and gently beautiful. Yet, if it is the Mariner’s perceptions that shift and not the characteristics of the marine creatures themselves then such a comparison collapses: the marine creatures do not possess a hybrid nature, rather, human perceptions are capable of hybridity. In the absence of true faith, the Mariner perceives the sea as a terrifying place of decay and mis-created life- forms; nonetheless when perceptually alight with true faith, that same world is beautiful. Unlike the creatures of the marine environment in The Odyssey, whose hybrid natures attest to their dangerous instability, the changing visions of those of “The Rime” reflect perceptual fluctuations. With the exception of the final episode where the sea is ruled by Aeneas, Virgil’s Aeneid depicts a sea environment which is essentially a force of bedlam. Partly, Coleridge’s poem depicts a similar sea and marine world. Particularly in Parts I-III, the sea is a sickening expanse of chaos, and later in Part VI the sea is described as “Still as a slave

before his lord”,86 but it differs from the depictions of Virgil when it becomes a signifier of God’s presence in everything. Lit up by faith and glistening as a vision of “the One Life”, in the moment of the Mariner’s blessing Coleridge’s sea is the dwelling place of the “happy living things” and as part of the notion of “the one Life”, the sea is not servile, it is part of God and God is in it—the sea is connected as are, according to Priestley, “all things ... as parts of an immense, glorious and happy system”. 87

Coleridge’s sea is the sea of the Bible viewed through the theology of Unitarianism. Coleridge’s depiction of “the One Life” in the blessing of the water snakes suggests the influence of Unitarianism and can be seen as an imagistic rendering of Priestley’s notion of

all living things as “but one family” with animals different to humans “only in degree”.88 In some ways, the moment of the Mariner’s blessing suggests a departure from the dominant visions of the sea in the Bible in addition to a departure from the Greco-Roman tradition. The

“The Rime”, Part VI, Lines 414-417. This is a reference to the moon but with strong resonances of the Bible’s recurrent them of God’s power over the sea. 87 Priestley, “Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity”, in Theological and Miscellaneous Works, p. 508. 88 Priestley, “Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity”, in Theological and Miscellaneous Works, p. 508. Slimy Things 207

Bible largely depicts a sea which is a paradox of God’s bounty and his wrath, his judgement and his punitive sea monsters. In the Bible, the sea reveals the power of God to control it: in the Psalms especially, it does suggest God’s presence in everything and his power to create, still, this presence is that of dominion and not that of Priestley’s family and its implicit suggestions of love. However, within the Unitarian emphasis on all of the world as “one family” and animals as “different only in degree” from human beings, God’s blessing of his creation in Genesis, his declaration of its “goodness”, could be read as an act of love for all (and especially the first generative fruits of the sea) and so the Mariner’s “spring of love” could be seen to mimic God’s initial creative act. With the exception of the blessing of the water snakes and the presence of a sprinkling of aesthetically Beautiful sea images (in Burke’s terms), Coleridge’s presentation of the sea and the sea voyage resembles, especially in notions of the sea’s terror and transformative power and the paradoxes of suffering and redemption, the most recurrent marine worlds of Homer, Virgil, and the Bible. Yet, most importantly Coleridge’s blessing, and even his expression of love, is in accord with paradigmatic images of the sea in the Bible. The images of the sea in Genesis display a sea where God is present and in which he creates and blesses life and calls it Good; it might be possible to infer that in calling it Good, God is expressing his love. The blessing of the water snakes, despite its aesthetic difference with the dominant images of the marine world in the Bible, is nevertheless overtly biblical because it is Christian—if, extending William Ulmer’s assessment, an overtly non-conformist form of Christianity.

Coleridge’s sea is a continuation of the biblical sea informed by a Unitarian worldview and is not a secular vision (as Abrams argues). The light that is God, revelation and life pervades the entire seascape by the end of the poem, “the rock”, “the kirk” and the seraph men on the ship “all light” standing “on every corse”, (Part VI, Lines 476, 490-1). The Mariner is himself suffused with God’s light. In a play on the word “light” even becomes the substance of the Mariner’s limbs (V. 305-8). The Mariner’s exclamation, “By the holy rood!”, is the key to understanding the most important aspect of faith which, for Coleridge, transforms the world. The Mariner’s faith in an afterlife has been restored and belief in transcendence has now pervaded everything around him and in him. “The Rime” illustrates that belief in an eternal deity is crucial, not simply as an idea that there is a transcendent being in the universe, but that human beings and all of creation have links to this being and therefore can transcend mortality. The sea has transformed the Mariner’s perceptions, it has left its purifying marks on his body which has been eaten smooth and lean and brown “as the Slimy Things 208 ribbed sea sand”,89 his hair is bleached of colour but the recognition of the presence of God in his surrounds and his true faith is recorded in his most important identifying characteristic, his “glittering eye”.

In “The Rime” the Southern sea transforms the Mariner or a God-inspired perceptual change in the Mariner transforms the sea: it is one and both. As a sign of God’s presence in the world, the sea is sublimely terrible and wonderful; it is momentarily, vulnerably beautiful, and it is the Mariner’s purgatory and his redemption. Nevertheless at one much quoted point, the sea is the Mariner’s utter hell when he laments, “Alone, alone, all, all alone,/Alone on a wide wide sea!” This lament is rendered, and yet utterly rewritten in materialist socio­ political and intellectual terms, by another poet some twenty years later— a poet struggling in his “wide sea of agony”90

These lines were given to Coleridge by Wordsworth, as David Watson Rannie notes in Wordsw orth and his Circle (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1907), pp. 71-2. Percy Shelley, “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills”, Selected Poetry, ed., H. Bloom (New York: New American Library, 1966). Chapter 7: Shelley ’s Sea-isle Utopias in the ‘deep wide sea of Misery ’.

The first time Percy Bysshe Shelley almost drowned was in Lac Leman in Geneva in 1816. The near drowning was so affecting he composed his will.1 The next was in an Italian canal near Leghorn, but this time, as Claire Tomalin notes: “he laughed it off seeing it as a good omen”. That was in 1821, a year before Shelley drowned in a sea storm off the coast of Viareggio.2 The sea’s potential for life, love, and pleasure but also death, destruction and fear was constant in Shelley’s life in the Italian exile years (1818 to his death). Shelley made his study at Livorno (where he and Mary stayed after the death of their son William) a room with a view of the two moods of the sea; there, as Mary observes:

the storms that sometimes varied our day showed themselves most picturesquely as they were driven across the ocean; sometimes the dark lurid waters beneath, as they were chased onward, and scattered by the tempest. At other times the dazzling sunlight and heat made it almost intolerable to every other; but Shelley basked in both, and his health and spirits revived under their influence.3

Shelley crammed his notebooks with sketches of sailboats and, in the months before his death, sailed with Mary in the custom-built Don Juan where Mary “felt the wind & our swift motion alone”. These life-giving pleasures are set against many terrible experiences: burying his daughter Clara on a Lido beach; the discomfort of the Casa Magni (constructed virtually within the sea) where he had visions of a child like Claire Clairmont’s dead girl ascending the

Claire Tomalin, Shelley and His World (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 40 and p. 48. Shelley could not swim. He had meditated on the prospect of drowning during his channel crossing with Mary and Jane (Claire Claremont) to Boulogne but the Geneva incident seems to have been the first near miss. Tomalin, Shelley and His World, p. 103. Shelley shared his passion for sailing with Lord George Gordon Byron and Edward Williams. Together they had sailboats built. The name of the boat (Don Juan) persists despite Shelley’s dislike of it which led him to “cut the sail to remove the offending name”. Mary Shelley’s Note on The Cenci, in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 10 vols., vol. 2, eds., Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (London: Ernest Benn, 1965), p. 157. All references to poetry and notes to the poems refer to this edition unless otherwise specified. Part, canto, act, scene and line numbers will generally appear in the text abbreviated. Deep Wide Sea 210

waves; visions of his bloodied housemates the Williams’; and visions of himself strangling Mary.4 Shelley compulsively turns over these dichotomous aspects of the sea, motion and life in his poetry. He repeatedly chooses the sea to represent what he saw as the dual motions of the universe at their most harmonious and perfected, and at their most violent and destructive.

As in Shelley’s verse, in his life both manifestations of the sea prevailed simultaneously and inextricably. The drama of the latter is arresting: the violent horror of Shelley’s body lost at sea for ten days and finally burnt on a seaside pyre, his heart pulled out of his burning corpse by Edward Trelawney,5 the “lashed deeps” that “glitter and boil” in Laon and Cythna and the “sea of life and agony” of “Lines Written Among the Eugenean Hills”.6 Yet there is also the figure of Shelley riding on the beach with Byron and doodling boats amid gentle oceans in his notebooks; there is the ecstasy imbued in poetic images of Adonais’ “sails . . . to the tempest given” and the “fortunate isles” of Prometheus Unbound filled with “wave- reflected flowers”, “floating odours/And music soft”.7

In what now might be considered an ultra exhibition of popular Romantic cliche, the twenty year old Shelley literally exploded revolutionary political pamphlets onto the Lynmouth landscape from a “fire balloon” during his brief residency; or he placed them into bottles and onto little paper boats and sent them off into the Bristol river, where, if fortune allowed, they might be snatched up by a tradesman or a washer-woman further down. Even better, the bottles and boats with their treasures would head out to sea and eventually find their way to a distant shore, and there they might be a conduit for that most violent and passionate fire—socio-political revolution.8

This account of Shelley’s behaviour demonstrates a lifelong preoccupation. The young Shelley felt in 1812 as he would always feel, that it was his moral duty to educate others into political justice and that writing was the tool. Moreover, the alternatively sporadic and violent, regular and gradual processes that I describe in this reliving of Shelley’s hilltop and

4 Tomalin, Shelley and His World, p. 103. 5 Michael Gamer, “Shelley Incinerated”, The Wordsworth Circle (Jan, 2008), pp. 23-26, p. 23. 6 Complete Works, vol. 1 and 2, Ingpen and Peck eds., Laon and Cythna 1.3.147-8; “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills”, Line 336. 7 Complete Works, vol. 2, Ingpen and Peck eds., Adonais, 55.490 and Prometheus Unbound, 3.2.32-3. g Tomalin, Shelley and His World, p. 26. Gary Sloan, “Shelley the Atheist”, American Atheist, Autumn (2003), pp. 7-9. Noting Shelley’s pedagogical optimism, Gary Sloan of the American Atheist made the following comment: “like Socrates, he thought knowledge begets virtue because nobody is wittingly iniquitous”. Deep Wide Sea 211 riverside activities are processes which continually occupied Shelley’s poetic thought. Shelley’s convictions and desires regarding the mechanisms of socio-political change swung anxiously between ideas of peaceful, incremental metamorphoses that he might play a part in but never see,9 and ideas that revolution would be and must be violent, that the retribution of the oppressed would engulf all forms of tyranny in “a wreath/Of ever-living flame”.10 For Shelley, violent brisk explosions and gentle tidal movements, as the lurid sea tempest and sunlit sea calm, represented the alternately violent and gentle manifestations of the principle of Necessity. Necessity recurs in Shelley’s writing as an axiomatic law of nature, a material process of change at the centre of causation, that “existing power of existence” infusing all of creation, including the human intellect and socio-political systems.*11

Shelley’s life and poetry demonstrate his fascination with the dual workings of Necessity. In Shelley’s figuration of Necessity, as Cian Duffy has argued, violent and destructive natural processes—earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and storming oceans—are equated with the politics of revolution, whereas harmonious and gentle natural processes —glacial movements, the revolutions of the stars, and gentle ocean tides—are equated with Godwinian gradualism. " In his representations of the sea, Shelley’s poetry alludes to Greco- Roman works and the Bible. As alternately violent and destructive, and gentle and renewing, Shelley’s processes of Necessity broadly reflect the monstrous hybridity of the sea in the

9 Gradual progress was for Shelley the “bloodless dethronement” of “oppressors” through education and mental “awakening”. Shelley, Preface to Laon and Cythna, in Complete Works, vol. 1, eds., Ingpen and Peck, p. 240. 10 Queen Mat 6.36-37. 11 Percy Shelley, Letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, Complete Works, vol 8 [letters], eds., Ingpen and Peck, p. 101. 12 Shelley ’s Revolutionary Sublime, as already cited. 13 Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, The Fox and the Magister’s Pox: Mending and Minding the Misconceived Gap between Science and the Humanities (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 96. Shelley’s conceptions of natural processes were influenced by contemporary debates between the Catastrophists and Uniformitarians (that term was used only after 1834). The natural sublime in its violent, extreme form is a significant part of the theories of catastrophism, just as the notions of more incremental changes (but still sublime in their awe-inspiring seeming endlessness) are part of uniformitarianism. Stephen Jay Gould, describes this debate: catastrophists theorised “that geological dynamics on our ancient earth had been primarily paroxysmal” and uniformitarian’s theorised that these “geological dynamics” were “gradual and accumulative”. Scientists broadly recognise both processes as significant in the earth’s origins and future development, and in his poetic treatment of these processes (while the cause of much discomfort because his utopias favour the latter), Shelley appears to acknowledge the role of both in the shaping of the earth’s and humanity’s systems. This influence is unfortunately outside the scope of the chapter. Eric Wilson discusses it in his article, “Shelley and the Poetics of Glaciers”, TWC (March, 2005) and book, The Spiritual History of Ice (New York: Palgrave, 2003). Wilson describes Shelley as “a catastrophist with a uniformitarian notion of time”. Deep Wide Sea 212

Greco-Roman and biblical works I have discussed. Yet, through his principle of Necessity, Shelley constructs an atheistic material universe rather than a universe founded upon divine and mortal dualisms. In Shelley’s verse, the dichotomies of the sea are not resolved by a Christian God or the gods or heroes of pagan antiquity, they become humanist paradoxes best illustrated through his portrayal of utopian sea-isles.

Shelley’s portrayal of Necessity is also beset by ambiguities of which his verse exhibits varying degrees of awareness. Necessity is portrayed in Shelley’s verse as both neutral and ameliorative, not to be deified yet often described in quasi-religious terms, and within the philosophical scepticism Shelley begins to explicate in “One Love” and “On Life,” Necessity, like other human concepts, becomes an imaginative construct rather than an absolutely knowable material fact.14 In “On Life” Shelley queries human access to absolute knowledge, but he remains resistant to religious attempts to fill the gaps in human knowledge with notions of the supernatural. Shelley also queries the value of the sublime affect in his verse, arguing for the importance of reason and the delusions of seeing nature as evidence of the supernatural in the world.

As noted in the introduction to this thesis, my claims about Shelley’s portrayal of the sea in this chapter are informed by Duffy’s exploration of Shelley’s “engagement” with the popular eighteenth-century aesthetic theories of Reid and Alison in Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime. Specifically, Duffy’s observations that: the natural sublime plays an intrinsic “analogical” role in Shelley’s portrayal of socio-political revolution, and moreover that the processes of socio-political change in Shelley’s work are the very same processes of

Necessity driving (and revealed through) instances of the natural sublime.15 Duffy analyses Shelley’s repeated insistence on the correct way to respond to the natural sublime; that is, to recognise Necessity, the law of nature and not the presence of God in the face of extremely confronting natural phenomena. For Duffy, the primary difference between Shelley’s conception of Necessity and notions of a “creator-God” is that Shelley’s Necessity is an impersonal and “essentially neutral principle”. Apart from this, he notes, in Shelley’s poetry “Necessity shares the traditional, sublime attributes of a creator-God—it is ‘eternal’ and

Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Wor/cs, including poetry, prose, and drama, eds., Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), “On Love”, pp. 631-2; “On Life”, pp. 633-6. Duffy, Revolutionary Sublime, p. 28, p. 11. Duffy remarks: Shelley’s writing does not merely use sublime natural processes to figure ‘awful’ political processes. Rather his writing repeatedly understands and figures political history as a function of natural history. And within this schema, violent revolution emerges as an ‘awful’ natural phenomenon—as a worrying instance, if you like, of the natural sublime. Deep Wide Sea 213

‘imperishable’—and Queen Mab’s apostrophes to Necessity repeatedly invoke the language of the religious sublime”.16 In my reading of Shelley’s portrayal of the oceanic element of the natural sublime, I prioritise another difference Duffy observes between Shelley’s conception of Necessity and common eighteenth-century notions of a “creator-God”: its materialism.17 I also add to Duffy’s list of differences: I argue Necessity emerges in Shelley’s poetry as the process of change.

Duffy has already convincingly detailed Shelley’s atheistic re-formulation of the

1 o eighteenth-century ideological underpinnings of the aesthetics of the natural sublime. In my view Shelley’s seascapes are central to this re-formulation. Briefly, Duffy argues that whereas influential aesthetic theorists, such as Reid and Alison, interpret sublime natural phenomena in terms of a kind of transcendent visitation of, to use Reid’s words, the “supreme mind” in the material world, Shelley interprets sublime natural phenomena as the evidence of the natural, neutral, and (I emphasise) material principle of Necessity.19

Whereas the creator-God of Reid and Alison is non-corporeal, Shelley’s Necessity is a material principle. To the extent that it “informs” the universe, Shelley’s Necessity is similar to the Deity of Reid and Alison, 20 but Shelley’s repeated merging of man with, for instance,

Duffy, Revolutionary Sublime, pp. 27-28: Shelley’s Necessity is also not “the non-interventionist ‘God’ of eighteenth century deism”. 17 Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 1047. Philosophical Materialism : “the opinion that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications; also, in a more limited sense, the opinion that the phenomenon of consciousness and will are wholly due to the operation of material agencies”. 18 Fully detailing the arguments for and against such a reading is outside the scope of this chapter. However, for a good summary of the debate: Arthur Bradley “‘Until Death Tramples It to Fragments’: Percy Bysshe Shelley after Postmodern Theology”, Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens, pp. 191-206, p. 191. Also, Valeria Tinkler-Villani, “Atheism and Belief in Shelley, Swinburne and Christina Rossetti”, Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle, ed., C. C. Barfoot (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 323-337 and Timothy Webb, “‘The Avalanche of Ages’: Shelley’s Defence of Atheism”, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 35 (1984): 1-39. Tinkler-Villani associates Shelley’s atheism with, among other things: “a basically progressive view of life” (p. 323). Webb describes it as a “defiance” that is “directed towards a future in which, after a season of violent transformation, man will be ‘somewhat changed’” (p. 39) respectively. The reasons behind my reading of Shelley’s sea with materialism and atheism in mind will be developed as part of my analysis throughout the chapter. 19 Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, p. 2; Duffy, Revolutionary Sublime, p. 5. In part it is Duffy’s focus on the influence of popular aesthetic theorists such as Reid and Alison, instead of the usual and less verifiable influence of Immanuel Kant, which sets her analysis apart from other critical engagements with aesthetics of the sublime in Shelly’s work. Duffy observes that critics, past and present, often fail to recognise the political foundation of Shelley’s treatment of the natural sublime because their analysis is sprung from “largely irrelevant Kantian paradigms”, which lead them to “effectively ignore the actual discourse on the natural sublime available to Shelley in the early nineteenth century. 20 Alison, Nature and Principles of Taste, pp. 324-6. Deep Wide Sea 214 blades of grass, small atmospheric particles and insects, and his insistence that “those viewless beings/Whose mansion is the smallest particle/Of the impassive atmosphere,/Think, feel and live like man” collapses the material/immaterial distinctions which Reid and Alison make the foundations of their aesthetics. For Reid and Alison, the non-corporeal and separate “higher mind” of God informs lowly, corporeal matter. “ For Shelley, Necessity lives through all and its very existence is equivalent to its material manifestations: it is both the “Soul of those mighty spheres”, the “Soul of that smallest being,/The dwelling of whose life/Is one faint April sungleam”, and it pervades man as well who is, “like these passive things”, fulfilling as they do Necessity’s laws.

In his portrayal of Necessity in Queen Mab, a poem whose fundamental precepts Shelley retained throughout his life, Shelley dismisses appeals to supernatural transcendence (“the falsehoods of religious systems” “or . . . deifying the principle of the universe”),24 triumphantly declaring through Mab “there is no God!” Prefaces to poems such as Laon and Cythna express disgust and disdain for religious institutions, or the “religious frauds” as Shelley characterises them.“ Prose works, from the boyish piece “The Necessity of Atheism” to the later “On a Future State”, envision a universe composed of natural material laws—laws which govern the human intellect as they do everything else. Even within the philosophical scepticism displayed in “On Life”, under which Necessity is less material fact and more

21 Queen Mab, 2.231-234. “22“ Duffy, Revolutionary Sublime, p. 15. 23 Queen Mab, 3. 228-234. 24 Shelley, Notes to Queen Mab, p. 135 [to 1.252-3]. Shelley wrote these notes; hereafter 1 will simply cite “Notes to Queen Mab” with that understanding. The full quote reads: “The plurality of worlds,—the indefinite immensity of the universe is a most awful subject of contemplation. He who rightly feels its mystery and grandeur, is in no danger of seduction from the falsehoods of religious systems, or of deifying the principle of the universe”. 25 Tomalin, Shelley and His World, p. 30; Notes to Queen Mab, p. 146 [to 7.13]. Shelley remarks: “This negation (“there is no God”) must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit coetemal with the universe, remains unshaken”. The phrase “coetemal with the universe” situates this “Spirit” as a material force. 26 Preface to Laon and Cythna, p. 240. 27 My interpretation partially aligns the interpretations of Paul Hamilton and Merle Williams (in addition to Cian Duffy). Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory> (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003) and “Literature and philosophy”, in The Cambridge Companion to Shelley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 166-183. Merle A. Williams, “Contemplating Facts, Studying Ourselves: Aspects of Shelley’s Philosophical and Religious Prose”, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, eds., Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb (Famham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), pp. 199-220. Williams notes that even when Shelley becomes discontent with a strict materialist position, he portrays a “universe” that is “governed by natural rather than supernatural laws” (p. 211). Deep Wide Sea 215

mental construct, Shelley dismisses religious systems (or “the shocking absurdities of popular construct of mind and matter”) which suppose a supernatural universe. Where for Reid “every existing thing must be either corporeal or incorporeal”, for Shelley, the term “soul” is analogous to the intellect or mind which is neither incorporeal, nor immortal, at least not in the way the “immense majority of human beings in all ages” would conceive of it. As Duffy observes, Shelley’s Necessity cannot be viewed as “any kind of neoplatonic world soul,

T 1 which exists independently of its material manifestations”. Feeding off their embedded mysticism, Shelley deploys words like “soul” and “spirit” as terms for Necessity and the human intellect. But if, as he remarks in “On a Future State”, both the “organs of sense” and the “intellectual operations dependent on them” die, while Shelley uses the rhetoric of the body/soul divide in his poetry, he rewrites the idea of the “soul” in materialist terms. 'X') Throughout Shelley’s writing, the soul is equated with the intellect and the intellect is material; that is, the intellect is subject to death and decay and also, as I discuss later in the chapter, subject to material renewal and the enduring material transmission of words.

Shelley delineates Necessity as a process, not a being, of endless change. Necessity can be viewed as a word given to the processes of change in the universe which Shelley famously described as the founding character of all existence: “Nought may endure but Mutability”. In Queen Mab Shelley overtly insists on Necessity’s pervasive universal manifestation and that manifestation is visible as motion: it is visible in the “minutest throb” through atmospheric particles and in the awe-inspiring “rolling” of the celestial “orbs”. Ambiguously,

Shelley, “On Life”, in Major Works, eds., Leader and O’Neill, Shelley refers to this belief as “their violent dogmatism concerning the source of all living things” (p. 634). 29 Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, p. 1 30 Shelley, “On a Future State”, in Complete Works, vol. 6 [Prose], eds., Ingpen and Peck, p. 205, p. 207. This is unfinished but it is, in its five pages, lucid and unambiguous. 31 Duffy, Revolutionary Sublime, p. 27. 32 Shelley, “One a Future State”, in Complete Works, vol. 6 [Prose], eds., Ingpen and Peck, pp. 205-209, pp. 206-7. For Shelley, even if it: should it be proved that the mysterious principle which regulates the proceedings of the universe, is neither intelligent nor sensitive, yet it is not an inconsistency to suppose at the same time, that the animating power survives the body which it has animated, by laws as independent of any supernatural agent as those through which it first became with it. 33 A. D. M. Hughes, “Shelley and Nature”, The North American Review 208.753 (1918), pp. 287-295, p. 287. Shelley, “Mutability”, 16 and Letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, Complete Works, vol. 8 [letters] eds., Ingpen and Peck, p. 101. Duffy also cites this letter (p. 27). As such, the process of material change is in effect Shelley’s principle of Necessity. Shelley’s celebration of change is one of the founding themes in his poetry, and natural grandeur is predominantly represented as processes of change; in the words of A. D. M. Hughes, for Shelley “all things are in flux and a burning energy”, and “infinity” is often figured as “motion” or “power”. Deep Wide Sea 216

Necessity is both immutable and keeps “regular” “paths”, and elsewhere in the poem, the

stars and planets are defined by their “ever-varying glory”.34 Shelley’s various characterisations of Necessity define it as processes of change which are, in their most

perfected forms, changeless.35 Shelley’s portrayal of Necessity as change, combined with the entrenched scepticism about immaterial transcendence visible in his prose and poetry, makes mortal/divine divisions inapplicable to his poetic universe. I propose a framework other than division between mortal and divine for the two distinct ways Shelley characterises Necessity (change) in his portrayals of the sea. Violent and brief processes of change cease to represent the material mortal portion of an immaterial transcendent realm represented by eternal cycles. Instead, these are the entirely natural processes of a wholly material universe and can be better viewed as cataclysmic, brief, destructive changes as opposed to utopian, harmonious eternal cycles of change.

As noted in the opening of this chapter, extreme emotional and ideological sets of dichotomies (many with parallels in Greco-Roman works and the Bible), are visible in the concepts of utopian change and cataclysmic change that emerge in Shelley’s writing. The dichotomous sets Shelley develops around utopian change are: socio-political, religious and

T Z. individual freedom, gentle love, mildness, death without sickness and fear, and mental expansiveness or infinity. The dichotomies surrounding cataclysmic change are: socio­ political, religious and individual tyranny, violent love, extreme passions (rage, hate and jealousy), death with sickness and fear, and the mental bondage that creates the idea of an infinite Deity. The first side of each pair of the dichotomies of the feminine supernatural, the heroic sea journey and Roman masculine virtues could be aligned with utopian change. Similarly, the second side of these dichotomous sets could be aligned with cataclysmic change. The dichotomies of God’s control over the waters inhabit a dubious space in Shelley’s verse; yet again, the first side of each pair and the second side could be aligned as above. But Shelley’s rejection of supematuralism undermines usefulness of these sets of dichotomies. In Shelley’s utopias, death and change are still part of a living world. Shelley’s utopias are impelled by the changelessness of change, the endless cycles of death, decay and

34 Notes to Queen Mab and Queen Mab, Note to 7. 13, p. 146 and poem reference 2. 238-43. 35 Duffy, Revolutionary Sublime, p. 27; Queen Mab, 1.274-6 and 1.255. 36 As discussed later in the chapter mildness for Shelley refers to the lackof extreme passions such as rage, hate or jealous love. Deep Wide Sea 217 renewal in material terms. Therefore, in this chapter I focus on the divisions of utopian and cataclysmic change.

My chapter extends Duffy’s critical discussion, moving it away from the violent drama of sublimity on land and its functional correlations with socio-political crises, towards the recurrent functional correlations Shelley draws between the heaving blackness of warring waves on a vast ocean and the patterns of human religious, socio-political tyrannies and individual passions. For Shelley, the ocean literally demonstrated and reflected the eternal processes of Necessity, “nature’s amoral law”.37 Within the context of this thesis, the ambiguities which beset Shelley’s conception of Necessity reveal that the sea is valued the most, and is most acceptable and aesthetically pleasing in Shelley’s writing when, as in the Aeneid, it is serving human needs. Further, Shelley’s treatment of the sea demonstrates that even when the supernatural is removed from conceptions of the sea and the universe, Romantic writers remove neither the ideological assumption of humanity’s pre-eminence in creation nor the assumption that there is one controlling force driving the universe. Nonetheless, in Shelley’s poetry the achievement of ultimate wonder, joy and hope for a better future is not deferred to some form of non-corporeal transcendence and/or the state of immorality. For the other writers in this thesis, belief in the supernatural or a version of non- corporeal transcendence precedes any conception of ocean and human existence as meaningful. Shelley does not view the ocean’s glory and human meaning as the result of a non-corporeal transcendent being, and in these ways his understanding of the ocean is fundamentally different to all of the other writers 1 have explored in this thesis. 38

Utopian Seascapes

Shelley describes the sea from two main perspectives, above and within: the view from the sky, shore or rocky promontory (with its Lucretian echoes), and the view from a

37 Duffy, Revolutionary Sublime, p. 56. 38 Shelley, “On Life”, in Complete Works, vol. 6 [Prose], eds., Ingpen and Peck, p. 193. Shelley also talks about the way humans are often driven to ideas of the transcendent not because they fail to understand but because they think they understand too much and seek unearthly wonder because they cannot find wonder in the earth. In “On Life” Shelley remarks that “the mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being”, it obscures the “admiration” and astonishment which should attend our view of “the sun, and the stars, and planets” and “the scenery of this earth, the mountains, the seas, and the rivers”. Deep Wide Sea 218

small boat on the waves (or the drowning man within them).39 Looking down upon the surface of the sea in Queen Mab, a viewer glimpses the reflections of the stars which reveal, as Shelley remarks in his notes to the poem, the “calm, regular and harmonious . . . paths of necessity”;40 and knowledge of the stars offers protection against the “danger of seduction from the falsehoods of religion”.41 Looking into the depths of the sea also reveals the workings of Necessity. In “Ode to the West Wind” and “Lines Written among the Euganean Hills”, the ruins of corrupt cities are glimpsed beneath the waves: the actually submerged Baiae which Shelley saw in 1818 (and refers to in “Ode to the West Wind”), and the imaginatively submerged Venice in “Lines”. The ruins of tyrannous empires bespeak the cataclysms of violent revolution but also, as moss and sea blooms riot,42 the possibilities of new “kindly blossoming”4' and therefore the eventual possibility of an earthly utopia dotted with flowering sea-isles.

As we have seen, Homer’s sea in the Odyssey is a hybrid mix of the beautiful and the hideous. In the Aeneid, Virgil’s sea becomes only truly aesthetically pleasing when it enters the service of Rome, and the King James Bible expunges the sea from the unearthly perfected earth of the New Jerusalem. Shelley’s utopian seascapes share something of Virgil’s emphasis on serving man, but Virgil’s ships turned sea nymphs serve the divinely sanctioned Roman Empire whereas Shelley’s utopian seascapes are demonstrations of material perfection, universal liberty and equality. While Shelley’s sea is often a hybrid mix of the beautiful and the hideous, his utopian visions remove what he constructs as the unpalatable aspects of the ocean: its vastness, solitude and inhospitality for all but birds and sea monsters. An ocean remains in Shelley’s conception of a perfected earth, unlike the New Jerusalem of the King James Bible, and while the New Jerusalem represents the material earth made fit for God, it is most unearthly—“descending out of heaven from God” with its bejewelled walls and streets, deathless and lit only by God’s light. Shelley’s utopias are material utopias

19 Paul Turner, “Shelley and Lucretius”, R.E.S. New Series 10.39 (1959): 269-282. In this essay Turner discusses the repetition of the image of the view of the sea from the shore or rocky promontory as explicitly Lucretian. 40 Shelley, Notes to Queen Mab, Note to 1.252-3, p. 135. 41 Shelley, Notes to Queen Mab, Note to 1.252-3, p. 135. 42 “Ode to the West Wind” 3.2-5, and “Lines Written among the Euganean Hills”, Lines 129-30. 43 “Lines Written among the Euganean Hills”, Line 166. Deep Wide Sea 219

predicated around his idea of gradual and harmonious change and are defined by the presence of flowering sea isles.

The flowering isles in Shelley’s utopian seascapes are characterised by the presence of the gentle and gradual manifestations of Necessity, the most perfected manifestations being the movements of the stars which Shelley makes analogous to socio-political liberty. These utopias are equally distinguished by the removal of the violent manifestations of Necessity embodied in the storming oceans, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions Duffy sees as analogies of revolutionary and reactionary violence in Shelley’s work.

Shelley’s fantasies of perfection focus on material achievements: intellectual, socio­ political liberty and progress for mortal humans and his sea utopias demonstrate the workings of the material process, Necessity. In their emphasis on material perfection, Shelley’s utopian seas revise traditional conceptions of utopia. They confirm Shelley’s enduring hope in the human potential for perfection. Nevertheless, they also evince his increasingly cyclical view of human history and his recognition of the impossibility of the utopias he describes. The focus of this chapter is on the transformed ocean and its blissful sea-isles which define Shelley’s visions of utopia in Queen Mab (1813), “Lines Written among the Euganean Hills” (1818)44 and Prometheus Unbound (1820), but it also includes an analysis of the fragment “A Vision of the Sea”. The increasing doubt that infuses Shelley’s sea utopias from Queen Mab to Prometheus Unbound implies his recognition of their ultimate failure, and even that these utopias are antithetical to the processes that create and sustain life itself. In Prometheus Unbound, the more desirable emotion or human trait is bom of its own wreck: hope from despair, love and gentleness from hate and violence and so the reverse is true. Hate and violence can emerge in the midst of love and gentleness and despair can emerge in the midst of hope. Demogorgon’s final speech implies that to have love and gentleness, violence and hate must exist; the one cyclically grows from the other. His speech even indicates that for a better humanity to develop it is imperative that this should be so. But for Shelley, as Demogorgon’s speech implies, and “A Vision of the Sea” more overtly demonstrates in the final section of the chapter, humanity is always, inextricably, embedded in these cycles.

44 Hereafter referred to as “Lines”. Deep Wide Sea 220

UMcpsisxd luojj y 3 Xaipqs SIV uepipoa z

Figure 3. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sketch and Poem Fragment.

The repeated presence of the sea-isle paradise, marked out by almost identical features in sketches, poem fragments and more completed poems make its symbolism and ideological underpinnings fundamental to an assessment of the portrayal of the sea in Shelley’s work. Drawings of island idylls with lush trees, calm seas and a sailboat in the shallows perfuse Shelley’s notebooks, and poetic images of flowering islands amid oceans of love define Shelley’s utopias. The sketch on the previous page visually corresponds to Shelley’s poetic depictions of utopia. It comes from the front pastedown of “one of Shelley’s notoriously difficult rough-draft notebooks”,45 now known as Bodleian MS. Shelley e. 4.46

Donald Reiman, Editor-in-Chief, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts: A Facsimile Edition with Full Transcriptions and Scholarly Apparatus, “Forward” to P.M.S. Dawson ed., Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 3, Bodleian MS. Shelley e. 4 (London: Garland Publishing, 1987), p. v.

Dawson ed., Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 3, Bodleian MS. Shelley e. 4, front pastedown, labelled p. 2 where the front cover is p. 1. Deep Wide Sea 221

Interpreting Shelley’s various sketches is a complex task. Nancy Moore Goslee, an editor of Shelley manuscripts, notes that they could be anything from what she calls “kinetic rituals to keep the ink and thoughts flowing” to “direct or symbolic illustrations of thoughts or lines written” on the page or following elsewhere in that notebook or others.47 Since their features—the boat floating on a glassy sea and the island abundant with trees and shrubs—are repeated in Shelley’s visions of utopia, the recurrent sea-isle sketches best fit Goslee’s latter classification. To the left of this sea paradise, scrawled in Shelley’s jagged loops, is a poetry fragment containing many of the theme and image patterns which recur in his more complete poetic seascapes. Below is one way the fragment could be read: it is edited for grammatical clarity and excludes crossed out phrases:

Great Spirit whom the sea of boundless mind Nurtures within its unimagined caves: In which thou sittest solemnly reclined Giving a voice to its mysterious waves Which breathes among the winds that wake mankind Thou must a portion be sounding sea should fail Like golden winged Love whose footstep paves An air borne Proteus—48

Several image clusters in this fragment demonstrate recurrent patterns in Shelley’s sea symbolism: “the sea of boundless human mind” and the “winds that wake mankind”. The sea recurs in Shelley’s poems as the embodiment of time and human things; the waves and violent winds over the sea are analogies for the inescapable pull of Necessity driving man and the earth through both violent revolutionary and reactionary change.49 The “wild West Wind” impels cycles of destruction and renewal in “Ode to the West Wind” and the “tempest fleet”

Nancy Moore Goslee, “Shelley at Play: A Study of Sketch and Text in His ‘Prometheus’ Notebooks”, The Huntington Library Quarterly 48. 3 (1985), pp. 211-255, p. 211. Dawson ed., Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 3, Bodleian MS. Shelley e. 4, p. 2, front pastedown. My edited transcription. The full transcription with all cross-outs and partial words can be seen in this edition. Rough winds embody cataclysmic violent revolution and cycles of tyranny and gentle winds embody peaceful periods of socio-political development. Deep Wide Sea 222 of “Lines”, compels the figure of the mariner through glimpses of the histories of socio­ political tyranny and the possibilities of a future of liberty.

Shelley uses the ocean repeatedly as a figure for time in his poetry. Time is driven forward, as are all things in Shelley’s construction of the universe, by the material, neutral and also ambiguously curative principle of nature, Necessity. As the sea of time, heaving with the rise and fall of empires, the ocean might be brackish with human tears but it is also, in Shelley’s view, leading towards the flowering sea-isles which constitute his utopia. The “Ocean of Time” moves towards a utopian goal but as it moves, it travels through what Shelley in Queen Mab calls “the tainted Flood of ages”: in other words, it travels through epochs of religious and socio-political tyranny, “waters of deep woe”, and violent revolution.50 Moreover, the sea of time is filled with many ruins, both corrupt cities of oppression and lost cities of republican virtue. In Queen Mab, Shelley compares the lasting significance or “fame” of tyrannous empires of religious thought and socio-political systems to the momentary foam on a sea wave amid a vast ocean of continually moving waves of time and cycles of human life:

Where is the fame Which the vain-glorious mighty of the earth Seek to eternize? Oh! The faintest sound From time’s light footfall, the minutest wave That swells the Flood of ages, whelms in nothing The unsubstantial bubble. (Queen Mab 3. 139-43)

Nonetheless this “unsubstantial bubble” absorbs much of Shelley’s attention as a writer. Moreover, the assurance of tyranny’s insignificance and certain demise in this early poem is more uncertain in the later “Lines”, where epochs of oppression and suffering are the black waves of the “o’er-brimming deep” grasping at the mariner. Even in Queen Mab, other images—like the “tainted Flood of ages” (6.224) where the sea metaphorically renders the risings and fallings of empires—suggest the greater significance of tyranny in all its forms in Time’s ocean. The change from Shelley’s representation of tyranny as a bubble to the more

50 Shelley, “Time” [also known as “Unfathomable Sea”], Complete tTorks, vol. 4 eds., Ingpen and Peck, Line 2. Deep Wide Sea 223

frequent images in later poems of tyranny as a storming ocean shows his increasing cynicism about the human ability to eradicate it.

Shelley’s use of the monotony of tempestuous waves as a figure for the cycles of socio­ political violence is visible in many poems. The close relationship Shelley develops between cycles of tyranny and the ocean can also be seen in the brutal fight witnessed on a seaside cliff between the “beauteous and mild” star/snake (representation of “Good”) and the “Fiend” of “Fear, Hatred, Faith, and Tyranny” the blood-red comet/eagle (representation of “Evil”) over the ocean at the opening of Laon and Cythna (1.1.130-1; 1. 26-29. 352-387). In The Triumph of Life, the sea storm is also used as part of the brutal allegory of the “Chariot” of life, this chariot is synonymous with cycles of socio-political violence and is so overpowering that those caught in it are made into nothings: “nor other trace I find/But as foam after the Ocean’s wrath/Is spent upon the desert shore” {The Triumph of Life, 162-4).51 In the version of the image of the “insubstantial [sea wave] bubble” in The Triumph of Life, Shelley makes humanity the foam evaporating amid sterility with the enduring cycles of waves being that of tyrannous empires of thought, politics and society. Repeatedly, Shelley associates a tempestuous sea (or rolling waves) with human experiences over the historical ages, experiences which he explicitly links with both the revolutionary conflict arising from, as well as the general suffering under, systems of religious and socio-political tyranny and oppression. Shelley allies the human population under tyranny with “a waste of waves” in “Ode to Liberty” (3.39) and in Laon and Cythna, the sea tempest is associated with both revolutionary and reactionary political struggles and the sufferings and struggles of humanity under slavery and religion. Shelley describes Laon and Cythna as a poem demonstrating “the unveiling of the religious frauds by which” Shelley’s characters “had been deluded into submission”.52 The sea is equated with the perils of religion and political oppression through which mankind travels in Canto 8:

‘O love! Who to the hearts of wandering men Art as the calm to Ocean’s weary waves! Justice, or truth, or joy! Those only can From slavery and religion’s labyrinth caves

Triumph of Life, in Complete Works, vol. 4, eds., Ingpen and Peck. 52 Preface to Laon and Cythna, p. 240. Deep Wide Sea 224

Guide us, as one clear star a seaman saves, —’ (.Laon 8.11.3289-3293)

In these sets of images, the seaman’s journey founders in the midst of the falsehoods of religion and political tyranny which Shelley sets in opposition to Truth and tranquillity. 53 Shelley’s use of sea imagery therefore subverts the Greco-Roman and biblical tradition of the sea journey traced in previous chapters in which travellers are saved through the supernatural powers of an immaterial deity (or deities) or the knowledge, belief and rituals associated with supernatural beings.

The sea-isle paradises in Queen Mab, “Lines” and Prometheus Unbound share almost identical imagistic and ideological features. These idylls have a similar look, sound and fragrance based around not only specific features that are present, but around specific features that are absent. They are characterised by the presence of the gentle and gradual motions of Necessity, the most perfected being the movements of the stars, which Shelley makes analogous to socio-political liberty and gradual political reform.

Shelley’s sea-isle utopias are blooming places, perfumed by flowers in sunlit gentle seas. Queen Mab’s “garden-isles begem” the ocean, and the gentleness of the ocean is denoted by the imagery of waves and flowers kissing: “green woods overcanopy the wave,/Which like a toil-worn labourer leaps to shore,/To meet the kisses of the flowrets there” (8.104-6). Similarly the island utopia of “Lines” is a “calm and blooming cove” in a “bright sea” (342, 361) and the oceans in Shelley’s utopian seas of Prometheus Unbound are filled with “Fortunate isles” and “mild, free, gentle voices” and “the light/Of wave-reflected flowers” (Prometheus 3.2.32-34).

Shelley’s pre-utopian seas are often mirrors to the perfections of the stars but in a utopian earth, the sea is itself calm, regular and harmonious. The surface of the ocean in Queen Mab is mirror to the realm of Necessity: the “clouds” that “gleam/Like islands on a dark blue sea” are in fact the “innumerable clusters of suns, each shining with its own light, and illuminating numbers of planets that revolve around them”.54 Instead of propelling the

Another example is given in the Dedication where the sea is that storming place, “the world’s tempestuous night” through which “Truth’s deathless voice” attempts to guide “the foundering seaman” (Laon, Dedication 14.118-126). 54 Queen Mab 2. 13-21; Notes to Queen Mab, 1.252-3, pp. 71-2. Deep Wide Sea 225

mind towards God in the manner of Reid’s sublime reverie, the vision of the sea at sunset allows “fancy” to rise above the earth into the shimmering world of the stars, the knowledge of which, for Shelley, dispels religious falsehoods. When Shelley makes knowledge of astronomy or the heavens a shield against religious mystification, he revises the Christian association of the heavens as the place of God and heaven as an immaterial paradise.

Dotted with flowering isles, Shelley’s utopian seas resemble Necessity’s palace in Queen Mab—the universe of planets and stars. In the context of Queen Mab, Shelley’s utopias are a “happy Earth!”, the “reality of Heaven!” (9.1). When they resemble Necessity’s palace, these sea isles are made analogous to a realm of material perfection (the realm of space with its stars and planets), whose proper understanding reveals the “infinite machine” of endless harmonious change, not the presence of an immaterial deity.55 Queen Mab's “faery Hall” (2.30-48) of stars and planets shares several features with Shelley’s utopian seascapes: both are filled with music, characterised by intense natural light and are associated with peace and joy through the repetition of words like “floating”, “light” and “melodies”.56 This close relationship between the stars and the sea is made even closer in other poems, such as “Ode to Liberty”, where Shelley uses ocean imagery to figure the universe of stars and planets: the earth in the universe of stars as an island “in the Ocean of the world” (2.18-19).

Shelley’s utopian seas are equally distinguished by the removal of the violent motions of Necessity embodied in the storming oceans, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions Duffy observes are often equated with revolutionary and reactionary violence in Shelley’s work. Prior to its transformation in Queen Mab, the sea is what Shelley considers to be a lonely unfruitful place, the abode only of the “bellowing monster” where only howling winds and “shrieks” of sea birds can be heard (8.97-98). The mariner of “Lines” suffers through the black tempests of the “o’er brimming deep” with momentary respites on “flowering isles” before the speaker imagines the uncertain fantasy of the “blooming cove”, and in Prometheus the sea had been bloodied through eons of warfare before its transition to gentleness.

Shelley’s depictions of marine creatures and marine plants tend to occur in sea vistas which exhibit the qualities he reforms or removes in his utopian seascapes, what he views as the unpalatable aspects of the ocean: its vastness, its violent storms, its solitude, its inhospitality for all those but birds and sea monsters and its demarcation as a place of war

55 Notes to Queen Mab, 1.252-3, p. 135. 56 Queen Mab, 8.100-7; “Lines” Lines 342-365, and Prometheus Unbound, 3.2.18-34. Deep Wide Sea 226 and bloodshed under tyrannous empires. The poetic speaker of Julian and Maddalo loves “all waste” but Shelley removes the sterility and isolation he here and elsewhere associates with ocean vastness from his utopian seas.57 Like the grand sea vistas of J.M.W. Turner where few marine animals dwell,58 Shelley’s depictions of marine creatures and marine plants are relatively few and on the whole they reflect Greco-Roman and biblical iconography which predominantly figures marine animals as alien and repulsive, dangerous or a mix of the beautiful and the hideous. Having failed to “love humanity”, the poetic speaker of Alastor embarks on a journey on “the drear ocean’s waste” and it is exactly these death dealing qualities of the ocean, its dreariness and sterility, loneliness and comfortlessness that become transformed in Shelley’s utopian seascapes. In Alastor, Shelley describes “the slimy caverns of the populous deep” as a place that the speaker of the poem knows Death, “that mighty Shadow loves” (Lines 305-306). The seashore in “Julian and Maddalo” is a “bare strand” with sands “ever-shifting” and

Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds, Such as from the earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds, Is this;—an uninhabitable sea-side Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried, Abandons; (Lines 3-9)

Radcliffe’s deployment of assonance and sibilance in her poetic seascapes accentuates the incantatory thrill elicited by her magical sea nymphs, as they also suggest a seascape filled with natural and numinous wonders. Shelley’s deployment of similar devices in Julian and Maddalo rather emphasises an association between sterile nothingness and sea expanses. The mix of assonance and sibilance in this extract produces a mood of isolation and emptiness; the harsh effect of the repeated “i” and “s”, “thistles/amphibious/is this”, is like the grating of bitter winds on dry bones. The fallen earth, the earth despoiled and perverted by tyranny and

57 The quality of vastness is treated ambiguously in Shelley’s poetry: on the one hand, vastness is a quality of the infinite universe of worlds declared to be Necessity’s realm in Queen Mab and it should be a quality associated with a utopia. However, the realm of Necessity is full of “worlds” and is therefore the fertile space of stars rather than an empty wasteland. Vastness then, in terms of empty space, is removed from Shelley’s utopias. 58 appendix 4. Deep Wide Sea 227

its bloodshed, is an earth Shelley links with the more irregular and discordant qualities of cataclysmic earthly change, and these are qualities which he largely removes from his utopian seascapes.

Shelley removes war and conflict from his utopias. In his utopias the sea is “unstained by blood” and travellers on the ocean are no longer beset by storms or “groans/And desolation, and the mingled voice/Of slavery and command” {Prometheus 3.2.18-20). Upon the demise of Jupiter who “sunk to the abyss” in Prometheus Unbound, Ocean remarks, “Henceforth the fields of Heaven-reflecting sea/Which are my realm, will heave, unstained with blood”. The seas continue to “heave” and the wave “leaps to shore” but the violence of storms and war in the “desert of those ocean solitudes” is no longer.59 The danger of sea travel is gone because “the rushing storm” is controlled by “kindliest human impulses” {Mab 8.98-100), and “the shadow of fair ships” is watched over by “Blue Proteus and his humid nymphs” {Prometheus 3. 2. 24-25). As in Queen Mab , where the child of a mythical ocean (Ianthe)60 is refigured as a student of human history and coming socio-political reform, Shelley borrows the mystery and magic of Greek myth for his Prometheus Unbound as part of a portrayal of the material magic of an earth filled with knowledge, not mystery.61 Shelley depicts an earth controlled by a human race perfected by intellectual freedom—freedom from all religious, socio-political and moral constraints. Shelley continually frames his work within the context of the liberating power of the achievement of knowledge of the material world, and within his conviction that mental degradation and socio-political and moral tyranny result from quests for the immaterial.

In Queen Mab, Shelley equates the harmonies that celestial movements embody with a morality based on atheism, universal vegetarianism, “consentaneous love” and “kindliest human impulses”. Man’s “age of endless peace” will occur, the Fairy tells Ianthe, when

59 Prometheus 3.2.18; Queen Mab 8.105, 96. 60 Christopher R. Miller, “Happily Ever After? The Necessity of Fairytale in Queen Mab", in Unfamiliar Shelley, eds., Weinberg and Webb, pp. 69-84, p. 75. Miller also notes Ianthe’s name recalls Greek myth. 61 Notes to Queen Mab, 1.242-3, p. 135. In Queen Mab Shelley deploys scientific knowledge as an intrinsic part of his attempts to revise the discourse of the natural sublime and to moderate the human response to it. He attempts to ward off the fear or incomprehension (which he associates as the prelude to the need to conjure ideas of a creator-God) of the infinite expanse of space with distance calculations and statements whose intent is to explain the mysteries of the universe in his notes, but also, in the poetic face to these notes, to maintain a sense of awe and aesthetic rapture. In Queen Mab ’s first note he writes: “in one year light travels 5,422,400,000,000 miles, which is a distance 5,707,600 times greater than that of the sun from the earth”. The poetic face of these notes invokes the otherworldliness of pagan myth when it characterises the universe of stars and planets as the “Fairy’s fane” and the “faery Hall!” Deep Wide Sea 228 humanity “fulfilleth” the “will” of the “Soul of those mighty spheres” already part of the “perfect symmetry” of the universe, and this age of peace is to a significant degree defined by the growth in comprehension that “there is no God” (Mab 7.14) and an earth where “All things are recreated, and the flame of consentaneous love inspires all life” (Mab 8.107-8). The cause of man’s debasement in Queen Mab is the “safety” and “grandeur” of “kings, and priests, and statesmen” (4. 80-9). In his notes to the poem Shelley states, “In fact, religion and morality, as they now stand, compose a practical code of misery and servitude”. Upon the destruction of the tyranny of kings, priests and statesmen: “A garden shall arise, in loveliness/Surpassing fabled Eden”. The biblical Eden is a fable in Queen Mab but the flowering isles of its utopian visions are, as noted, the “reality of Heaven” (my emphasis) The triumphant domination or influence of an immaterial deity is not merely absent from Shelley’s utopian visions; the absence of the belief in such a being is a definitive aspect of their foundation.

Changes to climate and the essential nature of humanity are also the predicates for a utopian earth filled with flowering sea-isles. In Queen Mab, Shelley associates a lack of climactic extremes with moral, intellectual, and socio-political harmony. Shelley describes an axial shift of the earth in Queen Mab resulting in what he viewed as improved climate conditions: a “habitable earth” that is “full of bliss” (8.58), where there would be “a perfect identity between the moral and physical improvement of the human species”.64 Changes in climate and diet underlie this “moral and physical improvement” Shelley remarks, again in the notes to the poem, on his belief “that the depravity of the physical and moral nature of man originated in his unnatural habits of life”.65 Part of this depravity is the consumption of “dead flesh”66 by humans and other species (in Shelley’s utopian vision all creatures are vegetarians), which has led to wasteful and socially repressive farming practises that mean that “the most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals.”67

62 Queen Mab 3. 226-240; 7.14.

63 Note to Queen Mab 5. 189, p. 142. 64 Note to Queen Mab 6. 45-46, p. 143.

65 Note to Queen Mab 8.211-12, p. 157.

66 Note to Queen Mab 8.211-12, p. 159.

67 Note to Queen Mab 8.211-12, p. 162. Deep Wide Sea 229

Perfection is also identified in “Lines” by a populace full of mildness and calm “far from passion, pain, and guilt” and these qualities of temper are similarly associated with the gentle celestial-like motion of “circling” and with the improved climate upon the fantasised “blooming cove” (Lines 345, 367, 342). The “clime divine and calm” is what transforms the “rage” of the “polluting multitude”, making it “subdued” and “calm” (Lines 356-8). More importantly, in the moments of respite on flowering isles, the speaker fantasises about socio­ political and intellectual liberty. As in Queen Mab, improvements for humanity are predicated upon socio-political and intellectual liberty; these human developments rather than notions of immaterial transcendence provide the foundation of the joy of that “blooming cove”. Standing on the island’s “the solitary hill”, the speaker contemplates the history of Venice and imagines the time when “Freedom” will loose “the Celtic Anarch’s hold” and the population “like pollution-nourished worms” would be released from their” dungeons”, or be destroyed to make way for “new nations” by the “sun” of “Truth”. A vision of socio-political liberty is what forms the basis of “the soft dreams of the mom” and the fantasy of the ocean isle “healing paradise” (89, 147-166, 327, 355). Echoing Coleridge’s Rime, Shelley repeatedly rephrases his opening lines: “Many a green isle needs must be/in the deep wide sea of misery” throughout “Lines”, but the effect of the metaphor is not the same. For Coleridge the pain and agony of his “wide, wide sea” is based around the perceived absence of an immaterial deity, but for Shelley, the agony of the wide sea of Time and human history is based around the absence of socio-political and intellectual freedom. In the previous chapter I argued that the decay and renewal of the ocean is expressed by Coleridge in terms of the Mariner’s recognition of God in the world. Shelley’s ideal ocean at the end of “Lines” is based on the achievement of intellectual transformation and social harmony.

The quality of human calmness is an ideal in Prometheus Unbound as well. In Act 3, Shelley imagines an improved humanity filling the sea-isles with “mild free gentle voices” and again this improvement in temperament is aligned with the harmonious natural motion conveyed through words like “flow”, “swayed”, and “floating”. Climactic calm is linked to human harmony and the harmony of the ocean where there no more is heard “the mingled voice of slavery and command” (.Prometheus 3.30-1).

The utopian vision of the final verse paragraph in “Lines” is not as ambitious or as assured as either Queen Mab or Prometheus Unbound (though Prometheus ’ curious ending Deep Wide Sea 230

reveals its own lack of assurance). The blissful isle imagined in “Lines” is at first a place only for the speaker, “for me and those I love”. Yet the happiness of this small community is the catalyst for a wider change for all humans or “the polluting multitude”, and then even the entire planet such that “the earth grow young again” (Lines 343-373). Shelley uses the “tempest” as well as “soft winds” and “spirits of the air” as poetic figures for the workings of Necessity which manifests as human thought in the poem. Thought operates in a dichotomous tryst between the visions of the “kindly blossoming” of socio-political and intellectual Liberty and dreams of utopia allegorised as gentle winds, and the painful recollections and agonies allegorised as violent blasts—both of these drive the speaker over the wide ocean of life and history. The part “healing” and part destructive operations of Necessity in “Lines” pre-figure those of Prometheus Unbound, where Necessity drives human history and intellect towards a perfection which may yet be undone. The tone of the vision at the end of “Lines” is hopeful though full of desperation and doubt, but that is what makes it all the more important and true as a Shelleyan ideal. Below are the first eight lines of the final verse-paragraph:

Other flowering isles must be In the sea of life and agony: Other spirits float and flee O’er that gulf: even now, perhaps, On some rock the wild wave wraps, With folded wings they waiting sit For my bark to pilot it To some calm and blooming cove, [...] (Lines 336-342)

Even in the midst of “Pain” due to the triumph of tyranny over socio-political systems and the seeming endlessness of “the despot’s rage, the slave’s revenge”, the flowering isles emerge; they “must” (Lines 234-6). In all their hesitant shimmering, the lexical indistinctness of the “some” in “some calm and blooming cove” and the modulations of “perhaps” and “may” (which make the existence of such isles even more uncertain), they emerge as a powerful Shelleyan image of human and oceanic perfection:

May a windless bower be built, Deep Wide Sea 231

Far from passion, pain, and guilt, In a dell ’mid lawny hills, Which the wild sea-murmur fills, And soft sunshine, and the sound Of old forests echoing round (Lines 344-9)

Shelley takes the control of the ocean traditionally reserved for God and gives it to man. Queen Mab, “Lines” and Prometheus Unbound emphasise a material re-creation and renewal of sea, earth and man involving man’s ultimate control of the sea and all of the elements. Greco-Roman works and the Bible, and the other writers in the thesis, all ascribe control of the sea as evidence of the power of a transcendent force; Shelley does not. Part of what improves the seas in Queen Mab is their subservience to the will of man:

The desert of those ocean solitudes, But vocal to the seabird’s harrowing shriek, The bellowing monster, and the rushing storm, Now to the sweet and many mingling sounds Of kindliest human impulses respond. (9.96-100).

In Act 4 of Prometheus Unbound Shelley details man’s ultimate control over the earth such that: “the lighting is his slave” and “the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare,/4Heaven, has thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none’”. Human control over the elements is less explicit in “Lines”. Even so, the “spirits of the air” (allegories for human thought), are said to repent allowing the “earth to grow young again”. The “spirits of the air” are the “winged winds” which give the speaker respite in his fantasy and they are also the “spirits” who “float and flee/O’er that gulf’ of agonised remembering leading him on to a hoped for future (and more lingering) isle of respite. As a prelude to earthly renewal, the repentance of these “spirits” culminates in a change in human thinking which changes the earth. In accord with Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound, the human mind in “Lines” has the power to change the earth and its oceans. The foundation of Shelley’s sea-isle dotted utopias is a change in human nature leading to human control of the elements, socio-political reform and intellectual freedom. In Queen Mab, it is earthly change that leads to a change in man but in Prometheus Unbound it Deep Wide Sea 232 is a change in man, and the end of mental slavery, that leads to a change in the earth and earns him the control over the elements. Shelley imagines the triumph, not of an immaterial power, but of an earth and a human mind where what he calls “the dark yet mighty power” “of kings and priests” will go “unregarded” {Prometheus 3. 173-7). The perfection of man is not his ascension to some immaterial state, nor his complete adoption of the rules of God, it is where all of mankind exists in intellectual harmony and whose intellect (or “soul”) is sufficiently freed from “custom’s evil taint” (3. 156) such that man is his own highest power. Earth declares: “Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul,/whose nature is its own divine control” (4. 400-1).

Immortality is not the foundation of hope or human improvement as it is in the biblical utopia of the New Jerusalem, or (for instance) in Wordsworth’s depictions of ideal existential states. In “Elegiac Stanzas” and the Immortality Ode, what gives hope and strength to Wordsworth’s speaker is a belief in human immortality or a former divine existence. In other words, strength comes from the belief that the wild sea of mortal life can be transcended by an immaterial soul. As “the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature”, Prometheus is “immortal”; that is, the qualities or virtues he embodies are eternal and eternally achievable by man (even should he suffer through ages of degeneration). Thus in the utopia Shelley imagines here, as in Queen Mat, human perfectibility is not about transcending physical matter or change. The perfected human being of Prometheus Unbound is still subject to change and death: Earth declares

And men and beasts in happy dreams shall gather Strength for the coming day and all its joy And death shall be the last embrace of her Who takes the life she gave, even as a mother, Folding her child, says, ‘Leave me not again.’ (3.103-7)

Similarly, revealing the future of human perfection in Queen Mab, the Fairy remarks: “Mild was the slow necessity of death” (9.57). Shelley theorises that minds would be “infinite” because they are free, because basic needs are no longer met through violence Deep Wide Sea 233

against other animals and because societies live in peace without political oppression of any

kind.68

Shelley’s confidence in the achievability of the human perfection he embodies in his utopian sea-isles declines from Queen Mat to “Lines”, and to Prometheus Unbound. The declining confidence in his predictions for humanity can be seen in tandem with the philosophical scepticism Shelley exhibits in “On Love” and “One Life”: in the former he writes we “seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience

within ourselves” and in the latter “nothing exists but as it is perceived”.69 Scott McEathron and Duffy are among the scholars who see in Shelley’s writing a move away from a strict materialist stance towards a position of philosophical scepticism. Within a framework of epistemological uncertainty, Necessity and other human concepts become imaginative constructs rather than absolutely knowable material facts.

Nonetheless, the philosophical scepticism in Shelley’s later work fails to negate the materialism permeating his writing; rather, it questions human access to absolute knowledge and therefore human access to knowledge about the state of the universe as material or

otherwise.70 McEathron describes Shelley’s philosophical scepticism as a “backpedalling” or “squeamishness” in the face of materialism’s implications for human death, but death is never eradicated from Shelley’s utopias and the kinds of transcendence Shelley imagines are not

immaterial.71

In “On Life” Shelley expresses his discontent with the confident epistemology of the materialist position. He is discontented with “such a view of things” because man’s centrality

68 Note to Queen Mab 8.203, pp. 156-7. 69 “On Love” and “On Life”, in Major Works, eds., Leader and O’Neill, p. 631, p. 634. 70 Williams, Merle A., “Contemplating Facts, Studying Ourselves: Aspects of Shelley’s Philosophical and Religious Prose”, in Unfamiliar Shelley, pp. 199-220, p. 200, p. 204. As Williams observes in the extant prose works and fragments “Shelley’s thought is shown to be nascent, provisional, constantly unfolding” and “the incomplete state of many of these texts captures the mood of a curious mind in dialogue with itself’. Williams also writes: “Shelley is thoroughly unsympathetic to the notion of an all-embracing deity, whose mental processes support the universe in its continuing existence”. 71 McEathron, “Death as ‘Refuge and Ruin’”, pp. 189-90. At the heart of the statement McEathron quotes (from “On the Punishment of Death”) as support for his claim for Shelley’s backpedalling (“whether death is good or evil, a punishment or a reward, or whether it be wholly indifferent, no man can take it upon himself to assert”), is Shelley’s questioning of the human capacity for absolute knowledge. Shelley highlights the limitations of human knowledge for the sake of highlighting the limitations of human knowledge, not in order to promote an idea immaterial transcendence or even its hope. Shelley’s prose and poetry consistently reveal his resistance to appeals to supematuralism. Deep Wide Sea 234 to the living universe is diminished and because Shelley sees the power of human thought as irreconcilable with decay and dissolution.72 At the same time, Shelley is also discontented with the “shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mind and matter . . . and its “violent dogmatism concerning the source of all things”, that is, a controlling immaterial deity. Shelley is discontented with both. In “On a Future State”, written but one year prior to “On Life”, Shelley remarks:

should it be proved . . . that the mysterious principle which regulates the proceedings of the universe, is neither intelligent nor sensitive, yet it is not an inconsistency to suppose at the same time, that the animating power survives the body which it has animated, by laws as independent of any supernatural agent as those through which it 77 first became with it.

So too, while Shelley speaks of a human “spirit” at odds with ultimate dissolution in “On Life”, it does not follow that this spirit is supernatural. Nor does it follow that the enmity Shelley perceives human thought to have with decay ensures an immaterial transcendence. In Shelley’s verse, the human mind and its virtues has an existence after the death of individuals, but this existence is figured in material terms. In Shelley’s poetry, any potential immortality of the intellect is imagined in terms of a material cycle: the transmission of particles in the decay and renewal of matter or the material transmission of writing through what he sees as eternal cycles of human life on earth.

The only “species of existence” after death Shelley’s prose and poetry describes is a notion which “mankind” in general is discontented with, that is, life after death is possible only as “the resolution of the component parts of the mechanism of a living being into its elements, and the impossibility of the minutest particle of these sustaining the smallest diminution”.74 This notion of immortality is expressed in Queen Mab, when the “Fairy” remarks:

Shelley, “On Life, in Major Works, eds., Leader and O’Neill, p. 634. Shelley declares that he was: “discontented with such a view of things as it afforded; man is a being of high aspirations ‘looking both before and after’, whose ‘thoughts that wander through eternity’, disclaim alliance with transience and decay”. 73 Shelley, “One a Future State”, in Complete Works, Vol 6 [Prose], eds., Ingpen and Peck, p. 206. 74 Shelley, “On a Future State”, in Complete Works, vol. 6 [Prose], eds., Ingpen and Peck, p. 205. Deep Wide Sea 235

There’s not one atom of yon earth But once was living man; Nor the minutest drop of rain, That hangeth in its thinnest cloud, But flowed in human veins: (2. 211-215)

Shelley continually depicts human renewal in material terms in his poetry. Adonais “is made one with Nature” in material ways recalling the decay and renewal of the intellect Shelley describes in the already cited “On a Future State” (quoted above): Adonais becomes an atomistic presence in “the moan/Of thunder”, “darkness and in light” “herbs and stone”; he becomes “a portion of the lovelinessAVhich once he made more lovely” (42.370-8). Written works possess the only other kind of immortality Shelley ascribes to: Adonais is among those “whose transmitted effluence cannot die/So long as fire outlives the parent spark” (46.407-8). As fire, this influence is figured in material terms signalling a material everlasting life—the transmission of works of literature through the ages.

The Romantic sea journey, as conceived by the other writers in this thesis is reconfigured by Shelley because his sea journeys take the voyager to a material utopia. As Reiman notes of “Lines”, Shelley repeatedly uses the sea and a voyage across the sea as a metaphorical representation of the journey of life; adding to this, I claim that in “Lines” (as in Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound), Shelley describes the personal, individual (the impersonal “I”) and also humankind’s journey through time and history. Repeatedly, the fantasy end point of this journey is imaged in terms of gentle seas dotted with lush islands where mankind lives in the harmonious freedom achieved through material perfection. Sea journeys to dystopia, for example those of Alastor and “Zeinab and Kathema”, are journeys to solipsistic self-worship and to the heart of the hypocrisies of empire and religion. In these poems, Shelley is at pains to dramatise socio-political and intellectual oppression in opposition to socio-political and intellectual freedom, and explicitly in Queen Mab and Prometheus, Shelley aligns tyranny with religious belief. The symbolic sea journey of Asia at the end of Act 2 is interesting in this context. An extract from her final speech of Act 2 follows:

We have passed Age’s icy caves, And Manhood’s dark and tossing waves, Deep Wide Sea 236

And Youth’s smooth ocean, smiling to betray: Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee Of shadow-peopled Infancy, Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day, A paradise of vaulted bowers Lit by downward-gazing flowers, And watery paths that wind between Wildernesses calm and green, Peopled by shapes too bright to see, And rest, having beheld; somewhat like thee, Which walk upon the sea, and chant melodiously! (2. 98-110)

The ocean imagery of Asia’s journey (“And Manhood’s dark and tossing waves,/And Youth’s smooth ocean, smiling to betray”), recalls the lexicon and imagery Wordsworth uses in “Elegiac Stanzas” when he pairs the ocean in differing states with the ages of man: the “glassy sea” of “THEN”, when in youth the “truth” of “a smiling sea” was one that “could not be betrayed” (Lines 4-32), as opposed to the “wise and well” imagery of the “deadly swell” and “trampling waves” the speaker can recognise as an older person (Lines 45-52).75 Both use the idea of oceanic stillness (glassy/smooth) to depict the ease of youth and the chaos of a turbulent ocean (trampling waves/ dark and tossing waves) as metaphors for the sufferings of maturity, and both use “smiling” to suggest the outrage and perversity of the youth’s deception. However, Wordsworth’s sea journey of man through the “smiling sea” of the betrayals of youth and the “deadly swell” of maturity culminates in the hope of an afterlife. Asia’s journey through the ages of man towards his perfected state culminates in the now familiar Shelleyean vision of a material utopia: a luminous flower-filled sea isle paradise in tune with the stars, “what we feel above”—that “paradise of vaulted bowers” lining the “watery paths”. Asia’s speech also rewrites the oceanic passage towards the realm of immaterial transcendence Wordsworth depicts in the Immortality Ode. Asia moves backwards through time, reversing the gyres of history and, to use the language of “Lines”, making “the world young again.” As in Queen Mab , the new and perfected humanity of Prometheus Unbound is imagined in terms of its return to nature or its pure state before the

75 Wordsworth, “Elegiac Stanzas”, in Selected Poems, ed., Hayden. Deep Wide Sea 237

tyranny of false belief; as the Fairy tells Ianthe, in the renewed man “those delicate and kind impulses/In nature’s primal modesty arose” (9. 80-1). Perhaps most significantly, the imagery of ocean control reserved for God or some immaterial power by our other writers is here given to man. Particularly in Prometheus Unbound, Shelley depicts an interrelation between humanity and the universe: where the tyranny reigns over the human intellect, it reigns over the universe. As Reiman notes, the human perception of the universe is distorted by a “slave mentality”.76 All the other writers considered in this thesis focus on the human failure to see an immaterial deity in the world as the basis of such a distortion. For Shelley it is the opposite: the belief in such a deity, as well as the maintenance of socio-political forms of oppression, distorts the human view of the world, making them look for the light of God on the ocean where they should see the radiance of the material light of the sun and the stars.

In Shelley’s utopian visions, gentle seas are filled with perfumed islands, God does not reveal himself nor does he change man, nor does the forsaking of earthly things change man. In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley focuses on a change in human nature and the transformative power of mental freedom from the all forms of the tyranny Shelley associates with belief in omnipotent power. Shelley also focuses on the transformative power of love, mildness and calm as the foundation of freedom and harmony. However, Prometheus Unbound demonstrates Shelley’s increasing cynicism about the longevity of the progress he imagines in his utopian visions because the transformed sea of Act 3 is still unstable. Even in a utopia, the reformed sea of Shelley’s drama is characterised as a hungry monster which needs to be regularly subdued. Shelley’s retention of Homeric imagery in this passage, for instance its equation with a hungry monster and its description as the “unpastured sea” intimates its enduring alienness. The continued monstrosity of the sea in Prometheus Unbound injects even more ambivalence into Shelley’s later depiction of a sea-isle paradise. In Queen Mab, the future transformation of the ocean into a perfumed delight for man is presented as absolute and even in “Lines” (where the possibility of finding the peaceful isle is uncertain), ultimate calm is achieved once discovered. Moreover, in the midst of his utopian vision of socio-political, intellectual and cosmic harmony and love, Shelley describes a universe where

Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds., D. H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977), p. 130. Reiman notes: “Given Shelley’s ethics and his theory of Knowledge (epistemology), it seems likely that he believed that when human beings saw the universe correctly, it would appear beneficient rather than hostile”. Reiman also notes that Queen Mab can be used to gloss and gauge the significance of the vision embodied in Act IV” of Prometheus. When he does this Reiman implicitly acknowledges the close ideological relationship between these two poems. Deep Wide Sea 238 the sun is tyrant whose gaze keeps the planets in line and a humanity where “love and might” go hand in hand:

Man, oh, no men! A chain of linked thought, Of love and might to be divided not, Compelling the elements with adamantine stress; As the sun rules, even with a tyrant’s gaze, The unquiet republic of the maze Of planets, struggling fierce towards heaven’s free wilderness.

(4.394-9)

When Shelley has the elements enslaved to man in his representation of utopia he commits the very mistake he seeks to avoid—he appeals to omnipotent power and control. Shelley depicts the end of the tyranny of kings and priests only to re-instate the tyranny of man over the earth. Shelley imagines a perfected humanity, pervaded by love, their impulses all, in the words of Queen Mab, “kindly” and no longer in the thrall of the qualities that have perverted human nature and allowed the reign of “kings, priests and statesmen”. Yet, through Demogorgon’s final speech, Shelley also acknowledges that the humanity of his fantasy may require further amelioration in the future, and in this acknowledgement he questions the suitability of the human race as the controllers of the earth.

Shelley’s utopian visions of gentle seas and flowering isles, with their emphasis on the “ameliorative”77 or progressive impulse of Necessity, undermine his definitive characterisation of Necessity as neutral. As a neutral principle, Shelley’s characterisation of Necessity escapes what he sees as the traps of a religious response to the natural sublime but I query the stability of the neutrality Shelley attaches to it. In my view, Shelley’s idea of Necessity as an agent of positive reform is at odds with his defining conception of its neutrality. As Duffy notes, the key advantages of Shelley’s “‘cultivated imagination’” is that it can avoid “‘vulgar’ anthropomorphism and ‘contemplate itself, not as the centre and model of the universe, but as one of the infinitely various multitude of beings of which it is composed’”. Moreover:

77 Duffy, Revolutionary Sublime, p. 28. Deep Wide Sea 239

Shelley recognises that Necessity is just as responsible for ‘merciless ambition’, ‘mad zeal’, and ‘the tyrant’s moody mind’ as for any liberty or virtue that may exist in the world—and again, this recognition persistently problematises his engagement with the 70 discourse on the sublime.

In his visions of utopian sea-isles on a perfected earth, Shelley draws humanity into the centre of the universe, and in trying to characterise Necessity’s role as an agent of progress, Shelley employs anthropomorphism. Within Shelley’s verse, if Necessity is neutral, there is nothing to indicate that it is an agent of what Shelley considers to be progress—bar a scientifically inaccurate notion that the earth’s shifting axis will lead to a geophysical change that is beneficial to all (especially man). There is every reason, given the material evidence of history and present circumstances as Shelley imagined them, to believe that revolutions are

on temporary and will at some point lead again to tyranny. Adopting the logic of Queen Mab, if such axial change leads to changes in human nature and the geophysical world, and more lasting reform does occur from a violent revolution (as long ages of life spring from icy cataclysms in “Mont Blanc”), there is still nothing to suggest that reformative change can escape reactionary aftermaths or that reform won both through gradualism and revolution will not face more violence and the need for more revolution in the future. Shelley is aware of this, hence the odd speech of Demogorgon at the end of Prometheus Unbound where Demogorgon acknowledges the possibility for the hand of “Eternity” to be “infirm”, for the ages of utopian progress to become again beset by oppression and in need of revolutionary “spells by which to re-assume/An empire” (4.565-9). The circular symbolism of the serpent “that would clasp her [Eternity] with his length” should Eternity’s hand “free” it is telling.

At the end of Prometheus Unbound, Demogorgon’s speech invokes both the utopian and the cataclysmic manifestations of change. Demogorgon invokes the enduring power of gradualist progress, the threats of oppressive violence and therefore the need for revolutionary defiance. At the same time, he invokes the ultimate success of some kind of

70 Duffy, Revolutionary Sublime, pp. 28-9. 79 Known to be inaccurate in Shelley’s lifetime. 80 Michael O’Neill analyses Shelley’s nuanced poetic investigation of conflicting ideas and the nature of conflict itself in The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Deep Wide Sea 240 blend of defiance (“To defy Power, which seems omnipotent”), and endurance (“To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite”). Below is an extract from Demogorgon’s final speech:

These are the spells by which to re-assume An empire o’er the disentangled Doom. To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent: This, like thy glory Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory. (4.568-578)

Hope propels the mariner of “Lines” to the isles of respite, the fantasy of a future of socio-political liberty, and the betterment of human nature but violence revolution and suffering are intrinsic to the relief and respite that is felt upon these isles. In Demogorgon’s final speech, suffering and destruction form the bedrock of utopia and its reclamation if destroyed. I draw attention to lines 573-4, “till hope creates/From its own wreck the thing it contemplates”, and especially Shelley’s lexical choice of “wreck”, with its associations of nautical disaster. Michael O’Neill describes the final lines Demogorgon’s concatenation of opposites to be “the more stirring for peering into an abyss of despair”.81 In these lines hope must be violently destroyed before “the thing it contemplates”, a utopia of love and harmony, can be possible or possibly returned.

Published with Prometheus Unbound, Shelley’s long fragment poem “A Vision of the Sea” can be seen as an address to the ambiguities of Demogorgon’s final speech. An analysis of this poem comprises the next and final section of this chapter. Described by Carl Ketcham in 1978 as “mysterious” and “a puzzle to critics”, scholars rarely discuss “A Vision of the

81 Michael O’Neill, “A More Hazardous Exercise: Shelley’s Revolutionary Imaginings”, The Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989) [The French Revolution in English Literature and Art Special Number], pp. 256- 264, p. 257. Deep Wide Sea 241

Sea”. 82 I see the poem as indispensable to an understanding of Shelley’s engagement, not with what Carl Ketcham called “man vs nature”, but with the simultaneous beauty and pathos of human embeddedness in nature.

The Sea in Shelley’s “Vision”

Shelley’s depiction of voyage and shipwreck in “A Vision of the Sea” underscores the material laws and savage harmonies of a natural world devoid of the presence of a controlling, vindictive or merciful supernatural power.84 It exhibits both the cataclysmic and utopian manifestations of the sublime and the laws of Necessity as Shelley variously conceives them: neutral and indifferent to human interests, impelling all in cycles of destruction and renewal yet also ameliorative and therefore impelling all with love towards ultimate calm and regeneration. However, “A Vision of the Sea” does more than demonstrate these two aspects of Necessity’s manifestations.

In “A Vision of the Sea”, Shelley revisits the paradoxes of Demogorgon’s final speech in Prometheus Unbound and, without the hope of a lasting triumph of “loving cycles”, depicts these laws of Necessity as different degrees of the same process. Scott McEathron sees Shelley’s portrayal of elemental harmony in lines 116-34 of “A Vision of the Sea” as representative of an alternative definition of the natural world (and man’s place within it) to the violent universe of the tempest passages. In contrast, I view Shelley’s depiction of elemental harmony as merely a different aspect of the same natural processes at work in the tempest passages. McEathron claims that when Shelley has the elements of sea, sky, air and sun in harmonious “love”, he creates a seascape that is unlike his earlier portrayal of an indifferent mechanical universe underpinned by indifferent material laws and unlike the God

82 Carl Ketcham, “Shelley’s ‘A Vision of the Sea’”, Studies in Romanticism 17.1 (1978), pp. 51-9. 83 Elsie Mayer, “Notes on the Composition of ‘A Vision of the Sea’”, Keats-Shelley Journal 28 (1979), pp. 17- 20, pp. 17-18. “A Vision of the Sea” was published with Prometheus Unbound as part of Prometheus Unbound, with Other Poems by Charles Ollier 1820. Mayer places “A Vision’s” “genesis” at Livorno in 1819, where Shelley and Mary went in deep mourning after the death of William in Rome. The poem exists in fragments in The Huntington Notebook, Shelley’s letters and in Mary’s Note on the Cenci. The fair copy (in Shelley’s hand) that most critical editions are based on is in the Harvard notebook, dated 1820, Pisa (p. 17). The Huntington notebook is useful in a study of the poem because, as Mayer points out this is where “the ideas and structure of the poem took shape” and because it contains an essentially whole draft of over 21 pages and is given its title (rare for Shelley with fragments). The notebook reveals that “Shelley had perceived the poem as a whole before 1820” (p. 18). Mayer also observes that Shelley adds the “Whilst-” that the poem finishes with in the fair copy (after the Huntington draft), which she reads as Shelley’s deliberate wish to make the poem and its themes fragmentary and unresolved. 84 McEathron, “Death as ’Refuge and Ruin’”, p. 174. Deep Wide Sea 242

o r infused and powered seascape of Coleridge’s “Rime.” Another way to view Shelley’s dichotomous portrayal of the seascape in “A Vision of the Sea” is to apply the terms I have employed throughout this chapter and to consider the seascape in “A Vision of the Sea” as demonstrative of both the cataclysmic and utopian manifestations of Shelley’s material principle, Necessity.

From the very opening scene that conjures “the terror of the tempest”, the ocean imagery is a mix of “wind-cloven wave” and “depths of dread calm”. Opposing aural and visual images spring from one another: the “earthquake of sound” from spinning “water­ spouts” compels the “waves and the thunders” to become “silent”. The ocean is both “the

oz: living sea” and the “destruction” and “death flames” that the ship must “suck” (Lines 1-31). Death comes from “pestilence” in the midst of calm on “the windless expanse of the watery plain”, as it comes from the “thunder” of the violent “tempest”. Death also feeds the life of the “sharks and the dog-fish” as the life of the pestilence feeds the death of the crew (Lines 46-57). The “clouds on the verge of the world” are said to “surround and sustain/The dome of the tempest”, but the tempest itself “rent them” and they disperse as does the storm (Lines 107-110). In fact, elements of chaos, “wind”, harmony and “light”, “interpenetrate” (Lines 116-20). If (as McEathron argues) at this moment the elements are sexualised, the “fierce winds” being “lulled” amid intimations of love-making in the image of “the long glassy heave of the rocking sea”, they also remain violent and combative since Shelley assembles images of “armies of light” and declares the “caverns of cloud are torn-up by the day” (my emphasis, Lines 119-125).

Brutality occurs in the “wide world of waters” even after the sea’s greater harmony is likened to the “passions made still by the presence of love” (Lines 130-5). The “foam and the smoke” of the “ghastly affray” between one of the twin tigers and a sea-snake creates beautiful “sun bows” even as it simultaneously creates horrible visions of imminent death—“the rattle of solid bones crush’d” and “the hot blood that spouts and rains” (Lines 137-142). The violent conflict between creature and creature also effects aural opposites: “The thin winds and soft waves” become “thunder”, while at once “the screams and hissings crawl” and are associated with the low tickling sound of “a centipede” (Lines 146—8).

85 McEathron, “Death as ‘Refuge and Ruin’”, p. 174.

86 Specifically lines: 1,9, 5, 10-11, 14, 16,32,31. 87 McEathron, “Death as ‘Refuge and Ruin’”, p. 184. Deep Wide Sea 243

Adding to this universe of co-existing and intermeshed opposites, the very same elements of the seascape (the winds, ocean, cloud, light and heat) author chaotic destruction and harmonious renewal. Brightness and heat are double-edged sources of life and death. In “A Vision”, light is associated with the deadly “lightning [that] is loose” and “the radiance of fear” (Lines 4,73). Nevertheless, images of light are also life-giving, as in the “beams of sunrise”, and the “golden, and crystalline,/Banded armies of light” linked with the “presence of love” (Lines 117-119, 130). Heat is this healing sunshine as it is also the destroying “death flames” of the surf (Line 19).

The guiding principle behind the sea tempest in “A Vision of the Sea”, its mix of “sound” and silence, “wind cloven wave” and “depths of dread calm” is a natural phenomenon Shelley variously refers to as a “tempest”, “storm” and “hurricane” where violence and calm co-exist interdependently (Lines 9-10, 14-16, 1, 12, 100). In the existing final lines of the poem Shelley writes “Death, Fear, Love, Beauty, are mixed in the atmosphere” (Lines 161-2). But throughout “A Vision”, Shelley details a seascape in which these dichotomies of violent destruction and calm harmony (and the qualities Shelley associates with them, terror, death, chaos and beauty, life, renewal) also coexist. In both the lines describing the sea storm and the lines describing what McEathron calls “sentient, idealized nature”,88 natural processes defined by this simultaneous mix of violence and calm, terror and beauty are the leitmotif of Shelley’s poem. The result is the depiction of a natural world, and human embeddedness in that world, where violent destruction and harmonious calm are reciprocal components of the one universe; not as McEathron would have it, the differing components of Shelley’s two different depictions of the universe and man’s place within it.

Shelley’s “terror of the tempest” allusively draws on the biblical deluge, the Virgilian storm, and Coleridge’s God-infused seascape of “The Rime”. Yet as McEathron observes, “A Vision of the Sea” rewrites the God-inflected seascape of Coleridge’s Rime. Shelley’s tempest is given no divine reason or control and no “moral” purpose beyond the presentation of life springing from death and decay and joy existing at the same time as fear.89 Nevertheless, McEathron also argues that the tempest passages reflect a mechanical universe

88 McEathron, “Death as ‘Refuge and Ruin’”, p. 184. 89 Shelley, Huntington Notebooks: Fascimiles of the Huntington MS. HM 2177 (vol. 4 Fascimiles), ed., Mary A. Quinn (London: Garland Publishing, 1990). 3 Pocket size notebooks [“A Vision” drafts concentrated in Notebook 2). Deep Wide Sea 244 which the calm passages do not, and he assumes that within Shelley’s depiction of a mechanised universe life is devoid of significance.90 This is mistaken, since the hope for life embedded in the luminous light and loving calm of regenerative elemental harmony in “A Vision” is also implied in the continued lives of the dogfish, sea snake and shark in the tempest-conflict passages as a result of the deaths of the crew, as well as the potential deaths of both tigers and the woman and her child. Nor is it the case that the elemental calm has some resonance with humanity that the violent storm does not. In this poem, Shelley personifies the elements of the sea tempest as well as the elements of sea calm, and throughout his poetry, links elemental violence to the human capacity for violence just as he links elemental harmony to the human capacity for love. In Shelley’s portrayal of the sea storm of "‘A Vision”, the universe is no more indifferent to man because it has violent natural processes than it is loving because it is calm.

The brief communities of the living emerge as the most hopeful of sea visions in this poem. These communities are represented by the mother and her child and by the twin tigers clinging to the wreckage. There is also a community suggested through the teeming dogfish waiting for nourishment and those marine animals in a deadly struggle for it, and there is another potential community implied through the child’s camaraderie with the tigers and the ocean. Shelley makes the sufferings of the woman and child analogous to that of the tigers, and the child responds to the sea and the tigers as friends, signalling a community of living beings. The dogfish, sea snake and shark are also a community; they are part of the “living sea” (Line 32). Shelley develops sympathy for the suffering of the tigers and the fair woman by emphasising the physicality of fear and loss for both.91 Shelley describes the tiger’s hair, limbs and eyes (“The tigers leap up when they feel the slow brine/Crawling inch by inch on them, hair, ears, limbs, and eyne,” Lines 92-3) as he has the adoring mother mourn the potential loss of her child’s hair, sweet hands and eyes (“Not to touch those sweet hands? Not to look on those eyes,/Those lips, and that hair” Lines 86-7). The Huntington notebook reveals the process of Shelley’s humanisation of the tiger’s suffering: Shelley chooses to have

It is in the context of what he sees as the “sexualized conjoining of the elements” and “sentient, idealized nature” (Lines 116-34) that McEathron regards Shelley as doing what he often does in his poetry, that is “insisting on a fundamental resonance between humanity and the natural world”. The raging storm and battling tigers are what he views as examples of a more “mechanized” natural realm. The child smiles on the sea and on the tigers: a smiling that in its repetition and assignation of kinship implies an intimate relationship rather than infant incomprehension. Deep Wide Sea 245

him “cry” over “howl”,92 describes the tigers as brothers, and draws attention to the cruelty they have already experience in the hands of humans: “their chains in the hold” (Line 41).

In “A Vision of the Sea”, the child and also the loving interplay of violent and calm aspects of the same elements enact the “spell” Demogorgon refers to at the end of Prometheus Unbound. In Prometheus Unbound, systems of violence and tyranny are broken by the pervasive spread of love and resistance to the desire for revenge and feelings of hate. Throughout his poetry, Shelley questions and seeks to rid humanity of the instinctual violence that defines the killing of the second tiger by the nearby rowers.93 Shelley has the mother and her child react differently to the rowers: the first impulse of the mother is to protect her child, the first impulse of the child is to smile and play; the first impulse of the rowers is to kill (69- 73, 155). The shooting of the tigers is both unnecessary and to be expected: it is both different from the violent fray of tiger and snake with waiting shark and the same. Violence is a source of disruption for some of these communities and the source of coalescence for others. On the one hand, the violence of the storm is neutral or at least non-supematurally orchestrated while the violence of the rowers is an unnecessary malice. Alternatively, the violence of the rowers is to be expected and part of the cycle of life. Yet again, the depiction of the fair woman holding up her bright child is idealised and its result is the preservation of life and a form of precious community, whereas the violence of the rowers results in the dissolution of the community of the tigers. The violence of the rowers also destroys the potential for a community of tigers and humans intimated through the child’s earlier joyful reaction to the tigers; Shelley writes that the child “is beckoning the tigers to rise and come near” (Line 72). However, when the rowers shoot the remaining tiger, the other has already been in conflict with the sea serpent, a conflict depicted as a cycle of coupled fearful despair and necessary nourishment. So too, in “A Vision of the Sea”, the brother-tiger’s death at the hands of the rowers will give life to the waiting shark. Violence both dissolves and creates living communities. Shelley describes material cycles of life and death in his depiction of the sea in “A Vision”; his sea is not underpinned by the inherent supematuralism of Greco-

92 Huntington Notebook, Facsimile, ed., Quinn, p. 263. Interestingly Shelley removes from the fair copy what might in the Huntington draft make the tigers more ‘Other’ to the child: in the Hungtington draft Shelley mentions “the ears, tail” and “eyeballs” in the draft become “eyne” in the fair copy. 93 Line 155. The first thing the marksmen do is kill the tiger and there is no suggestion that the rowers help the woman and her child or even that rescue is their intent. Shelley makes no reference to the rowers killing the tiger out of fear for the woman and child. Deep Wide Sea 246

Roman works and the Bible, neither the swarming deities and monsters of the former, nor the omnipotent deity of the latter.

In the Huntington version of the poem, uncertainty surrounds whether the ocean is the grave of the ship and its crew or whether the ocean and the child are the living flowers growing amidst decay. In an early draft of the poem in the second Huntington notebook, Shelley crosses out lines which would have implied the ocean is made a tomb by the tempest.94 Also on this page of the notebook appear lines which do not make it into Shelley’s fair copy of the poem:

Like a grave where sweet lilies & violets grow- The child & the ocean still smile on each other.9:>

On the same page, erupting in the midst of these lines, Shelley draws an island-like shape with a tree. The drawing may be an unrelated doodle, but existing as it does on the page with these lines, its visual semantics fuse with that of the poem fragments. Shelley has already linked human life and death to natural regeneration and decay: disease runs through the crew members as “blight through the ears of a thick field of com” (51) and human body parts are thrown into the sea and become God’s “manna rain’d down” to marine creatures (57). These final lines recapitulate the symbiosis between decay and renewal, asserting that renewal comes from wreckage and refuge can be found in ruin. Appropriately then, a mound of earth with a frenetically jutting trunk and skewed star-leaves rises in the midst of verses on fragile living beings hovering over a death that is also life.

In “A Vision” Shelley leaves unresolved the paradoxes embedded in the line “Death, Fear, Love, Beauty, are mixed in the atmosphere”. The poem is cut off with the woman attempting to keep her child alive propped up in the sea amid the apparently ever-present cycles of death and life, decay and renewal, and the child and sea are established both as sentient and intimately related:

94 Huntington Notebook, Fascimile, Quinn ed., p. 367, transcription line 6. 95 Huntington Notebook, Fascimile, Quinn ed., p. 367, transcription lines 11-12. Deep Wide Sea 247

Her child Is yet smiling, and playing and murmuring: so smiled, The false deep ere the storm. Like a sister and brother The child and the ocean still smile on each other, Whilst- (Lines 165-9)

The final extant lines equate the child’s happiness and playfulness with the treacherous and “false” smiles of the sea before the storm. The child then, like the sea, has two moods or two capacities, and like the ocean its calm will be betrayed by its storms.

The awareness of cyclical processes which seem eternal—the cycles of calm and storm, gentleness and violence, life and death, and renewal and destruction—afflict Shelley’s idealist utopias with anxiety. Shelley’s awareness of the interdependent and potentially endless nature of these cycles shapes his portrayal of the sea. This awareness underlies the suggestion in “Lines” that the traveller on the ocean of life must have those moments of respite and reflection upon a flowered isle, but must also return to the sea, and even, that without a return to the sea those moments upon the isle would be less beautiful and less full of knowledge. Furthermore, this awareness underlies Shelley’s division of the category of sublime change into two parts: the thrill of violent revolutionary change and the enthralling serenity he associates with the more gradual changes of the planets and the stars. The former is needed and desired as the catalyst for the latter, yet the latter is, in Shelley’s view, an emblem of perfection and more desired, and also the most impossible. To employ the language of “Ode to the West Wind”, “if winter comes can spring be far behind?” Nonetheless, if spring comes, can winter be far behind and is not winter necessary for the regenerative life-flowering of spring to be possible?

When Shelley placed his boats and bottles in the water, the river and the sea became literal conduits for revolutionary messages. The ocean is regularly a metaphorical embodiment and a literal illustration of the forces driving individual and socio-political upheaval in Shelley’s poetry. The ocean is also a favoured place where the knowledge of the revolutionary fate and future of the world is revealed; knowledge which Shelley (with varying degrees of certainty) believed could and would ultimately transform both the geophysical and socio-political reality of the earth. As metaphorical embodiments of individual and social upheaval and the sites of revelation, Shelley’s seascapes repeat clusters of images and themes visible in Homer, Virgil and the King James Bible. The trials of the Deep Wide Sea 248 deadly, rising dark waves, rocks and boats of the Aeneid recur in Shelley’s seas as figures for the exhilarating and exhausting sufferings of human existence. Like Menelaus and Jesus’ disciples, many of Shelley’s poetic speakers seek and are granted prophetic or special knowledge by the sea in an image assembly of supplicant, sea vista and the dramatic (often symbolic) presentation of truth.

Even though Shelley’s depiction of the sea departs from that of the other poets considered in this thesis primarily because his allusions to Greco-Roman works and the Bible, and his deployment of these and other sea related image and theme clusters, seek to demystify, reformulate and ultimately eradicate appeals to a supernatural, non-corporeal deity and traditional Christian notions of immortality. Shelley reformulates the oceanic iconography of Radcliffe, Wordsworth and Coleridge which, with all their subtleties and differences, share the desire, not simply to infuse their seascapes with supernatural mystery, but to make nature an emissary or a reflection of God or numinous powers. As discussed in previous chapters, Radcliffe’s “sprightly” nymphs (with their ethereal voices and airy dances on the sand) disappear after their evening magic rites, inflecting the seascape with supernatural mystery; allusions to an immaterial pre-existence impregnate the “mighty waters” rolling in Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, and it is a recognition of God’s lighted presence on the ocean which saves the Mariner in Coleridge’s Rime. These poets created seascapes pregnant with eternal, immaterial magic. Shelley’s sublime ocean is predicated on materialism and atheism, what the “earth, and stars, and sea” might be if they were not thought to be creations or reflections of supernatural deities, if the “Large codes of fraud and woe”, religion and political tyranny, could be “repealed]” (“Mont Blanc”, lines 142-4, 80-1). Shelley’s sea is essentially that liquid “mirror”—the materialist magician’s seeing stone (Queen Mab 2. 225).

When Wordsworth, in “Elegiac Stanzas” deploys the waves of the ocean as metaphors of the sufferings that lash humanity, he uses a material phenomenon to image the sufferings of what he conceives as the immaterial and immortal human soul; he employs, as Corbin observed more broadly of the Romantics, “the mirages of what Ruskin was to call the pathetic fallacy”.96 When the other writers discussed in this thesis contemplate the divide between the body and the soul, they situate the former with mortality and the latter with the immortal in accord with the laws of an imagined supernatural deity. In his poetry and prose

96 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 164. Deep Wide Sea 249

Shelley refutes the idea of such a Deity; he invokes the law of Necessity, an entirely material principle, as the driving force of the universe. Given the material force Necessity is the power that drives all, the divide that is driven open between the human being and the rest of the natural world implied by the pathetic fallacy becomes substantially reduced in Shelley’s poetry, and the relationship between the human and the natural world ceases to be so strictly metaphorical. If the body and mind of man die, if the mind of man fragments into “its elements”97 and these elements are not diminished as fragments but become the “atomjs] of yon earth” (Mab 2.211), and if all the atoms of the earth were once living men, then Shelley imagines a relationship between humanity and the natural world which is not imagined by any of the other writers I have dealt with in this thesis. Moreover, if the drops of rain in the clouds created from the evaporation of the sea have all “flowed in human veins” (Mab 2.215) and rain falls on the sea, then when as Corbin notes—“the sea-shore offered a stage on which, more than anywhere else, the actual spectacle of the confrontation between air, water, and land contributed to fostering daydreams about merging with the elemental forces”—this is literally the case (and not a daydream) for Shelley.98

Nonetheless, as part of Shelley’s establishment of the material foundation of natural grandeur and human affairs he invokes theories of benevolent progressive change and gives man a pre-eminent position in the universe. Certainly, in Queen Mab, what Shelley presents as geophysical improvement impels what he sees as human individual and socio-political improvement, but in “Lines” and Prometheus Unbound, human improvement underpins improvements in the geophysical environment. For Shelley, theorists like Reid and Alison glorify ignorance and accept the political status quo as a result, but Shelley’s emphasis on the human capacity to improve humanity and the world around by gaining enough knowledge of natural processes (and controlling the earth through this knowledge) might constitute another form of ignorant deification. Necessity is depicted by Shelley as an indifferent force and he uses the idea of its neutrality repeatedly to berate human arrogance—expressed most eloquently in Queen Mab, “How strange is human pride!” (Mab 2. 225); yet even though it is presented as neutral, Necessity somehow impels all towards improvement. In the emphasis on improvement and the notion of making creation “good”, Shelley’s principle of Necessity recalls the God of the Bible, though it lacks the quality of immaterial transcendence.

97 Shelley, “On a Future State”, p. 205. 98 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 164. Deep Wide Sea 250

Shelley’s utopian earth is speckled with flowering sea islands; it is a world where human beings, other animal species and earthly elements live in harmony together, but Shelley depicts this harmony as one where a perfected humanity is at the centre, controlling all. Here, Shelley undermines his conception of an indifferent, inhuman principle of Necessity and ignores the very lessons inherent to his materialist version of the natural sublime that he wished to teach others; that is, the beauty, life and joy of the earth and the universe (and man who is inalienably part of it) is bound up in eternal cycles of birth, deadly violent destruction and varying material forms of rebirth. These contradictions in Shelley’s work, most exposed through his visions of utopian seas, are telling because they bind him to the other writers in this thesis even as they separate him. Chapter 8: ‘The destroying angel of tempestthe Sea of Charlotte Bronte.

Figure 4. John Martin, The Evening of the Deluge, mezzotint and engraving (1828).

John Martin’s visual artistry was a favourite in the Bronte household.1 Charlotte Bronte saw Martin’s The Evening of the Deluge (1828) every day that she passed the parsonage walls, its whorls of chaotic water rising blackly in a seeming elliptical oceanic temple of storm, its tiny, fragile human figures suffering prostrate on a dwarfed stone jutting into the apocalyptic, lightning-lit abyss with arms raised in desperate supplication. In an article published in 1995, “‘The Burning Clime’: Charlotte Bronte and John Martin”, Christine Alexander analyses the significant influence this popular, “everywhere talked of and criticized”, Romantic artist had on Bronte. Alexander’s essay explores Martin’s appeal for Bronte, with its basis in the

Christine Alexander, ‘“The Burning Clime’: Charlotte Bronte and John Martin”, Nineteenth Century Literature 50.3 (1995), 285-321, 286; Michael J. Campbell, John Martin: Visionary’ Printmaker, London: Campbell Fine Art in Association with New York City Art Gallery, 1992. 2 ~ Review of Lives of the most eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. By Allan Cunningham 3 vols., London (1829), Edinburgh Review 49.98 (June, 1829), pp. 459-472, p. 460. Martin was on the fringe of the art establishment. Tempests of Destruction 252

depiction of the extremes of heaven and hell and landscapes full of lurid colour, extremes delineated literally in Martin’s biblical engravings and metaphorically through his renderings of the excesses of human passion which both attracted and repelled Bronte. These excesses

touched on something inside her, that “divine, silent, unseen land of thought”*3 * she simultaneously longed for, relished, and feared. Extending Alexander’s work, I show how

Martin’s renderings of the “infernal deeps”4 and raging mountains of seas of punishment and suffering influence the sea imagery Bronte uses to reflect her heroines extremes of passionate love, fury and creative desire.

Biblical allusions infuse the sea images of Martin and Bronte. As already seen, the biblical sea is a purifier and a punisher; it is God’s tool to control in mercy or release in wrath. Greco-Roman echoes are also evident in Bronte’s identification of the sea with both the beauty and repulsiveness of violent feminine emotions and creative desires. In Bronte’s fiction, the dichotomies of the feminine supernatural manifest in the simultaneous allure and hideousness of female creativity and passion. Nevertheless, the Christian ethos at the heart of Bronte’s narratives make the biblical sea and its Martinesque lens the more significant influence. Martin’s influence on Bronte was habitual, imagistic and ideological. The everyday spectacle of The Deluge on a Haworth wall, and Bronte’s exposure to Martin’s artistry in general (much of his work was based on biblical subjects), mediated Bronte’s interpretation of the sea imagery of the Bible, drawing it into the paradoxes of the excesses of passion and imagination and their restraint. She saw his artistry as the embodiment of passionate extremes in style and subject, extremes her writing retained despite her partial rejection of them—a rejection that paradoxically reflected Martin’s methods.

Martin’s influence was not eradicated in Bronte’s work once she rejected her early fantasy worlds. As Alexander notes, Martin’s portrayal of the spectacles of human excesses and struggles contained its own cure due to its continual focus on the insignificance of humanity in the face of natural grandeur and God’s power. Bronte came to associate John

Martin’s lurid imagery with “sexual luxury” and “melodramatic excesses”,5 and even the

Charlotte Bronte, “1 am just going to write because I cannot help it”, c. Oct 1836. Christine Alexander, “Charlotte Bronte at Roe Head: Introduction to Bronte’s Juvenilia”, in Jane Eyre: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, 3rd edn, ed., Richard J. Dunn (New York: Norton, 2001), pp. 407-408, p. 407. [The complete text of the Roe Head Journal is in Alexander’s section], 4 Review of Lives of the most eminent British Painters, p. 466. 5 Alexander, ‘“Burning Clime’”, p. 313. Tempests of Destruction 253

hellish “infernal world”.6 Her ostensible rejection of Martin’s artistic style is mirrored in her rejection of her own fantasy worlds which had become as torturous as they were bewitching. But Martin’s effect on Bronte was not so simple, as Alexander observes, for as he inspired her own extravagant fancies, his work also “can be seen as reinforcing Bronte’s sense of

guilt”.7 *Martin’s vision of the world retained traces of a puritanical upbringing even as his freer thinking adulthood rejected much of its fundamentalism in favour of a more liberal deistic theology. In Martin’s art, human entities are frail and awed or intimidated by the dominating forces of nature within whose grandeur they are set, or against which they are

o supplicants and futile strugglers.

For these reasons I have chosen to analyse Bronte’s biblically allusive oceanic visions as they engage with those of Martin. Her work retains traces of his drama, and it also retains the imagery and themes of the tiny human struggling against a hostile world and the force of personal desire.9 This is a painful Martin trace for Bronte to retain because it speaks to her own experience of the world, as she regularly described it: the experience of an unattractive woman with little money, forced to teach rather silly girls with little chance of securing the love of a man whom she could love, a woman who still had dreams and was filled with creative energy and the desire to fulfil her artistic visions amid a world in which she perceived herself (and was) largely invisible, and in which many of her efforts at writing and

6 “All this day 1 have been in a dream” Oct 14, 1836. Alexander “Charlotte Bronte at Roe Head”, in Jane Eyre: Authoritative Text, 3rd edn. ed., Dunn, pp. 403-6, p. 403. 7 Alexander, “‘Burning Clime’”, p. 315. g Mary Pendered, John Martin, Painter: His life and Times (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1923). Pendered remarks that Martin (pp. 232-3) “had been trained to fear hell-fire like his ancestors” but that “before he arrived at middle years” he “had ‘faced the spectres of his mind’ and triumphed over them”. I do not dispute this, Martin (pp. 136-7) was a “free-thinking” man for his day; his Deluge painting reflects his belief that it occurred due to “the consequence of sun, moon and comet in conjunction” but he also retained a belief in “an Omnipotent Power” and saw no divide between this and science which proved earth older than described in the Bible. In his brochure explaining the three pictures of which the Deluge is one, Martin writes: “In the distance is the Ark illumined amidst the general gloom by the last beams of the sun and protected by the Omnipotent from the fury of the elements raging both above and below”. If Martin (p. 231) “entirely disbelieves that anything not good, merciful, or great can come from such a source” [i.e., God], as his friend Ralph Thomas remarked [recorded by Pendered] then the waters of the Flood must be one or all of those three things. 9 Alexander, ‘“Burning Clime’”, p. 317. Tempests of Destruction 254 relationships were rejected.10 Recording her experience as a teacher at Roe Head, Bronte remarks:

am I to spend the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness and apathy and the hyperbolical & most asinine stupidity of these fat headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience & assiduity?*11

Bronte may have tried to keep back the flood of the excesses of imagination, sexual desire, and the underside of human nature, with its potential for violence, rage and madness, which she saw embodied in Martin’s paintings. Still, what Alexander refers to as the “Martinesque” is present. Alexander notes several examples which my discussion in this chapter analyses in detail: the drowned figure in Jane Eyre’s watercolours, episodes of emotional crisis, and the depicticn of the shipwreck at the end of Villette. I take up these examples, and other passages from her novels and poetry, in order to explore the confluences between sea imagery and the way Bnnte portrays disastrous events, the extremes of human experience and the emotional excesses of desire, all-consuming love, rage, isolation, and despair. I also include examples from the poetry of Anne and Emily Bronte in order to briefly explore the contrasts between Charlot:e Bronte’s portrayal of the sea and that of her sisters.

As metaphors for buried female passions and the potential liberation of the self, the sea scenes in Bronte’s writing disturb mid-nineteenth-century social conceptions of acceptable and ideal femininity, as they also disturb the conceptions of acceptable and ideal femininity held by her heroines and, given the evidence of her art, letters and journal fragmer.ts, Bronte’s own conceptions of ideal female selfhood. This is because Bronte’s sea images reveal emotional extremes and longings for passion and mental respect and understanding in unattractive and poor women, and because in imagining sea extremes such women reveal their creative desires and abilities as well as their imagination freed from

“duty”. 2 Bronte’s imaginative creations, her “visitors” or the “spirits” from the “vasty deep”,

Alexander, “Burning Clime”, p. 317. Christine Alexander describes “the reality of her position” as “the position of the penniless single woman struggling to realize an artistic dream in the face of a hostile reality”. 11 “All this day I have been in a dream” Oct 14, 1836. Alexander “Charlotte Bronte at Roe Head”, in Jane Eyre: Authoritative Text, 3rd edn. ed., Dunn, pp. 403-6, pp. 403-4. 12 Mary Taylor to Mrs Gaskell 18 January 1856, in Mrs Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857 repr. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1974), p. 92. Gaskell is quoting from a letter MaryTaylor wrote to her about Tempests of Destruction 255 enthral her but also fill her with shame and fear.13 She is “ecstatic” when the “ongoings of the infernal world” of her imagination are clear to her;14 yet, as she remarks in an often quoted letter to Ellen Nussy, if her inner “thoughts” and imaginative “dreams” (in this case of her

Angrian world) were known, “you would pity and I daresay despise me”.15 Bronte’s characterisation of Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe have biographical precedents, and I observe biographical correlations in my discussion, not to confuse an author with her characters but to point to the deep-seated significance of the recurring sea images and ideological clusters I analyse. Bronte uses the sea to signify the subjugated desires, imaginative power, violent fantasies and repressed fury of her heroines.

As a hybrid of fantasy and nightmare, Bronte’s sea of female passion and imagination is another incarnation of the Homeric ocean. The dichotomies of the feminine supernatural manifest in the allure and hideousness Bronte ascribes to female creativity and passion (or emotion) through sea imagery. Female creativity and passion are the ultimate abstractions of the outrageous sea monsters, nymphs and goddesses of Homer and Hesiod. Bronte depicts the expression of true and extreme female emotion and creativity as beautiful and hideous, familiar and alien, and able to produce stability and chaos. The expression of true and extreme female emotion and creativity leads to fertility and barrenness, and passionate love and rage in relationships with others; it elicits wonder and terror, hope and despair from those who succeed (and fail) to comprehend these female emotions and creative acts, and from the heroines themselves. In Bronte’s fiction, Christian faith resolves the dichotomies of wonder and terror, hope and despair that result from the expression of true and extreme female emotions and creative acts. To allow female emotion and creativity an unbounded existence, Bronte’s work suggests, is to sin, enter the chaos and destruction of formlessness and death, and be in need of punishment, purification renewal, salvation and redemption. When Bronte uses the sea to portray the release and restraint of female emotion and creativity, her portrayal

their mutual friend, Charlotte Bronte. Mary Taylor is describing Bronte’s attitude to teaching: “She seemed to have no interest or pleasure beyond the feeling of duty”. 13 “My compliments to the weather” [undated], Alexander “Charlotte Bronte at Roe Head”, in Jane Eyre: Authoritative Text, 3rd edn. ed., Dunn, pp. 409-416, p. 409. 14 “All this day I have been in a dream” Oct 14, 1836. Alexander “Charlotte Bronte at Roe Head”, in Jane Eyre: Authoritative Text, 3rd edn. ed., Dunn, pp. 403-406, p. 403. 13 Charlotte Bronte to Ellen Nussey 10 May 1836, The Letters of Charlotte Bronte.with a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, 1829-1847, vol 1., ed., Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 143- 4, p. 144. Tempests of Destruction 256 of the sea also recalls the dichotomies of Roman masculine virtue. As in the Aeueid, her heroine’s must release extreme emotions like rage and irrationality but they also need to contain them as part of the establishment of their superior status.

Bronte also uses the Greco-Roman tradition of heroic suffering to define the worth of her heroines but this heroic suffering is predominantly construed in terms of Christian sacrifice and is underpinned by a Christian worldview. Like Wordsworth, Bronte portrays the battle of the individual with many of the dichotomies of the heroic sea journey. She depicts her heroine’s battles with identity and erasure, life and death, home and exile; community and isolation, trust and betrayal. These dichotomies overwhelm her speakers with grief and the pain and despair of existential incomprehension. As noted throughout this thesis, in the Odyssey and the Aeneid, supernatural aid and birth allow the hero to extricate themselves from the latter side of each pair for the most part. In Bronte’s work the dichotomies of the heroic sea journey are resolved by the transformative power of Christian faith and become instead the dichotomies of God’s control over the waters. Identity and erasure, life and death, home and exile, community and isolation, trust and betrayal are interpreted within the matrixes of form and formlessness, redemption and sin, purification and punishment and salvation and damnation, changelessness and change. Within Bronte’s fiction, belief in God’s control over these dichotomies grants meaning and order to individual existence. Identity, life and home, community, trust and infinity are extricated from erasure, death, exile, isolation, betrayal and limitation in her work because the Bible and Christian faith explains form out of formlessness, and provides a moral guidelines to redemption, purification and salvation. However, in Villette, Bronte depicts the erasure of self, the death of the loved, exile, isolation, betrayal and the limitation that results from intellectual and emotional stifling as the necessary suffering condition of her heroine. In the novel, the suffering state of Lucy Snowe (and the sacrifice Bronte makes of this heroine’s hope for a passionate relationship, community, trust and emotional and intellectual freedom) makes her ultimately worthy of salvation.

The dominant morality infusing Bronte’s sea imagery is Puritan Christianity similar to that of Martin’s works involving the sea.16 Bronte depicts the extreme emotional and ideological dichotomies embodied by the feminine supernatural in the Greco-Roman tradition as her heroines’ battles with their own emotional and creative extremes. In these battles

16 Alexander, “Burning Clime, pp. 315-6. Tempests of Destruction 257

Bronte’s heroines are portrayed as suffering, defeated supplicants and their emotional and ideological dichotomies are resolved by the concept of a Christian God with Puritan overtones. The dominance of Christian Puritanism in Bronte’s portrayal of the sea makes her sea of female passion and imagination a manifestation of the punitive biblical ocean, that emblem of chaos controlled (and in need of control) by a righteous divine power and extreme tool with which to purify sin, because Bronte’s heroines also display the dangers of emotional intensity and imaginative excess. In both Villette and Jane Eyre Bronte presents the reader with characters forced to step back from the brink of these extremes; both Lucy and Jane are rewarded for their emotional restraint. The sea emerges in these novels as an emblem for the emotional surges felt by the ordinary, plain woman—emotional surges whose wild rages of love, sexual desire, bitterness, anger and grief are all the more extreme for being felt by women whom society asserts have no right to feel them.

Oceanic Vistas of Female Subjectivity

Ellen Nussey remarks that when Bronte took her first view of the sea in 1839, it “quite overpowered her’’ and Bronte “could not speak till she had shed some tears”. Bronte was twenty-three years old by the time she stood on a Bridlington cliff to face the sea, but she had

1 o already interiorised “how dark the waves flow”. In a journal fragment from Bronte’s teaching years at Roe Head the sea is thought. The wonders and terrors of exploring the mind become embodied in the oceanic quest of the diver “sinking] through the surge”:

Look into thought & say what dost thou see Dive, be not fearful how dark the waves flow Sink through the surge & bring pearls up to me Deeper ay deeper, the fairest lie low

I have dived I have sought them, but none have I found In the gloom that closed over me no

flowed by As I sunk through the void depths so black & profound

Ellen Nussey, “Reminiscences of Charlotte Bronte by a Schoolfellow” in Letters of Charlotte Bronte, vol 1 ed., Smith, Appendix, p. 606. The Poems of Charlotte Bronte: A New Text and Commentary, ed., Victor A. Neufeldt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), dated as Oct, 1836, numbered as poem 117, p. 209. Tempests of Destruction 258

How dim died the sun & how far hung the sky

What had I given to hear the soft sweep Of a breeze bearing life through that vast realm of death Thoughts wear untroubled & dreams were asleep The spirit lay dreadless & hopeless beneath.

As equated with the seas depths, the mind’s depths in this poem are made analogous to the “dark”, the “black”, the “gloom” and even to a “vast realm of death”. Thought is terrifying in its gaping extremes of potential shining pearls and reality’s “void”.19 With its forceful calls to action, the first stanza exclaims against the fear of a submersion deep into thought’s realm through the use of the verbs “look”, “dive” and “sink”. The suggestive “pearls” result from energetic, even exhausting but exhilarating excavation; they seem the fruits of bravely pursuing dreams. However, the second stanza intimates the futility of such action, the suffering which is linked to the longing for thought’s riches, and even in the final lines of the last stanza, for the suspension of the agony of desire associated with dreams. More ambiguously, the “spirit” which seems to have returned empty in the second stanza is “dreadless”, which should be promising in its links with the fearlessness required to plumb the abyss of the mind, and “hopeless”, which seems its antithesis or at least a contrarily impotent companion. In part, Bronte’s poem simply and even childishly states the problem of coming up with good ideas, yet it also suggests the painfulness of contrary desires. Charlotte’s poem sets up the following oppositions: the desire for an active, challenging engagement with one’s own consciousness and the frustrations of failing creatively versus the opposing need to achieve a mental peace based on not needing or wanting to create or to know the self, a peace based around contentedness with sleeping dreams (passivity, inactivity, resignation to an unchallenging mental state). To be content with sleeping dreams

19 “Well here I am at Roe Head”, 4 February, 1836. Alexander “Charlotte Bronte at Roe Head”, in Jane Eyre: Authoritative Text, 3rd edn. ed., Dunn, pp. 399-401, p. 399. In this journal fragment from Bronte’s Roe Head teaching days, she writes of the brief time when she could rest and have mental space after her long hard day: “I now, after a day of weary wandering, return to the ark which for me floats alone on the billows of this world’s desolate and boundless deluge”. As a contrast to the sea’s depths as containing thought’s private gems, Bronte elsewhere in this journal links the vast ocean with her teaching duties, the duty of thinking about and thinking for others whereas an “ark” that “floats” her over this vast ocean of duty is a space of private thought. Tempests of Destruction 259 would allow the inner world to model the “frail, modest figure, the epitome of sobriety”70'' the English public demanded of poor, plain women—the modest figure which masked the glory but also the pain of the imagination released, a pain which emerges in Bronte’s attitude to her own writing and in her heroines’ experiences of their emotions.

Where sea depths are the inner realms of the mind in the above poem by Charlotte Bronte, a tempestuous sea is made into a metaphor of subjective freedom by Anne Bronte in “Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day”.21 In this poem, the awakening of the soul is linked to the “rapture” of the “earth and the seas”. The poetic speaker imagines her “spirit” caught by the “wind”, and a correspondence is established between what the wind does and emotional activity: its roaring, its turbulent effect on the branches of trees, leaves, clouds and the ocean is linked to fierce emotional energy: the “soaring of my spirit”. The speaker declares a longing to have sight of the sea swept to drama by the wind, and through her depiction of the violent movements of the elements, Anne brings to imagistic life the surge of intangible feelings:

I wish I could see how the ocean is lashing

The foam of its billows to whirlwinds of spray;

1 wish I could see how its proud waves are dashing,

And hear the wild roar of the thunder to-day! 77

From 1840-45 Anne spent summers with the Robinson family at Scarborough and she developed a love of the sea. In her biography of Anne Bronte, Winifred Gerin notes Anne “loved the sea best when it was at its wildest”.23 During her final illness she longed to be near the sea, insistently pressing her case to a reluctant Charlotte, who eventually took her to

20 Gordon, Lyndall, Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), p. 4. 21 Anne Bronte, “Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day”, Agnes Grey and Poems, ed., Anne Smith (Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1991). 22 Anne Bronte, “Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day”, in Agnes Grey and Poems, ed., Smith, p. 170, Stanza 3, Lines 9-12. >3 Winnifred Gerin, Anne Bronte (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1959), p. 163. Gerin reprints “Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day” (p. 163). Tempests of Destruction 260

Scarborough to die there. She is buried in the graveyard there overlooking the sea.24 In Agnes Grey, the sea environment recurs as a place where the senses are elated to such a pitch that words fail. In chapter 24, Agnes notes that “no language can describe the effect of the deep, clear azure of the sky and the ocean . . . above all the brilliant sparkling waves”. Agnes’ “footsteps” are “the first to press the firm unbroken sands”,26 and here she echoes the delights of personal freedom and independence. She is not lonely on the beach but glad that hers are the only footsteps, just as in the previous poem she is glad to be alone, carried by the wind. Like the other writers in this thesis, Anne Bronte establishes a link between the rapture of the individual soul (described through sea imagery) or the vision of the solitary person on the shore and an intense access to the inner self, some kind of privileged wisdom or deep universal truth. Resonant with the portrayals of Radcliffe, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s contemplative souls (and Shelley but without a divine element), the individual capable of this (what might be called) special knowledge or depth of passion represents a morally superior human ideal. As in the Bible and Greco-Roman works discussed earlier, the ocean plays a special role, usually as trial or judge, in the acquirement of wisdom, moral purity, heroic status and divine sanction.

By way of contrast to Anne’s correlation of the freed inner self and oceanic vistas, in Emily’s poetry the sea recurs as an image of the agonies of mortal, material life. Detailing an intense feeling of misery she writes,

Sleep brings no strength to me, No power renewed to be brave: I only sail a wilder sea, A darker wave.“77

24 Juliet Barker, The Brontes (London: Phoenix, 1985), p. 588, p. 594. 25 Anne Bronte, Agnes Grey, ed., Hilda Marsden and Robert Inglesfield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 196-7. 26 Anne Bronte, Agnes Grey, p. 197. 27 Emily Bronte, “A.G.A.”, in Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights and Poems, ed., Hugh Osborne, intro. Margaret Drabble (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), p. 298, Lines 13-16. Dated November 1837. This poem is also known as “Sleep brings not joy to me” in Janet Gezari, Last Things: Emily Bronte’s Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) p. 96. Tempests of Destruction 261

For Emily, as it is for Wordsworth in the Immortality Ode, the sea is associated with the imprisonment of the “home of clay” that is the human body and its subjugation to the vicissitudes of time and death. The unstoppable repetitive action of the waves of the sea mimes the ravaging effects of time, a metaphor popular in Shelley’s verse as seen in the previous chapter, though unlike Shelley’s general use of this metaphor (which needs to be considered with respect to his notion of a future utopian earth), Emily’s poem highlights Time’s ability to separate people by death. Time’s effects are ruinous and wasting; time does not lead towards hopeful regeneration but the achievement of the cruel rupture of loving human relationships. In “R Alcona to J Brenzaida” (also known as “Remembrance”) written in 1845, she writes:

Have I forgot, my Only Love, to love thee, ? fi Severed at last by Time’s allwearing wave?

The sea is also linked to the finite trappings of the natural world in Emily’s verse, and in the long tradition of this device, expressed most potently perhaps in Genesis 1 (and discussed in chapters 3, 5 and 6 of this thesis), the sea and the rest of the material world, are dualistically set against the construct of an immortal non material spirit. In a poem of 1838, “I’m happiest when most away”, she writes of the joy of her soul when it can transcend “its home of clay”, when it can be released, a pure soul, resembling no aspect of the material earth:

Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky But only spirit wandering wide Through infinite immensity

Whereas the sea is a place of independence and liberation in Anne’s writing, Emily often makes the sea part of those earthly things that cloy at liberation and imprison the true, ethereal, spirit. However, the “inky sea” of Emily’s poem ‘“Enough of Thought,

28 Emily Bronte, “R Alcona to J Brenzaida”, in The Poems of Emily Bronte, ed., Barbara Lloyd-Evans (London: B. T. Batsford, 1992), p. 130, Lines 3-4. Numbered 36 from The Gondal MS. 29 Emily Bronte, “Pm happiest when most away”, in Gezari, Last Things, p. 75, Lines 6-8. Gezari reproduces the poem. Tempests of Destruction 262

Philosoplher”’(1845)3() is briefly transformed into a luminous space where three streams representing the dichotomous aspects of human subjectivity (read by Juliet Barker as “heart,

t i soul and mind“)' are resolved. This ocean receives a golden stream, one like blood and one like sapphire, streams which she intimates are three warring gods, emblems of the wars of human desires and sufferings—wars which make the speaker of the poem utter a “coward cry” for death. The “inky sea” or “ocean’s gloomy night” is transformed by the “dazzling gaze” of “:he spirit” thereby ceasing to embody the imperfections of mortal life: identity, hope for heaven, and fear of hell.

‘0 for the time when I shall sleep ‘Without identity— ‘And never care how rain may steep ‘Or snow may cover me! ‘No promised Heaven, these wild Desires ‘Could all or half fufil— ‘No threatened Hell—with quenchless fires ‘Subdue this quenchless will!’(Lines 7-14)

Under the “sudden blaze” of the “spirit”, the sea containing the three aspects of self is become “the glad deep” which “sparked wide and bright-white as the sun, far more fair/Than their divided sources were”. Though an isolated case in Emily’s verse, this is a particularly significant imagistic contrast to the dominant portrayal of the sea, in Charlotte Bronte’s writing because instead of the idea of passion out of control or the chaotic elements of self in need of control, the sea is momentarily a place of the luminous peaceful co-existence of all aspects of the self.

Emily Bronte, ‘“Enough of Thought, Philosopher”’, in The Poems of Emily Bronte, ed., Barbara Lloyd- Evans (London: B. T. Batsford, 1992), p. 57-8. This poem (no. 27) appears in one of the three notebooks into which Emily transcribed her poems, the ‘E. J. B. Transcribed February 1844’ (EJB notebook or EJB MS). Lloyd-Evans notes (p. 164) that these lines (7-14) are underlined in the manuscript. I reproduce the lines from her reproduction. 31 Juliet Barker, The Brontes: Selected Poems (London: J. M. Dent, 1984), p. 139. Tempests of Destruction 263

A Sea of Emotion in Jane Eyre and Villette.

Charlotte Bronte’s ocean images repeatedly generate an iconography, and are repeatedly inscribed with an ideology, echoing Martin’s biblically inspired ocean artistry. They feature, as does Martin’s work, violent storming seas or vast ocean expanses in synthesis with particular thematic clusters: the sins of passion and intellectual excess; the judgement, purging and punitive containment of sin and excess by a higher power; and notions of helpless supplication of the kind suggested by Martin’s many renderings of desperate arms outstretched in the midst of oceanic chaos.

The sea repeatedly acts as an emblem for passion out of control in Bronte’s writing. It can represent the intoxicating power of unrestrained emotion and imagination and the sinister side of subjectivity let loose and, for Bronte at least, such extreme oceans of feeling must be contained because they are in the end isolating and potentially destructive. In Jane Eyre and Villette, ocean images bearing the imprint of John Martin’s tempestuous, biblically inspired sea visions are deployed to figure the excesses of desire, despair, and madness as well as the Christian bulwarks Bronte builds against these excesses. " Her seascapes are places of extreme isolation, suggesting the bliss of the self set free as well as loss, death and despair. To a lesser extent, because of the overwhelmingly Christian ethos of her work, Bronte’s ocean images are also similar to the classical works I discussed in my earlier chapters. Oceanic torrents of passion and imagination have a siren-like quality in Charlotte Bronte’s work: they are beguiling and seemingly irresistible. Nevertheless, their restraint replicates God’s control over the sea in the Bible because it reflects a distinctly Christian morality based around the presence and intervention of God’s judgement and “mercy”. As Shanyn

Fiske has noted, the ambivalent experience of home in Villette has Odyssean echoes.34 Adding to this, when the simultaneous allure and repulsion of violent female passions and imaginative heights are metaphorically rendered through sea imagery, they reiterate the sublime hybrid nature of Homer’s and Virgil’s sea females. As noted in earlier chapters, the Bible’s ocean is dichotomous; it is, for instance, both the begetter and annihilator of life, it is

32 Alexander, ‘“The Burning Clime’”, p. 320. 33 Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 591; Villette, ed., Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Quotes from the novels refer to these editions unless otherwise stated and will generally appear in the text of the chapter. 34 Shanyn Fiske, “Between Nowhere and Home: The Odyssey of Lucy Snowe,” Bronte Studies 32 (March, 2007), pp. 11-20, p. 11. Tempests of Destruction 264 associated with God’s presence and absence along with playful creatures and evil monsters. Nonetheless, the association of the feminine with sea imagery that is simultaneously appealing and repulsive is a particular association visible and disseminated in English culture through the mythology and imagery of Homer and Virgil, and it is this explicit link between femininity, ocean imagery and these hybrid qualities which recurs in Jane Eyre and Vil/ette. When Charlotte Bronte depicts female passion and creativity as both beautiful and terrifying, she invokes the sea of the Greco-Roman tradition; when she controls this sea of passion and creativity with a purifying and punishing sea embedded with overt Christian referents, she invokes the sea of the Bible.

The vignette sketches in Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds also influence Bronte’s portrayal of the sea in Jane Eyre. ~ When Jane is hidden behind scarlet drapery in the window seat reading Bewick’s History at Gateshead, her isolation and capacity for emotional extremes is mimicked in the geographical extremes of the pages which “treat of the haunts of the sea fowl” (12).36 Alison Hoddinott notes that Bronte’s “characters are frequently placed morally and temperamentally by reference to their taste in literature or art”. Bronte’s characters are also morally and temperamentally defined by their response to the ocean, either literally or as represented by literature or art. Jane’s absorption in particular sea images from Bewick’s book forms the initial bedrock of her moral, intellectual and emotional superiority, as it also establishes her status as the hero of the narrative. That Jane’s happiness is in part predicated on reading and escaping into Bewick’s drawings sets her above her cruel aunt and spiteful cousins whose happiness is instead based around vanity or bullying, and also sadism in the case of John whose pastimes include “twist[ing] the necks of the pigeons, killing] the little pea-chicks” and “set[ing] the dogs at the sheep” (22). The moral importance of Bewick’s drawings is discussed in an article by Branwell where he writes of their capacity for “extending] the range of our sympathies, and compelling] us to

Christine Alexander, “Bewick, Thomas”, in Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith, The Oxford Companion to the Bronte’s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 31-33, p. 32. Alexander notes that “the Bronte children poured over both engravings and text in Bewick’s most famous publications, copying his illustrations and transposing their suggestive ideas into their writing”. 36 Christine Alexander, “Educating ‘The Artists Eye’: Charlotte Bronte and the Pictorial Image”, in The Brontes in the World of the Arts (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 11-30, p. 12. Alexander describes a autobiographical precedent in Charlotte Bronte’s description of Jane’s hidden reading spot: “Like the young Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte habitually retreated to a secluded place to examine a book”. 37 Alison Hoddinott, “Reading Books and Looking at Pictures in the Novels of Charlotte Bronte”, Bronte Studies 32 (2007), pp. 1-10, p. 1. Tempests of Destruction 265

understand both what our feelings are and in what manner to express them”; they are drawings “where every changing cloud, or opening leaf, or mossy stone, or fleeting wave, may yield something of pleasure to a mind not wholly absorbed in frivolous vanity or lust or gain”. A sea scene of a shipwreck amid rocks and storm is chosen among two other illustrations Branwell identifies from the horde in Bewick’s two volumes for its verisimilitude and “appeal to the human feelings”.38 Jane emphasises three sea images out of five Bewick illustrations in her recollection of imaginative absorption and escape at the window seat (an increase from Branwell’s one out of three). The three sea scenes Jane notes are as follows: “the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray”, “the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast”, and “the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking” (13). Jane’s preoccupation with these sea images from Bewick’s History reveals her fascination and affinity with the monstrous hybridity of the natural sublime—violent, exotic, desolate realms suggestive of freedom and adventure and also doom and despair. As in the Odyssey and the Aeneid, sea adventures play a significant role in the development, trial, and establishment of Jane’s status as a heroine; they also lead her “home” (as Fiske defines it) in that they establish her as worthy of another person who understands her intellectually and emotionally and with whom she shares such understanding.39

Jane is drawn to these sea images, to an extent recalling Auden’s point noted at the opening of this thesis: that the Romantic sea adventurer differs from the Greco-Roman in their pursuit of oceanic adventure as opposed to being forced to sea as part of exile or unsought quest. Even so, given the ill-treatment Jane receives in her aunt’s home, Jane’s preoccupation with exotic and “desolate” sea realms in part represents her exile within the home (13). Perching upon the window seat with its view away from the “claustrophobia” of the house and the unfriendliness of its inhabitants, towards a “winter afternoon” (whose “pale blank of mist and cloud” and “ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly” finds an extreme corollary in Bewick’s “firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters”), Jane is lost in her book with its own window into a world of whirling seas, “that reservoir of frost

38 Victor Neufeldt, “A Newly Discovered Branwell Publication”, Bronte Society Transactions 24.1 (1998), pp. 11-15, 14-15. Hoddinott notes that “Branwell describes three illustrations in British Birds and praises them for their truth to nature and appeal to the human feelings. Two of these illustrations are strikingly similar to those described by Jane”. 39 Fiske, “Odyssey of Lucy Snowe”, p. 16. Tempests of Destruction 266 and snow” (12-13). This introduction establishes the divisions between the outer Jane and the inner Jane—it establishes that Jane has a hidden world with which these excesses of frozen waters have a correspondence, and it also establishes her utter emotional isolation in her aunt’s home. Her immersion in Bewick’s book is an escape into a fantasy world, a “land of mist and snow”; she is drawn into this world and transported, just as the young Charlotte Bronte must have been transported into Martin’s fantasy world when she looked at the engravings on the walls of the parsonage. Yet, even if it was shattered as each sibling died, Charlotte Bronte had for most of her life the joy of mental companionship which the young Jane lacked.

The sea environment described as part of this initial characterisation of Jane is one of contraries. In some respects the isolation it depicts is fantastic and exotic: the “haunts of the sea-fowl” are a dream land for Jane who is harassed and despised by her aunt and cousins (12). The “bleak”, violent and wondrous sea images identified by Jane tell a “story” which is “ever profoundly interesting” (13). The description of the sea fowl’s haunts at “the southern extremity” and the “solitary rocks and promontories by them only inhabited” creates an analogy with Jane on her own solitary perch at the window. The southern extremity imaged in these haunts, with its sea “in vast whirls” boiling round naked melancholy isles which —despite their desolateness, or even because of it—indicate hope and stability amidst chaos and destruction. The sea birds in their strange home at the extremes of the earth have a freedom about them, an untouchable liberty, but their presence in an otherwise seemingly uninhabitable waste also embodies desolation and alienation from the comfort of mutual understanding and shared feelings. The image of a wave-lashed rock finds parallels in the tiny figure of Jane, parentless and largely friendless, accosted like that rock by the surging of emotions (in her altercation with John, Jane is called “a fury” and “a picture of passion”), and broken as that boat by early losses and grief (16). From the onset of the novel Bronte describes Jane’s thoughts and emotions in terms of water imagery. In the red room Jane experiences the “rapid rush of retrospective thought” and reflections on the cruelty with which she is treated “turned up in [her] disturbed mind like a dark deposit in a turbid well” (21); further, her “forlorn depression” is a “damp” to the “embers” of her “ire” (23). Yet, in addition to their capacity for destruction, moral power and purity are associated with Jane’s emotions. There is a righteous freedom embedded in Jane’s emotional outpourings against her unjust treatment analogous to the elements let loose in Martin’s The Evening of the Tempests of Destruction 267

Deluge, with their denotation of the immense rapture of unrelenting chaos, punishment and all-consuming power.

The ekphrasis of Jane’s seascape drawings in chapter 13 also presents visions of overwhelming forces triumphing over the tiny human form that are both hideous in their import of death and isolation and fascinating because of their portrayal of natural grandeur and far flung extremes and the power of Jane’s emotions and creativity. Bronte knew from Bewick that these far flung extremes were places of continual burgeoning. Speaking of the breeding habits of the “sea-fowl”, Bewick records a duality where remote places of snow and desolate raging waters teem with life.40 Bewick’s duality is transformed in Bronte’s work as an interior burgeoning: sea extremes become emotional extremes and emblems of an active creative impulse which makes for a truly living mind. Jane, responding to Rochester’s inquiry, remarks, “I was absorbed, sir: yes, and I was happy. To paint them, in short, was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known” (167). The subject matter of these drawings is constructed as all the more uncommon because it elides representation: Jane declares that she “was quite powerless to realise” what she had “imagined” (167). Her ability to conceive these images and to render them even a little (to “secure the shadow of’ a “thought”, 167), testifies to Jane’s superiority of mind, since she paints what she has not seen, and her intensity of feeling, because she paints “the glassiness of despair” and the tragedy of the “corpse” which “glanced through the green water” (166). Further, through these drawings Jane’s character is suffused with numinous suggestions. Rochester observes, “the drawings are, for a school-girl, peculiar. As to the thoughts, they are elfish” (167); thus linked to preternatural power, Jane’s artistic control over the sea realm marks her out as special despite her physical plainness. Within Bronte’s portrayal, creativity produces the sublime affect: it is utterly absorbing, begets the “keenest pleasures”, and is overlaid with notions of the supernatural. Moreover, as in Greco-Roman works, Jane’s ability to grapple with the chaotic ocean element establishes her heroic status. However, while creativity and emotional depths distinguish the uncommon worth of Bronte’s heroines, these qualities are also imbued with demonic connotations.

40 ... Thomas Bewick, “Introduction”, in History of British Birds, vol. 2 [History and Description of Water Birds] (Newcastle: J. Blackwell and Co., 1847), p. xiv: “Although it is not certainly known to what places some of these kinds retire to breed, yet it is ascertained that the greater part of them hatch and rear their young on the rocky promontories and inlets of the sea”. Tempests of Destruction 268

The image of a lone rock or cormorant in the midst of a surging ocean is a recurrent image in Bronte’s work. It is an image visible in a juvenile sketch copied from a Bewick engraving as well as in allusions to Bewick’s engravings in Jane Eyre and the description of

Jane’s watercolours.41 The image of the rock with a lashing sea around it bears some iconographical echoes of Martin’s Deluge and its stone jutting out with human forms twisting in supplication and desperation, but Bronte’s jutting rocks and cormorants are depicted with no suggestions of supplication. Bronte’s lone rocks and cormorants imply self-possession and calm in the midst of chaos, a haven from suffering and punishment or, as in Jane’s watercolour, an ambiguous mix of providential renewal or cruelty (the bracelet in the bird’s beak is described as having been “washed or tom” from the “fair arm” in the sea). Bronte’s portrayals of lone rocks and cormorants are also associated with the life-giving power of creativity as well as its destructive thrall. Birds have a long historical association with “the realm of spirits as opposed to that of bodies and their carnal appetites” and the cormorant recurs in Bronte’s work as a creature linked with the imagination (whose creations Bronte

referred to as “spirits”), and the mental enervation it brings.42 Yet, as the Roe Head fragments reveal, for Bronte, the imagination is overtly sensual. She writes of the “wild and wailing music” of the Angrian characters coming “thrillingly to my mind’s—almost to my body’s—ear”, and in one of “two rambling poems” (as Alexander describes them) she enthuses: “They live! They gather round in bands,/They speak, I hear the tone;/The earnest

look, the becoming hands,/And am I now alone?43 Yet the cormorant is also infused with sinister associations in Bronte’s work. Commenting on Bronte’s juvenile copy of one of the engravings in Bewick, Alexander and Sellors note its potential “Miltonic associations of temptation and death” since Satan: “sat like a cormorant . . . devising death” atop “the tree of

life”44 These echoes of Milton add a connotative layer of “temptation and death to the link Bronte makes between creative power and the cormorant: she writes because she “cannot help it”. Consumed by her vivid character, she feels “as if some huge animal had flung itself

Charlotte Bronte, “Cormorant on rocky coast” [24 Jan 1829], in The Art of the Brontes, eds., Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 160-1. 42 Graham Gibson, The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), p. xiii. 43 Charlotte Bronte, “The ‘Roe Head Journal”’, in The Early Writings of Charlotte Bronte, ed., Christine Alexander (New York: Prometheus Books, 1983), pp. 140-1. [Alexander reproduces the poem fragments in this section], 44 John Milton, Paradise Lost (London: Penguin, 2000), Book IV, Lines 194-8. Tempests of Destruction 269

across me”45 and, as Alexander remarks, her imaginative “visions made Charlotte feel sinful”.46

Bewick’s birds and Jane’s own drawings reveal something of her hidden self; they reveal her imagination enthralled, the depths of isolation, fear, longing for freedom, for life and for escape, and her fascination with extreme, exotic locations. Jane is excited, not frightened, by the “Alpine heights above heights” and the “forlorn regions of dreary space” of the North Pole and the “vast whirls” of the “Northern Ocean”. Her creative impulses are piqued out of “half-comprehended notions”, notions from which she conjures “shadowy idea[s] of [her] own” (13). These notions are described as “shadowy” but they are as “strangely impressive” to Jane, as her drawings are strange and impress Rochester even when again they are characterised as merely the “shadows” of her thoughts (167).47 In her ability to depict despair, death “out of her own head” in the drowned figure drawing, Rochester observes that she must have existed in “a kind of artist's dreamland” and in his desire to question her and to see her drawings he shows his desire to see Jane (167), not the dim governess who is laughed at or ignored by the likes of Miss Ingram, but the person of passionate feeling and creativity. Just before Rochester asks her to marry him, he teases her with the threat of his potential marriage and departure with Miss Ingram. Jane is gripped by the fear of losing Rochester and thinks of the distance that would exist between them both in terms of a literal sea, if he were to leave England, and a metaphorical sea, the sea that would be her own loss and cold isolation without him as well as what she calls the “wider sea” that would separate them, the sea of “wealth, caste, custom” (330). When, in the moment before Rochester’s proposal, Jane tells him she must go, she reveals the buried side of herself: “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you-and full as much heart!” (332). Nevertheless, as the

45 “All this day 1 have been in a dream” Oct 14, 1836. Alexander, “Charlotte Bronte at Roe Head”, in Jane Eyre: Authoritative Text, 3rd edn. ed., Dunn, pp. 403-406, p. 406. 46 Alexander, The Early Writings of Charlotte Bronte, p. 140. 47 Bewick, “Introduction”, British Birds, vol. 2, p. xiv. In his introduction, Bewick quotes a section from Thomson’s Seasons but when Charlotte Bronte cites this section from Bewick, she shortens the quote from Thomson. Bronte’s shorter quote emphasises the desolation of the far north, its extreme climate and ocean storms. Through the memory Bronte gives to Jane, the desolation of the realms of snow and ice are accentuated due to the Thomson lines she leaves out but which Bewick included in his introduction. Thomson’s lines speak of “the living clouds” and “infinite wings” and the plume-dark air” filled with “one wild cry”. In Bewick’s introduction, they imply the spectacular wonder of the fruitfulness of this snowy region, rather than its emptiness. Tempests of Destruction 270 ensuing narrative of separation implies, this is an emotional intensity that cannot be allowed to run rampant.

In the aftermath of the knowledge of Rochester’s marriage to Bertha, Bronte describes the terror of Jane’s sublime emotional cavalcade by using imagery from the biblical Flood. This imagery resonates with both the puritanical elements inherent in Martin’s depiction of God’s power to control sinful excesses and the despair of supplicants amid his overwhelming wrath, and what Greisinger describes as the Evangelical precepts of individual access to God and self-control: 48

My eyes were covered and closed: eddying darkness seemed to swim round me, and reflection came in as black and confused a flow. Self-abandoned, relaxed and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a Flood loosened in remote mountains, and felt the torrent come: to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength. I lay faint, longing to be dead. One idea only still throbbed life­ like within me—a remembrance of God: it begot and unuttered prayer: these words went wandering up and down in my rayless mind, as something that should be whispered, but no energy was found to express them—‘Be not far from me, for trouble is near: there is none to help.’ It was near: and as I had lifted no petition to Heaven to avert it—as I had neither joined my hands, nor bent my knees, nor moved my lips—it came: in full heavy swing the torrent poured over me. The whole consciousness of my life lorn, my love lost, my hope quenched, my faith death-struck, swayed full and mighty above me in one sullen mass. That bitter hour cannot be described: in truth, ‘the waters came into my soul; I sank in deep mire: I felt no standing; I came into deep waters; the Floods overflowed me.’ (389-390)

In this passage, the biblical Flood coalesces with Jane’s emotional deluge of doubt, despair and feelings of loss and self-pity, and this oceanic deluge is partly a Puritan vision of punishment. The influence of the Puritan tradition, which Alexander identifies with Martin’s trademark depiction of human insignificance relative to natural grandeur, is accentuated in The Evening of the Deluge through the enormous scale of water to humanity, and in the above passage the “Martinesque” emerges in Bronte’s images of a powerful overwhelming Flood cascading over a despairing form. Moreover, in its unsought spontaneity, the “One idea . . . of God” which “begot an unuttered prayer” suggests the Calvinist precept of Grace. Bronte intimates that if Jane is to be saved from the wrath of God (which consumes her through her own emotional storm), her salvation may occur through God’s Grace and not the

48 Emily Griesinger, “Charlotte Bronte’s Religion: Faith, Feminism, and Jane Eyre”, Christianity and Literature 58. 1 (2008), pp. 29-59, p. 35. Tempests of Destruction 271

performance of a conscious act. Yet, this “One idea”, to use one of Nigel Scotland’s definitions of English Evangelicalism, emphasises Jane’s “subjective assurance of the presence of God” in her moment of despair.49 Jane’s perception of God’s presence and function is ambiguous in this passage. The thought of God is described as present in her mind, it is the “One idea” that is “life-like”, but she does not perform the traditional signs of the supplicant. For she declares, “as I had neither joined my hands, nor bent my knees, nor moved my lips—it came: in full heavy swing the torrent poured over me”.50 The “Flood loosened in remote mountains” is simultaneously her punishment and her saviour. Unable to make the appropriate gestures to God, Jane drowns in her emotional pain: the deluge “swayed full and mighty above me in one sullen mass”. Nonetheless, this torrent of pain also signals purification and renewal. The “dried-up creek bed” in which she imagines herself lying down is a symbol of sterility and loss, intensified through anaphora. In the wake of the torrent Jane remarks, “to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength. I lay faint, longing to be dead”. Nonetheless, after the “torrent” Jane emerges pure or renewed in strength as the next chapter begins with Jane’s immoveable “Conscience”, the unrelenting moral voice that forces her away from what is construed as the weakness of her desire which would make her Rochester’s mistress or keep her close to him and therefore close to that temptation. The watery “mire” of loss and despair into which Jane has sunk into at the end of volume 2 is associated at the beginning of volume 3 with the “slough” of sexual temptation and guilt. Describing her decision to leave Thomfield after the ruined wedding, Jane personifies “Conscience” and “Passion”, and uses intimations of drowning in an abyss of filth to suggest the potential for sin and despair if she should remain with Rochester without being his bride:

Conscience, turned tyrant, held Passion by the throat, told her tauntingly, she had yet but dipped her dainty foot in the slough, and swore that with that arm of iron he would thrust her down to unsounded depths of agony. (391)

Against the notion of Grace there is the voice of Jane’s “Conscience” declaring that she “will” save herself, be her own “priest” and the one to cut off her own “right hand” (391).

Nigel Scotland, Evangelical Anglicans in a Revolutionary Age (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2004), pp. 17-18. Griesinger also quotes Scotland, p. 34. The torrent is described as “loosened in remote mountains” and the mountain has a long tradition as a Christian icon for God. Tempests of Destruction 272

Bronte’s deployment of Flood imagery in the passage that ends the second volume and opens the third swings pendulum-like between the Evangelical and Puritan traditions. 51 The result is that her emotional Flood emerges both as a terrifying emblem of punishment and unassuageable waves of loss and despair (but for an act of God), as well as an emblem of Christian salvation and the cleansing and morally strengthening power of suffering. An aspect of the Puritan conversion narrative emerges through the “downward movement” of Jane’s despair in the first passage followed by her utter helplessness yet simultaneous remembrance of God and cry for help, finalised by an “upward” stage where Conscience triumphs. But Bronte places an Evangelical emphasis on the subjectivity of salvation instead of the intervention of God through Grace. The combination of Puritan and Evangelical theology in these passages supports Griesinger’s description of Bronte’s “not conventional” Christianity.' Though it may not be “conventional”, Bronte’s use of Flood imagery reiterates a tradition of biblical iconography where great sea-like swathes of water punish and purify, yet Bronte also refashions these cascading waves: they become the sublime tumult of thought and emotion, and God is internalised such that his all-powerful wrath and redemption operates within the mind of the believer. God’s purifying ocean has become the dark waves of thought bounded by Christian morality.

When Jane leaves Thomfield rather than stay with Rochester as his mistress, she uses a self-control infused with Christian morality to force her away from the emotional tide that would have kept her enthralled in her passions for him. In terms of the novel as a whole, the return to self-control is made the predicate for the ultimate union between Jane and Rochester. The unrestrained, violent madness of Rochester’s first wife destroys itself, quite literally, and Rochester’s own violent nature is tempered. Jane does marry her love, she is granted the experience of reciprocal passion, but it is a passion that is legitimate in Christian terms, one where the ocean of feeling has been curbed and purged by suffering—once given up and waited for, it is sincere but it does not drown in the profanity of excesses.

James Calvin Davis, “Pardoning Puritanism: Community, Character, and Forgiveness in the Work of Richard Baxter”, The Journal of Religious Ethics 29. 2 (2001): 283-306. As Davis remarks in his first footnote, Puritans are often used as a “type” without allowing for the “complexities” in theology or the differences between Puritan thinkers. 1 do not want to make the same mistake. I make my claims on the basis of Charlotte Bronte’s experience and perception of different Protestant traditions from what can be learned from her writing. 52 ~ Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 22. Greisinger also quotes Taves, p. 36. 53 Griesinger, “Charlotte Bronte’s Religion”, p. 46. Tempests of Destruction 273

Villette is dominated by a similar curbing or “subjection” (to use Bronte’s chosen word) of emotional excesses, though in an often quoted response to the novel, Matthew Arnold saw in it “nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage”.54 Candour and seeming resignation mark Lucy Snowe’s acknowledgment of her own unattractiveness and her acceptance that society in general would view her as quite ugly, quite unfit for passion, love and the kinds of happiness brought by them. She declares of herself: “you are well habituated to be passed by as a shadow in Life’s sunshine” (420). Nonetheless, beneath this ostensible acceptance and resignation, the need to be loved and understood consumes Lucy Snowe. Waiting on a letter from Dr John, Lucy notes: “I suppose animals kept in cages, and so scantily fed as to be always on the verge of famine, await their food as I awaited a letter” (334).

In Jane Eyre and Villette, emotional extremes are repeatedly rendered through ocean imagery and emotional extremes are the foundations of characters displaying notable creativity and intelligence. Creativity and emotional depths make Jane and Lucy morally superior; they set them apart as heroines despite their physical unattractiveness and yet these very aspects are presented as destructive and in need of control. The sea has an important role to play in terms of how Bronte constructs the worth of her characters, and it also figures in terms of how Bronte construed her own worth. Reinforcing Bronte’s correlation of the sea with emotional depths, alienation and isolation—and coupled with physical unattractiveness—in what is now called the “Good-bye’: a comic sketch” (part of her letter of 6 March 1843 to Ellen Nussey), Bronte depicts herself “grotesquely stunted” and separated by the English Channel from the beautiful and romantically suitable Ellen Nussey.55 Bronte saw herself as ugly and others, even friends, confessed they saw her in quite the same way.56 Acceptance and resignation are embedded in the self-lampooning of the “comic sketch” but so is a cruel sense of alienation given the expanse of the channel separating Bronte from Ellen and self-loathing, evident in the ugly caricature Bronte makes of herself with its bulbous body and misshapen hag-like features.

54 Charlotte Bronte, Letter from Charlotte Bronte to William Smith Williams, 6 November 1852, Letters, 1852- 1855, vol. 3, ed., Smith, p. 80; Matthew Arnold to Mrs. Foster, 14 April 1853, The Brontes: The Critical Heritage, ed., Miriam Allott (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 201. 55 Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars, eds., The Art of the Brontes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 261 56 Clement Shorter, The Bronte’s: Life in Letters (1908), p. 81 Recalling her early impressions of Bronte, her friend Mary Taylor recounts: “1 told her she was very ugly. Some years afterwards 1 told her 1 thought 1 had been very impertinent. She replied ‘you did me a great deal of good’”. Tempests of Destruction 274

Bronte invests Villette ’s Lucy Snowe with a seeming meek acceptance of her lot in life. Even so, raging desires for love and companionship break through her “external

c *7 coldness”. One example is her violent reaction to the loss of a letter from Dr Bretton:

My letter! my letter! I panted and plained, almost beside myself. I groped on the floor, wringing my hands wildly. Cruel, cruel doom! To have my bit of comfort pre- tematurally snatched from me, ere I had well tasted its virtue! (307)

In her biography, Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life, Lyndall Gordon emphasises Bronte’s “inward and creative life”, the “stranger creature” whose passion and imagination were forcibly masked by the needs of decorum. As Gordon notes, “not to do as you wished, to put others before yourself, was the essence of Christian morality. To prefer to write would have

CO appeared to her a selfish whim”. Like Gordon’s characterisation of Bronte, there are two sides to Bronte’s heroine of Villette, Lucy Snowe: “the creature inoffensive as a shadow” as Dr John sees her, and the inner Lucy in which rage oceanic “storms” of desire and sadness that lead her to a nervous breakdown in the long vacation described in chapter 15 (202). The resolution Bronte offers in Villette for this dichotomy is not as mercifully resolved as it is in Jane Eyre: the personal happiness and contentment achieved through the “home” of mutual understanding and love is not unambiguously granted to Lucy. The suffering Lucy endures has no certain reward, and the satisfied Christian assurance of Jane Eyre becomes a more agonised and somewhat empty prayer.

Adding to Shanyn Fiske’s observations in her article “Between Nowhere and Home: the Odyssey of Lucy Snowe”, I analyse Bronte’s deployment of sea imagery as an analogue for unbearable, hideous and yet also heartbreakingly gorgeous suffering. Bronte uses both Greco-Roman and biblical allusions in her construction of Lucy’s heroism which is repeatedly characterised and defined in terms of sea imagery. Like Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Bronte was not privy to a classical education but the influence of Greco-Roman works upon her work is unmistakable. Fiske describes the influence of John Wilson’s Odyssey essays (published in Blackwood’s Magazine) upon Bronte’s description of Lucy’s recovery room in the Bretton house as well as Bronte’s treatment of the idea of homecoming and heroism. As

57 Charlotte Bronte to W.S. Williams 6 November 1852, in Letters, 1852-1855, vol. 3, ed., Smith, p. 80. 58 Gordon, A Passionate Life, pp. 3-4, p. 53. Tempests of Destruction 275

Fiske notes, suffering underpins the heroism of Odysseus and Lucy. Moreover, “devastation at sea” for both repeatedly symbolises this suffering.59 Lucy’s breakdown during the long vacation is characterised as a “storm”, and its torrents of emotion are described with sea images. Below is the passage:

Between twelve and one that night a cup was forced to my lips, black, strong, strange, drawn from no well, but filled up seething from a bottomless and boundless sea. Suffering, brewed in temporal and calculable measure, and mixed for mortal lips, tastes not as this suffering tasted. Having drank and woke, I thought all was over: the end come and past by. Trembling fearfully—as consciousness returned—ready to cry out on some fellow-creature to help me, only that I knew no fellow-creature was near enough to catch the wild summons . . . Some fearful hours went over me: indescribably was I tom, racked and oppressed in mind. Amidst the horrors of that dream I think the worst lay here. Methought the well-loved dead, who had loved me well in life, met me elsewhere, alienated: galled was my inmost spirit with an unutterable sense of despair about the future. Motive there was none why I should try to recover or wish to live; and yet quite unendurable was the pitiless and naughty voice in which Death challenged me to engage his unknown terrors. When I tried to pray 1 could only utter these words:— “From my youth up Thy terrors have I suffered with a troubled mind.” Most true was it. (197-8)

Bronte transforms biblical Deluge imagery into a metaphor for Jane Eyre’s psychological anguish, and in doing so the oceanic swathes of water take on a partly punitive function in that novel. To an extent, Jane was guilty of the weakness of desiring Rochester and mourning his loss despite his sin against God. In this passage from Villette, the sea is a metaphor for a suffering of preternatural extremes devoid of punitive associations; instead, suffering is invested with the associations of trial and sacrifice. Moreover, the assurance of a merciful God and a righteous providential plan is absent. Lucy ingests “suffering”, metaphorically imaged as “seething” mixture “drawn . . . from a bottomless and boundless sea”. The substance of this suffering is of a kind beyond what a human can endure: it is “black, strong, strange” of a kind not “mixed for mortal lips”. That Lucy Snowe does endure it, that she drinks this ocean of suffering and survives, intimates supernatural strength and inculcates her into a realm of specialness and Greco-Roman heroism. Lucy’s oceanic trial recalls the oceanic trials of Odysseus and Aeneas, as it also recalls Christ’s cup of suffering. The reference to a “cup” that “was forced to my lips” is an allusion to John 18:10-11 and

59 Fiske, “Odyssey of Lucy Snowe”, pp. 17-18. Tempests of Destruction 276

Matthew 26:39.60 Both biblical passages portray Christ’s willing acceptance of, and submission to, mortally incomprehensible (though provoked through the sins of mortals) suffering, suffering which he, like Lucy Snowe, has not deserved. Further, these Greco- Roman and biblical allusions construct a suffering that has a higher purpose, a suffering extending beyond the self at the behest of a higher power: they establish the sufferer as more worthy of transcending the mortal realm and more worthy of divine blessing while at the same time highlighting their mortal pain. The depiction of Christ’s verbalisations of his agony in Matthew 26 accentuate his humanity by showing him capable of intense feeling and emotion rather than insisting on a divine aloofness or God-like immunity to suffering: Christ does not want to bear the suffering of crucifixion and death, he finds it unbearable, yet he still submits to it at the will of a higher power. Similarly, Lucy has the cup of suffering “forced to [her] lips” and “having drunk” she is “ready to cry out” for help but instead remains on her “knees in bed” (197).

Lucy’s feeble address to God, “From my youth up Thy terrors have I suffered with a troubled mind”, has none of the self-effacing submission of Christ’s “not as I will, but as thou wilt”.61 Unlike the sea journeys visible in Greco-Roman texts and the Bible, the Greco- Roman and biblical sea journey which Lucy interiorises is not an assured journey to happiness or salvation. Lucy’s “seething” sea of suffering is associated with a relative inability to pray or perceive a merciful God, identified only through the phrase “Thy terrors” in the quoted passage. However, Lucy’s kneeling posture on the bed, her attempts to “pray” and her own perceptions of her suffering as “the trial God appointed me” (198) demonstrate an enduring Christian faith and a willingness to submit to sacrifice. The concept of physical sacrifice is at the core of Christian belief and the ingestion of pain overtly linked to Christ’s pain intimate such a sacrifice. Lucy’s suffering is lessened soon after this episode, even though the reward that follows is uncertain. These biblical connotations invest Lucy with a Christ-like quality and set her high above the other characters like Ginevra Fanshawe who whine and wail, and selfishly demand the attention of others, at often the slightest and most trivial of problems. Yet these connotations also maintain Lucy’s humanity, just as Christ is

60 John 18:11 “Then said Jesus unto Peter, Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which my Father hath given me, shall 1 not drink it?” Matthew 26:38-39 “Then saith he unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me. And he went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.” 61 Matthew: 26: 38-9. Tempests of Destruction 277 simultaneously man and God, imbuing her with a moral and emotional superiority. Given these allusions, the contrasts Lucy continually draws between her own life and the lives of others (such as Miss Fanshawe, Polly Home and Louisa Bretton), Lucy’s superiority is almost savage in its divine righteousness. Even as Lucy appears self-deprecating and self- denying she is violently asserting the worth of herself in her perception of her God-appointed trial.

The visit to the underworld is a crucial turning point in the heroic sea voyages of Odysseus and Aeneas, and Lucy’s sea journey to Europe is from the beginning associated with this transformative aspect of the Greco-Roman journey. Bronte uses mythical references in her description of the Thames which will take Lucy Snowe out to the open sea and across the English Channel: “Down the sable Flood we glided; I thought of the Styx, and of Charon rowing some solitary soul to the Land of Shades” (61). Lucy’s response to this sea journey marks her as a long suffering Greco-Roman hero, and Bronte’s depiction of the seascape draws out the dichotomy of allure and repulsion that repeatedly underlies Bronte’s use of sea imagery. The ship Lucy travels on is called “THE VIVID” (62) and Lucy’s demeanour is likewise vivid at first. Appraising her feelings about the upcoming sea journey, Lucy remarks, “How is this?” said I. “Methinks I am animated and alert, instead of being depressed and apprehensive?” I could not tell how it was” (62). At first the entire seascape is delightful but then seasickness transforms the “divine delight” into the “’delusions of the demon’”:

I was not sick till long after we passed Margate, and deep was the pleasure I drank in with the sea-breeze; divine the delight I drew from the heaving channel-waters, from the sea-birds on their ridges, from the white sails on their dark distance, from the quiet, yet beclouded sky, overhanging all. In my reverie, methought I saw the continent of Europe, like a wide dream-land, far away . . . Cancel the whole of that, if you please, reader—or rather let it stand, and draw thence a moral—an alliterative, text hand copy— “Day-dreams are delusions of the demon”.

Becoming excessively sick, I faltered down into the cabin. (68-9)

The dual self-assertion and self-deprecation that marks Bronte’s portrayal of Lucy Snowe is also visible in her description of Lucy’s perception of the difference between her life and that of Louisa Bretton, a contrast depicted in terms of sea imagery:

The difference between her and me might be figured by that between a stately ship, cruising safe on smooth seas, with its full complement of crew, a captain gay and Tempests of Destruction 278

brave, and venturous and provident; and the life-boat, which most days of the year lies dry and solitary in an old, dark boat-house, only putting to sea when the billows run high in rough weather, when cloud encounters water, when danger and death divide between them the rule of the great deep. No, the “Louisa Bretton” never was out of harbour on such a night, and in such a scene: her crew could not conceive it; so the half-drowned life-boat man keeps his own counsel, and spins no yams. (226)

The experiences and spectacles of oceanic storms of suffering are depicted as both appalling and impressive. " The survivor of these seas of pain is the worthy one, and by extension the cruiser on calm seas of happiness is not. To an extent, Bronte construes Louisa Bretton admiringly, comparing her to a “stately ship” and deploying heroic adjectives for the captain who is “gay and brave, venturous and provident”. The description of the “Louisa Bretton” suggests preparedness but also superficiality, even frivolity compared to the dangerous voyages of the “life-boat”. Louisa Bretton’s journeys seem trivial: they are merely in the “harbour” away from the “rough weather” which is imbued with the qualities of the Virgilian storm with its trademark features of waves rising to the sky (Lucy depicts the “life-boat” journey through sea tempest “when cloud encounters water”) and suggestions of death dealing immortal struggles between the will of gods and men and men bom of gods (“when danger and death divide between them the rule of the great deep”). The journeys of Louisa Bretton are also associated with childish make-believe, the “yarns” that the “half-drowned life-boat man” does not “spin”. It is perhaps this assertion of the seifs superiority and worth that makes it necessary for the sea storm at the end of the novel to ameliorate any final subjective triumph, either to tear that self down finally or contradictorily to raise it up again in the way it is always raised, through suffering. If the worth of the self is predicated upon its suffering, upon its travail through seething seas, then such travails cannot end.

The sea images in Lucy’s description of her recovery room in the Bretton home again associate the Bretton existence with falsity and with a cloying sweetness: they evoke fantasies of magic through the allusion to a “mermaid” and fantastical visions of a room filled with coral for cushions and dolphins in the comers of the ceiling. Fiske compares Lucy’s ambiguous response to her room in the Bretton household, post breakdown, to Wilson’s

(1~ The allure and also the repulsion of the tempestuous sea is a common theme throughout Charlotte Bronte’s poetry in which the sea is a place of wild and free self-hood and the unknown, as it is also a place of fearful death. To give only a few examples of many from. Poems of Charlotte Bronte, ed., Neufeldt: “JUSTINE, upon thy silent tomb the dews of evening/weep” Lines 41-44; ST. John in the Island of Patmos”, Lines 11- 12: “Or is his soul on some far off journey gone/To lands beyond the wildly howling wave?” Tempests of Destruction 279 description of Odysseus’ response to the too perfect idyll of Calypso’s island, referring to it as “an underwater world, removed from the troubles of known reality”. " The shelter and hope Lucy receives in the Bretton household is temporary and illusory; as in Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas”, this sea calm is a betrayer, as is much of the comfort she receives in her life. Wonder and alienness characterise Lucy’s room which is “like a cave in the sea”, with “shell-shaped ornaments”, “white mouldings like dolphins in the ceiling-angles”, a “pin cushion” with an “affinity to coral” and “dark-shining glass” that “might have mirrored a mermaid” (227). The storm that had tortured Lucy now seems a lullaby, “the dash of its fiercest breakers could sound down in this submarine home, only like murmurs and a lullaby” (227), and again the image of waves lashing a rock recurs as an emblem of a haven from suffering and punishment and the combination of both rock and water signals salvation. Yet the Bretton lullaby is temporary. Fiske notes “Charlotte’s transformation of Homer’s myth [of Calypso’s island] into a metaphor for Lucy’s psychological disorientation” (18). I claim Bronte also transforms Homer’s portrayal of the sea’s dichotomies of allure and repulsion into a metaphor for the ambivalence and duality that marks Lucy’s characterisation: her heroism is based on suffering and so she must continue to suffer to be a heroine. The sea cave is not Lucy’s proper home. The majority of Bronte’s sea images are of rough seas, seas that are always “raging” or “tossing”, “wild” and “dark” and/or emitting a “deep moan” or “wildly howling”,64 and fittingly, Lucy’s home is the “sea when the billows run high in rough weather”. In this Lucy has an affinity with the speaker of one of Charlotte Bronte’s poems who declares:

“O, might I find a dwelling but half so calm as thine, When my life-storm stills its yelling, when my comet-fires decline! But the wild, the raging, billow is a fitter home for me: The coral for the willow; for the turf the tossing sea” (Lines 41-44)

The sea has repeatedly acted as a metaphor for creativity, desire and emotional intensity in Charlotte Bronte’s writing. In Villette, the sea personifies suffering; its

63 Fiske, “Odyssey of Lucy Snow”, p. 17. 64 Again, to give only few examples of many from, Poems of Charlotte Bronte, ed., Neufeldt: “JUSTINE, upon thy silent tomb the dews of evening/weep”, Lines 24, 43-4; “THE day is closed, that spectral sun”, Lines 71 -4; ST. John in the Island of Patmos”, Lines 11-12, and “Long since as 1 remember well”, Lines 197-204. Tempest \ oj Destruction 280 unrelenting brutality during storms embodies the acuteness of Lucy’s emotional anguish in the midst of frustrated desires for love and companionship, isolation and creative starvation. Most importantly, the violence of the sea is defined as the proper home of the novel’s heroine, the sea of suffering is associated with trial and heroic passage: these together, the sea as raging emotion and suffering, and this raging sea as Lucy’s home, define her superiority and authorise her heroic status, but they also mean that the ending of Villette must be tragic. Within this associative pattern “the destroying angel of tempest”, with its cormorant-like self- possession satanically (in the Miltonic tradition) intent on death, its “perfect work” in the middle of chaos, can be read perversely as Lucy’s return to her home.

Below is the passage:

The skies hang full and dark—a rack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms—arches and broad radiations; there rise resplendent mornings— glorious, royal, purple as monarch in his state; the heavens are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle at its thickest—so bloody, they shame Victory in her pride. I know some signs of the sky; I have noted them ever since childhood. God, watch that sail! Oh! guard it! The wind shifts to the west. Peace, peace, Banshee—“keening” at every window! It will rise—it will swell—it shrieks out long; wander as I may through the house this night, I cannot lull the blast. The advancing hours make it strong: by midnight, all sleepless watchers hear and fear a wild south-west storm. That storm roared frenzied for seven days. It did not cease till the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks: it did not lull till the deeps had gorged their full of sustenance. Not till the destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work, would he fold the wings whose waft was thunder—the tremor of whose plumes was storm. Peace, be still! Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered—not uttered till, when the hush came, some could not feel it: till, when the sun returned, his light was night to some! Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy bom again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life. (617)

An acute pathos builds in Bronte’s portrayal of the sea storm which concludes Villette, imbuing it with a sense of unstoppable tragedy. This pathos is achieved through aural cues: the agonising doom embedded in the repeated long vowels, “glorious”, “noted”, “know” and “so”, which act like a sacrificial drum beat, and the screaming intimated through the assonance of “Peace, peace, Banshee-keening”, and through a glut of brutal images spreading a spectacle of death. Through the seascape that ends Villette, Bronte portrays an apogee of savagery: a sky thick with blood and the brutal “deeps” cruelly consuming life till they had Tempests of Destruction 281

“gorged their full of sustenance”. Bronte’s selection of the word “sustenance” is interesting: the word “gorged” suggests excess and reckless gluttony but “sustenance” suggests the consumption of what is necessary for survival. Additionally, “sustenance” is interesting in terms of the notion of divine sacrifice developed allusively in the description of Lucy’s emotional breakdown during the long vacation. In the ancient tradition of sacrifices made to gods, the “deep” requires its “sustenance”.65 Repeating both Greco-Roman and biblical iconography, Bronte makes the sea into a monstrous and all-powerful entity.

An atmosphere of loss inflects the language of the storm passage: the lexical repetitiveness of the passage overall mimics the shudders of uncontrollable sobbing, and the opposing perceptual binaries achieved through the “shrieks” set against the “hush”, and the “sun” set against the “night”, craft an uncrossable emotional gulf. The vastness of this gulf is further signalled through the contrasting quantitative vision of “a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores” and the “some” for whom the storm never ends. Alexander describes the figure of Vashti in the novel as a representation of “the dark uncontrolled self’ which is “ultimately destructive and will further alienate Lucy from her fellow human beings”. Further, Alexander remarks: “if Lucy is not to be swept away by what she refers to as the ‘necromantic joys of fancy’ she is forced to suppress, then she must maintain a

Christian fortitude against the tempestuous seas of life.”66 Yet Lucy does not possess an absolute Christian fortitude. Once again, the satisfaction of praying and the satisfying effects of a granted prayer seem to elude Lucy Snow: “Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered—not uttered till, when the hush came, some could not feel it: till, when the sun returned, his light was night to some!” Lucy has always been that “some” who receives pain while others are relieved; the evidence of the past is prophetic: “I know some signs of the sky; I have noted them ever since childhood.” It is unclear whether M. Paul dies at the end of Villette but given the lexical emphasis on loss, the build up of images which create a spectacle of death, the pattern of Lucy’s suffering, as well as Bronte’s incarnation of the wind as a “Banshee” implies death. When Lucy declares, “Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope”, the intimation is that M. Paul does in fact die but that it is better for the

65 Odysseus and Aeneas are continually making sacrifices to the gods on their sea journeys, and the god of the sea is particularly voracious. 66 Alexander, “Burning Clime”, p. 320. Tempests of Destruction 282 reader to believe that he does not. This preservation of a sliver of hope makes the atmosphere of loss even more excruciating.

Again and again Charlotte Bronte presents her readers with poor, plain, self-confessed physically unattractive women who, in the society they inhabit, have no right to anything but a bleak position of hard work, inhibition and invisibility; yet she portrays these woman as filled with longing and intense feeling, creative energy and the desire to have a relationship with a man of similar qualities. Why does Bronte step back from giving Lucy the man who really saw her, the man who had to “testily lift his hand to screen his eyes because [she] tease[d] him with her obtrusive light?” (420) I propose that Bronte needed to finally restrain Lucy’s passion, and prevent its consummation because it was too much ecstasy for Lucy and M. Paul to have found each other, and within the schema of the Christian sacrificial suffering she developed as the basis of Lucy’s heroism, it was aesthetically and morally fitting that the raging sea of their desires and emotions would ultimately destroy their hopes. Conclusion: Romantic Seas, Sublime Pathways to God

In this thesis, I argue for the ineradicable influence of Greco-Roman works and the Bible on Romantic portrayals of the sea contrary to the dominant critical paradigm of Romantic aesthetic transformation. With their specific analyses of the Romantic sea, Corbin and Isham are the most contemporary exemplars of this paradigm; however, this paradigm builds on earlier studies such as those of Abrams, with their emphasis on the secularising processes of the Romantic age. Within analyses describing an aesthetic break between the portrayal of the sea in Romantic literature and Greco-Roman and biblical seas, a reductive picture develops of the Romantic secularisation of the sea and the sea-loving Romantic. If the Romantics loved the sea, most loved it as evidence of the presence of God or gods; they loved the superlative human placement in creation and human immortality the Christian religion promises, and they loved the magic and mystery of Greco-Roman myth for a version of the same reasons. But for Shelley, the sea and humanity fuse within a material universe; yet paralleling the Christian tradition, Shelley saw the sea as evidence of a single controlling force in the world and he placed humanity at the centre of creation.

A fundamental interrelationship exists between Greco-Roman works and the Bible in English Romanic portrayals of the sea which needs to be understood within the context of the indelible presence of God and the mortal-divine dualisms of British eighteenth century aesthetics. The Romantics may manipulate and transform Greco-Roman and biblical deities and monsters into a sea of supernatural signification, existential symbolism, the extremes of socio-political evolution and individual passion and creativity. But Greco-Roman and biblical traditions underpin these manipulations and transformations, and these manipulations and transformations continue sets of symbols, metaphors, associations and ideologies drawn from these traditions.

In some respects the claims of this thesis mark no disagreement with Corbin. Corbin explicitly notes in the opening chapters of his book that the repulsion preventing sixteenth and seventeenth-century writers from admiring the sea was constructed on a coherent set of sea stereotypes emphasised by biblical interpreters and Greco-Roman commentators drawn from, and not fully reflecting, the sea imagery of the Bible and ancient Greco-Roman works. 284

In many respects the differences between this thesis and the studies conducted by Corbin and Isham result from differences in emphasis. Corbin’s primary focus is on the development of a European beach culture. He traces the desire for terrifying thrills that involved people flocking to the sea (as opposed to avoiding), bathing and scaling cliffs in the Romantic period. Isham’s work is directed towards illustrating the more concentrated emergence of images of the sea in the writing and art of the Romantic period. My thesis primarily departs from Corbin and Isham because I see the Romantic sea as inherently theistic. I show how this concentration of sea imagery and these “new” systems of Romantic appreciation were founded on a Greco-Roman and biblical sublime aesthetic. While the Romantic aesthetics of the sea can be seen to contribute towards new systems of appreciation and new ways of considering the sea as appealing, they are also equally and at the same time founded on old ways of viewing the sea that make it horrifying and repulsive.

Romantic seas are fundamentally theistic and embedded in British eighteenth-century aesthetic theories which are also theistic. Shelley is the exception. Shelley reformulates the oceanic iconography of Radcliffe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Charlotte Bronte which, with all their subtleties and differences, share the desire, not simply to infuse their seascapes with supernatural mystery, but to make nature an emissary or a reflection of God or numinous powers. Shelley’s allusions to Greco-Roman works and the Bible seek to demystify, reformulate and ultimately eradicate appeals to a supernatural deity and traditional Christian notions of immortality. Nevertheless, as noted, Shelley’s depictions of the sea share some features with a Christian worldview.

The sublimity of the Romantic sea is based on its synonymy with contrary dichotomous sets of ideas and images drawn from Greco-Roman works and the Bible. Romantic seas reflect the interdependent, inextricable and dichotomous nature, what I call the monstrous hybridity, of the extreme ideas and emotions tied to the sea in Greco-Roman and biblical works. Specific sets of dichotomies are visible in Greco-Roman and biblical portrayals of the sea and continued by Romantic writers: the feminine supernatural, the heroic sea journey, Roman masculine virtue and God’s control over the waters. Most Romantic writers appeal to supernatural presences in their attempts to resolve these dichotomies. The established critical paradigm of Romantic aesthetic transformations of the sea cannot account for these contradictions because it assumes Greco-Roman and biblical works exercised little influence on the Romantic imagination and employs reductive assessments of the Burkean sublime without reference to the theistic basis of eighteenth-century aesthetics. 285

The Greco-Roman tradition enters the Romantic sea through the portrayal of monstrous hybrid dichotomies and through a shared supernaturalism, where the sea embodies or is the special place of a Dissenting God, or Greco-Roman deities and spirits. The dichotomies of the feminine supernatural and Roman masculine virtue are maintained as a femininity of powerful, independent, creative and passionate excess which both requires expression and restraint in the writing of Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Bronte. The dichotomies of the heroic sea journey underpin the tormenting voyages, wrecks and drownings that define individual worth, virtue and transformation in the work of all the Romantics but especially in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Romantic seas encode the dichotomies of God’s control over the waters in explicit figurations of the sea as an instrument of God’s punishment and mercy and spiritual purgation—the necessary precondition of resurrection and immortality. Within Shelley’s humanist revision of the Greco-Roman and biblical tradition, the sea’s monstrous hybridity becomes the opposition of intellectual, socio political tyranny, chaos and violence and intellectual, socio-political liberty, peace and harmony.

In Homer’s Odyssey, the dichotomous images and ideas visible in the portrayal of the sea are never resolved. Odysseus escapes the sea’s dichotomies, but the sublimity of the Homeric sea is based upon this lack of resolution. In contrast, the dichotomies of Virgil’s sea in the Aeneid are resolved into the figures of helpful sea nymphs, controlled by Aeneas for Rome’s omnipotent destiny; the sea is sublime because these contraries are controlled and resolved within the compass of Roman power. The sublime sea produced by the dichotomous images and ideas visible in the sea of the Bible is also controlled, and in the end expunged, by the power of one omnipotent God—these three types of sea-sublime manifest to varying degrees in the depictions of the sea by the English Romantics.

The Dissenting tradition manipulates the Romantic portrayal of the ocean and marine animals. The type of Protestantism that emerges in the writings of the English Romantics in this thesis directly informs their portrayal of the sea. The sea is often read as a pagan place for both Radcliffe and Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s uninspiring experiences of the Low Church and the Anglicanism of his age, with its horror of superstition, influenced his use of pagan belief and myth in addition to Christian referents. Pagan belief and myth added an explicitly otherworldly magic to his images of the sea not entirely captured by Christian allusions. In Coleridge’s work, the aesthetic shift, in Burkean terms, from the sublime to the beautiful in the moment of the Mariner’s blessing of the water snakes, is underpinned by Unitarianism and marks Coleridge’s departure from the dominant inherited Greco-Roman 286

and biblical depictions of the sea. Notions of purgation fit within Unitarian theology but Coleridge’s portrayal of the sea’s violent horror and its purgative function, and in part its potential for beauty, can be aligned with the sea visions of Homer and Virgil. But it is when the sea and marine creatures feature in an act of love, that Coleridge produces a vision fully within the compass of a Unitarian reading of the Bible and its theology of the world’s interconnectedness. Even so, the sea snakes and the sea are not sources of beauty or sublimity themselves; they merely reflect the beauty and sublimity of a Unitarian God.

Homeric echoes are evident in Charlotte Bronte’s identification of the sea with the irresolvable contraries of the beauty and repulsiveness of passionate feminine feelings and desires. However, the Christian ethos at the heart of Bronte’s narratives makes the biblical sea and its Martinesque lens the more significant influence. In her narratives, the response to the hybrid grotesque of female passion (with its Homeric precedent) is a violent Puritanism. Bronte’s correlation of female power with sea imagery finishes what Radcliffe began. For Bronte, images of the excesses of the sea symbolise the crucial and also terrifying aspects of female emotional intensity and imaginative excess. Bronte ultimately turns the excesses of female oceans of passion into Puritan instruments of ennobling suffering. Radcliffe portrayed the sea as the realm where domesticated versions of mythical sea females raise her heroines above their misery and give a harmless magic to their developing, Unitarian, reason. The power of Bronte’s women lies in the curtailing of their passions and the experience of suffering that makes them worthy. The sea is both a female threat and a Puritan weapon and its contradictions are controlled by a God edged with Calvinism. There is a hint of this in Radcliffe’s association of the sea with the madness and lust of Sister Agnes. However, linked with Radcliffe’s poetic sea nymphs, the sea of feminine fancy is controllable and even assists in the creation of the balance between sensibility and reason—the Unitarian balance Radcliffe figures as the epitome of female virtue.

The portrayal of the sea is almost always sublime—this is as true today as it was for the Romantics and even before the term existed or its characteristics and affective registers were codified. The sublime is founded on images of the dichotomous, infinite, untouchable and inexhaustible ocean controlled and given meaning and purpose through a supernatural presence and its utility to humanity. Within the aesthetics of the sublime, terror, incomprehension, and the emotional seduction of the suspension of reason define the sea. In short, within the aesthetics of the sublime the appeal of the sea is predicated upon desire mixed with repulsion, fear with delight, and the joy of ignorance and human egotism. 287

In my introduction I quoted George Levine and linked my approach with what he called “reclaiming the aesthetic” and accordingly this thesis does not demystify Romantic seas; it analyses and anatomises the aesthetic power of Romantic oceanic imagery with its locus in the sea imagery of Greco-Roman and biblical works. The goal is to make the assumed visible and the unconscious conscious, not to destroy the pleasure to be taken in works of art, but to understand its craftedness and its origins. Nonetheless, analysing literary representations of ideas and images grants insight into what consciously and unconsciously sits between humanity and the sea. It allows an acknowledgement of the human gaze directed at the ocean and the ways in which that gaze constructs what is seen. But the ocean exists outside our perceptions. At a time when humans need to understand, take responsibility for, and act to change their devastating impacts on the ocean and marine animals, there is a pressing need to analyse the assumptions and ideologies infusing the aesthetics of the sea, particularly in literature and poetry whose potent influence on human perceptions is often unconscious but whose manifestations are everywhere. My thesis contributes to such an analysis. This thesis has been about the Romantic sublime sea and its Greco-Roman and biblical foundation; the ways in which the sublime mediates modern interactions with the sea is a future research path.

Other aesthetics are possible. In the moment of the mariner’s blessing, the slimy things become Beautiful rather than Sublime in Burke’s terms. A similar moment occurs in a work by Joseph Mallard William Turner (1775-1851) whose artistry has become a dominant popular emblem of Romanticism. I would like to end this thesis by including a little known Turner watercolour as an opposing partner to Dore’s Leviathan—together they act as icons of the monstrous hybridity of the Romantic sea.

J.M.W. Turner’s watercolour, Sunset at Sea, with Gurnets (1836-40)1 depicts living fish, beautified and personified, peering out of the gentle waves whilst basking in the afternoon light. This piece contrasts dramatically with other Turner works involving marine subjects where marine animals are depicted in throes of death, hunted, bloody and sublimely

Notes on the original painting (viewed at The Whitworth Gallery 18 July 2006) from: Whitworth Art Gallery, “The Manchester Whitworth Institute, Council Meeting Records” in Whih\>orth Art Gallery: Annual Report 1870-1923. The title “Sunset at Sea, with Gurnets” is not Turner’s original. In a Council report of 1912, the watercolour is referred to as “Rough Sea and Gurnets’. The watercolour was presented to The Whitworth Gallery by the nephews of a well known Manchester collector , J.E. Taylor-it was then described as “a sea- piece-with gurnets and sunset effect; two large fish in the foreground to the left on brown paper”. When sold to J.E. Taylor it was described as “Sunset with Gish in Foreground”. This information is from the Manchester Gallery accession records. 288 obscure, as in Turner’s four whaling oils A Harpooned Whale (c. 1845), The Whale Ship (1845), Hurrah! For the Whaler Erebus! Another fish! (1846), Whalers (Boiling Blubber) Entangled in the Flaw Ice (1846).

Sunset at Sea, with Gurnets is something of a curiosity within Turner’s artistic collection.“ Exhibited rarely, it spends most of its time placed firmly away from the light in the Prints and Drawings room of Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery. Turner’s original has been ill-served by its many inferior and misleading catalogue or online reproductions. Even here, it has been necessary to include a reproduction of the watercolour that does not do it justice; it may simply be impossible to reproduce the subtle colouration of Turner’s original. Mistaken interpretations can easily result when reproductions of Sunset at Sea, with Gurnets are consulted without reference to the original. Inaccurate reproductions make the sea appear rugged and ultimately produce a stormy, morose looking seascape fitted well to Burke’s category of sublime qualities. In the original, the effect produced is more appropriately suited to Burke’s category of beautiful qualities; the fish are in the foreground but they are comparatively small, they have a luminous blue applied to them and the area around the sun is not dark or stormy, it is light blue and grey; melon and white. The fish are drawn in to the space of natural illumination, allowing them to partake of the beauty its lightness signifies. Elemental interdependence is created by the subtle repetition of the same colours in the sun, sea, sky and fish—it evokes the delicate beauty of the scene, promoting the idea of fragile interconnectedness, and with this image of fragile marine interconnectedness I conclude.

2 Gurnet or Gurnard. Gurnets inhabit deep coastal water and are often caught by trawlers. Yet, they can be seen, especially juveniles, floating fanlike on the surface of the sea with their large, rainbow coloured pectoral fins. Figure 4. J.M.W. Turner, Sunset at Sea, with Gurnets, watercolour with body colour and chalk (c. 1836-40). 290

Appendix

1. John Percy: Newly Recorded Compositions and Research. From a seminar presented on 19 October, 2010, to the School of English, Media and Performing Arts, UNSW, Sydney, Australia.

CD/File attached: “The Sea Nymph” and “Air”. Sung by Phoebe Humphries, accompanied by Lloyd Grant, recorded by David Gilfillan, produced by Mandy Swann.

What I have discovered about John Percy comes from three sources at this time: two brief entries in musical dictionaries, Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1954-61) and A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Mangers and other Stage Personnel in London 1660-1800 (1982) and the information that can be gleaned from the musical score for the five relevant compositions located to this date. Percy is thought to have been bom in 1748 in London and it is known that he died in 1797. If his birth date is correct he was 49 years old when he died. Percy was married and had three children. He was admitted at age 31 to the Royal Society of Musicians in 1786. His ballads were popular in the 18th century. The Grove’s Dictionary notes his works have been forgotten but for one called “old Wapping Station“. I am investigating that composition currently. He published Select Songs (26 in number) between 1795-1797. Eight songs with an Accompaniment for Violin (1781) and Six arietts (1785) and many single songs.1

Many of Percy’s compositions appear to have been based on novels and plays, for example: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Goethe’s tale of the suicidal bereft lover, The Sorrows of Young Werther. All the songs held at the Bodleian are individual song sheets. Of the five I have, three come from his Select Songs publication (1795-7). They are all focused on poems from The Mysteries of Udolpho, Radcliffe’s best known and most widely studied novel. Radcliffe’s Udolpho was published in 1794 and Select Songs between 1795-7, so it seems fair to say Percy was capitalising on Radcliffe’s immense popularity during this time. Each score is inscribed to a woman, some bearing the same last name. Nothing has been

Highfill, and Kalman, Dictionary> of Actors, p. 262. 291 discovered about these women so far. They might have been pupils, from family acting as patron to Percy. The quality of the printing can be considered to be good because it is readable some two hundred years later and seems to be selling at a relatively expensive price at 1 shilling, suggesting a middle to upper class market.

2. Burke’s categories Within Burke’s divisions, the “dark”, “uncertain”, “confused” and “terrible” are “sublime to the last degree”.2 3Burke observes “power” and “obscurity” are “necessary” to produce the sublime affect, and “broken rugged surface[s]”, “strength” and “sad and fuscous colors” that are “dusky or muddy”, “strong and glaring” or “black, or brown, or deep purple”. Extreme “bitters” as well as “stenches” can produce the sublime affect.4 Boundless extremes of “length, height, or depth” solitude and of course “Infinity”; for Burke: “infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror” and this delightful horror is the “truest test of the sublime”.5 The “shrill harsh” and “deep sounds” “sounds” of “men, or any animals in pain or danger, are capable of conveying great ideas” and the “great and awful sensation” of the sublime”, especially “the angry tones of wild beasts”.6 For Burke, beautiful qualities “inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection”, and “cause love” of humanity or living things.7 The beautiful object, or the object suggestive of beautiful ideas, is “comparatively small”, “smooth” and “has an appearance of delicacy, and even of fragility” and associated with “transparent substances” “clean, even smooth and weak” musical “notes” and colours such as “light greens”, “soft blues” or “weak whites”, “pinks” or “variegated” if the colours are “strong”.8

Burke acknowledges that “the qualities of the sublime and beautiful” can be “found united” but the most powerful sublime affect is produced by the most uniformly sublime

2 “ Burke, “Philosophical Inquiry”, in Works, vol. 1, p. 133.

3 Burke, “Philosophical Inquiry”, Works, vol. 1, pp. 139, 133, 193, 197, 159. 4 Burke, “Philosophical Inquiry,” Works, vol. 1, p. 163.

5 Burke, “Philosophical Inquiry,” Works, vol. 1, pp. 148, 116, 149.

6 Burke, “Philosophical Inquiry,” Works, vol. 1, p. 162. Sounds of pain are sublime: “unless it be the well- known voice of some creature, on which we are used to look with contempt”.

7 Burke, “Philosophical Inquiry,” Works, vol. 1, p. 114 and p. 166.

8 Burke, “Philosophical Inquiry,” Works, vol. 1, pp. 193, 190, 196, 204, 197. 292 object with purely sublime qualities (within his definition of the sublime). If the object has qualities that are beautiful and sublime, its sublime affect is lessened.9

3. Siren-Song links between the feminine supernatural and Radcliffe’s heroines In The Mysteries of Udolpho, a powerful, magical nymph with the ability to produce an otherworldly tune appears as a “song” overheard by Emily and the peasant girl Maddelina on a seashore over which cliffs hang and a vista emerges of rock, dense trees and the “sweeping bay” (Vol. 3, Chpt. 7, p. 420). It is here that Tuscan peasants are performing what is described as an “invocation” titled “To a Sea-Nymph”. Emily hears music as she walks along the beach in the company of Maddelina and a couple of Montoni’s men. At first she hears “a chorus of voices” then “one female voice was heard to sing in a kind of chant” and this singing girl is surrounded by peasants as she holds a ritual “garland of flowers” which she will throw into the waves; it is the girl’s solo that is interpolated into the narrative (420).

Since those who comment on the poetry in Udolpho tend to focus on Emily’s Venice poem, this short “song” titled “To a Sea-Nymph” is reprinted here in full:

O nymph! Who loves to float on the green wave, When Neptune sleeps beneath the moon-light hour, Lull’d by the music’s melancholy pow’r, O nymph, arise from out thy pearly cave!

For Hesper beams amid the twilight shade, And soon shall Cynthia tremble o’er the tide, Gleam on these cliffs, that bound the ocean’s pride, And lonely silence all the air pervade.

Then, let thy tender voice at distance swell, And steal along this solitary shore,

9 The Sublime and Beautiful for Burke are not allied, or the same, they are opposite and contradictory, when they are blended with each other, the “power” of the Sublime is not so strong as when the Sublime stands uniform and distinguished, and the power of the Beautiful is not so strong as when the Beautiful stands uniform and distinguished. 293

Sink on the breeze, till dying—heard no more— Thou wak’st the sudden magic of thy shell.

While the long coast in echo sweet replies, Thy soothing strains the pensive heart beguile, And bid the visions of the future smile, O nymph! From out thy pearly cave-arise!

(Chorus)—Arise! (Semi-chorus)—Arise!

Like the nymph in “The Sea Nymph”, the power of this nymph’s song is based around its unearthliness, here demonstrated by its ability to charm away the cares of the “pensive heart”(Line 14), but also its ability to put Neptune safely to sleep that the nymph may frolic upon the surface of the sea (Line 2). The nymph’s voice is personified; her song is given the magical capacity to be full of substance in one moment and ethereal in another as it grows into a physical form to “steal along this solitary shore”, but can then “sink on the breeze” into nothingness (Line 10-11). The supernatural potency of the nymph’s song is intensified by the intimation that it has the ability not to predict the future but to transform it; to “bid the visions of the future smile” (Line 15). The prose description of the peasant song and its effects accentuate the otherworldly qualities of the nymph’s music. As a “kind of chant” which belongs to a ritual “invocation”, the song has already acquired a numinous quality before it begins. After the peasant song ends, Emily is said to be “awakening from the pleasing trance, into which the music had lulled her”, a description suggestive of being spell bound, held sway under power of supernatural enchantments (420).

In The Romance of the Forest, a similar depiction of music’s power to captivate and bewitch emerges (vol. 2, ch. 11). Adeline’s mind, lately overwrought by the advances of the lecherous Marquis (the “votary of vice” as he is described), is briefly transported by a song titled “Song of a Spirit” in which what appears to be a female sea spirit testifies to her powers of enchantment. In this “song”, two unearthly forms and two unearthly songs emerge. First we meet the playful spirit who travels everywhere, floats on the sea and plunges into its depths but also ascends ruined towers and wanders in lonely woodlands; this spirit is not referred to as a sea-nymph, its haunts do appear to be seascape bound, but it does (like 294

ödolopho ’s poetic nymphs) fly from shore to shore and frolic in the sea. Late in the poem it is suggested that this spirit can produce “thrilling sounds” and music that is characterized as “sad solemn strains, that wake the dead” (Lines 41-44). Sea nymphs also emerge (compliant magical beings under the sea, playing their “dulcet shells” especially for this spirit), whose extraordinary power is partly established by the willingness of these magical sea nymphs to play their unearthly music to honour the spirit (Lines 29-32). Supernatural origins and otherworldly effects are the main features of both forms of music: the spirit tune has the power of resurrection and the nymph produces raptures and overwhelming emotional outbursts. As in both of Udolpho ’s nymph poems, emphasis is placed on the subtlety of the drawing out and diminishing of musical notes and its correspondence with human (and here supernatural) emotions. This is a characteristic Radcliffe’s conception of otherworldly music shares with Homer, but for an important distinction: for Radcliffe, this overflow of emotion stops at blissful tears or is prevented from excess by the cessation of the song. In the Odyssey, this emotional overflow becomes insanity and finally death. The way the nymph music “swells” upon the spirit (Line 30) suggests a living entity. Growing and fading, it possesses an almost substantial form which is just out of reach of perception.

Sea nymphs also conjure unnaturally potent music in “Written on the Isle of Wight”, appearing under the ignominious title “Miscellaneous Poems” affixed to Gaston De Blondeville. In fact, external to Radcliffe’s novels, many of the shorter poems that sit attached to Gaston feature magical sea nymphs and fairies. In this poem the speaker declares:

Raise such a strain, O Nymphs! whose spell may spread A sweeter grace on all the eye beholds, That the fine vision of these seas and shores May paint their living colours on the mind, With charm so forceful, as Time cannot fade. (Lines 122-126)

Here, the music of the nymphs is so bewitchingly beautiful that it has the power to bore into a person’s very soul; moreover, it defies time, irrevocably searing, not only itself but the vision of the seascape upon the memory. The “sweeter grace” effected by the nymphs is something intangible and supernatural; it is cast by their “spell” and its sweetness adds a layer of magic 295 to “all the eye beholds”. In this, a compact is imagined between the knowledge of the world achievable via physical perception and that otherworldly sheen produced by supernatural beings laden with ancient mystery. The even metre Radcliffe favours in her poetry, with its incantatory effect, reinforces notions of spell-casting and mental withdrawal from the uneven, sober truths of reason.

4. Turner’s Marine Subjects

Out of the thirty or so representations of marine animals Turner produced, only six display them alive and in water. The remainder focus on studies of dead fish or apocalyptic human endeavours to kill marine animals. While an enormous number of Turner works are devoted to representations of the sea, it is not until his middle age that Turner generates a significant quantity of representations of marine animals. Almost all of the pieces featuring marine animals were completed from about the age of 43-71. Indeed, in the context of his entire artistic collection, the thirty or so pieces (Largely watercolours and/or sketches) that depict marine animals are to be seen as perhaps a minor aspect of his artistry. Held at Tate Britain, the Turner Bequest contains approximately 300 oil paintings and around 30,000 sketches and watercolours (including 300 sketchbooks). However quantatively insignificant the works featuring marine animals may be when related to Turner’s other works, they are significant lenses through which the ambiguity that inhabits nineteenth century attitudes towards marine animals can be viewed, not least because there are so few pieces that feature marine subjects in Turner’s multitude of seascape oils, watercolours and sketches. Turner is famous for his seascapes and his ardour for fishing is well established, but marine animals are at the periphery of Turner’s vision of the sea. But for a few depictions of marine creatures, Turner’s exquisite light and motion filled seas are predominantly fallow voids.

Turner’s artistic collection reveals that his sketches, watercolours and paintings of marine creatures were largely done in the middle to later part of his life, arguably suggesting an increased awareness of marine life. Several interesting examples are: Stormy Sea with Dolphins 1833-40, oil on canvas; A Study of Fish c. 1844-5 (Whalers sketchbook, Finberg CCCLIII); A Harpooned Whale c. 1845 (Ambleteuse and Wimereux Sketchbook, Finberg CCCCVII); Whalers at Sea at Sunrise 1845; Stormy Sea with Dolphins 1833-40, oil on canvas; Sea Monsters and Vessels at Sunset c. 1845, watercolour and chalk on paper (Finberg 296

CCCLIII 21); Sunrise with Sea Monsters c. 1845, oil on canvas and Storm Clouds: Whale Rising 1845 (Ambleteuse and Wimereux sketchbook).10

There is one early artwork, done when Turner was a young man of twenty one which features marine animals and it is: “Study of Clouds; two lobster pots with fish, 1796-7 (from Wilson Sketchbook, [Finberg XXXVII]). With this exception, the remainder date from “Neptune’s Trident” (1818 -26), at its earliest estimation when Turner was forty-three, to his last two whaling oils: “Hurrah! for the Whaler Erebus! Another Fish” and “Whaler’s (Boiling Blubber), entangled in flaw-ice, endeavouring to extricate themselves”, both exhibited in 1846 when Turner was seventy-one.

10 Studied at Tate Britain, July 2006. 297

Bibliography

Primary Sources

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