Unsex5 d Women: The Politics of Transgression in the Poetry of Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Charlotte Smith A Thesis Submitted for the Degree o f Doctor o f Philosophy Lancaster University October 1998 By Penelope Joyce Elizabeth Bradshaw, B.A. (hons), M.A. ProQuest Number: 11003634 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 11003634 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 Penelope Joyce Elizabeth Bradshaw, B.A. (hons), M.A. Unsex’d Women: The Politics of Transgression in the Poetry of Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Charlotte Smith October 1998 ABSTRACT Despite recent revisions of Romanticism which seek to include women writers in that movement, the women poets writing at the end of the eighteenth century remain marginalised, both in our understanding of Romanticism and as literary figures in their own right. This is partly due to the problems which arise when seeking to fit a new group of writers into a previously constructed literary movement. Readings of women’s poetry in relation to this movement have led to the construction of their work in terms of the defining ‘Other’ to male Romanticism, and as a consequence their poetry has been defined as primarily concerned with the domestic and the quotidian. My thesis rejects the category of Romanticism as a means by which we can understand late eighteenth century women poets and situates their work in a much more complex network of cultural, social, philosophical and political discourses. It takes two women poets of the period, Anna Barbauld and Charlotte Smith and focuses on their much neglected political poetry, in order to demonstrate the ways in which these women writers themselves challenged the expectations about the poetry women should write and transgressed into the public sphere. It takes as its starting point the contemporary criticism levelled at these women, that they had ‘unsex’d’ themselves by their repeated transgressions into the political. In rejecting essentialist constructions of late eighteenth century women’s poetry and focusing on Barbauld and Smith’s transgressive interventions in politics, this thesis argues that the poems respond to the debates on women’s rights which mark the period, and which led to the production of the seminal feminist polemic, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft. In placing Barbauld and Smith’s poetry in the context of this turbulent and exciting moment of gendered political awareness, I offer a revisionist reading of their poetry, as not only highly politicised, but invested with an early feminist agenda. An introductory chapter sets up the critical tools which the readings of individual poems use: a rigorous historical contextualisation combined with attention to textual nuance and meaning in the poems at the level of language and imagery. This is followed by a biographical/introductory chapter on Barbauld (Chapter One) and three subsequent chapters which offer readings of individual poems by Barbauld (Chapters Two to Four). Chapter Five is a biographical/introductory chapter on Smith, and again this is followed by three chapters which offer readings of individual poems by Smith (Chapters Six to Eight). In both cases the three chapters which offer readings of the poetry follow a historical trajectory, looking at early poems, then poems produced in the radical years of the 1790s and finally at the poems written in the early years of die nineteenth century. In following this shared trajectory the thesis raises questions of both difference and shared agenda between Barbauld and Smith, and the conclusion offers a comparative assessment of their poetry in terms of radicalism and feminism. Contents Introduction 0.1 Overview 1 0.2 Ways of Approaching Late Eighteenth Century Women’s Writing 2 0.3 How We Read Late Eighteenth Century Women’s Poetry: Recent Models and My Theoretical Approach 15 0.4 ‘Unsex’d Females’: The Reaction Against Political Women Writers 23 0.5 The Urgency of Re-Reading 25 Chapter One ANNA UETITIA BARBAULD: From Pleasure to Politics 1.1 Overview 33 1.2 Biography 35 1.3 Contemporary Literary Status 47 1.4 Recent Critical Reassessment 50 Chapter Two Early Poems: Shifting Intellectual and Political Horizons 2.1 Warrington: ‘A Brightening Influence’ 56 2.2 Gendering the Enlightenment 60 2.3 The European Scene: ‘This Late Sickly Age’ 75 Chapter Three A Growing Radicalism: The French Revolution and the Rhetoric of Rights 3.1 ‘A Natural and Inalienable Right’: The Test and Corporation Acts 90 3.2 ‘Long-Forgotten Rights’: ‘The Poor African’ 94 3.3 ‘The Rights of Woman’ 105 3.4 ‘Doctrines Perfectly French' 111 Chapter Four The Napoleonic Years: ‘Storm[s] of War* and Dystopian Visions 4.1 ‘The Great Giant and Monster Buonaparte’ 126 4.2 ‘The Intervention of a Lady Author’: Critical Responses to Eighteen Hundred and Eleven 132 4.3 Dark Visions: The Failure of the European Enlightenment 138 4.4 ‘New Veins of Thought’: The Death of a Princess 149 Chapter Five CHARLOTTE SMITH: A Private and a Public Sorrow 5.1 Overview 155 5.2 Biography 159 5.3 Contemporary Literary Status 169 5.4 Recent Critical Reassessment 172 Chapter Six The Sonnets: Female Suffering and Transgressive Desire 6.1 The Sonnet Debate: ‘In Bold Defiance of Literary Conventions’ 178 6.2 ‘A Despondence Which May Look Like Affectation’: Exceeding the Discourse of Sensibility 184 6.3 Female Desire and Social Transgression: Harnessing the Ocean 190 6.4 Appropriating the Sublime: An ‘Experience of Empowerment’ 197 Chapter Seven The 1790s: ‘Gallic Mania’ and Social Problems 7.1 Radical Connections: ‘A Hot-Bed of Disreputable Jacobins’ 210 7.2 Society’s Outcasts: A Voice from the Margins 213 7.3 Revolutionary Politics: The Emigrants 224 7.4 ‘A Choice of Cures’: Women’s Options under Patriarchy 239 Chapter Eight The Final Years: Excursions in Time and Space 8.1 Expanding Intellectual Horizons: ‘The View from Mental Heights’ 248 8.2 The Politics of Science 249 8.3 Interventions in Science: ‘An Antepast of Paradise’ 255 8.4 A Panoramic View of History: ‘The Rifted Shores’ 263 8.5 Exotic Captives and ‘Dazzling Comets’: The Effects of Commerce 269 8.6 A ‘Transient Gloom’: Visions of a Collapsing Civilisation 274 Conclusion 9.1 Establishing Difference 285 9.2 Ideological Positioning and Differences of Political Vision 285 9.3 Political Strategies 290 9.4 Political Contributions 294 9.5 Assessment 298 Bibliography 305 Introduction Overview Despite recent revisions of Romanticism which seek to include women writers within that movement, the women poets writing at the end of the eighteenth century remain marginalised figures, both in our understanding of Romanticism and as literary figures in their own right. This is partly due to the problems which arise when seeking to fit a new group of writers into a previously constructed literary movement, problems which are exacerbated when the ‘new’ writers are women and the movement has largely been constructed through literature and criticism written by men. The general aim of this thesis is to find a strategy of reading the poetry written by women in the latter years of the eighteenth century, both in terms of critical and literary positioning, which does not continue to marginalise their work. I am concerned with re-positioning these women in the literary space within which they wrote, the mainstream of literary culture. In order to establish a sense of women writers of this period as individuals but also to raise questions of difference, I examine in detail the work of two women poets: Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743- 1825) and Charlotte Smith (1749-1806). The thesis aims to demonstrate both the differences between the poetry produced by these two women and also the similarities, in particular, the refusal by both to be restrained by the pressure on women in the eighteenth century not to write politically. Both women juggled the image of the respectable ‘feminine5 lady writer with their desire to insert themselves in the public discourses and political debates of the day. At the present time, although new anthologies are appearing to challenge the construction, these two women are generally perceived as writers of sentimental, quotidian, and cliched verse. Yet both were perceived as ‘Amazonian5 revolutionaries by the Reverend Richard Polwhele in his now infamous poetic diatribe, The iJnsex’d T'emales, and aligned with Wollstonccraftian feminism because of their transgressions into the public world of politics.1 'Ibis contemporary alignment with the feminist figure Wollstonecraft is the starting point for my thesis. I examine the ways in which Barbauld and Smith respond in their poetry to the same set of historical events, intellectual questioning, and turbulent politics as Wollstonecraft, 1 and look at the ways in which they repeatedly deconstruct their own self-constructed image? of ‘proper’ lady writers by their transgressions into the public sphere. Ways of Approaching Late Eighteenth Century Women’s Writing I want firstly to set out a discussion of some of the key critical readings of women’s poetry of this period, and secondly to illustrate the ways in which my own approach will differ from and interact with these. I will point out what I see to be the limitations for future study of the approaches of critics who have been crucial in bringing this body of literature to the forefront of academic discussion in the last twenty years, and turn to some of the diverse, smaller projects by lesser known critics whose more recent work has suggested new approaches and ideas.